Let Your Servant Go in Peace (1st Sunday after Christmas / The Presentation; Luke 2:21-38; January 1, 2016)

Let Your Servant Go in Peace

1st Sunday after Christmas / The Presentation 

Luke 2:21-38 

January 1, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

Today, of course, is New Year's Day. We all know that. But we also know that it's not the beginning of the Church year. New Year's Day owes more to the ancient Romans than it does to the ancient Church. The Christian New Year happens on the first Sunday of Advent. The Church has its own day today.

In the Western tradition of which are a part today is the Festival of the Presentation. Today was picked for that because of Luke's Gospel where, at the beginning of our lesson, it says, "When eight days had passed, Jesus parents circumcised him and gave him the name Jesus." When eight days had passed after Jesus' birth--and here as in other places "when eight days had passed" means simply "a week later"--Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the Temple and there made the offering for him as their first-born boy. They offered two pigeons as an offering.

In the Torah offerings were normally more substantial than that--a yearling calf or ram--but a provision was made for the poor who could not afford such an expensive sacrifice that they could offer two pigeons or turtledoves instead. This doesn't mean that Mary and Joseph were poor, since the exception had become the rule by the time of Jesus. It does mean, though, that our reading is giving a special emphasis to the theme of the poor.

In Mary's song, for example, in the first chapter, we have the theme this way: "[God] has pulled down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed." Simeon and Anna who figure in our reading show the Temple-centered piety that was favored by people who were known as "God's poor." Having no other way of staying alive--they were poor--they leaned entirely on God's mercy--they were God's poor.

The Gospel of Luke, like the other gospels, the New Testament, and, indeed, the entire Bible, is relentlessly political. Our reading adds to this that the politics is a class politics that notices that the poor and the rich do not have the same interests or aspirations.

So, today being the Festival of the Presentation, we hear from a part of Luke that we often neglect, since the Presentation only falls on a Sunday once every seven years or so and since we have more often observed Epiphany, which actually falls on January 6th, on the first Sunday after Christmas, and we flip over to Matthew and the magi.

Not today. Not this year. Today we have Joseph and Mary, Jesus' pious parents, whom we would have to consider, at least loosely, to be among "God's poor," doing what ought to be done for Jesus. And they are met on the Temple grounds first by Simeon--whose interaction with the holy family is described in detail--and second by Anna. Both are important.

Anna was a widow who our translation says had been married for seven years and then widowed. She was either unable or unwilling to marry again and so became a part of the community of people who lived in or very near the Temple grounds. She devoted her days to fasting and prayer. For more than sixty years--from about the age of nineteen or twenty to the age of eight-four--she lived this life of devotion.

Simeon was man who had been blessed (or cursed) with the promise that he would not die until he had seen the Christ. We may take this as a blessing, that is, that he would see the Messiah before he died. Or we may see this as a curse, that is, that he would not be allowed to die no matter how tired he became of living, until he had seen Christ. His "song" leans toward the second reading.

Simeon and Anna are both to be found among those who were "looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem [or Israel]." We hear the word redemption and we immediately think that it must have something to do with sin being forgiven or Jesus' death on the cross, but those are unlikely readings here. Redemption is, first and foremost, a social, not a religious, event. To redeem means to buy back, especially to buy back from slavery, to pay for a slave with the purpose of then setting them free. In this case what is being redeemed is Jerusalem or Israel.

How is Jerusalem in slavery? It lives under the heel of the Romans with the collaboration of the elite of Jerusalem: the high priests of the Temple and the ruling Council. What would it mean for Jerusalem to be redeemed, to be bought back and set free? It would mean ridding Jerusalem of the Romans and of the rich ruling Jewish families, too. It would mean that the powerful would be pulled down from their thrones, that the lowly would be lifted up, that the hungry would be filled with good things, and the rich would be sent away empty-handed. In a word the redemption of Jerusalem would mean justice.

