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Luke 2:22-40 I learned some interesting stuff this week as I was preparing this sermon for all of you, and so today’s sermon will kind of take on more of a teaching style. But I figured since all the kids have been out of school for about a week now, that this was okay. This morning we’ll be studying and talking about Jesus’ very first visit to the Temple as recorded in Luke, chapter 2, which I read about just few minutes ago. Before we really dig into some of that interesting stuff, I’d like to give you the main point of the message this morning. I think that the main point and the thread that ties this whole thing together is this: In Christmas, God is doing something new, but its not really new. The new thing God is doing is simply keeping an old promise – a promise to save the world. So keep that in mind as we dig in and do some serious Bible study this morning. We begin in Luke 2 with Jesus being presented by Mary & Joseph at the Temple. Now there were actually 3 reasons why they would’ve made the 80 mile trek from Nazareth to Jerusalem to the Temple with a newborn baby. There were 3 rituals that they needed to take care of. First, they had to have Jesus circumcised. This was a medical procedure of sorts performed by the priests and it was so sacred a thing that it was the one thing that was allowable to do on the Sabbath day. Kids, if you don’t know what circumcision is, ask your folks when you get home. The second ritual they had to do was a purification ritual. In Judaism, certain kinds of body functions made you unclean and meant you couldn’t enter the temple until you waited a certain amount of time and make a sacrifice. Childbirth was one of those things that made you unclean. If you had a boy, you were unclean for 40 days. If you had a girl, you were unclean for 80 days. Go figure. Anyway, Mary had to go to the Temple to offer her purification sacrifice. To make her clean, she was supposed to offer a dove and a lamb, which was a pretty expensive sacrifice. The law did make an exception however, for the poorest of the poor. If there was no way you could afford a lamb, the law allowed you to substitute another bird instead. This was called the Offering of the Poor, and it shows you just how poor Mary & Joseph were, because they offered up two doves instead of the lamb. And the third ritual that they were to do was called the Redemption of the First Born. Back in Exodus, it says that every first born male belongs to God and should be set aside. Parents, however, were supposed to redeem their eldest son for a price that was paid to the priests. In other words, they were kind of buying their son back from God. What’s interesting in this story about Jesus however, is that Mary & Joseph never did this with Jesus. They never “bought him back from God”, which means that Jesus fully and completely belonged to God. They may have raised him, but he was really set aside completely for God’s purposes. Now, these 3 things were all Jewish rituals, ancient practices that Mary & Joseph were very obedient and faithful in following. I think in today’s world, rituals often get a bad rap. For whatever reason, our society seems to discount them as foolish, as having little meaning, as empty, and as something only religious kooks or nuts do. Alan Culpepper, in a book called Luke, says this about the importance of rituals: The observance of religious requirements and rituals has fallen on hard times. Essential to Judaism is the praise of God in all of life. The Jewish law taught that God was to be honored in one’s rising up and lying down, in going out and coming in, in how one dressed and what one ate. The pressures of modern life have reduced the significance of rituals in the lives of most Christians. Busy schedules, dual-career marriages, and after-school activities mean that families eat fewer meals together and pray together less often. Family Bible studies are virtually non-existent. Religious rituals are reduced to church attendance at Christmas and Easter and socially required ceremonies of weddings & funerals. The result has been that God has receded from the awareness and experience of everyday life. Many assume that God is found only in certain places, in sacred buildings, in holy books, or with holy people. What is refreshing about Mary & Joseph as parents is that they recognized the importance of rituals, of practicing their faith with their child, even if it meant great sacrifice. Their faithfulness as parents is to be commended and by their example, we are freed to follow and practice life-giving rituals as well. We are free to pray at home, to tell our kids “No” that family time is more important than basketball practice, that God is who gives us our meaning – not sports or school or friends. We are free to read the Bible as a family, to not have all the answers, and to realize that life’s most important lessons are found in scripture not on a playing field or in a classroom. Adding Christian rituals into your family’s life together would be something new for our society and maybe for your personal life, but it’s not really new. For it is in rituals like prayer, reading the Bible, tithing, attending church every week where you are reminded that God is still keeping his ancient promises to save you and the rest of the world. In the ritual celebrations of Christmas, which we’ve all just done, we remember that God did a new thing, that wasn’t really new at all. He kept his promise to send the Messiah. The second part of our Gospel lesson tells the story of Simeon and Anna – two really old people who represented all of Israel at their best. They were devout, obedient, constant in prayer, led by the Holy Spirit, at home in the Temple, longing and hoping for the fulfillment of God’s promises. They are important to the story of Jesus, but only because they use his presence as an opportunity to depart in peace and allow Jesus to take center stage. Reading about Simeon and Anna, these two people who are just kind of waiting for that last big thing in their life, I’m reminded of that movie that came out last year called The Bucket List. The movie is about these two old guys with terminal illnesses who had a list of stuff that they wanted to accomplish before they kicked the bucket, so to speak. Anna & Simeon’s Bucket Lists both included the same thing: see the Messiah. And they both earnestly believed that they wouldn’t kick the bucket until it happened. You know, we have a saying in today’s world, “Seeing is believing.” Well, with Simeon & Anna, it was just the opposite. They were believing and so they were able to see more than the obvious. In this infant, they see salvation and redemption. Because of their faith, they were able to see God in the ordinary, in the mundane, in this poor little family that had just traveled all the way from dirty ol’ Nazareth. And as they check this off
of their respective Bucket Lists, Simeon sings a song that has since
become famous under the name Nunc Dimittis. Nunc Dimittis is simply the
first two words of the song in Latin. For the last 2,000 years, the
Nunc Dimitis song has been sung daily by Christians in a ritual called
Compline, which is a set of prayers you can say or sing before going to
bed. The Nunc Dimittis also has a place in our Lutheran worship as an
option we can sing just after Communion. What’s cool about using the
words of the Nunc Dimittis as a ritual in these two places is this: in
both instances, at the end of the day and at the end of Communion, you
can ask yourself, what have your eyes just seen? What have your eyes
seen before going to bed? Probably the common stuff of everyday life:
dirty dishes, filthy clothes, dusty furniture, piles of paperwork, toys
scattered all over the floor. Where was God’s salvation in such common,
ordinary things? What have your eyes just seen in Communion? A small
piece of bread, a sip of wine, other folks – friends, strangers, fat
people, skinny people, ugly people, beautiful people, smelly people, old
people, young people. Where is God’s salvation in such common ordinary
things and people? God is present in a baby, in bread, in wine, in
other people, in the ordinary events that happen everyday. Where God is
present, there is salvation for those with the faith to see more than
just the obvious. In Christmas, God does a new thing, but its not
really new. He’s been with us the whole time and we may not have even
noticed. He’s been keeping his promises since the very beginning, and
we may have been too faithless to believe it, too dense to realize it,
or too apathetic to even care. Nonetheless, God remains faithful. He’s
doing a new thing, that’s not really new at all. He’s keeping his
promise to save the world. And he’s doing it through Jesus Christ.
Amen. |
