It’s the first Sunday after Christmas – that not-quite-so-special time when the magic of the Yuletide season starts to fade and where everything starts to return to normal.
With the notable exception of New Year’s Eve, our festivities are now over. The presents have been opened, the pudding has been eaten, the angels have gone back into heaven and Santa has evacuated the shopping centre! The church returns to a more standard number of worshippers. It’s the time of crumpled paper, of overstuffed rubbish bins, and of post-Christmas sales. It’s time to wash up, clean up, and sober up, at least for a couple of days.
We had a very special time at Holy Trinity this Christmas. Our Christmas concert went very well. We pulled off Carols on the Lawn once again without getting rained out (despite all dire warnings from the weather bureau). Our Christmas service was well attended and this was followed (in our case) by a lovely luncheon with a variety of lovely guests, and this year we had some special assistance from Belinda and Mahmoud Mourad from the Imam Husain Islamic Centre who cleaned the kitchen and prepared salads and helped in a variety of ways and then left before lunch was served (thus avoiding the ham)!
Of course there was no boxing on Boxing Day this year – thanks be to God! Not many in the congregation now have been here long enough to remember the series of fight-night fundraisers I did on the day after Christmas in the late 1990’s. What was it that made me think that was a good idea? I think I was just too taken with the marketing slogan: Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill – we’re putting the Christ back into Christmas and the boxing back into Boxing Day!
All that was soooo .. last century, and Christmas Day was sooo … last week, even though the visible signs of the Yuletide season are still all around us, and will no doubt remain so until we can muster the energy yet to start taking them down. Even so, the lights and the tinsel just don’t seem to glow as brightly as they did a couple of days ago.
We still sing Christmassy hymns of sorts too, but they don’t sound quite the same as they did a few days back, and it’s hard to sing them quite as heartily.
The family Christmas tree says it all, I think. It is still up but the lights are off and the presents that were under it are gone (all except for dear Aunt Ethel’s present as we still haven’t got round to visiting her yet, but we will soon).
The post-Christmas fridge is a powerful symbol at this stage too. It still has plenty of food in it, but already we are thinking less about feasting than we are about dieting, and we’re wondering what we’ll do with all those left-overs!
If last Sunday was the week of great expectation, this week coming is the week of the great resumption. We still hymn the arrival of the master, but we’re now also thinking about the arrival of the great Mastercard bill.
It’s time to start taking things down and packing things up, putting the Tupperware smile back in the fridge, and getting back to work. It’s ‘Back to Business’ Sunday, which perhaps explains why our Gospel reading for this week depicts Jesus and His family getting back into the normal routine of life.
After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child. He was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.” (Luke 2:21-24)
There you have it: Jesus was circumcised, Mary was purified and Jesus was presented at the Temple. In other words ‘Jesus was done’.
That’s how it’s generally referred to nowadays by those who still consider baptism mandatory for their children. ‘We’d like to get him done’, the parents say, often blithely unaware of just how uninspiring that sort of statement is as a proposal for baptism.
Mind you, in Jesus’ case the whole process was far more elaborate. The baby had to be circumcised, the mother purified and then the child presented. There was a lot more doing involved in getting someone done in those days!
To modern ears the process not only seems overly complicated but archaic, particularly the idea that a mother should be considered ritually unclean after childbirth (as women would regularly be considered unclean throughout their lives, according to the Torah) – all presumably on account of the shedding of blood.
The purification concept was preserved in Christian tradition in a ceremony known as ‘the churching of women’, and you’ll find a version of that service in the older Anglican prayer-books though it has been omitted entirely from the most recent version.
Once upon a time we did have members of our community who would reminisce about being ‘churched’, and clearly the emphasis shifted from being a purification service to one of thanksgiving for the survival of the mother. Even so, as less and less mothers died in childbirth (thankfully) the service became less and less relevant.
It was all very relevant to Mary and Joseph though. They were faithful Jews, and by saying that they ‘had Jesus done’ I don’t mean to suggest that they simply performed the obligatory steps without heartfelt spiritual enthusiasm. On the contrary, I envisage each step of the process being carried out in a spirit of sincere prayer and contemplation. Even so, I assume that the reason they went through this process was simply because that’s what members of their spiritual community did. Mary and Joseph were doing the done thing.
It wasn’t long after the birth of Jesus that the family started integrating themselves back into the routine of their community, and there is indeed something rather familiar about the whole temple scene, perhaps especially when they are met at the door by a couple of elderly folk – Simeon and Anna – who had been floating around the back of the building.
The elderly pair both gravitate towards the child, as elderly folk in churches everywhere are apt to do, though in this case it turns out that the old folk see more than cuteness in this new member of their community!
