Malachi 3:1-4
Psalm 84
Hebrews 2:14-18
Luke 2:22-40

+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

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WEEKS like the one we just had make me think of a story I heard in seminary about a man from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who just finally got fed up with the winter weather there, so he proposed to his wife that they go down to Florida for a week to thaw out.  Both of them worked, so they had some problems coordinating their schedules.  The husband had to go on a business trip on a Wednesday, so they decided he would fly straight to Florida on Thursday, and his wife would meet him down there on Friday.  When the man got there and checked into his room, he opened his laptop and sent a quick email to his wife back in Minnesota.  Unfortunately, he accidentally left off one letter in typing his wife’s email address, and the email wound up in the in-box of an elderly woman in Pittsburgh, whose husband, a Lutheran pastor, had just died a few days earlier.  In fact, her children were still staying with her after the funeral when she checked her email, found the message, read it, uttered a little scream and fainted.  When the woman’s son reached her lying on the floor and glanced up, this is the email he read on the computer screen: 

To:                  My loving wife

Subject:           I’ve arrived!

I just wanted you to know that I’ve made it here safe and gotten checked in.  Everything has been prepared for your arrival here tomorrow.  Looking forward to seeing you then.

Signed:            Your loving husband

P.S.                  Sure is hot down here!

That story isn’t particularly apropos of anything on this day, a day on which we hit a trifecta of feasts.  We’ll talk very briefly about each, but what comes to the fore in my mind in the rites and in the reading from Luke’s gospel is a sense of “the old” meeting “the new.” 

First, the most obvious “old meets new” is an old man who meets a new child.  Simeon, like Anna, his “twinned” character in Luke’s gospel, is old, devoutly religious, and he’s waiting.  Luke says Simeon was waiting for “the consolation of Israel .”  He had heard from the Holy Spirit that he wouldn’t “see death” before he saw this consolation with his own eyes. 

That’s a curious phrase – the “consolation of Israel ” – and researching this week, I found a surprising amount of information about “consolation” in the ancient world.  Even more than today, there was a duty in antiquity to console people who were afflicted, especially if they were about to die.  One set of people, the Epicureans, would console by assuring you that “death is the absolute end . . . a cessation of all feeling.”^[1]  Other philosophers believed in immortality of the “good” soul, and they consoled with the hope that maybe you had cultivated enough virtue to immortalize yourself and cheat death.  But listen to this:

For all the consoling descriptions there is at bottom a profound lack of hope or comfort in the world of antiquity.  The dead are called blessed whether there is ascribed to them a new life or an eternal sleep or total annihilation.  But in fact most of the usual reasons for comfort sound cold and comfortless . . . .  Time and again the saying of [the Greek poet] Theognis is repeated:  “Best of all for mortals is never to have been born, but for those who have been born to die as soon as possible.”^[2]

Simeon wasn’t waiting for consolation like that.  Behind Simeon’s longing is Isaiah 40:1f:  “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid . . . .”  In Jewish thought, the comfort or “consolation” Isaiah prophesied became a term of art^[3] for the messianic hope, the dream that one day an anointed king, would restore Israel , remove her guilt, and soothe all the pains of her people.

The consolation Simeon waited for and that Jesus brings turns out to be neither the inevitability of annihilation, nor the reward for a lifetime cultivating virtue.  It’s not an insipid “Well, she’s gone on to a better place,” and it’s not oppressive moralism.  The consolation Jesus brings is Jesus.  He lives the life we should have lived, he dies the death we should have died, and he is resurrected, so when we are “in him” (through baptism and participation in the Church) death has no sting.  Simeon held in his arms the child who would be that Messiah, and he was the consolation.  It’s why Simeon could “depart,” which really meant “die,” in peace. 

