Luke 2:22-40

After last Thursday’s Christmas Day service, as Sandy and I were wending our way to the door, exchanging Christmas greetings with everyone, we were approached by a couple with three small children.  There was something vaguely familiar about the couple, something that told me I should know who they were – and yet no names leaped out of my subconscious, no bells in my memory rang to rescue me from my confusion. 

I have to admit, I’m pretty hopeless at remembering names – which is why I’m so glad many of you wear name tags! Unfortunately, this couple weren’t wearing name tags, and so as we wished one another a happy Christmas, I did so with the fixed smile and ultra-bright cheeriness of a person desperately wracking their brains for a name and coming up with a complete blank.

And then the man said: “You probably don’t remember me, but my name is…” And, of course, as soon as he said his name, I remembered immediately who both he and his partner were – a couple whom I had worked with nearly twenty years ago when I first entered the workforce.  I have not seen them for at least fifteen of those twenty years, and of course they looked different as one expects after such a span of time – but the cast of feature and sound of voice was still sufficiently the same to have prompted my memory, even if all the details didn’t fit over the outdated template in my mind.

It was one of those delightful little coincidences that can add unexpected dimensions to any day – even a day as already loaded with meaning as Christmas Day.  But as I reflected – with some delight – upon this unlooked-for encounter, I recalled another, less happy occasion when I was reminded of a past I would rather have forgotten.

This encounter came in the form of a letter inviting me to the tenth anniversary reunion of my graduating year at high school.  I recall that as soon as I realised what it was, I scowled angrily, crumpled the letter into a tight ball, and threw it into the bin.  I did not attend the reunion, and took steps to ensure the high school were not able to contact me in future.

From which you will gather that I did not have an enjoyable experience in secondary school.  Indeed, it would be fair to say that my late teens into my early twenties was a particularly unpleasant period in my life, a period in which I was a deeply conflicted individual, angry and cynical and well on the way to becoming a bitter, vindictive human being.

I won’t bore you with all the details as to why that time in my life was so dark, but in retrospect I can now see that much of the hurt I experienced in this period was self-inflicted, a product of my immaturity and lack of life-experience.  But, paradoxically, on the other hand, at least some of this pain was also the result of my growing life experience, of my emerging from the safe assumptions and protected environment of childhood into the less assured, more pressured, riskier realm of adulthood.  I was being required to make decisions and take responsibility on the basis of very little – and largely irrelevant – life-experience – and I was having to learn the hard lessons that arose from the mistakes that inevitably resulted.

That’s the thing about experience: you have to learn and re-learn all the lessons on your own, and no amount of advice or instruction from others can save you from the cuts and bruises of discovery.  Of course, it’s not all hard learning and grim experience: life also contains its share of pleasant surprises and delightful encounters.  But, as often as not, in order to appreciate the fullness of those pleasures, we have to appreciate the difficulties and dangers: as the saying goes, no-one gets out of this life unscathed.

And it was like that for the early church.  The Christians of the period in which Paul was writing his letters, and a little later, when the authors of the Gospels were writing their accounts of Jesus’ life, were people who were living through a period of change, a period in which old certainties were being cast aside, and they were being required to come to grips with a new world, a new reality presented in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  They were a people who had to work out what this Gospel of Christ meant for them as human beings; and because their past life experience was largely irrelevant for that purpose, they made mistakes, they got bashed around and cut about as they experienced this continual process of discovery and change.

The Christians of this period were like teenagers becoming adults: they had to make decisions and take responsibility, they had to emerge from the safe cocoon of their old lives into the riskier, more difficult life to which they were being called.

Sound familiar? Hands up anyone who thinks this might also be a picture of the church in the present?  Hands up if you think that the church, as a community of faith, is in a situation where it must emerge from old certainties and old securities into a less certain, riskier future? Hands up if you think the church is currently experiencing some growing pains as we earn a few bumps and scratches while we’re undergoing a process of discovery and change?

But in retrospect we ought not be surprised that this is the case, because the life of the church has always been one in which the People of God are called to reflection and renewal and change.  When we think of the Church’s tradition, we can be inclined to think of it as immovable, unchanging, and permanent, because we can be inclined to associate Church tradition with its most visible monuments: with cathedrals and lines of succession and values and standards which we perceive as inherited from the distant past.  But that can be misleading: because while we certainly do inherit buildings and ministries and theologies, we also change them, we re-shape and renew them to make them speak to different times and different understandings.  Which isn’t to say we throw out the old and bring in the new; rather, that the old leads to the new, and the new comes out of the old. 

There is a theological principle: Christianity is on the move.  And it is on the move because, just as cultures and languages and knowledge never stay the same, so our faith never stays the same: it changes because it changes us; as faith grows and shapes us into a renewed people, so our renewal in turn grows and shapes our faith.  The two exist in a mutual relationship, and the common agent of that relationship is change.

