Simeon
Sermon Dec. 28, 2008 Lk. 2:21-40, Isaiah 62:1-5

We say that the Christmas season is for children, as it surely is. Youth and age frame Luke’s story surrounding the Nativity. Old Zechariah and Elizabeth are with the youthful Mary and Joseph. Now two people, both of whom I picture as old, Anna and Simeon, frame an infant it must have been a thrill for these two country people of Galilee to be able to present their firstborn in the temple in the throbbing city of Jerusalem. Anna and Simeon hear the throbbing cry of a circumcised baby.

Christmastime is a movement into the world imagined by Isaiah. Part of the letdown after Christmas is that things looked so pretty, a winter wonderland all around. We pack away the decorations as we look to next year, but at this point it feels like taking down beauty by the calendar date. So it feels as if Beulah land, marriage celebration land, is being replaced by a more desolate look, in part, by our own hand, forgotten until next year. Of course, the reverse is true as well. The whole point of Isaiah’s image is to show that marriage is closest metaphor we can use to get at the complete loyalty God has to the people. A marriage creates a family; It is our culture’s way of announcing that the welfare of the other is as much part of our life as our own, maybe even more so.

Of course, the Incarnation is another way of coming at the same point. God wants the partnership to be so unbreakable with us that God’s own self would join with us in the person of Jesus. All the way back to Abraham, God had the sign of circumcision to show the pledge of fealty. Now God’s own would undergo that same pledge in the temple of Jerusalem. Simeon and Anna lived on the dark side of Isaiah’s vision, but here, at life’s end, they enjoy the wedding feast of God and humanity in the beloved temple. The old ritual of circumcision breathes in the fresh, 8 day old life of Jesus. For Christians, we can look at our baptism as a marriage vow.

Not only do they see a long-held dream fulfilled, they burst into a vision of the future as well. Some see the future as all in the hands of God, but most of us see a mixed picture where we form the future along with the hand of God. What we dodoes matter for the shape of the future. In that sense they appear to us as Father and Mother Time, as they know the past, see Jesus in their own lives, and peer into the future. They are not ghosts as in A Christmas Carol. These real people see is a mixed future, as it always will be until god’s vision finally falls into place. They are symbols of the fading of the old order, and the birth of the new. Here, the old transforms the old, reshapes it. Our liturgical season doesn’t line up with the cultural calendar. For it, Christmas is over, but for us it is going strong until Epiphany, the Magi fo January 6^th, 12 days of Christmas.

2009 beckons. We look with mixed regret and happiness at the year almost complete. We especially hope for better times to start to appear. I always push the idea that the spiritual always includes the whole of our lives. At the same time, we cannot neglect the spiritual side of our lives. Perhaps we can learn to ask what God would like us to make of the situations where we find ourselves. Like Anna and Simeon it is good to ask what we would like to live to see. It is good to look back and gape at what we have already seen. Fro instance, I never thought I would live to see Eastern Europe be free of the Russian boot without a shot being fired. Just because we grow older we don’t have to lose our dreams. The New Year is the province of us all, the young and old together.