Luke 2: 25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. 27 Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying: 29 “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace.30 For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations:
32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.”33 The child’s father and mother marveled at what was said about him.34 Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, 35 so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” 36 There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, 37 and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying. 38 Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.
In the people gathered in the temple in the story we just heard there is a beautiful picture of the church. But don’t look for the church in the massive and beautiful temple itself. All the heavenly truths that those columns and chambers and altars and pillars symbolized only pointed toward the one whom Mary and Joseph brought in among them, as a baby. Just a few centuries before, the Prophet Malachi had predicted, “The Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple!” But who could have foreseen that the “the Lord whom you seek would suddenly come to his temple,” as a babe in arms?
This most basic and beautiful image of the church in today’s story is simply Jesus and the people gathered around him, because of him, and for him. That’s all you really need for church, anywhere and anytime: Jesus and the people gathered around him, because of him, and for him. And not just people, but generations of people. For Simeon and Anna were old enough to be Joseph and Mary’s grandparents.
Why would the presence of the generations be so important? Especially today when it seems like the church, in America, at least, can be almost as much segregated by age and generation as it is by race, culture, language and class? And when the rapidly accelerating changes in technology and culture make it seem like every generation is a country or a culture to itself, with a language of its own? I am reminded of that every time I struggle with my cell phone, until a13-year-old takes it, pushes a few keys, and Voila! Problem solved.
But just when I’m tempted to believe that there’s no bridging the generation gap, I notice how the next “new thing,” for the up-and-coming generation often turns out to be a very ancient thing as well. Like when the hit new CD on the top of the charts for half a year was “Chant,” a collection of medieval Gregorian chants sung by Benedictine monks in Spain. Basically, the greatest hits of the 9th Century, in Latin. It had an appealing integrity to many young adults precisely because the monks who issued that CD didn’t care whether it would be the latest hot new thing. They did not produce it with either the teenage and young adult market in mind, but that’s who bought it up. That showed me that there is in us a hunger for what is timeless and eternal, as well as for whatever is new or improved. You see that same hunger also in the popularity of those genetic testing kits that tell us about our ancestry. Our ancestors and our elders represent what is timeless, eternal and enduring, and connect us to it.
But there are at least two more reasons why the church needs generations gathered around Jesus: for the blessings, the admonitions and the warnings that the younger generations bring to the older ones from their ideals, and the blessings, plus the warnings and admonitions that the older generations bring to younger people from their experience.
Let’s start with the blessings and admonitions that the older generations bring to the younger ones: We read that the elder Simeon blessed “them,” meaning Joseph and Mary, and the baby Jesus. If Jewish tradition is any guide, Simeon would have said to the baby Jesus, “May you be like Ephraim and Manasseh.” That’s the Jewish blessing given to boys, ever since Jacob blessed his grandsons, Ephraim and Manasseh, and said that Israel would always say, “May you be like Ephraim and Manasseh.” Jacob must have seen what was blessed about Ephraim and Manasseh. They are the first pair of brothers in the Bible who weren’t estranged from each other, or in rivalry or competition with each other, like Cain and Abel, or Jacob and Esau. It’s a prayer, then, for a child to also grow up and live in peace with his family and his fellows. Isn’t that a proper blessing for “The Prince of Peace?”
Another blessing that Jacob saw in Ephraim and Manasseh: they were born, grew up and lived in a majority idolatrous, imperial Egypt, and yet remained Hebrew. So the blessing, “May you be like Ephraim and Manasseh,” encourages children to be minority lights of the Holy One amidst a majority that does not see such light. Isn’t that a proper blessing for Jesus, “The Light of the World?”
For the girls they say, “May you be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.” Then the blessing continues for both boys and girls with these words of the Priestly blessing from the Book of Numbers: “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”
Sound familiar? We often say or sing that same blessing at the end of worship. Isn’t that a proper blessing for the One who is our Supreme High Priest?
Just how important are the blessings from our elders we hear in the cry of Esau to his father, Isaac, after his younger brother, Jacob, stole the blessing for his firstborn elder brother, by deceit. He cried out in anguish, “Bless me, too, my father! Is there no blessing left for me?”
But it’s not only verbal blessings, the blessings of words, for which we hunger. When we first learned, as babies, to smile, it was because someone older was smiling at us, usually, but not only, our parents. When we first learned to love, it was because we were looking into an older person’s eyes, looking at us with love, again, usually, but not only, our parents. The word, “benediction” means in Latin “to say good words.” But those smiles, and those looks of love, are also blessings, blessings deeper than words, which we can carry all throughout our lives.
And not just from Mom and Dad. When our youngest daughter was born in West Africa, all sorts of people blessed her, with the common, customary blessings everyone gives for anyone’s newborn child: “May God make her destiny sweet,” or “May God make her to thrive,” or “May God make her younger siblings more numerous than her older ones.. We didn’t rush to say Amen! to that one. But it shows how much they value children there, and how the entire community’s blessing is important to a child’s healthy development, not just Mom and Dad’s.
