The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick Sermon
Posted on
February 2-2014
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Presentation in the Temple
Malachi 3:1-4, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40
As we struggle to understand what it means to be a disciple of Jesus today the lessons from this morning’s as well as last week’s readings are both challenging and instructive. They are challenging because they give us examples of people who seemed to know immediately and without hesitation that the Jesus whom they encountered was truly the son of God or the messiah. In last week’s lessons Peter, Andrew, James and John all seemed to know without a moment’s hesitation that a man whom they had never previously met was the person for whom they ought to abandon everything and follow simply because he told them to do so.
In this morning’s lessons Simeon and Anna looked at the baby Jesus and seemed to know instantaneously at first glance that he was the messiah. This kind of immediate recognition of God in a momentary glance is a challenge for my rational and overly linear mind. I often wish I could look at someone and know immediately, regardless of context, whether he or she was a disciple of Jesus. It would certainly help if we could have Jesus in his full humanity standing immediately before us giving us through his words and deeds both moral guidance and a living model of what God expects of us. Direction and guidance are always easier to receive when they are concretely embodied directly in our presence in another human being. That is why God in his mercy toward us, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, sent us Jesus, a man who literally shared flesh and blood with us in order to participate fully in our human condition, in order to redeem us from the evil and corruption that had over time infected it. Jesus was not just a spiritualized human but a human being in all respects, literally warts and all, just like us. Our spirits exist in integral relation to our bodies and not apart from them.
Now what Simeon and Anna claim to see is the incarnation or embodiment of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But, and this is what is challenging, they see that incarnation in a little baby, not in the full-grown man the disciples in Galilee saw and heard.
At the time Simeon and Anna saw Jesus he was probably no older than a month and a half, the time when a new-born child and its mother, according to ancient Jewish tradition, had to submit themselves to a ritual of purification in the temple.
But this raises the question for me of what exactly did Simeon and Anna see in a 6 week old baby that made them believe that they were looking at the Messiah? This is the same problem, in a way, that arises when we ask what led the shepherds at the manger and the Wise Men from the East to believe they also were looking at the fully human Son of God just a few hours after his birth? If Jesus was literally flesh and blood, as the Gospel clearly says, and was like us in all respects except that he did not sin, then how can the appearance of a newborn baby’s face encased in a little baby fat and drool, reflect to an observer the appearance of God in human form? I don’t mean to be irreverent, but if the Incarnation was real it means that Jesus went through the same growth and development as any other human being. And babies drool, and yammer, and fuss, and squirm, and utter inarticulate cries. And this must have been the Jesus upon whom Simeon and Anna gazed. So how did they know this squalling infant was God in human form? One obvious answer, and it’s explicit in the case of Simeon, and probably in the wise men from the east, is that God granted them a special revelation about the infant Jesus at whom they were gazing. Without that revelation Jesus would have looked like any other 6 week old child who clearly did not yet have the fully developed consciousness of someone who would later call people to repentance in anticipation of the coming of the Kingdom of God. Six week olds simply aren’t like that.
But with Jesus’ resurrection and ascension from his embodiment in historical time and space we have to look among those real people still embodied around us in the world today to see where God is incarnating his purpose and manifesting what it means to be a contemporary disciple. Today I think most of us, at least I can speak for myself, have not been graced with an immediate special revelation about precisely where in the world we can find God’s intentions incarnated today. This is not to say that we should be looking for a re-enactment of the first and decisive incarnation of God into the person of Jesus. But if being a disciple means modeling our lives on Jesus, then surely there are people in our own world who are doing just that: modelling their lives on Jesus. But how do I know who and where they are? Unlike Simeon, Anna, and the magi, we are left with the complicated job of discerning who is a true disciple of Jesus amidst a welter of often obscure and contradictory clues leading to a lot of false messiahs. Simeon, Anna, and the wise men got something like an immediate time-frozen snapshot taken by a flash bulb which instantaneously illuminated the significance of Jesus in a single brightly lit revelatory moment. The baby Jesus had not yet established the arc of a life with a beginning, a growth period, and a ripening into maturity. He hadn’t even reached a month and a half at the time of his presentation in the temple. To see in a month old baby the fullness of the messiah takes a special revelation and most of us don’t get those these days.
