Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from January 1, 2006

“Simeon’s Song”

Rev. Thomas Ratmeyer

Scriptures:

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 2:22-40

What does one preach about the week after Christmas Eve and Christmas Day?  In a sense, all has been said.  What does one do after the gifts are unwrapped, and the heart and mind have to slowly rewind from the spin of anticipation back to the much slower pace of the present moment?  What about food?  What do you feel like eating now after all the cooking and the spreads of plentiful delicacies?  One of the preaching resources that is available to us calls for a “bread and butter” sermon today, a simpler fare than the ornate vocabulary that may have adorned the Christmas message.  We’ll see what happens.

The gospel lesson makes sense in many ways.  Christmas Eve had taken us from Galilee and Nazareth to Bethlehem.  The story today takes us and Mary and Joseph with their newborn back where we came from.  There are precious few Scriptures about the child Jesus to begin with.  It seems like a gift when we can accompany him for a little while in his childhood before we jump to the thirty-year old rabbi and teacher.

But Luke has a very specific reason to tell this story and to tell it in the way that he does.  I want to take two points from this scripture and then show how they might help us think about what matters on this first day of the new year.

First, the story of Jesus in the temple goes to great length to show that Mary and Joseph do everything that the law, according to Hebrew scriptures, requires.  We hear of the circumcision of the boy Jesus when he’s eight days old.  He’s given the name that the angel had announced he should have when that angel visited Mary.  There’s the presentation of the first-born male child in the temple.  There’s the offering of the sacrifice for the purification of Mary.  Everything was according to the Hebrew law.

Now, Jesus’ life and teaching will be offensive later on to the norms and order of society.  He will be critical of the hypocrisy of some teachers and scholars of scripture who have such a legalistic view of life that they forget the spirit behind the law.  Yet Jesus is a Jew from the beginning to the end of his life, and the way he lives and what he preaches does not ever overcome the law of the Hebrew scriptures.  It fulfills them.  Any temptation on our part to view the Hebrew scriptures as old in the sense of obsolete or outdated would mean we would miss the very core of our Christian faith—the desire to understand God’s will in God’s history with God’s creation.  We would dismiss the richest traditions of our faith.

The Jewish life of faith seeks to praise and honor God continuously from one’s rising in the morning to one’s last thought at night, and in all we do in between—eating, working, in the way we dress, we act toward each other and we act toward God’s creation.  Our life and how we live it are never to be separate from the one who created us.  Our Jewish heritage is one of ritual—but not a ritual that takes us outside of the world that would separate us from what is going on or what we need to do.  Instead, it’s a ritual that puts us square in the middle of the most worldly world and helps us live more fully as children of God.

In every generation our sense of ritual changes.  This is a nicer way of saying that few of the rituals I experienced growing up are still in place in my life today.  The family and society at large had a greater hold on our time in days past, from the daily shared family meal to the Sunday afternoon walks to the societal expectations of regular worship attendance and dress codes, to the style and timing of weddings and funerals and such personal, yet public, events.

Don’t get me wrong.  Our rituals have not disappeared.  They have been personalized or, you might say, individualized.  Even within one family, it might now be various rituals that only one or two members of the family share with each other.  I’d like to think that we still mark daily events, as well as special times in our lives in ways that recognize the sacredness of life and the presence of God in the every day even if we don’t always specifically say so.

My first point, celebrating the Jewish heritage of our Christian faith, is that we should never fall into the habit of seeing God only in certain places, only at certain times, in buildings that have religious names, in books that have “holy” in the title, and in rituals over which just clergy can preside.  There is a window to the presence of the one who creates and redeems in all moments of our lives, and in all things we do.

Secondly, as we look at this new year and hope for peace, it also might feel some uncertainty about what is to come.  We should keep in mind the words of Simeon when he sees the baby Jesus in the temple:  “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.”

Luke tells us that Simeon was a devout and righteous man, a man on whom rested the spirit of God.  He knew, through that spirit, that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah.  When Simeon saw the baby in the temple with his parents, he knew him for who he was, the fulfillment of God’s promise not only for the original people of God but for all the world.  Simeon’s proclamation didn’t mean that he was going to die now.  It meant that his wait was over.  He would now be at peace no matter what happened because he knew that God’s promise was fulfilled.

Simeon’s prayer has become a part of the history of the church.  It is the invitation to believers of all times to recognize that, through the coming of Jesus Christ, God’s promise is fulfilled and we all can be at peace on them most fundamental level.  No matter what happens, the truth is that God has reconciled the world with God’s self.  We are redeemed for our shortcomings, even our sins.  What ultimately, awaits us is life, not death.

I want to invite you to say Simeon’s prayer together with me as a ritual that we share at the outset of the new year.  It is printed in the Chalice Hymnal under the number 156.  I will ask Trish to play the music for us.  We’ll sing it once and then we’ll sing it again at the end and we will say the words together.

“Now let us sing our Savior’s praise, and tell God’s goodness all our days.

Lord, now let your servant go in peace;

your word has been fulfilled:

my own eyes have seen the salvation

which you have prepared in the presence of all people,

a light to reveal you to the nations

and the glory of your people Israel.

Now let us sing our Savior’s praise, and tell God’s goodness all our days.”

May the blessing of God be with you in the year to come.  Amen.