This sermon is from almost exactly a year ago, when the first Sunday after Christmas was the last Sunday of the year. I’m using it to think about the sermon I’m working on for tomorrow, which is touching somewhat related themes from a different direction. Text is below.
After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.”
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” And the child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. (
Luke 2:21-39)
Good morning, Merry Christmas, and Happy Impending New Year!
It’s a privilege and a delight to share this time with you.
I finally saw the new Star Wars movie this week. Somehow, almost miraculously, I made it two whole weeks without being spoiled, which I attribute entirely to the greater frequency of miracles during the season of the birth of the infant Christ. Have any of you have seen it? —Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil it for you, I’m not a monster, I’m just curious.
It’s fantastic, in my opinion, for a lot of reasons. Some of them are literary-criticism reasons about tropes and subversions and writing and imagery whatever, but frankly it’s fantastic mostly because of how the story feels when it’s absorbed you and you’re experiencing it unfolding.
I saw the original trilogy many times as a child, because my parents owned the VHS set and we watched it together, and then my younger brother, who was about three or four at the time, got really into it in the way that kids that age get into things (he named a little sock monkey Jabba the Hutt, for instance), and for six months or a year one of the movies was always playing in the house. I’m pretty sure I saw the prequels, but I have no memories of them at all. Which is to say that when I watch these new ones in theaters, it’s young Mark Hamill and young Carrie Fisher (may light perpetual shine upon her) and young Harrison Ford and their space antics that make up the emotional backdrop for the new movies. And part of the incredible thrill of watching them for me, and for many (but of course not all) other people, is the way that they touch, in so many tiny ways, the shapes of the old movies: a line or a scene that’s a subtle homage, some set piece like an easter egg in the back of a shot, little winks from the past to the present that tell me that we’re all seeing and feeling these things together. Part of the joy of the thing is seeing the same grand themes, the same tides of the story (a looming, efficient, violent, overwhelming enemy; a scrappy, brave band of rebels; the making of nobodies into heroes; Hail Mary victories; the power of hope) used as the bones for something new, making the new feel familiar and so somehow more striking.
It’s fitting, I think, that these movies keep coming out at Christmas, another reworking of old pieces into a new thing at the time of year when we work new pieces into an old thing. Every year we tell the story we all know, assembling it like a puzzle from Matthew and Luke: a young woman and her fear and her courage and her certainty, a bewildered but gentle-hearted man, a journey, the shepherds, the angels, the wise men and their opulent gifts, the flight from danger into a foreign land, the sense that something had changed forever, that something had been done that was so new that it could never be old, and it isn’t, even though we have been talking about it now for nearly two thousand years and it is as familiar to us as our own traditional family meals and arguments whatever it is we forgot, again, this year. The Christmas story, coming as it does as the secular calendar ends and the Christian calendar is just beginning, turns up again, every year, just in time to provide a frame to surround what has happened to us since last time: A birth, a marriage; a divorce, a death. A joy, a grief. A growing into ourselves, a growing lonelier, a growing up. A well-worn story about how nothing is the same anymore. Every year Christmas comes to be the familiar frame that holds everything that has made us different this year.
I believe that it is safe to say that in the nine months, give or take, from an angel’s sudden announcement to an unwed teenager about her conceiving the Messiah to the birth of that child, heralded by angels and a pack of men who had most recently been living outside among sheep, before she and her new family had to flee the murderous wrath of a paranoid puppet king, Mary understood that what was happening was not like anything that had happened before. Certainly not to her, anyhow. And so what comes next in the story, according to Luke, anyway, can at first seem a little confusing. When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.” After all that, after everything, why would you… go to church?
