First Presbyterian Church
December 31, 2023, Christmas 1B
Unexpected Prophets
As we gather on this seventh day of Christmas, we are presented with a scripture that takes us to the fortieth day in the life of the infant Jesus. That fortieth day was a significant one for a Jewish baby (particularly a first-born male child) and its mother, as it was a day for the two to be presented in the Temple for the child to be dedicated to the Lord. One might look back to the story of the child Samuel, whose mother Hannah had dedicated her child to the Lord, for a model of how this worked. Presuming that they had stayed in Bethlehem since the birth, the trip to Jerusalem and the Temple was a fortunately brief one for Mary and her husband Joseph.
It's worth noticing that the offering they were named to offer says something about Joseph and Mary. For those who could afford such, the offering meant to be used here was a lamb. The "pair of doves or two young pigeons" were designated specifically for those who couldn't afford a lamb. In other words, Joseph and Mary were poor.
It wasn't unusual for the Temple to be crowded; between such work as what Joseph and Mary had come to do and any number of other small rituals, there was usually a lot going on. This visit, however, turned out to be anything but routine for this new family.
First appeared a man named Simeon. Luke wants to make sure you know he was a "righteous and devout" man, possessed of a vision that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. He was moved by the Spirit to be at the Temple that day, and presumably that same Spirit pointed out this family to him and to the child in particular as that promised Messiah. He takes the child from the parents (a move that would likely bring an attempted kidnapping charge today) and lifted up his praise to God in words that have become one of the occasional songs of the church even today, like Mary's Magnificat that we heard a couple of weeks ago. (You can find a version of Simeon's song in your hymnal at #545.)
When he had finished his praise, he blessed the couple, but (again presumably moved by the Spirit) had something more to say to Mary, a hard word in this case, both about the fate of this child and also how Mary herself would be affected: "a sword will pierce your own soul too." Here was something that had not happened to this point in Mary's experience with this birth; no such warning had been given by Gabriel or by Elizabeth or anywhere along this way she had traveled. It's hard for us to imagine how such a statement must have hit her.
While Simeon was with the family, another surprise prophet was drawing the whole Temple crowd's attention to them. Unlike Simeon, Anna is definitively named as "a prophet," indicating that this was not new territory in her long life. She had apparently taken to staying in the Temple full-time and not eating, perhaps in her own kind of waiting parallel to Simeon's. By this time the Temple authorities might well have started to consider her a nuisance. While he is speaking to the family, she is proclaiming to all who are passing by, all who "were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem." One might argue that this makes Anna "the first evangelist," the first to bear public witness to the Messiah, to speak that news to not just a select few, but to all who were present in the Temple that day.
It had been forty days since Jesus's birth, and months before that for Mary's encounter with Elizabeth and her own song of what this child was to be, and months before that when Gabriel had first appeared to her. Obviously, a lot had happened in between; the months of pregnancy, the unexpected trip to Bethlehem, the birth itself, and the appearance of those shepherds. Now, after all this, comes this unexpected encounter with prophets while doing their religious duty in the Temple. How much had time dimmed the memory of those initial encounters? And how much was the memory of those encounters stirred up now in this new encounter?
If Mary, with all she had experienced to this point, could be caught off guard by Simeon and Anna, how much more so are we unprepared for any kind of prophetic word? We live in a time and culture in which "Christmas" starts sometime after Labor Day and ends no later than, say, 2:00 p.m. on December 25; how much are we capable of hearing a word about this Messiah, this Son of God no less, who did not disdain humanity but instead became one of us and lived among us? Can we still hear and hold that message of God breaking into the world as one of us on a day when much of the country is preparing to party mindlessly over the end of one year and the start of another?
How do we remember to listen to unexpected prophets when they receive a word? (One hint: anyone who calls himself or herself a prophet is virtually never a prophet.) How do we stay ready to receive? How do we stay prepared to discern what the Spirit is doing and where it is leading?
Perhaps this is our one quest to take with us from this season of Christmas: how to stay ready for the word from unexpected prophets.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #143, Angels from the Realms of Glory; #121, O Little Town of Bethlehem; #124, Still, Still, Still; #132, Good Christian Friends, Rejoice; #---, What child is this (additional verses); #123, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear; #144, In the Bleak Midwinter; #147, The First Nowell (stanzas 1, 2, and 6 only), #136, Go, Tell It on the Mountain
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