If all were sweetness and light in the world, that’s all our children would need: words and looks and actions of affirmation and encouragement. But this being a fallen world, we also grow up needing warnings and admonishments from our elders. That’s also what Simeon gave Mary and Joseph gave, when he 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.” He was not just being a prophet when he said that, but also something of a parent, or uncle or grandfather.
Such a word of warning, and a note of sober realism, is the other side of the coin to the expressions of joy and affirmation that Anna and Simeon gave. Words of affirmation without ever any warnings or admonition, are cheap; words of warning and admonition without ever any words of affirmation are just cruel.
I wonder if the young men, mostly young adult white men, marching for white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation in cities like Charlottesville this year had enough older father and mother figures, like Anna and Simeon, to affirm their real worth—which has nothing to do with their skin color. And did any older parental figures warn and admonish them against the direction they are heading? How many of them ever even got to know or talk with a veteran or an older immigrant who saw the Nazi death camps, with someone who lost loved ones in Auschwitz or Treblinka, or who survived them? Did they ever know any civil rights activists and witnesses from the 1960’s? From the news I’ve read, I get the impression that they live much of their lives in a social media echo chamber of like-minded people and pundits of their same age, race and gender. In that isolated echo chamber one can forever stoke up their own and each other’s rage and resentments, their ideologies and illusions, with nothing and no one to challenge them.
Yet there are older men like Don Black and Arno Michaelis reaching out to them. They are father figures who have left and renounced white nationalism. They have a knack for engaging young adults who joined those movements at the same age as they once did, and helping them out of them. But for such things to happen, someone has to break through the echo chambers and the alternative realities that people increasingly inhabit, and to reach across the gulfs and chasms between the generations, the genders, the races and the political parties.
An elderly gentleman in a church I served in Kansas did just that during a worship service twenty-some years ago. A little baby behind him was wailing up a storm during the prayer time. The poor parents were getting ready to leave the service, nearly beside themselves with embarrassment and frustration. When that gentleman turned around to say something to them, they were sure that their worst fears were about to be fulfilled. But he said, “I’m so glad to hear that sound around here again; I’ve missed it lately; we’ve gone too long without it until now.” With those words he reached out and gave the young family a blessing borne of his long experience.
Because he understood the blessings that the younger generations also bring to the older ones, just by being. So, to those younger than myself, of which there seem to be more of you every year, especially to the youth and young adults, this sixty-one year-old admonishes you: in all your struggles to figure out the world and find your place, please always resist any feelings or thoughts that you and your existence are anything but a blessing to us and to the world. Whatever your struggles and setbacks, questions or confusions, tell any passing doubt you might have about the blessing you simply are to go take a hike, in Jesus’ name.
Tacked onto the wall of the room in which our first daughter slept in her crib as a baby was a card that someone had sent us, with these words from the poet and author, Carl Sandburg: “Every child born is God’s way of saying ‘Yes, the world shall continue.’” That quote did not come with an expiration date. Your very existence and presence blesses your elders with a most basic hope too deep and too great almost for words: that God wants this beautiful but crazy, mixed-up world to continue, even if without us some day.
Yes, you also bear the hopes of your parents and grandparents that you will honor and continue all that was sacred to us, but even more, that you will improve upon our faulty stewardship of all that we said was sacred to us. When we elders were the youth, we were sure that we would do better than our elders in this respect. Now, we’re not so sure we did. Often, we just found different ways to fall short.
You’ve probably already noticed. The first complete sentence out of the mouth of our younger daughter was, “But that’s not fair.” We would hear that more than once. Sometimes she was right. So it’s not just the young who need the warning and admonition of the elders, based on their experience; we elders need the warnings and the admonitions of our children and grandchildren, based on their ideals.
If children are to grow up with a secure sense of who they are in God’s sight, to be at peace like Ephraim and Manasseh, and to be prophets like Anna and Simeon, we can’t rely on parents alone. Not in this acid bath of a culture. We all need the blessings and warnings that our elders can give us, until we finally become Anna and Simeon, and are ready to say, “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace.”
That’s where we, the church, come in. For we all are children of the same God who created the musk ox. Whenever predators threaten a musk ox herd, the adults form a circle with their horns pointing outward. Inside that circle are all the calves of that herd. Any adult musk oxen in that circle will face down the charge of a polar bear or a wolf pack in order to protect any calf within the circle, whether it’s their own calf or not. In addition to the four people of different generations gathered around Jesus in the Temple, wouldn’t those musk oxen also make a beautiful picture of the church of Jesus Christ, in relation to its youngest members?
I invite Jana up to tell us about one of Zion Mennonite Church’s ways of providing young people with their own Simeons and Annas: