2 - 2-2020 Readings And Sermon

A reading from Malachi.

Thus says the Lord, see, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.

The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight.

Indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?

For he is like a refiner's fire and like fuller's soap.

He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.

Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord, as in the days of old and as in former years.

The word of the Lord.

A reading from Hebrews.

Since God's children share flesh and blood, Jesus himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he may destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham.

Therefore, he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.

Because he himself was tested by what he suffered.

He's able to help those who are being tested by the word of the Lord!

When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, Jesus' parents brought him 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 turtle doves or two young pigeons.

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, his name was Simeon.

This man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him.

It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah.

Guided 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, Simeon took him 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, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.

And the child's father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him.

Then 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, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed, and a sword will pierce your own soul too.

There was also a prophet Anna, the daughter of Phanawel of the tribe Asher.

She was a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then as a widow to the age of eighty-four.

She never left the temple, but worshipped there with fasting and prayer night and day.

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.

When they'd finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.

The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him.

The Gospel of the Lord.

We don't get to do it quite often, but today's High Holy Day is the presentation of the child Jesus in the temple.

This happens 40 days after Christmas Day, and this year it's on a Sunday.

So it's not actually a one in seven probability that that happens.

You have to factor in leap here as well.

So here we are at the presentation of the Lord.

Now, there's an interesting uh reference that we get in the scriptures that um Mary and Joseph are fulfilling the scriptures.

So um just to kind of bring you up to speed on that, at the time of Abraham, at the time of Moses, there were many, many folks who were worshiping not only gods of the sky, but gods of the earth.

Gods of the sky were worshipped at what are called high places.

The closer you get, the better.

Gods of the earth were worshipped in low, low valleys.

Those gods, if you know your Hebrew Bible, were called names like Milcom or Kemosh or Molech.

And the way that you worshiped a god of the earth was with the most important transaction you could make.

You see, the more you gave to a god, the more the god would give back to you.

You can find that message, by the way, on any preaching network.

It's called Prosperity Gospel, and it says that the more you give God, the more God will give you.

So the bigger your pledge, the bigger your reward.

I don't know about the reward, but the bigger your pledge.

Okay.

This is not just about 10% of your money.

No, the most valuable commodity, the most valuable item you could ever possess was your firstborn son.

And so the people around Abraham, the people around Moses, would take their firstborn son to the low points, to the valleys, and in worship of Molech or Milkom or Chemosh would burn them alive, with the understanding then that they had given everything and thereby obligated Chemosh or Milcom or Modlek to return the favor at some point later.

Now we may say that's terrible thinking, but you know, if you've ever taken a test, like in high school, and you were not prepared, and you said, God help me with this test, and I'll become a nun, you have indulged in this way of thinking, which is a way of thinking that says, God is not about giving, God is about investments and trading.

So, what can you trade God to get what you want?

It's the same kind of thinking.

God tells Moses, so I'm not in that business.

God tells Abraham, I'm not in that business.

Do not ever kill somebody and think that that's a sacrifice to me.

Instead, you're supposed to take your firstborn son and present them at the tabernacle or later at the temple with an offering and thereby consecrate them as belonging to the Lord, not to you.

So you're presenting them to God.

My firstborn son is yours in life.

If you're rich, you offer a goat or you offer a lamb.

If you're poor, you offer some turtle doves or a pigeon.

This is what Joseph and Mary do.

Now we get to hear in Hebrews this quick mention of death.

And you know, it's I don't know if you realize this, but our New Testament is written in Greek, but in all capital letters.

There's no lowercase.

In fact, there's not even spaces between words because paper was so precious.

They're all crammed together.

So when our when our translators are going from Greek to English, honestly, they have to sometimes do their best to figure out what's the tone of a passage.

Tone, right?

Because it's all written in cram.

There's no commas, there's no semicolons.

And death is one of those funny words because I want to tell you, God is not afraid of us dying at all.

If God were worried about us dying, we would have been made out of iridium.

We're made out of dirt.

This is how the story goes.

I want to suggest to you that this death probably deserves a capital D.

Jesus did not come to deliver us from dying one day.

Jesus came to deliver us from living every day in a state of death with a capital D.

Living as though we were separate from God, living as though we were separate from one another.

That's the death capital D Hebrews has in mind.

Death with a lowercase D is not your enemy.

We're gonna celebrate this, in fact, on Ash Wednesday.

We are all going to die.

That's alright.

God made it to be so.

What we ought not do is live in death while we're alive.

And just to really turn this a little bit tighter, there's a place outside Jerusalem called Gehenom.

It's the low point outside Jerusalem.

It's exactly where people sacrifice their firstborn children to Molech and Kemosh and Milcom.

In Greek it's called Gehenna, which your Bible translator will take to English as the word hell.

So I put before you that hell, rather than being some place of torture after you die, is the place we go to appease God by sacrificing our own children.

That's what hell is like.

And Jesus came, you see, in the story to deliver us from that kind of death.

We get to hear the story from Malachi that what's about to take place is that God is going to clean the people up like a fuller's soap.

That's what you clean wool with.

You don't torture wool, you clean it so it can be useful.

You don't refine metal to punish it, you refine it to set it free.

So what God is going to do, according to Malachi, is clean up the priests so they can offer acceptable sacrifices.

And what we've decided in the church is that it's a priesthood of all believers.

So the goal of Malachi is that God will refine us so that we can offer acceptable gifts, not transactions or trades where we give up loved ones.

Acceptable gifts of life.

