December 31, 2023
1st Sunday of Christmas
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 148:1-14; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:22-40
Rev. Chip Roland
You’ve probably heard the saying that “God loves us just the way we are, but loves us far too much to leave us like that”. There’s great hope for healing and newness in this. But there’s also a little part of us, in the back of our minds, if we’re being super honest with ourselves, that’s a little uneasy. Sheesh God! Is that a promise or a threat or what?! Because what if we’re comfortable just the way we are? What if the way we are, while not joyful and flourishing is familiar and safe, if kind of a pale, anemic type of safe?
The book of Isaiah cries out into the author’s present-day that Jerusalem’s vindication will shine out like the dawn, a burning torch, a glory for all the political powers of the day to marvel at. There will be a turn of seasons for Zion, a Spring of new life and wonder. It’s likely that these passages were written during the Babylonian exile, or perhaps it’s closing days when the hope of a return to Judah orchestrated by the Cyrus, the emperor of Persia was in the air. A professor of mine used to say that it’s important to listen for what he called “the wind the text is pushing against”. So, when we see Isaiah using the language of rebirth in glorious hyperbole, it’s easy to imagine he was speaking to an audience that was skeptical, that had lost hope or even interest in the homeland of their grandparents and great-grandparents in the sixty to seventy-odd years of the exile.
Not to turn a sermon into a history lecture, but the whole point of the Babylonian policy of deportation from colonized lands was this. The first generation would lament the things they had lost, the second generation would adapt to reality as it was, learning to live in their new land. The third would become comfortable citizens of wherever they were, good Babylonians who, in this case, happened to be Jewish. So imagine what it was like to hear that you should pick up stakes, uncouple yourself from the comfortable and familiar, even the happy, to return to a homeland you never knew, that you only heard about in stories. My prof compared it to this. His children were raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He, was born and raised in Horton Kansas. Imagine what his kids would have thought if he went to them and said, God is doing this new thing in Kansas, and we have to leave everything we have to take part in it.
One would think by the time Mary and Joseph presented Jesus as an infant in the temple that being amazed was becoming old hat for them.
Simeon had been looking forward to the consolation of Israel, which is a very nuanced concept to unpack here. Does it involve independence from Rome? Certainly. Does it mean the restoration of the David dynasty? Likely. But it also involves faith in God’s ongoing promise of healing, newness, and glorification as seen in our reading from Isaiah. A glory that the whole world will be taken up in! A future that harkens to the past but is better, more whole than the past, embodied in the Messiah. Moved by the Spirit, he found the epicenter of his hope in Jesus. It’s interesting that, in the midst of his joy, what he says to Mary is starkly honest. The new hope that Jesus brings will be all that he hoped for, but crisis will come with that change. Many will rise and will be uplifted by the gospel. It will cause others to fall. A sword will pierce Mary’s soul as well. It’s difficult to know what to do with that. But we might look to what it must have been like for Mary to see her son, her baby that she gave birth to in a manger crucified to get a sense of what he talking about. The future calls us to hope, but it remains the case that pain is part of life. Anna understood this as well. Either she was a widow to the age of 84 or a widow for 84 years. The first is more plausible, but she understood grief and her life journey had brought her to a closeness to God almost unprecedentedly. She also found in Christ something that animated her, perhaps something she had been looking for in all her years of worship and fasting. Even in her closeness to God already, this child represented something new the Lord was doing in the world.
What can we do with this today? That we are having this worship service on New Year’s Eve obviously lends itself to contemplation of the year ahead. The hope and the worry. Called calls us to newness, to change, to a greater, whole future than the past. But change, even deliriously good change brings crisis. Even a change as stark as a transition from slave to child calls us to leave the familiar to embrace the new. Westminster looks to the new year with an understandable mixture of hope and concern. We are on a journey to discover together what the future is. Both new healing and discomfort are all but guaranteed because that, as we all know, is the way life works. But, in your own mixture of hope and concern, I ask you to take comfort in this. God goes with us. A God whose love for us is so unfathomably great that he became a child, cold and vulnerable to be with us in this life, to redeem us, to be in solidarity with us. Happy New Year.
© Rev. Chip Roland, 2023, All Rights Reserved
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