01 January 2012

New Year’s Day / The Name of Jesus
Luke 2:15-40
1 January 2012


Those of you who were at the 7 pm worship service on Christmas Eve may have heard me offer a short quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer during the Let the Children Come time … though it may have gotten lost in the midst of everything else which was going on in the children’s message, but it bears repeating today, this First Sunday of Christmas …

[The central message of Christmas is that] God turns toward the very places from which humans turn away.

Today’s Gospel story … what we might call “the rest of the Christmas story” because it completes the Bethlehem portion of Jesus’ life narrative … is full of those “God-turning” moments:

• God turning toward the shepherds as they hear the angels’ word first and hurry to see Mary and Joseph and the child Jesus;
• God turning toward the Jews, a point particularly emphasized in the rituals described, as well as the stories of Simeon and Anna;
• And in and through it all, God turning toward Jesus.

Let’s spend some time this New Year’s morning taking note of these.

First, the message about the shepherds. It may be an old saw from so many Christmas Eve sermons, but it bears repeating: shepherds were and are outcasts, living on the fringe of society, out in the wild, away from “decent, God fearing people” … they, ritually unclean by the rules of Hebrew religion; they, the low ones in a social system heavily stacked against them … yet they, they are the ones who first hear the message of good news from God … “this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known” to them.
To these people on the outside, God has turned first with the Good News of Jesus. It is still as earth-shattering a message now as it was then … echoing Mary’s words in the Magnificat; right here, those words are being worked out in human history … God is bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly … the Good News of Jesus Christ does not come first to the halls of power or into the lives of the rich and famous … but to backwards country bumpkins … and smelly ones at that.
It is a worldly slap in the face … an insult, an affront … of the first order.
God is not going to play by our human orderings and rules.
God is turning toward the very places from which humans turn away.

The same can certainly be said of that second point … that here in these words God is showing a particular turning toward the Jews. The story moves rapidly to the words of Jesus’ naming, and Mary and Joseph’s obedience to the most ancient of Jewish rituals and laws.
Still, despite these clear words … and this never fails to amaze me … still, many, many Christians forget the fact, Jesus was and is … a Jew. Though our western European and American portraits paint him to appear as someone who would easily fit in on the streets of Oslo or Munich or Minneapolis / St. Paul … they’re just plain wrong. Jesus was a child of the Mideast, born to Hebrews of the area, so he would have looked like … everyone else from that Mediterranean area of the world. Dark complected. Dark haired. Short and swarthy. And eight days after he was born, he was circumcised, so to keep the law of the Hebrew people.
Luke spends a lot of time in these verses emphasizing Jesus’ Jewishness … from his circumcision and naming, to his mother’s purification ritual, to his presentation in the Temple in Jerusalem. We recall that Luke’s gospel, and its companion volume, Acts, were likely written to Gentiles (non Jews) in the Roman world, so that, as Luke states at the beginning of the Gospel, “you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”
Unfortunately, part of that instruction was likely derogatory words and actions, discrimination, persecution, hatred of the Jews, even then, among Christians, even then, in the Roman world. Perhaps Luke saw this anti-Jewish belief and behavior, and wanted to set early believers straight … reminding them that Jesus was himself born a Jew, and began his life fully within the customs, laws and rituals of the Jewish religion.
And that’s a good reminder for us, as well, when we try to make Jesus over from “God for us” to “God like us.” When we say in the Creed that Jesus was made “truly human” it means just that … that Jesus was fully a person of his place and time in the world … he wasn’t a 12th or 18th or 21st century person; he wasn’t Chinese or Botswanan or American. He was born and lived his earthly life as a 1st century Jew … which serves well to remind us that God chose to become human in a particular place and time … to show us that we, too, are called to live fully engaged in this life which we have been given; not wishing and hoping that we’d be living sometime, somewhere else … dreaming, hoping to be beamed up or blasted out or raptured away … no, we are called to live right here, right now, engaged with life as it is for us, and for our neighbor.
This is also a reminder that ritual can serve us well, as a reminder of the sacred, the holy, in this life, and can enhance our engaging in it, rather than escaping from it. We have become an increasingly de-ritualized society … who prays before meals anymore? Who reads the Scriptures around their meal table anymore? Who eats together as a family anymore, conversing about the events of the day just past? Jesus’ full engagement with his Jewish religion meant his full engagement in the ritual of what it meant to be a first century Jew, honoring God in all of life … from one’s rising up to lying down, going out and coming in, in how one dressed and ate.
In some ways we Lutherans have been much to blame for the de-ritualization of Christianity. Though it was never Martin Luther’s intent to wholesale throw out many of the rites and rituals of the Christian faith … from making the sign of the cross in remembrance of our Baptism … to the differing colors and vestments of our corporate worship together … to individual and family prayer at our waking up and going to sleep … those who followed the Great Reformer “cleaned house” of many of these rituals because they were “too catholic.” So we became a church devoid of many of the rich traditions which taught generations faith, and as the first Protestants, we passed this sterile faith along to other Christians as “what God really wants.”
Thankfully … we Lutherans have been recovering many of these rituals and traditions in our corporate worship together … from making the sign of the cross … to weekly communion … to a renewed appreciation of our Baptismal heritage. But our individual and family faith traditions may still be lacking.

