Trinity United Methodist Church – Orange, VAIt is a pleasure for me to be back here in Orange for this service today. This is the church I associate with Christmas because for all of my childhood this is where I was at Christmastime. All of those candlelight Christmas Eve services. All of the Christmas pageants. All of my friends. All of the adults here who were more than people my parents knew – they were like bonus parents. When I come here I am grateful to have had the opportunity to grow up in a place like this.
So here we are again and it is still Christmas. It’s a strange Sunday because we have the temptation to forget that Christmas continues for 12 days, even though we’ve been singing about the partridge in the pear tree for two months. And after all of the anticipation and tension and busy-ness of this last season, we probably just want to kind of catch our breath, don’t we?
Wednesday night – Christmas Eve – now that was the magic. I don’t know what your Christmas Eve looked like but it usually means last minute gift-wrapping, sneaking around the house with Christmas secrets, the candlelight service at church. And if you had young children in your house, you know that the excitement level was at fever pitch. Of all of our holy days, Christmas is the most kid-friendly.
Now, though, the presents are unwrapped, the food has been eaten (unfortunately), the football games have begun. There are more celebrations to come for some of us, but in the cold light of day there is a part of us that is ready to just climb back into something like normalcy and routine.
The mood of the Christmas story is changing in our bible readings for this morning, too. The shepherds and angels and starry nights in a borrowed manger are gone and now we find Mary and Joseph doing just what every good Jewish couple would do with a first-born son. They were taking the baby Jesus to the Temple to dedicate him to the Lord.
It’s known as the Presentation of Jesus and it probably would have occurred some forty days after his birth. Maybe Mary and Joseph were looking for some normalcy, too, after all the turmoil of Jesus’ birth…after all the strange witnesses to what that birth meant. They were following the rules of the Law, which were as old as the hills and as steady as stone.
What Mary and Joseph did not expect to find at the Temple were more witnesses to what God was doing in this little child. But there they were – Simeon and Anna.
Simeon was an old man and a good man. He was like those kindly old men who do not lament that the world has gone to pot since we got rid of home milk delivery but who look forward to something great yet to come. Like the Cubs winning the World Series or a bypass around Charlottesville. Something like that.
But what Simeon looked forward to was Israel’s salvation. Simeon knew the promises of the prophets who talked about a coming Messiah who would redeem the people from their situation. He was inspired by the Holy Spirit – like many of the prophets before him. The Holy Spirit spoke to him in remarkable ways and one of the things that was revealed to him was that he would see God’s Messiah before he died. So he waited.
He waited…until this day when Joseph and Mary brought their child to the Temple. There was nothing extraordinary about the scene to mark the child or his parents as different from anyone else. No angels overhead. No halo. It was just a couple bringing a sacrificial offering of two birds, which was the allowance in the Law for a poor couple.
Simeon, however, saw the child and knew that this was the one for whom he waited. He went to the couple and took the baby in his arms and he prayed a prayer to God. Old Simeon, the One who Waits, told God he was now ready for death because he had seen with his own eyes the promised Messiah, made flesh in the child in his arms. Something old met something new and God was praised.
Simeon wasn’t the only witness that day in the Temple. There was also an elderly woman inspired by the spirit of the prophets. Anna, 84 years old…widowed long ago. Anna also waited on God, praying continuously to God in the Temple.
She also saw the couple and burst forth in praise. She shouted out that this baby was the one who would redeem Jerusalem and Israel and all the nations. Something old met something new and God was praised.
So maybe Christmas is not just a kid-friendly holiday. Here we have two people who waited long years for the Savior and who became witnesses like the shepherds and animals and magi. Mary and Joseph were amazed. Simeon warned Mary about the struggles ahead, the grief that would come to her. But underlying it all was good news – God had come to young and old. God was here.
You might not know this, but I come from an interesting family. Carson Lee has no idea what he’s getting into. This clan of ours, like every family, I think…I hope, has its share of eccentrics. I’m one of them. But one of my favorite eccentrics was my Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim lived in Blackstone and in his later years if you went to visit him you would have to wind your way through his house that was piled from floor to ceiling with papers and books. He was a preacher, you see, and these were all bulletins and sermons and notes from his many years in the pulpit.
I rarely saw Uncle Jim. Usually it was just once a year at the family reunion. I was just a boy then and he was an old man who looked even older than he actually was because he had a long, white beard. But as unlikely a pair as we were – I can remember a couple of family reunions when I spent most of the time with Uncle Jim.
I can’t say I remember any great pearls of wisdom which he gave me, but he was a great storyteller and something about him spoke to me. I felt something rich was passing between us.
When Uncle Jim died, I inherited some of his books, one of which is his old Bible with his notes in it. Something I still pick up from time to time. In a way, Uncle Jim acted as a Simeon or an Anna to me – a witness to what God was doing in the world and how the long arc of time was full of the promise of God.
I’ll admit that Uncle Jim was a little odd, but I compare what I grew up with to the world I knew in the inner city when I did my ministerial internship in Dallas, Texas. In West Dallas it felt like a community without any senior citizens. It was a broken neighborhood populated by young people. If you grew old (and for some it really was an if) then you did whatever you could to leave. The result of this was that the wisdom of the elderly was lost to that community.
