"The Week After Christmas"

Dear Friends in Christ,

   I won’t ask you to raise your hand if you can identify with that woman’s sad plight, but what she expressed in that little poem is one reason why I’m sure health clubs are so full in January.  Well, that may be how we feel a few days after Christmas, but have you ever wondered how Mary and Joseph felt after that magical night when the angels sang outside the hills of Bethlehem and the shepherds worshiped at the manger-bed of their newborn son?  After all these amazing events, they too had to do what I’ve stated in my sermon title for today.  They too had to go “Back to the Real World.”  And that trip back to reality was not always an easy one for them.

   For example, in v. 24 of our text for today Luke gives a tiny, very subtle clue that life was not going to be a piece of cake for Mary and Joseph.  After telling us that they took their newborn son to the temple in Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, which was required by Jewish law for all first born male children, Luke also mentions that they went there “to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: ‘a pair of doves or two young pigeons.’”  Now what’s so significant about that?  Well, way back in the 12^th chapter of Leviticus we are told that the customary sacrifice would consist of a lamb, but if the couple was too poor to afford a lamb, then they were to offer a pair of doves or two young pigeons.  Since that’s the sacrifice Mary and Joseph offered, it gives us a little insight into their financial status.  Put simply, they were poor.  Had they lived today, they would not have lost any money in the current economic crisis because they would have had no money to lose.  They would have had no 401k’s that they could watch slowly evaporate before their eyes.  They would have had no CD’s or savings accounts that they could tap into when an emergency arose, which may have been one reason why God sent the Wise Men to worship the baby Jesus because what did they do while they were there?  They presented him with extravagant and costly gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Those gifts would come in mighty handy when Mary and Joseph would have to flee Bethlehem and go to Egypt because of King Herod’s attempt to kill this baby that he saw as a threat to his throne.  And that experience is just another indication that life would not be easy for them.

   Add to that the rather mysterious comment that the aged Simeon makes in our text for today when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple to present him to the Lord.  After praising God for allowing him to see and to hold in his arms the promised one that his people had been waiting for for centuries, he then turned to Mary and said: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” I’m sure Mary must have wondered about that last statement: “A sword will pierce your own soul too.”  What could that possibly mean?  Well, it would be 33 years before she found out, but I’m sure that as she knelt at the foot of her Son’s cross, gazing upon his bloodied and beaten body, those words of Simeon must have come back to her as she felt that sword of sorrow piercing her heart in a way that she could have never before imagined.

   So life was not easy for Mary and Joseph, was it?  And life is not easy for us either.  It reminds me of an amusing true story about a man named Maurice King.  Maurice became displeased with his barber who was not particularly adept as using a razor.  Rarely would Maurice leave this barber’s shop without a new collection of nicks and scratches.  But of even more concern to Maurice was whether his barber’s tools were as sanitary as they should be.  So he invented a germ-killing blue liquid that he began marketing to other barber shops and hair salons.  You’ve probably seen glass jars containing this blue liquid in barber shops or beauty shops that you’ve been in.  Do you know what it’s called?  Barbicide.  That name is a little inside joke thought up by its maker after a particularly bad trip to the barber.  I say it’s an inside joke because the word barbicide means “kill the barber.”

   Well, just like Maurice King, Mary and Joseph did not escape life’s nicks and cuts and scratches.  And neither do we.  And guess what?  Neither did Jesus.  Contrary to what some Christians probably want to believe, Jesus did not have some kind of protective shield surrounding him when he was growing up in Nazareth.  He was fully human in every respect except that he was without sin, and since bumps and bruises are part of what it means to be human, we can assume that he was not somehow miraculously exempt from them.

   In fact, one of those nasty bumps must have occurred some time after he had reached the age of 12 and before he began his ministry at the age of 30.  Care to guess what it was?  How about the death of his earthly father, Joseph?  Following Jesus’ appearance in the temple at age 12 after Mary and Joseph unknowingly leave him behind in Jerusalem, there is a rather lengthy stretch of 18 years where the Bible is silent about what happened in Jesus’ life.  But when the Gospels pick it up again once Jesus begins his earthly ministry at 30 years of age, Joseph is never mentioned again.  Mary is.  His brothers and sisters are.  But no Joseph.  So most Bible scholars assume that he died somewhere during those 18 silent years, a death that must have been a major blow to Jesus because he had no doubt spent a lot of time with Joseph in the carpenter’s shop, learning the trade so well from him that later on he himself would be identified as the carpenter from Nazareth. 

   So not only were Mary and Joseph susceptible to the trials and troubles of life, so also was Jesus.  The question is, how did they do it?  How did they handle those difficulties that came their way because whatever they did just might be what we need to do when we’re faced with our own set of difficulties?  Well, what they did can be summed up in one word, a word that we talked about last Sunday.  And that is the word trust.  They realized that they had a Heavenly Father who was bigger and greater than any problem they could ever face and they followed his lead.  They surrendered themselves to his will.  Need some examples?

   Let’s start with Mary.  When the angel Gabriel appeared to her in Nazareth and told her that she was going to give birth to the Messiah, she asked her share of questions as to how this could be, as any sane person would have done under the circumstances; but then in a show of complete trust, she surrendered herself to God’s will when she said: “I am the Lord's servant…May it be to me as you have said.”

   When Joseph first received news that his betrothed was pregnant and he knew he wasn’t the father, it took an angel of the Lord to convince him that this was all God’s doing.  And again, in a show of complete trust, he surrendered himself to God’s will and took her as his wife.  And he continued to demonstrate that same trust throughout the Christmas story whenever he was called upon to do things that I’m sure he did not understand at the time.

   And when Jesus found himself praying and struggling in the Garden of Gethsemane about all that was soon to happen to him, again, in a show of complete trust, he surrendered himself to his Father’s will and went to the cross to accomplish and complete the mission for which he had been sent to this earth.

   So trust – something that doesn’t come easily to most human beings because we like to be in control.  We’re like the rooster in the children’s story who got up before dawn every day to sit on the roof of the farmhouse and crow so that the sun would rise.  Notice what I said there.  He crowed so that the sun would rise.  He thought that it was his crowing that caused the sun to rise and that if he didn’t do his job, then everything would go wrong.  Because that’s what he believed, he frequently worried about what would happen if he ever became ill or worse yet died.  How would the crops grow?  How would the children wake up in time for school?  How would the frost melt and the flowers bloom?  He envisioned a world that would become cold and dark, a world that would no longer be able to support life.  That’s a pretty heavy duty responsibility to carry around with you day after day, isn’t it?

   Then one evening this rooster attended a party and overslept the next morning.  The other animals noticed that he was not in his usual position on the roof of the farmhouse to make the sun come up and they were just about to panic when all of a sudden they saw a glimmer of light on the horizon.  It was the sun!  And it was rising without the rooster’s crow.  And when the rooster woke up and realized that the sun had risen without him, at first he was embarrassed.  But then he was relieved.  “What a weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” he thought, “that I don’t have to – indeed, I can’t – make the sun come up.  There must be Someone Else taking care of it.” 

   And of course, he was right.  There was someone bigger and greater than he who was in charge of not only making the sun come up each day, but of everything else that goes on in this world.  And if that Being whom we know as God is that big and that great, then he is definitely deserving of all the trust we could possibly place in him.

Amen.