R. Alan Culpeper in his commentary on Luke’s gospel makes a valid point, in bringing out what we have lost as God’s people by removing ritual from our lives:

For many, religious rituals are reduced to church attendance at Christmas and Easter and to socially required ceremonies at births, weddings, and funerals. The marking of both daily and special events with rituals that recognize the sacredness of life and the presence of God in the everyday is practically extinct. The result has been that God has receded from the awareness and experience of everyday life. [People’s] lives … move in a secular realm devoid of the presence of the holy. Little room for mystery remains in the everyday …

Yet the message of Luke’s gospel here, is that God unmistakably turns toward these very places from which humans turn away. God is calling us, you and me, back to life which reflects the giftedness, the holiness, of God For Us … that Jesus came into the world means that this life is different for us, and we are called to honor and recognize this in our lives … individually, corporately, among friends, in families.
Here’s one ready way for you to try that in the New Year.
Every week we offer these little “Taking Faith Home” fliers so you can do just that … take faith home, to engage in some practice of that which we preach and feed on here in this one hour each week, to take it into the 167 remaining hours of your week. There are prayers, there are readings, there are blessings, there are caring conversations and devotions, service opportunities and rituals and traditions in which to engage each week.
I’ll be blunt. We have got a great thing going here corporately as Nativity people and congregation. Our attendance, our giving of ourselves, through service, through financial stewardship, it’s all growing. God has blessed us tremendously in the year just past and we give great thanks for that even as we look ahead with eager anticipation to what 2012 will bring to this community of faith.
But all of that good feeling pales with the joy of the Lord of which we will each be a part, as we grow personally in our faith journey, in our own devotion life, in prayers and caring conversations in our homes and in our families, outside these walls. I know some of you already engage in these rituals and faith practices, and that’s great … we have and will continue to ask you to share with us, and help lead us, into growing in our own discipleship journeys. For those of you who have yet to begin … may I encourage, commend, exhort you to make a New Year start, by trying just one of the ways these little helps list, to engage your faith outside of worship, during the week? Please. Give it a try. I will be praying for you as you give it a try.

One thing you find, as you go on this discipleship journey with Jesus, is that it doesn’t mean everything is going to automatically go well and right in your life from now on. Far from it. Sometimes the walk of faith, the discipleship journey with Jesus, seeing life through the eyes of faith, obedience, submission, confession and repentance, means that it’s just plain harder, the path is rougher, there are more boulders in the way.
It was this way for those there at the outset. Note the strange ominous words of old Simeon:

This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too.

Note how Mary pondered in her heart all these things which happened and these words which were said.
There will indeed be falling and rising, there will be opposition and swords piercing souls, that is for sure. We rehear and rehearse that story in Jesus’ life beginning next week, on Baptism of our Lord Sunday, as the story told in worship of the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry … sent forth from his baptism, God turning toward and sending forth Jesus, to bring his Word into the world … here, next Sunday, that story begins once more, among us.
And in our own lives, we rehear and rehearse those words … God’s turning toward Jesus, God’s turning toward us … in our own lives, we rehear and rehearse these words as we remember our own baptism, God’s lavish gift to, on and for us … a lifelong sign and symbol of our dying and rising with Jesus, a remembrance of our “walking wet” through life, our Lord with us, through all the swords and boulders … and blessings and rejoicings … of this life.
Our baptism … and the rites and rituals given us which we are called to follow … are palpable reminders … every time we dip our fingers in the font, and make the sign of the cross on our foreheads or over ourselves … every time we confess our sins and shortcomings and hear the words of forgiveness … every time we eat and drink at this lavish feast of faith and community, spirit-blessing and filling … we are reminded that our Lord is with us ... all ways … and most especially, in the places and through the times from which others might turn away.
In our sorrow and in our thanksgivings … in bad times and in good … whatever this new Year of our Lord 2012 has in store for us … we will rest assured and work assured, go out assured and come in assured, lay down assured and rise up assured … that our Lord is with us … always, in all ways.
Baptized, We Live … fully engaged in Jesus for the life to come, we go forth assured in Jesus … to fully engage in this life we are given to share, to live and serve and give Jesus-life with all, in his name …
… to Rejoice, rejoice, with thanks embrace another year of grace.
Amen.