The Redemption of All

[note: I preached this sermon on 12/31/2017 at Asbury First United Methodist Church in Rochester, NY. If you're the type who would rather read a sermon, the manuscript is below. If you're the type who would rather watch, the video is embedded below too. If you're the type who would rather listen, well here's the link to just the audio]

Luke 2:22-40

When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up 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 turtledoves or two young pigeons.”2

Now 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. 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 Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped 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 had 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.

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They call them Roses

But if you didn’t know that they were there, chances are you would miss them

            You’d think that they were a mistake

                       

                        Some paint fell off a truck

                                    Or some painter got careless or  something

photo credit: myself
Sarajevo, 2015

But if you kept looking and paid attention, you’d start to notice that these Roses—these Sarajevo Roses—are scattered throughout a war-torn city

            Red resin poured into scars in the concrete

                        Scars formed by mortar shells

Mortar shells that ripped holes in the concrete as they ripped families apart

These public works of art serve as memorials to lives lost to urban warfare—to the nearly 14,000 lives lost in the Siege of Sarajevo—their blood forever calling out to us from the ground

Something ugly transformed into something beautiful

It’s how a community has responded to and copes with tragedy and trauma

Rather than trying to hide the scars that reveal their communal loss and sacrifice, they turned them into signposts

Beacons that still—over twenty-five years after the start of the conflict—cast a light on the world’s brokenness and in so doing transform the ugly and profane into something sacred and beautiful

We need these Sarajevo Roses, because let’s be honest, if it were up to us, we’d rather cover up the cracks

            The cracks in the sidewalk

                        And the cracks in our lives

Deep down though, we know that no amount of concrete or drywall or rebuilding efforts will ever be able to fully fill those cracks

            To bring back the lives lost

But if we’re willing to keep our eyes open and pay attention, the cracks that betray the brokenness of our world can reveal to us a profound truth that can transform the ugliness of our broken world into something inexpressibly beautiful

We don’t need to look that long or that hard

            These cracks transcend space and time

Any given generation in any given location has its own cracks to contend with

Take Anna—the prophet Anna; we heard about her this morning—the daughter of Phanuel of the Tribe of Asher

The concrete of her life bore cracks and scars given to her by the brokenness of her world

Eighty-four years old and a widow living in a time and place where the death of a woman’s husband might as well be a death sentence. In a day and age when literally every aspect of a woman’s identity was connected to—inextricably tied to—her husband or father, the death of Anna’s husband meant the loss of whatever financial and social security she had

And prior to her marriage, it’s not like she had much of that to begin with anyways. See, we’re told that Anna was a daughter of the Tribe of Asher

Now, for those of us who aren’t scholars of the Jewish diaspora following the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of the 700s and 500s BCE chances are that’s a piece of trivia that means absolutely nothing

But bear with me because it turns out that—as my seminary professors are ever so fond of saying—the biblical authors never wasted ink

            There’s no such thing as an insignificant detail in the biblical texts

So I did some digging and it turns out that the Tribe of Asher was one of the ten tribes of Israel considered to be forever lost after the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom 700 years before the events of our Gospel lesson this took place. In the interest of time, I’ll spare you the nitty gritty details of ancient Assyrian foreign policy—you’re welcome—but suffice to say that by the time Luke’s Gospel was written, the Tribe of Asher was widely known as one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

In short, it’s more likely than not that after the death of her husband Anna had absolutely no family to lean on

The only inheritance she probably ever received from her family was a knowledge of the world’s brokenness

            Anna was a widow who came from nothing

                        As far as society was concerned, Anna was nothing

It’s likely why she gravitated to the Temple and spent her days in prayer and in fasting

            It was the only place of security she had left

Anna knew about the ugliness of the world

But an encounter with the newborn Christ would transform that ugliness into something beautiful

Now, who can say for certain what it was exactly that Anna saw in this child that completely turned her world upside down

Who knows, maybe he was just especially good looking—a first century Palestinian Gerber Baby model if you will

            Probably not

But we know for certain that it wasn’t based on anything Jesus had done, because at this point in the story, Jesus hadn’t really done, well, anything

            He hadn’t walked on water or calmed any storms

                        He hadn’t restored sight to any blind persons

                                    He hadn’t told any sermons or delivered any parables

                                                And he sure hadn’t been resurrected from the dead

Beyond being born, which as I understand it was more of something Mary did anyways, Jesus hadn’t done anything

And yet, an encounter with this child—

This, in the words of great 21^st century theologian/fictional NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, eight-pound, six-ounce newborn infant Jesus don’t even know a word yet—

Was enough to transform Anna’s entire outlook on her situation

            Something ugly

                        Transformed into something beautiful

At that moment she came, and she began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem

            The redemption of Jerusalem

Whatever it was that Anna saw in that eight-day old baby born to a peasant teenager out of wedlock and born into a broken and hurting world is ultimately irrelevant

            What matters is that she did see it

            She opened her eyes and paid attention

She didn’t see this child as the mistake any other person would see, but rather as the one who would bring about the redemption of Jerusalem

            The one who would bring about the redemption of all

Do you see? This is what an encounter with Christ does. It completely and totally changes our perspective on everything. It shifts the way we perceive the world around us.

Through Anna, we see a woman who bore the scars from a broken and ugly world and yet freely and eagerly left her last place of comfort—her last place of security—to go out and proclaim the good news that this child would bring

Her world was just as broken

            The baby Jesus didn’t bring her husband back or change her familial lineage

She’s still just as much a widow from a nothing family at the end of this story as she was at the beginning

Her encounter with Christ didn’t pave over the cracks in the concrete in her life that brought her a lifetime of suffering

            Instead, the baby Jesus gave her something far more powerful

                        A new outlook

                                    New vision

Anna’s encounter with the Christ child showed her that the cruelty and ugliness of the world with which she was so accustomed was not the way it had to be

The cruelty and ugliness of the world with which she was so accustomed was not the way it ought to be

                        Another way exists

                                    A better way

And I think that’s a message we could all stand to hear on this New Year’s Eve, because friends

            It’s certainly

                        Been

                                    A year

We’ve all come to this space for different reasons

Maybe some of us have had an encounter with Christ at some point in our lives and are trying to make sense of it

Or maybe we’re still searching for that encounter with Christ

Regardless of what brought us here this morning, we stand on the precipice of a new year and can’t help but reflect back on a year that has seen mass shootings, an ever-widening partisan chasm, devastating natural disasters that have left parts of our country under water and burnt others to the ground and that’s just what’s happened on the national level of our consciousness

I suspect there are plenty in here or listening on the radio or watching on the livestream who are bearing scars brought on by the ugliness of our world in personal ways that will never be broadcast on the nightly news

There are plenty of cracks in the concrete of our world calling out to us

Cracks that reveal the brokenness and ugliness of our world and ask us well what are you gonna do about it

And quite frankly, I don’t think that I can answer that question with any certainty

I don’t think anyone who stands in this pulpit—or any pulpit for that matter—can answer that question with any certainty

But the miracle and the scandal of Christmas is that we can do something about it

Christ came down to us—Emmanuel, God is with us

Christ comes down as one of us and meets us in the cracks of the world and shows us that absolutely no one and absolutely no thing is beyond redemption in the sight of God

Christmas shows us that at the center of all our grief and suffering

            In the center of our own very rose

                        We find Christ

                                    The lamb of God

                                                The Alpha and the Omega

                                                           

                                                            God—with—us

He comes to show us that no matter how ugly and broken our world may seem, an alternate reality is within our reach—can’t you just taste it?!

We can pave over the scars and try to hide the pain and suffering

            Or we can shine a light on it

                        Turning those scars into roses

            Roses that cry out it doesn’t have to be this way

This world, long thought to be lost, is not a mistake

            It’s worth redeeming

                        It’s worth saving

The beauty is there, we just have to open our eyes and pay attention.