I know that justice, especially political and social justice, is for some Christians, only a minor theme, if a theme at all of the good news. For better or worse, justice looms large for me as the center of God's dream and of the good news that proclaims that dream. Some grow weary of hearing about justice. I sometimes grow weary of preaching it. But, as I said to a friend of mine not too long ago, if you can find me a non-political Bible, I will gladly preach it. But I haven't found one yet. As the layers of self-help, piety, and moral advice have fallen away from the text under the scrutiny of close reading, I have found that the theme at the center of the Bible's story is the theme of social, economic, and political justice.

And justice always cuts in two directions: it favors some and disfavors others. That disfavoring of some is why some people hated Jesus and everything he stood for and, when they had the chance, they arranged for his judicial murder. But it's also why "God's poor" embraced so gladly the coming of the one who would do justice. Justice was the hope of "God's poor," the hope shared by Simeon, Anna, Mary, and the unnamed others to whom Anna spoke when she spoke about Jesus. Jesus, in ways that aren't quite named in the first two chapters, but that are spelled out in the rest of Luke, fulfills that hope for justice: "Now, master, let your servant go in peace, according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation. You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples. It's a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for your people Israel."

These few words have become part of the bedtime prayers of the Church as Zachariah's Song and Mary's Song have become part of the morning and evening prayers. As each day ends, before surrendering to sleep, the Church looks back at the day and claims that in some place and at some time during that day, God's justice has been revealed, the hungry have been fed, the rich have been sent away empty-handed, the lowly have been lifted up, and the powerful have been pulled down from their thrones.

But it's also a prayer that yearns for far more than it has witnessed. Justice is done somewhere everyday. But injustice is done in far too many places and far too often. Like the prayer that Jesus taught us, it is has largely gone unanswered.

But even in the unanswering, there is movement that is taking place. Simeon says, "This boy is assigned to be the cause of the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that generates opposition so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed." I am struck these days by the variety of things that are claimed for Jesus. Or perhaps it would be better to say that I am struck by the variety of positions for which it is claimed that Jesus is the sponsor. For some Jesus is the one who defends straight, white, English-speaking cultural power from all threats: from LGBTQ folk whose loves are claimed to be neither healthy nor holy; from African Americans whose lives only count for as much as three-fifths of a white life; from Spanish-speaking masses tired of huddling in poverty from the violence we have exported to their teeming shores, and, from those who, praying to God in Arabic, discovered a world-threatening demand for justice in the words of the Quran. For others, placing themselves in the tradition of Simeon, Anna, and Jesus' mother, Jesus is the bringer of justice, the proclaimer of a peace that can only be built on justice, the one who has demonstrated once and for all just how futile all violence is by suffering its worst under Roman rule and scorning its power to silence by rising from the dead.

The strands of American Christianity are being teased apart in our day. Increasingly, there are only two choices. The next few years will provide a partial demonstration of what one choice looks like, put into action. The next few years will reveal the inner thoughts of many. And they will pierce our hearts as well.

So what do we do? Well, we can pay attention. There are people who are proclaiming, "Look! There he is!" people who preach a Jesus who has nothing at all to do with the Jesus of our morning's reading. They say that they are Christians, and that may be true. But they cannot be Jesus-followers, because their values are greed, privilege and disdain for anyone who is not like them, the very opposite of the values that Jesus both preached and lived. They claim to love Jesus so they can be free to hate their neighbors. They claim to give themselves to Jesus so they claw their way to power and wealth. Their religion is a lie. The next few years will lay that lie bare. We need to keep our eyes open and not be taken in or confused by a Jesus label.

So what do we do? We can pray. We can pray these old unanswered prayers and sing these only-partially fulfilled songs. We can pray the yearning in our hearts for the completion of what is only half-finished. We can pray the Lord's Prayer, every day, until God answers it. Just as a few weeks ago Jeremiah was told to get another scroll, and another, until the powers that be would listen to what was written on them, so we can pray until God listens and answers, until the day comes when, with more of a sense of fulfillment than Simeon had, we may sing, “Now, master, let your servant go in peace, according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation.”

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