The sort of simple, even kind of facile reason is that they were supposed to. The presentation of an infant that Luke mentions is not really clear as a tradition, but the sacrifice mentioned is: Leviticus 12 stipulates the period of uncleanness and separation and the steps for purification and rejoining the community after the birth of a child. In the event of the birth of a son, the mother was to keep to herself for forty days (thirty-three days following the eighth-day circumcision of the child), after which she was to bring animals for sacrifice: a lamb and a pigeon or turtledove, or, if she could not manage the lamb, two birds instead. Mary’s offering of two birds is the clearest indication in the text that she and Joseph were poor—a sacrifice being a sacrifice, not “whatever you can spare that day,” that they brought what was stipulated for those for whom a lamb was out of reach makes clear that they had very little. This event also seems to refer to the command in Exodus 13 to redeem firstborns, whether human or animal: the first offspring was holy to the Lord, and so had to be redeemed (presumably through a sacrifice or payment); offering the animal (but never human children) is also an option. So you might say that they went to church because they had to, according to the rules.
But that doesn’t touch the deeper question: Why, after everything they had seen and experienced, after Mary’s declaration in the Magnificat, did they worry about the rules of religion?
I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you. But I can offer the idea I started with: the way that a frame surrounds, the way a vessel holds. The way that what you already had can give a shape to what you have now. The map, of course, is not the territory, but a map can get you through it, a map can show you where you are now, in relation to where you have been, of course, but also to where you can go, if you like. When Gabriel told Mary that a new thing was to be done in her and the joy of the unborn John in Mary’s cousin’s womb proved it, Mary sang about the coming of a world she had never seen—was Roman occupied Palestine a world where the poor were lifted up and the rich sent away any more than ours is today?—using words from the mouths of prophets centuries before she was born. Simeon, an old man whose life had been waiting, comes to the temple under the prompting of the Holy Spirit to see the infant whose birth was the fulfillment of the promise God had made to him and to his whole people. And Anna, a prophet, a woman on her own for decades, spent them in the place she knew to be a place of worship, sees the child and immediately begins telling anyone she can—strangers, travelers, worshipers—who he is and what this means, because it means something they have been told would come. The map, of course, is not the territory, but we humans are very small in the scheme of things and we need something to hold us and the immensity of our experiences in order to get through them, a light to see by, a sextant for the spangled heavens by night and a sketch of a coastline that’s all towering stone and mist by day, old words to mark the bright outline of a new vision, an old shape for a new wineskin, a vessel to hold the wine that is a covenant.
We talk sometimes about being “spiritual but not religious” as though the two are fundamentally at odds instead of words by which we might try to describe the outside and the inside of something that cannot actually be described. Mary went to the temple to do what was required in the Law of Moses not because she lacked spiritual imagination—Mary who has argued with angels and given birth to the Son of God—but because she knew, knew through sight and sound and through the labor of her own body, that God was great, and faithful, and alive, and the traditions of her ancestors connected them to each other and to the God who had become so intimately real to her. And again in the temple God met her, in the mouths of two holy people who prophesied greatness, and pain, and redemption.
And when they had finished everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.
Every year, in the strange, quiet, awkward days between Christmas and New Years Day, I struggle to find in myself some emotional stirring left from the Christmas Eve vigil, fearing that, if I allow the rhythms of my life to reassert themselves, I will have somehow lost the meaning, the experience, the connection to the beating heart of faith that I sometimes fleetingly feel when stained glass reflects candlelight and everyone is singing a carol from memory. And every year in this, I think, I have done myself a disservice, and missed the thing that God is doing, has always done: that the shape of things, the stories, the familiar, is that which will hold the new, the inbreaking, the heartstopping, will show us the contours of it, its angles and planes, how it fits and we fit in it. I have missed that the mother of God nursed an infant in the glow of an army of angels and then offered two birds in the temple, was accosted by two prophets and then returned home to Nazareth. The beating heart beats in-out, in-out, beats us through moments of transcendent awe and through the doors of church on a slow Sunday and there is no difference in the heartbeat and no difference in the closeness of the Divine Presence, now in glory shining in the heavens and now in the cup and the table and the same words again this month that we heard last month, showing up for us again like clockwork to give a shape to whatever we hang on them, to hold what we have to put into them this time, thanks be to God, Amen.
NOR ANY OTHER CREATED THING 