Seeing Salvation

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Christmas 1B

Text: Luke 2:22-40

²²When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord ²³(as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), ²⁴and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.” ²⁵Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. ²⁶It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. ²⁷Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, ²⁸Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, ²⁹“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; ³⁰for my eyes have seen your salvation, ³¹which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, ³²a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” ³³And the child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. ³⁴Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed ³⁵so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” ³⁶There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, ³⁷then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. ³⁸At 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. ³⁹When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. ⁴⁰The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.

Simeon and Anna.

They were fixtures at the Temple. They’re the ones who knew where those special candles and the decorations were stored from one year to the next, and just as important, HOW they were supposed to be stored. They kept track of that stuff because, for the most part, being in and around the Temple was their LIFE.  That is what they’d come to dedicate themselves to.

But they weren’t the only ones.  There were the priests, the assistants, the moneychangers, the suppliers, the deputy assistants and THEIR assistants. 

They were all there just as often as Simeon, and had structured their lives around Temple worship from the time they were kids. Some had been there longer than Anna, which was saying a LOT, considering how old she was now and how young she was when she lost her husband.

So what was different about Simeon and Anna? How did they key into what was really happening when Joseph and Mary showed up with their newborn baby, and not the others?

Scripture gives us part of the answer in introducing us to Simeon: The Holy Spirit had revealed to him that he would not die until he held the Messiah in his arms.  We find that in verse 26.  But if we go back just one phrase, we read this at the end of verse 25: ‘The Holy Spirit rested on him.’ So how does that happen? Does the Holy Spirit just show up one day and say ‘here I am!’ and move in like an unwelcome guest?

Not at all. 

To be in a relationship, there must be reciprocity – a mutual exchange.  That is, there is something offered and received by both people who are involved in the relationship.  If you have ever been involved in a one-way relationship it doesn’t take long to realize that the word relationship doesn’t quite apply when everything flows in one direction and one direction only.

It is no different when we enter into relationship with God. What WE struggle with is to try to identify what it is that we bring to the relationship.  After all, we ARE talking about being in a reciprocal relationship with the creator of the universe…talk about figuring out what present to give to the person who has everything … this is kind of the ultimate example.

But that IS the question, isn’t it? What would God want with us, much less FROM us? As soon as we hear that, if we’ve spent any time in Sunday School, the quick and easy answer is right on the tip of our tongues: our hearts, or our lives, our souls.  But I think that might actually skip over what is at the heart of the question.

Let me back up a little bit.  We think of being in relationship with God in terms of salvation.  Or we’ve been trained to think that way: that a relationship with God MEANS being ‘saved’.  And to a degree that is correct.  But let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective. 

We believe salvation is by grace through faith, not by works, to quote scripture, so if salvation is a done deal as soon as we have the faith to declare that Jesus is Lord of our lives, then what does that mean for our relationship with the Lord?  In other words, if, as soon as we move in the direction of God and receive the gift of salvation, THAT aspect of our relationship is taken care of, God is saying, essentially, ‘you know all that stuff you worry about doing and being and following in order to gain salvation?  The right living, the right thinking, the proper attitude, the right schedule of church attendance, all that stuff, it’s dust in the wind.  You HAVE salvation.  Here, it’s yours.  Free to you.  Somewhat costly to me, but that’s just the kind of God I am.

So, now, what are you going to DO about it? How are you going to carry on, in the understanding that what you do has absolutely no bearing on your salvation, on how much I love you or on what I was willing to do for you, because that’s all been taken care of?

If we reframe the question of our relationship with God away from that initial salvific connection into an ongoing, growing, and developing relationship, then we begin to understand that THIS relationship is not that different from other relationships in our lives – of course, this one MATTERS exponentially MORE than other relationships we may have, but it is also one that we express THROUGH ALL the other relationships in our lives.  But in the sense that it is one that we have to work at, that we pursue, that we engage, that we … nurture, that we tend to, that we CARE about, it is not so different. 

