New Beginnings
New Beginnings
By Greg McDonell
January 1, 2012
Reading: Luke 2:21-40
I overheard, the other day, a clerk at a department store convey to a co-worker that she was darn glad Christmas was over. I wanted to jump into the conversation and say, “But no, Christmas is not over….Christmas has twelve days!”
I thought better of it, however, realizing that if I had been working in retail during this time of the year I to would be glad it was over. My eavesdropping on this honest conversation and my look into today’s text caused me to ponder what Christmas really means and does it have a beginning and an end or could it be that Christmas represents New Beginnings anytime we give birth to the Christ Child?
It is true that the pressures of secularism and our modern life cause us to bunch up our rituals into manageable bite size chunks for an economic stimulus. Just as these two store clerks were taking down the Christmas glitter I noticed that Valentine hearts awaited them.
We more and more, it seems to me, reduce the significance of our ritual observances. Busy schedules, dual careers, after-school activities assure that fewer families share a meal together uninterrupted. Prayers before meals and family bible study are almost a thing of the past. We flood to church on the High Holy Days and feel as if we have completed our ritual obligations. Thus our daily experiences are reduced and impoverished.
Day laid upon day take on little meaning beyond themselves…….scant room is open for the transcendent God to enter. Our daily lives are void of mystery as they become more subject to secularism and technology.
R. Alan Culpepper extends to us this challenge:
“The challenge to modern Christians is to find effective rituals for celebrating the presence of God in the ordinary. We need to learn to greet the morning with gratitude; to celebrate the goodness of food, family, and friendship at meals; to recognize mystery in beauty; and to mark rites of passage.” Luke The New Interpreter’s Bible ----like sixteenth birthdays and the end of any war. (pause)
There is something so curious about this passage to me. We find Joseph and Mary dutifully following the Jewish rituals of circumcision and purification. . That, in and of its self, is most common for a Jewish family. We tend to forget that Jesus was a Jew. But what is strange to me are these two old Jewish characters in the story, namely, Simeon and Anna, who see in this child the Consolation of Israel and the Redemption of Jerusalem.
What about them allowed them to see something very special in this child? What about them opened their eyes to a new reality to new beginnings for Israel and the world?
Simeon and Anna saw that day what they must have seen thousands of times...an infant being carried into the Temple by a poor, peasant, pious family many who have walked days to fulfill their obligations.
We have an old adage that “Seeing is Believing.” This wasn't the case for Anna and Simeon. In fact the opposite seems to have been true: They believed, so they were able to see more than the obvious. In THIS infant they saw consolation and salvation.
God is present in an infant, in bread and wine, in you and me, and in the everyday events of our lives....if we have faith to see. I am struck that Simeon's response was not tied to his own salvation but that of the people.
We simply cannot turn this special event into some kind of self-focused happening. The object of God's love, according to the biblical faith, is not first of all the church; it is the world: For God so loved the Cosmos........
Such understanding should bring us to New Beginnings....where we proclaim boldly the all inclusive love of the one we seek to follow. Anything less than that is less than Christian...in my way of thinking.
So perhaps New Beginnings happen for us as we find ourselves in the Old Rituals. Every birth of a child reminds us of new beginnings. And when we enter into the ritual of Baptism can we not see the face of God.
There were three things about Simeon and Anna that, I think, made them more able to see the divine in this vulnerable child.
- First of all they were people of prayer spending much of their time in the presence of God.
- The second factor was their willingness to be led by the Spirit of God....the same Spirit that this child, once grown up, would promise would be with us.
- The third reason I believe they were able to see what so many had missed is the fact that they were unencumbered by this world. I would suggest that the more we have the harder it may be to imagine a life of total dependency upon the Christ.
So perhaps we might be drawn ever closer to seeing if our New Beginning in this New Year would include prayer, openness, and a new found freedom from the shackles of a world bent on binding us up.
Or one might suggest that we refuse to see because we know as long as we are in this world – there will be no escaping the fact that the message of this Jesus will have an edge to it. As soon as it becomes warm and fuzzy and unchallenging – it has become a watered down relationship.
Jesus, the Consoler and Savior, has done his part; and he placed the church into our hands to continue in the work of the Holy Spirit.
“We can find comfort in Jesus; but we should never get comfortable with Jesus.” Gerry Goebel, One Family Outreach
Yes, Jesus is the sign of New Beginnings of new things to come. And yet we have no easier a time today than the days past as to what real evidence we have to show that the world is a different place……because of this one birth.
What can we say when our children ask about the child in the manger while in some parts of the world children from two years old and under have died and are dying, not by an order from Herod, but by the ever-increasing cruelty of war and ever-decreasing imagination of Christians. What over the years have we been able to tell the Jewish people about our Consoling and Saving Jesus as remnants returned from the Death Camps...camps ever-worse than Babylon? And what can we say to ourselves when we look at our unhealed and unsaved stage of our own lives after hearing the message of healing and salvation that has dominated the Christmas worship for over two thousand years?
These questions are as old as the first Christian message itself and the answer we give is as old as well.................
For you see, the presence of the Messiah is a mystery; and it cannot be said to everybody and it cannot be seen by everybody, but only by the likes of Simeon who was driven by the Spirit. This thing called salvation flies in the face of pious opinion or intellectual demands. The Mystery of Salvation is the mystery of a child. Isaiah anticipated it, by ecstatic vision as did Virgil in poetic illumination. They all felt as did the early Christian that The Mystery of salvation is the Mystery of a child.
A child is real and not yet real. It is in history but not yet historical. Its nature is visible and invisible. It is here and not here. And so with salvation. Salvation has the nature of a child. As the whole of Christendom remembers every year, in one of its most impressive rituals, the child Jesus, so salvation, however visible it may be, remains always also invisible.
I have come to believe that if you want a salvation that is only visible you will not be able to see the divine child in the manger or the divine man on the cross. Salvation is a child who when he grows up is crucified.
Only if we can see power under weakness, the whole under the fragment, victory under defeat, glory under suffering, innocence under guilt, sanctity under sin, life under death can we say: Mine eyes have seen your salvation.
It is hard to say because it was and is and will always be a mystery...the mystery of a child. But in the seeing there we will find the New Beginnings we seek.
A Blessed and Glorious New Year to you all.