I received a lot of advice from senior clergy, when began my journey as an ordained minister. The most unusual came from a minister many of you would remember, Carman Riggs. He was then the Minister of Pastoral Care at St. John’s United Church. He told me to prepare for my first Christmas season because, “that’s the time when many older people prepare themselves for death”. I recall thinking that was an odd thing to say. And besides, we have no control over how and when we die (that was before the advent of MAID). But as I discovered and am still discovering, for reasons that remain a mystery, Christmas is a time when, deep within our subconscious, at the place where the body and the spirit intertwine, people prepare to die.
Into this season of year come two bent-over figures, Anna and Simeon. Some preachers will romanticize their stories, playing up their child-like joy at seeing the Christ, face-to-face. And I never want to be guilty of diminishing joy. But my own experience is that joy is not really joy unless it has engaged in a long, drawn-out stare down with something that threatens to push it out of sight--joy vanquishes something in its ascendancy: despair, hopelessness, physical pain, perhaps a deep, disquieting grief that one's life never lived up to expectations.
Maybe some of you have had the hardest conversation there is: talking with someone who is facing death and who is not at all at peace with her life. There is an existential wrestling match with the spectre of death that can challenging to engage. Not everyone emerges, like Jacob, with a blessing. All of us know people who died, despairing.
I imagine this dynamic at play beneath the appearance in the temple of Anna and Simeon. The ancient world could not have been a comfortable place for the aged to persevere. No climate control, no pain relief, little capacity to mitigate the embarrassing or just plain uncomfortable effects of the body's natural process of breaking down. There was physical pain in their bodies, morning, noon, and night, a burden that grew heavier with the dawn of each day. Was there something more? I don't want to play psychologist for Anna and Simeon, but getting old is not a gentle process on the mind either. David Rackham often tells me, “Kevin, don’t get old, it isn’t a pretty picture.” Social isolation, an inability to sleep well, irritability, gaps in the memory, are all common as we age. There is this frustrating sense that you can't keep up, that the world doesn't need you, that your body and mind that have been your bread-and-butter have sold you out. I've listened to conversations about the graying of the church is discussed like it's a mortal wound, evidence of a church's irrelevance.
The thing is, more times than not--when I've sat with older adults, I walk away blown away by how openhearted and faithful and even visionary they are. It is no exaggeration to say that m any older folks are the more radical disciples: anti-war activists, poverty rights advocates, openly gay before that was even an option. In their retirement, they are the soul of our church: they are the ones who ask me how someone is doing, what they can do to help; they prepare dinners for the family where the young mother is receiving chemo; they sit quietly alongside friends when they have lost their spouse of fifty years; they attend an otherwise sparse daytime funeral for the member who suffered for years with untreated mental illness, and they sit in the pews every Sunday, whether the sermon is good or lousy or somewhere in between. All the while, they wonder, “Do I matter?”
As we get older and we continue in the journey of faith, there continues to be joy. There's probably more joy there than I can even imagine. I have seen it here in this church; new members for the UCW, new members for Men’s Club, JOY lunch, the STRUM group, our huge choir, the ukelele sessions, faith study, the funeral ministry, coffee hour hosts, ushers, Walk and Talk, you name it, there is laughter to be heard.
The late Presbyterian minister and poet David Steele wrote about Simeon. In a poem, he recalls hearing that Simeon, a bit of a codger, was going back and forth to the Temple every day in his final years, pronouncing that very same blessing over all the babies presented to him. It's meant to be funny, this image of Simeon, but then, suddenly, Steele turns and says this:
When I read the blessing
And thought about it,
I began to wish he was right,
About Simeon--and those babies.
And I began thinking about our babies.
And I wished someone,
Some Simeon,
Might hold my grandbabies high--
And yours--
The born ones and the not yet
Proclaiming to them
With great conviction,
"You are the saviors of the World!"
Meaning it so absolutely
Those young 'uns would live it,
And love it,
And make it happen!
It's not that we are saviors, we babies. Not at all. It's just that for those who have walked the long road of faith, who have held on to the long cord of life in their hands and felt all of its frays and burrs, but also found it indescribably sturdy, for those who have waited on God, holding on until their hands hurt, holding on for their lives…they have received their reassurance. And although I don't know yet for sure what it is, I suspect that assurance comes with deep joy.
Joy vanquishes something in its ascendancy. And joy always finds a subject to shower itself upon. And if you hold on long enough, or if something holds you long enough, then, then, what joy! You can hold the baby in your crooked arm and meet its eyes and whisper in its ear, "Oh, you young one…oh, if you only knew how hard it will be…and, by God, how good it all is."
Joy comes in the evening. Joy comes when we can say with all of the saints, "Lord, 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.”