We also see old practices and old rituals meeting a new reality.  Luke has conflated two Jewish rituals, the “Presentation of the Firstborn” and “Purification of a Woman After Childbirth.”   As far back as the Exodus, all the firstborn in Israel – animals or people – belonged to God.  Jewish law (Exod. 13) required Jews to sacrifice their firstborn livestock and to make a monetary payment for – to “redeem” – a firstborn son when he was forty days old.^[4]  That’s why Mary and Joseph brought a pair of birds as a redemption price for their son.  The Purification is an old tradition, too.  Leviticus 12 said the mother of a male child is ceremonially unclean for forty days after the birth, when she is to bring an animal to the priest to sacrifice for her atonement.  If you’ve seen something in the 1928 Prayer Book called the “Churching of Women,” that’s what the rite comes from. 

Presentation and Purification were both ancient rituals, time-honored and part of the very fabric of Jewish life.  But we would learn they were just sketches or shadows of the sacrifice that the child Simeon held would offer to redeem the world.  The letter to the Hebrews tells us the blood of animals was never sufficient to take away sins (Heb. 10:4); what was necessary was for Jesus to give “one oblation of his self, once offered” to make a “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.”  The new reality of Jesus shows the old practices to be the shadows that they are, and does what they could never do – reconcile us fully to God.

And I do say “reconcile us.”  On Candlemas we bless and light candles, and the choir sings the Nunc Dimittis, Simeon’s ancient hymn declaring that the child he held would be “a light to lighten the Gentiles.”  We believe Jesus reconciled us to God, that the merit of Christ isn’t limited to devout Jews like Simeon and Anna; it explodes the old wineskins of Jewish tribal religion and runs over to cover all the peoples of the earth.  Because of the new reality of Jesus, salvation didn’t come just to old Simeon, not just to Israel , but to the ethne, the Gentiles, all the people in the world. 

But there is one more way that “old” must meet “new.”  This salvation the child brought – we can’t just sit back and let it come to us; we actually have to bring our old selves to Jesus for him to make us new.  It’s universal salvation, but it must come to us as particular individuals.  Simeon blesses Jesus’ parents, but he has a warning for Mary:  “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel , and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”  (Luke 2:34-35)  Michael Wilcock writes about it in his little commentary on Luke: 

Simeon’s warning to Mary tells us that the universal offer to salvation does not mean that it will be received by everyone indiscriminately and automatically.  It is offered to all; but it has to be considered by each.  It is a universal offer, but it brings a personal challenge.  There will be those who will speak against this sign of God’s love that has been offered to them, for it searches men’s hearts, and some will be scandalized by a salvation which can only be achieved by way of the cross . . . .  There is none to whom the message of the gospel is not directed.  Luke, having concentrated this great gift of God in the Lord Jesus Christ alone, now extends it to the whole human race, and to each person in particular, and requires men to ask themselves whether they have yet accepted it or are still rejecting it.^[5]

These stories challenge us to bring the old in us and exchange it for the new life Jesus offers.  It may be an old fear of death, but Jesus can take that fear and we can say, with Simeon, “Now I can depart in peace” because I’ve found real consolation in a loving God who overcame death.  Maybe the old is an idea that God has to be appeased by good works, so you’re wearing yourself out trying to live well enough to somehow earn God’s favor.  But like the blood of Mary’s sacrifice couldn’t really atone for her, good works don’t atone for us, so Jesus takes the old image of a God who must be appeased and superimposes himself, a God who loves us infinitely, who has our names carved in the palms of his hands (Isa. 49:16) and wants to give us real redemption and liberation.^[6] 

Books tell me in this room are three kinds of people:  (1)  There are probably a handful of us who believe the gospel wholeheartedly and are already living with that kind of consolation.  (2)  There are also some of us who have never believed, and Jesus asks again, “Will you take the new life I offer in return for the shards of your old life?”  If so, then by all means be baptized and start making that consolation yours.  (3)  But the third group is probably where most of us are – baptized, members in good standing of this parish, fine and upstanding Episcopalian citizens.  But we still hold pieces of our old lives because we don’t really believe God can take them out of our hands.  I have old pieces of myself that I won’t give up.  What people like us can do is come to communion and, again and again, offer to God the parts of ourselves that he hasn’t yet healed, and dare to believe, even in our doubt:  Behold, he is making all things new.

+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.