That's the promise of Malachi.

And Jesus comes according to Hebrews so that he can do it just like us and show us there's a different way than what we usually settle for.

Which means he had pimples on prom night.

He probably got the flu type B at some point in his life.

I betcha he was in love with some girl and she said no.

Did that happen to you?

In every way.

And yet he didn't live in death with a capital D, which means we don't have to either.

This is the message of the incarnation.

Fast forward then to Mary and Joseph bringing him to the temple.

By the way, one of Jacob's kids is called Simeon too.

He's the one from which Aaron, Aaron's descendants come.

This guy called Simeon has been told that, hey, you're going to see the Messiah and the salvation of God before you die.

Now, who knows when he was told that?

He could have been 10.

I guess he could have been 82.

So Simeon has this idea that one day it's going to happen.

And you know, that means from that moment on he gets to play the waiting game.

And uh, this is one of the great things about doing Bible study.

This week, we were able to hear this presentation.

I mean, this was very timely, by a New Testament scholar who said, you know, um, there is a huge difference between waiting and loitering.

And the scriptures make this clear over and over and over again.

And I wonder about Simeon.

He's been told one day you'll get to see this.

And the question is, then how does he orient his life?

Does he wait for that to happen with expectation, but also look for it to happen?

Or does he loiter?

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know this.

Most of us look forward to these big achievements happening, and we often don't know what to do till we get there.

So we either loiter, or even worse, we solicit.

And those things are categorically different from waiting.

From waiting.

If you are into morning prayer or evening prayer, you know the song of Simeon by now, because he says, Today I've seen the salvation of the Lord.

And if you pray morning prayer, or if you pray evening prayer or compliment, you say that.

As in you're supposed to make that claim every day or every night, that on that day you have seen the salvation of the Lord.

Now, I grew up in a church in which we were waiting for the rapture, and I want to tell you that was all about soliciting and loitering.

This, though, is about an invitation we have every day of our lives to look over our day and see God's salvation play down in our lives somewhere.

I'm not always good at that.

And you know, I realized we were talking to our day school kids this week.

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

But you know the turn is if you can't say something nice, think harder until you can.

If you can't see the salvation of the Lord in your day, don't rest there.

Think some more.

Open yourself some more so you can say these words with Simeon.

In fact, I have seen the salvation of the Lord.

I had a teacher once upon a time, he really was a gifted guy.

He now runs a Catholic Retreat Center in Georgia.

And he said, you know, um, sometimes the church has this message, which is you're not supposed to be preoccupied.

You're not supposed to be thinking about particular thought patterns so you could be open.

But he ultimately said, you know, it's not really wrong to be preoccupied as long as you're preoccupied with the same kinds of things God is preoccupied with.

I thought this was really interesting.

And he came up with this spiritual exercise you could do to figure out indeed what you're preoccupied with.

And it goes like this anytime your mind wanders, especially during a meeting, maybe during church, let it go.

Just let it go, pay attention to where it goes, and then just jot down where your head went.

The grocery list, having enough coffee, that home renovation I'll do when I have enough money, whatever it is.

And then a month later, have a look at that little book, and you'll discern where your heart really is.

Look at where your mind wanders, and you'll know where you go.

I've never done this exercise, even though I'm a big believer in it.

I think I'm afraid to write it down.

I can tell you I know where my treasure is.

And it needs refining.

It needs refining.

Part of my treasure is about what'll happen next instead of where Jesus has been embodied today.

Boy, you know, there are some difficult days.

There's been some difficult months.

Sometimes I say, boy, you know, got those under the bridge.

We were just there to survive.

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

But part of, I think what Simeon invites us to do is to think harder, and this is hard thinking for me, that even the most difficult things, whether they were days or weeks or years, have resulted in me becoming the person that I am.

The good, the bad, or different, those things have made me.

And God is grateful for me as I am, even if I'm not grateful for myself.

And maybe that's the refining that we need to do.

You know, it's this funny thing that I've met so many people who have been diagnosed with cancer at an early age or have gone through the throes of addiction and come out.

And by the way, I'm not saying this is how it should be, but what's interesting is these people say, you know, um, cancer taught me to be grateful for my life.

Recovery taught me to be grateful for my life.

These people have told me without those things, I don't know that I would appreciate living.

This is really strange to hear.

By the way, I'm not telling you you should get sick so you'll enjoy life.

I'm not saying that.

What I am saying is these are sometimes the jewels that people bring out of dark periods in their life, is they say, that terrible thing ended up being redemptive for me.

I'm not asking God to afflict me so that I can be grateful.

See, that's backward.

I think the goal is, God, how can I be grateful for having seen you, the salvation of the world in my life today?

Please remember that when Simeon sees this baby, he's seeing a 40-day-old child.

He's not seeing a military mastermind.

He's not seeing some swarthy or disciplined person, he's seeing a little kid.

It's a little bit miraculous because I see God best when my kids are asleep, not when they're awake.

But isn't this the invitation to see Jesus in a little kid some point in our day, or in a coworker, or in a sunset, or in laying down in the grass, or whatever it is, and not to call that some earthly pleasure, but to say God is absolutely in this flesh today.

I don't know where your heart is.

I don't know.

I don't know what it is that God and you would like to refine from yourself so that you're no longer living in worlds called death.

But my prayer is that each and every day we can say with increasing integrity, now I can depart into peace, whether it's sleep or otherwise, because today I have seen the Lord.

And I have to say, if we've seen the Lord, we have a lot better chance in introducing people to the Lord as well.