You see, God wants company.

God created us to be in communion with him. Genesis tells us that God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. Actually, if you read the verse, it’s not exactly such an idyllic picture. That verse, in chapter 3 verse 8, says that Adam and Even heard God walking in the Garden, and they hid themselves, because they knew they had sinned. It is not an image of pre-fall perfect harmony, but of a post-fall seeking – on the part of God – for his creation – even then, however you want to interpret the beginning of Genesis, the image we have is of a God who is already, as soon as that separation happens, working to reestablish the relationship with us.

And that is the story that is found throughout scripture. Time after time after time, we turn away from God, or turn away from who God intends us to be, and are either distracted by other shiny but ultimately worthless ‘treasures’, and God is always coming after us, sending food in the night, prophets to declare his jealous love, sending angels to announce his purpose into our lives, and, eventually, coming and living with us.

So how we ‘see’ salvation changes depending on how we view our relationship with God. If we think of that relationship in formulaic terms – sort of like a math equation – A plus B = C; where A is God and B is us and C is salvation and that’s IT, then it is a very bare-bones, shallow image of salvation, isn’t it?

If, however, we think of our relationship with God as one that is as involved, as interesting, as demanding as our relationship to our dearest and closest friend, then we begin to get the picture of who God has been throughout history – you’ve heard me say it before, God is about relationships – God is a relational God – that is how God communicates, that’s how God operates.

Will you join me in entering into that relationship more deeply and fully this year?  

Let’s pray.

Announcements and Blessings

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Advent 3B

Text: Luke 1:39-56

³⁹In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” ⁴⁶And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, ⁴⁷and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, ⁴⁸for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; ⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. ⁵⁰His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; ⁵³he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. ⁵⁴He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, ⁵⁵according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” ⁵⁶And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

My knowledge of Mary growing up was limited to basically two events.  She was present at Jesus’ conception and birth, and she was present at his death.  She kind of ‘bookended’ the gospel story.  Part of the reason she was limited to that in my upbringing was I’m sure, due to the fact that I was a Baptist in a country that even now professes to be over 80% Roman Catholic. And while it is a sad statement, it is also a true statement that just as the reformers were apt to do, Baptists in Chile who came out of the Roman Catholic tradition tended to leave lots of things behind; the veneration of saints, the theology of sacraments, the confessional, infant baptism, and the veneration of Mary – in many instances simply because they were so tied to the Roman Catholic tradition.    

I think that dearth of knowledge – that scarcity of exploration of Mary’s experience, and most importantly, her response to what is the single biggest event in human history made for a lesser understanding of the message of the gospels for me.

I’m not going to come out and tell you we need to begin to set up an altar with the image of Mary, or that we should think of her as co-redemptress alongside Christ, or that we should pray to her so SHE can speak to God on our behalf, I am too Baptist to do that. 

What I will say is that we DO need to stop and think about Mary more often than simply twice a year.  And I say that fully realizing that in some cases, the only time many people DO stop and think about JESUS is at those same two times each year, so we’re crowding the scene a little bit, but bear with me.

If, as it is commonly accepted today, Mary was a young teenager – around 14 years of age – when she found out she was pregnant, I wonder what the REAL first thought that went through her head was.  I mean, yeah, the first words RECORDED that came out of her mouth were ‘how so, I’m a virgin?’ followed shortly by ‘here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.’   But I would love to know what her first THOUGHT was.  I wonder if it might have been something that would be impolite to translate from the Aramaic she spoke?  I wonder if her first thought was fear?  Societal norms were different in those days – to put it mildly – and young girls of fourteen were already of an age when they could begin to conceive, so I don’t think there was a freak-out moment when she realized she wasn’t going to get to play with her friends anymore.  She had probably long since given up childish things and had for at least two if not three years been a working member of the household – whether in keeping house, or cooking, helping with the family business or tending to some responsibility or other, she was not a child. 