Simeon took [the baby Jesus] in his arms and praised God, saying, “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation …
There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age … At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. (Luke 2:28-38)
We are not told how Mary and Joseph reacted to the prophetic announcements of Simeon and Anna but they must have been quite startled, even if Simeon and Anna themselves were less than startling characters.
It is curious, in fact (and typical of the way God works, according to Luke) that Jesus is welcomed into the temple not by the High Priest, nor by any of the clergy, but by a man and a woman whose only qualifications for spiritual authority was that they were both pious and elderly!
Simeon was no priest or retired clergy person. He was just ‘good old Simeon’ who had been a pillar of the church for as long as anybody could remember. We’ve had a goodly number of Simeon’s in our community over the 25 years that I’ve been here and they’ve all had a deep affection for children. We’ve had a goodly number of Anna’s too, though it may be that Anna was a good deal older than any of the great grandmother figures we’ve had here. It all depends on how you interpret the text.
Luke says “She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow for eighty-four years. (2:36-37)
Depending on where you put the comma, this could mean that she was 84 in total or that she had been 84 years a widow! Even if she married as a teenager, this would put her well into her 100’s!
It’s easy to get these things mixed up of course. I was told of a clerk who was reviewing a passport application that asked “age of mother (if living)” and “age of father (if living)”, to which the applicant had responded with the ages of 111 and 115 respectively! The clerk said “are you sure your parents are that old?” to which the applicant said “well, they would be, if living.”
Anna was certainly still living, whether 84 or 104. Either way, she was a woman of great age and a woman of great faith who had dedicated her whole life to prayer. You’d think she might have been in a home but the Gospel tells us that she never left the temple, which means she must have had people looking after her there and bringing in food, though it also says that she fasted a lot, so maybe they didn’t have to bring in food all that often?
We can speculate, at any rate, over Anna’s great age and her great health, but what is really being focused on here is her great insight. Both she and Simeon sing and shout and prophesy about the arrival of someone who they have recognised as being very special – Jesus.
“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.” … “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.” (Luke 2:33-35)
God intrudes into our world in a whole new way in the person of Jesus. Jesus is not like those who came before him. St Paul would call him ‘the visible image of our invisible God’! And yet, where do we initially find this new intrusion of God? We find Him at the back of the old cathedral. He’s there for the regular service. He’s being nursed by some of the older parishioners.
The old and the new come together in Jesus! Jesus is a fresh Word from God, and yet Jesus is a part of something very old and familiar too. This new intrusion is part of a larger story – a story that goes back long before this birth, back before even Simeon and Anna’s birth, back even to creation itself!
And so we find this new intrusion of God at the back of the church amongst the elderly. The new is being woven into the old as the family takes their place in the traditional spiritual community so that they might worship with them in the usual way and do what has always been done!
Let me close with some words from Henry Van Dyke, who is a sort of male version of Helen Steiner Rice, and whose messages inevitably turn up on cards or are quoted in old Christmas movies that play this time of year.
“Are you willing”, says Henry Van Dyke, “to forget what you have done for others and to remember only what others have done for you…. to stoop down and consider the needs of little children… If so, then you can keep Christmas, and if you can keep it for a day, why not always?”
It’s a piece of sentimental syrup, but it does embody something of the ‘Christmas Spirit’, I think, and ‘If you can keep it for one day, why not always?’
I think we know full well why we can’t keep Christmas always. It’s because it would be too damn exhausting! And if we did keep Christmas every day, then Christmas would really be anything special at all, would it?
In truth, we weren’t built to have special things happen every day of our lives. We need special times but we need routine too. And if you are like me, while you enjoy all the special celebrations and special foods, you probably quietly look forward to going back to eating corn flakes and toast in a morning too.
And here on Sundays we will now start getting back into our regular routine. No more special services for a while, no more special parties or luncheons. Sunday School will recommence and home groups will reconvene and, yes, it would be wonderful to see some spectacular miracle disrupt our routine in the weeks to come, but my expectation is that God will probably just chose to just go with the flow, and work with us steadily, as per normal, and that’s OK, because God can be truly present with us in all of that too.
The new and the old, the spectacular and ordinary, come together in Jesus! This is what incarnation is all about – that the God who is there in the skies over Bethlehem in the chorus of the angels is back the following Sunday, hovering about the back of the church with the old folk. We experience Christ on those special occasions, and then we take Christ back home afterwards. God is with us all the time, in Bethlehem and back home with us in Nazareth.
We can’t have Christmas every day, and frankly, we don’t want to. But we can have the presence of God with us every day – at the special and extraordinary moments, and also in the familiar and the routine moments. All we need is the discernment of a Simeon or an Anna to notice when God is present!
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 29th of December, 2014.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