Look at Jesus in today’s Gospel reading.  In accordance with the Mosaic law that required all firstborn male children to be dedicated to God, Jesus’ parents take him to the Temple in order that he might be presented to God. What’s more, the ritual of dedication is also conducted in accordance with the Mosaic law, which requires an animal sacrifice by way of offering to God.  So Jesus is steeped in the traditional rituals of his people and their relationship with God: traditions which, in the form of the Second Temple of Jesus’ day, went back at least five hundred years, and whose roots went back at least another five hundred years before that. 

But here’s the thing: scholars now recognise that the Judaism of Jesus’ day was not the same as the Judaism of King David’s time; and that the Judaism of the present is not the Judaism that existed at the time of Jesus.  Which isn’t to say that these three expressions of Judaism bear no relationship to one another, that the Judaism of the present and of two thousand years ago didn’t grow out of the Judaism of King David’s time.  But what it does show is that faith does not exist in a vacuum, that just as faith changes history, so history also changes faith.  The Bible is such a big and complex and varied book precisely because it is the history of faith changing, developing, and renewing over time in response to the very changes which faith and history produce in human beings.

And we see that symbolically in the figures of Simeon and Jesus.  Simeon is an old man, righteous according to the Law of Moses and longing for the day of restoration promised by God through the covenant with Israel.  He is the very essence of the tradition of faith, steeped in ancient, received practices, yet also looking forward, to a time beyond those practices, to a time when they are brought to their fulfilment. 

And so God’s Spirit leads Simeon to the Temple to perform the ancient ritual of dedication for the child Jesus, the child who will grow into an adult and who, through his public ministry, death, and resurrection, will change everything.  Simeon the ancient, the solid, the dependable, leads to Jesus the disturbing, the risky, the over-thrower of certainties.  Now, take note of that phrase “leads to” – Jesus is not a break from Simeon – Jesus arises out of Simeon.  Jesus is not proclaiming a “new faith” – Jesus is proclaiming the Good News of faith brought to fulfilment.

But that fulfilment isn’t the restored kingdom of David that many Jews in Jesus’ day were hoping for: a Kingdom of Israel once again independent and free from occupation, an Israel that was a power in the world under God’s particular, divine protection.  And neither is that fulfilment to be found today in visions of Christendom, visions of the Church triumphant, of a society in which congregations are big and getting bigger, where most people agree that it’s important to attend Sunday services, and our kids grow up learning the truths we want them to know without distractions or competition from other sources.  Because however much this vision might have once reflected a social reality, and whatever might have been the benefits of that reality, we must always be careful to not confuse the fulfilment of our faith with the particular form the church takes in a given time or place. 

Because the fulfilment to which faith in Christ calls us is not to be found in security and certainty, it is to be found in faith as a lived reality, a reality in which we encounter what Christ himself came to bring us: life in all its abundance.  And an important and necessary part of that abundance is difficulty and challenge and uncertainty, the kind of messiness and complexity that requires us to take responsibility and make decisions, even if our previous life experience is ill-equipped for the purpose.  The kind of abundance that requires us to get cut and bruised as we undertake the life-long process of working out what our faith means to us as human beings.

Which isn’t to say that we ditch our received inheritance, that we casually or unthinkingly abandon the past under the delusion that we can create a future out of nothing.  On the contrary, the future can only be built out of the past, because the only thing that can lead to the future is the past.  We must be like Simeon, blessing the future with the ancient foundations of our received tradition – a tradition that looks forward beyond itself, a future that looks beyond itself to the One to whom its rituals and ceremonies point.

Because as Paul reminds us in the letter to the Galatians, we are heirs: heirs to a tradition of struggle and growth and change and renewal.  Heirs to a faith that is a lived reality, that draws us into the abundance of life with all its hardship and difficulty, with all its sudden delights and hidden pleasures.  Our adoption as children of God through our faith in Christ means that we are still experiencing the troubled and sometimes painful transition from our adolescence into adulthood.  It is a process of transition that will continue until the fulfilment enacted in Christ is completed and all things are brought to their end – and to their wholeness in God. 

It is a process which we experience through the way in which our faith changes us and we in turn change and renew our expression of faith.  And it is a process we experience in the way in which the church appears across human history, in all its varying and changeable forms.  The church as it was 500 years ago is not the church we know today, nor will it be the church of 500 years hence.  But it will still be the church, and it will still proclaim Christ’s Gospel – so long as we are prepared to take the risk of faith, which takes us into uncharted places and unknown times.

I don’t know if I will ever see my former colleagues again – they freely admitted they were once-a-year Christians, so our encounter on Christmas Day was pure happenstance.  But even though I couldn’t quite remember their names, I did recognise – albeit unconsciously and imperfectly – their faces and voices.  And that is a recognition that reminds me that I have a past and a foundation for my present, however much I have changed in the years since I saw them last.   And so do we all, and so does our faith – and so does the church that is but the outward expression of our faith.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.