Posted by: pastor on 02/24/2009 17:31:09
Sermon from Christmas 1
Ordinary Habits: Flexible Piety
Christmas 1 2008 CLC 12/28/08 St. Luke 2:22-40
In the Name of Jesus:
When I was in my internship year a member of the congregation council in my congregation objected to the word “sermon.” Having grown up in a denomination in which sermons referred mostly to the personal moral failings that God was angry about, he preferred a neutral-sounding word like “message.” It was very hard for him to understand that a sermon might be something other than what he’d grown up with.
But I understand: it’s taken me a while to understand, deeply, that piety is truly devotion, and to allow it to be stripped of the baggage that I, at least, have sometimes associated with it: outward signs of religiosity; a self-righteous, easily offended brand of faithfulness; a vocabulary of churchy-sounding words divorced from concern for justice.
But that’s not true piety, is it? True piety is reverence for God, often nourished by acts of obedience. True piety is closely akin to humility, and is evident in those who walk closely with God. People like Joseph & Mary, a poor and pious pair: These apparently ordinary parents of an evidently extraordinary child do for him what good Jewish parents did: they have him circumcised on the 8th day, then on the 40th bring him to the temple to be presented to God, with an appropriate offering for the occasion, since they are a poor family, a pair of pigeons. According to tradition, Mary will undergo ritual purification after giving birth. They are rooted in the traditions of faith. Pious. Devout.
At the temple we meet Simeon, whom we suppose to be old—he seems so in artists’ renderings—a pious Jew who has waited in hope and expectation for “the consolation of Israel”—for the Messiah. Anna is there, too—an elderly widow—a prophetess, surely poor, utterly dependent on God, her entire life is devoted to praying and fasting. The temple is her home as much as any place is. These two also embody true piety. Their hearts—and more than their hearts, their lives—on the consolation of Israel, God’s promised salvation.
These days of Christmas can become for many a kind of morning-after: at best, a time of quiet contemplation of God’s gift to us in Jesus, but at worst, a hangover of over-indulgences of various kinds: too much food, too much drink, too much wear and tear on Visa or Mastercard, too much pressure to create one perfect day of family togetherness and merriment. On the first day of Christmas we may or may not receive from our true loves a partridge in a pear tree or a Wii Fit or whatever else we thought we desired; on the second or third day of Christmas the polish may have dulled.
Anna & Simeon offer a kind of antidote in their response to the infant Jesus, brought to the temple by his Mary & Joseph for the most ordinary of rituals for good Jewish parents. Simeon’s years of waiting and hoping are fulfilled! Anna’s ardent prayers are answered! Their piety finds its goal.
Yet it’s hard to imagine that this baby, with these poor parents, met their expectations, that he was the consolation of Israel in Simeon’s mind’s eye; how could he have been? A poor, infant Messiah was hardly the conquering hero of anyone’s reckoning but God’s.
But Simeon’s yearning for God’s deliverance, while rooted in traditional piety, remained open to God’s prerogative, open to the leading of the Spirit which “rested on him.” Only by the leading of the Spirit could a pious Jew like Simeon be allowed to recognize in the infant Jesus the salvation for which he had waited, longed, hungered. Steeped in tradition, his reverence for God flexes to wrap itself around Jesus, the gift of God in humble human wrapping.
At the early service on Christmas Eve the children found the baby Jesus for our nativity not behind the pulpit, where some, at least, expected to find him, but under the tree, as a gift. Along with Anna & Simeon you and I are look for our Messiah, our salvation, our consolation in an unexpected place.
God’s astounding gift to us does not come in fine wrappings, but bound in strips of cloth: the swaddling cloths of Bethlehem become the linen bands of Jerusalem. Our gaily lit Christmas trees foreshadow the tree on which Jesus will hang for us and our salvation. We celebrate the birth of the Messiah, but already today the Church remembers the holy innocents slaughtered by Herod, because this infant Jesus poses a threat to those who seize and cling to power.
God’s self-giving to the world in Jesus is welcome to those whose eyes, opened by the Spirit, recognize that good news for the marginalized, the disenfranchised, is good news for all.
Week after week we gather, out of piety—call it habit, or devotion, or obligation, or because this place—or some place a lot like it—seems as much like home as anywhere else; these people as much like family as anyone else—we are gathered here by the Spirit, and through the Spirit our eyes are opened once again to receive God’s gift to us: Jesus, our consolation; the habits of our devotion the preparation to glimpse what God is doing in us, for us, with us.
Maybe it’s not what we expected; maybe you had something else in mind: health or wealth, job security, a family as picture perfect as the Holy Family—or the Waltons. Even so, nurtured by our own ordinary piety, our unremarkable habits of prayer and worship, of working and eating and drinking together, the Spirit opens our eyes, too, to see in Jesus the infant, in Jesus the crucified, Jesus the risen and ascended Son the consolation God has promised.
And sent out by that same Spirit, we proclaim with Simeon in word and deed that salvation has indeed come to all peoples, and with Anna give praise to God for the redemption that is offered in Christ Jesus. Amen.