In our society today, we enjoy an extended childhood far beyond what our ancestors did – and far beyond what many other cultures in the world today do as well, and our expectations of what is proper for a young woman of 14 and what is not are different from that which was common in first century Palestine.  But in one way they do remain somewhat aligned – in that a child is better BOTH conceived and born within the bounds of a loving relationship between his or her parents. I fully realize that seems to be less and less the norm, but that line in the gospel narrative still resonates with us today.  We can associate with Joseph’s response to the news of Mary’s condition – that he would quietly and discreetly dis-engage from her so that there would be less of a hullabaloo when the folks in town began to notice the growing baby bump. 

I am of two minds when it comes to the “Magnificat” – that is the name given to the song that Mary sings after she and Elizabeth get together - it is called that because ‘magnificat’ is the word that comes first in the Latin version of scriptures that we read in English as ‘my soul magnifies the Lord’ – it is a beautiful hymn, a beautiful expression of someone being totally in love with the will of God for their lives, totally submitted to whatever that means for them, totally engaged in moving forward into it.  It even manages to include echoes of God’s justice that sound an awful lot like it comes from Psalms than from the New Testament.  It’s closest in wording to Hannah’s song, which is found in 1 Samuel 2:1-10.  So there is a pretty good chance that Mary was paraphrasing a passage of scripture that she grew up with and personalized it for herself on this occasion. 

There is also the chance that the whole hymn was inserted at some point in the early oral history of the church – the words being placed in Mary’s mouth by faithful followers who would rather hear this than Mary’s cries of joy and fear intermingled with peals of laughter when Elizabeth comes to her door and opens it and sees her and says “Holy crap! You too?!”  There are many possibilities that can be explored in that way. 

But God has seen fit to give us the Canon in this form, and we believe that to be for a reason, and however it came to be, God was in the process, so here we have this joyful, faithful, spiritually uplifting and idealized response to God’s moving in her life from the woman who stuck it out.  She never denied Jesus.  She pushed him when he needed to be pushed, at that wedding in Cana, scripture doesn’t say she gave him a spanking when he got away from the family when they went to the temple when he was twelve, and she didn’t, but I can promise you that somewhere in there with the fear any parent feels when they temporarily lose a child in a place they don’t live, she probably thought ‘just wait … when we get home …’

You see, Mary has, to some degree even more than the apostles and Jesus himself, been dehumanized in the centuries since she found out she was pregnant.  It makes it that much harder to connect with her today.  We read about the disciples making mistakes or being boneheaded about something, we read about how Jesus cried, or was angry, or was tired and rested.  We read the letters of Paul and his humanity comes through loud and clear.  He is angry, he is sarcastic, he is blunt, but he can also be a poet, he can evoke images with sublime words that cut to our very core. 

So don’t be shy about studying Mary, reading books about her, doing Bible Studies about her.  She’s no more or less human than every other character in the Bible. 

And while God DID use her in a special way, the bottom line is that she was willing to LET God use her – in whatever way God needed to.

We can all learn from her submission, her faithfulness in the face of the uncertainty of what the future held, and her willingness to continue to follow and to believe – wherever that ended up taking her – even if it was to the foot of the cross at Calvary.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Announcements and blessings … we have been blessed beyond measure, insofar as we have also, within us our Lord Jesus.  But a blessing as we know, is not something to be contained within ourselves, but is to be shared.  So insofar as we live out that blessing of having Jesus in us, we are announcing his presence.  We are announcing that he is active and living in the world, and he is doing that through us.  So that is our challenge. That is what has always been our challenge – to make our living in that sense comparable to Mary’s.  And it’s not a perfect model to go after, as idealized as her life IS in the gospels.  It is achievable.  It’s not just an idea we hold within ourselves, it’s not just a concept that we profess to believe; it’s not just a life ethic that we follow.  We host in ourselves the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit is out to do amazing things.  REALLY amazing things, if we just let him.

Let’s pray.