It’s not only in West Dallas. Wherever children grow up in households without parents and grandparents or adults who care about them – and there are households like this is every community – when this happens children are denied something they need – contact with people whose life experiences can offer visions of hope. They are also denied knowing people whose faith has developed over many years and whose faith has been tried and tested by trials. It is a frightening experience to grow up in a world without elders.
Now, I realize that age doesn’t always imply wisdom. What’s that saying? ‘There’s no fool like an old fool’? But one of the things God has given us as a gift is the faithful experience of the older members of our community.
I don’t have to tell you that we live in a youth-obsessed culture. Music and movies are driven by youth interests and images. Products sell themselves as ways to deny or hide the effects of aging. Just like that neighborhood in West Dallas, it can sometimes seem that the elderly are invisible.
We also are resisting growing older. Robert Bly, the poet, has called us the "sibling society", a nation of people who are stuck in a kind of stagnating adolescence where there are fewer and fewer people willing to take on adult roles. Bly says that there are no elders to initiate people into adulthood - no people willing to spend the time needed to guide young people into a new role as adults bearing the responsibility for passing along our most precious traditions.
Simeon and Anna show us how much God values the experience of age and how often God uses that experience to bear witness to the good news of Jesus. We only have to look back at the stories of Joshua being mentored by Moses, Samuel mentored by the old priest, Eli, and Ruth with her mother-in-law Naomi, to see how the process has worked itself out throughout the Bible. Throughout our tradition there is this practice of mentoring and guiding people to deeper experiences of Christ’s love.
There have been a lot of studies in recent years about how young people find their way into a life’s vocation – a sense of belonging in their lives that is attuned to their gift’s and God’s call. I’ve been involved with these studies through the Board of Ordained Ministry as we have looked at how people are nurtured for ministry, but it’s a bigger question. How do we help people know who they are and who God is calling them to be?
Dori Baker lives in Altavista and has thought and taught and written a lot about youth ministry. In her latest book, Lives to Offer, she talks a lot about the value of intergenerational sharing in congregations. A curriculum of vocation, she says, might be envisioned as a “companioned walk shared by faithful sojourners in search of compelling ways to offer their lives in response to God’s call.”[i]
A companioned walk is what we initiate every time we baptize a baby in this congregation. It’s what we commit to when we welcome a child and promise with that child’s family to bring him or her up in the faith. It’s what we do when the church is at its best.
At Franktown we have been trying to incorporate more intergenerational events into our congregational life. One of the most significant of these has been our confirmation program which pairs youth with adults chosen by the congregation. Most of the confirmation process is done one-on-one with youth and adults meeting whenever they are able for 13 weeks. It is powerful for both and the relationships that are built up, we hope, will last. One of my favorite parts of the program is seeing confirmands and mentors sitting together in worship or meeting in the hallways of the church to plan their next get-together. It feels like what church is supposed to be.
Last spring I was conducting some interviews with church members as I was getting ready for a conference on calling congregations. One of those interviews was with one of the senior members of the church, a man who had been a school principal for a long time. As we were talking, he started telling the story of when his family home burned to the ground. He was a grown man at the time and his father was the only one living in the house. Fortunately his father got out safely, but most of the most important things the family owned went up in flames.
The father told his son, “I had two desks in the house that I wanted to give to you and now I won’t be able to do that.” I was wondering why he was telling me this story, this son who was now an elder in the church, but then I got it. He said his lesson from the fire was, “If you want to keep something, you’ve got to give it away.”
Like Simeon, like Anna, like Christmas, like our whole lives. If we want to keep the hope that makes this holiday good news for every person, then we have to give it away. Thanks be to God for communities where Jesus still comes and where people of every age experience the salvation of God.
Luke 2:22-40
Now when the days of their purification were fulfilled according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, just as it is written in the law of the Lord that "all firstborn males shall be called holy to the Lord," and to give an offering according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young doves."
Now, look, a man named Simeon was in Jerusalem and the man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And a revelation had been given to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before seeing the Lord's Messiah. Now he came in the Spirit to the Temple, and the parents of the child Jesus brought him in to do according to the custom under the law. Simeon took him into his arms and praised God saying,
"Now you are dismissing your servant, Master,
according to your word, in peace;
For my eyes have seen your salvation
which you have prepared before all the peoples,
A light of revelation to the nations
and glory for your people Israel."
His father and his mother were amazed at what was being said about him. So Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother, "Look, this one is destined for the falling and raising of many in Israel and to be a sign that will opposes - and your very soul will be pierced by a sword - so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed."
Now there was also the prophetess Anna, daughter of Phanuel, from the tribe of Asher. She was of great age, having lived with her husband for seven years after her marriage and then as a widow to the age of 84. She did not leave the temple but worshipped there, fasting and praying night and day. At that hour she appeared, praising God and speaking about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.
And when they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
[i] Lives to Offer: Accompanying Youth on Their Vocational Quests, Dori Grinenko Baker & Joyce Ann Mercer [The Pilgrim Press: Cleveland, 2007], p. 6.
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