Unlike a snapshot fully illuminating the significance of Jesus at a single glance, we are more like being in the position of watching a very lengthy movie or reading a long novel which goes on for hour after hour or hundreds of pages covering the arc of the lifetimes of their protagonists. In discerning the significance of someone’s life, the plot and meaning emerge for us only over time and only through pains-taking interpretation and deduction from the patterns of meaning that we see developing within the narrative through the acts of those being portrayed. Unlike Simeon we see Jesus and his disciples today only within the overarching pattern of God’s work of redemption stretching back to the calling of the people of Israel. But that pattern of redemption continues even after the ascension of Jesus into heaven. There are still disciples of Jesus in the world today, people who are living, if flawed, models of what it means to live a Christ-filled life even in the midst of the messy, complex, ambiguous world in which we are enmeshed. The question is how do we find and identify them? Rather than a snapshot illumination we have to unpack the clues as best we can as to where Jesus’ work is being done in the world. And any discernment can be mistaken. But there are some clues which the light of dedicated reflection can give us.
One clue is that those who are doing the work of Jesus in the world today will those who are profoundly uncomfortable with the status quo, with much of what we take for granted. If there is one thing that characterizes all disciples of Jesus it is that they are uneasy with a complacency or acceptance of the world in its present forms and structures. The true disciple of Jesus will be someone who points us beyond where we are now and calls us to challenge and destabilize the prevailing practices of the world because they do not embody of the Kingdom. But this destabilizing of the status quo is not just an end in itself. It is intended to create the conditions for a more equitable, loving, and just community of persons, living not for themselves but for others. In a society in which the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us is growing every day, in which those being left behind are being left on their own by our systems and structures, the disciple of Jesus will be someone who is willing to expose the moral emptiness of a system that coddles the already privileged while making the dispossessed and disadvantaged even more desperate. The disciple of Jesus will be someone standing up for the poor and marginalized even while the rewards of wealth are flowing to others who already have more than enough. The disciple of Jesus will be someone who persists in adhering to the promise of the kingdom no matter what obstacles he or she encounters along the way, someone willing to say that the emperor of wealth has no clothes.
Now where do we find such disciples? Where are the people whose arc of their lives reveals ongoing and sustained commitment to changing the unjust structures of the world? People are not known fully or primarily by a single revelatory moment but only over the course of their whole lives dedicated to the mission of God. Where are these people? They are usually outside the comfort zone of people who are fully content with the world as it is. They are not normally what the world might think of as extraordinary celebrities who light up the skies, though occasionally the brilliance of a few breaks through our jaded complacency. One thinks of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. But most of Jesus’ disciples from the world’s point of view are much more ordinary. And where are they? They are right here, sitting and living and worshipping beside us, they are our brothers and sisters in this community, many of whom have suffered injustice and discrimination but have been tenacious enough not to retreat from the battle. They are also out there in other communities comprising the countless but unnamed persons who have given their lives to fight injustice, bigotry, and racism usually outside the glare of celebrity. They are the people in public and business life who work for more humane and just social policies, who are willing to sacrifice their narrow short-run interests in order to advance the cause of the long-run interests of the inclusive loving community of the kingdom of God.
But to see the work of these contemporary disciples of Jesus we have to look beyond the snapshot. We have to look at the whole course of their lives because the battles for justice are not fought in a day: they are fought over many, many years. What we should be looking for, unlike Simeon who saw the messiah in a month old baby, is the persistent, enduring, and long-suffering work of people spread out over the course of their whole lives, people known and unknown to the glare of publicity, who incarnate the discipleship called forth by Jesus. Discipleship is a life-long calling and can only be discerned fully after many years. So don’t be seduced into waiting for an instantaneous snapshot flashbulb experience: get down in the trenches with those who are engaged in the struggle of a lifetime. Hear their stories, pray with them, and join them in the struggle because they are where Jesus can be found today.