First Sunday after Christmas

First Sunday after Christmas (B)

December 31, 2017

Text: Luke 2:21-40

            I broke a rule.  Well, it’s not really a rule, so much, as perhaps a protocol.  I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I added a verse to the Holy Gospel assigned for the First Sunday after Christmas.  Now, you can do this, though it isn’t usually done and I’m normally against playing around with the assigned lectionary.  I’m one of those odd ducks who believe our fathers in the faith may have had some wisdom when they figured all this out, more wisdom than I possess, and this pericope has a very long pedigree in the Church.  But you can add to a reading, and while today is the First Sunday after Christmas, it is also one of those years where this Sunday falls on New Year’s Eve, which in the Church Year also happens to be the Eve of a significant Church Feast commemorating a very important event in the life of our Lord.  This evening is the Eve of the Circumcision and Name of Jesus.

            This is why many of you remember having Church on New Year’s Eve, and more likely, New Year’s Day.  We won’t be this year, for a number of reasons.  But there are good reasons for having it.  It is certainly appropriate to end the outgoing year and start the incoming year with Confession and Absolution, the hearing of the Holy Gospel, and the Sacrament of our Lord’s Body and Blood.  New Year’s, insofar as it corresponds to ancient traditions going back to the Old Testament New Year Festival, always has about it a sense of commending the Old Year to God’s mercy and forgiveness in Christ, giving thanks for His gifts, reconciling with one another and forgiving one another, and commending the New Year to God’s grace, praying for His blessing.  That is all very important, and I urge you to think of the New Year in just that way.  But that’s not the only reason, or even the main reason, you had Church.  You had Church because this Feast commemorates our Lord’s fulfilling the Law of Circumcision for all of us, for all time, bringing it to a conclusion in His first shedding of His holy precious blood for our salvation.  This is the circumcision to which all the circumcisions that went before point, and they all find their fulfillment in it.  And now we don’t have to circumcise for religious reasons.  We can circumcise for other reasons, but we shouldn’t attach any religious significance to it whatsoever.  St. Paul has a lot to say about that.  Now we have Holy Baptism, which is so much more than circumcision, and it’s for boys and girls, young and old, all people.  And on this day when our Lord was circumcised, He received His Name: Jesus, as the angel commanded.  Jesus (Joshua, Yehoshua in Hebrew), which means, YHWH saves.  For that is what He comes to do, and what He does as He sheds those first tiny drops of blood for you.  That’s why I added the verse.  “At the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21; ESV). 

            Happily, the texts that actually are assigned for this First Sunday after Christmas emphasize time…  St. Paul writes, “When the fullness of time had come…” (Gal. 4:4).  Our Holy Gospel begins (in the real beginning of it at v. 22), “When the time came…” (Luke 2:22).  The verse I added says, “At the end of eight days…”  Now, that time stamp gives us the clue about what these references to time being fulfilled and coming are all about.  The Eighth Day.  The Day of New Creation.  Sunday.  The Creation of the world started on a Sunday.  It took six days for God to complete it (not that He couldn’t have done it faster, but look what care He has for His creation, that He took His time).  And on the seventh Day He rests.  Not that He’s tired.  He’s giving us a pattern.  We need rest.  Our workers and our animals need rest.  And we need a day set aside for God’s Word and gifts and prayer.  But then the Eighth Day!  Sunday again.  Creations gets going, back to work, back to living in the gifts received on the seventh day!  Or at least that was how it was supposed to be.  We all know how that ended, with Adam and Eve naked and broken in sin, expelled from the Garden, East of Eden, where there are thorns and thistles and sweat and pain.

            What does God do about it?  He gives us Holy Week.  He gives us His Son, Jesus, into death, for our forgiveness, life, and salvation.  Jesus dies on Friday, the sixth day.  The shedding of His blood in circumcision pointed to this event upon which all of human history and our eternal salvation hinges.  On the seventh day, He fulfills the Sabbath, even as He fulfilled circumcision for us.  He brings it to its conclusion, to its goal.  He rests in the tomb.  And then?  Sunday!  The Eighth Day!  He rises from the dead!  And creation is redeemed, restored, better than ever, better even than the Garden!  We can’t see it yet with our bodily eyes, but we know it.  It will be apparent when Jesus, who is risen from the dead, raises us from the dead.  Then we’ll see it.  The Eighth Day is the Day of Resurrection!  It is Easter!  It is the New Creation!  It is the fulfillment of all time.  It is the goal of everything.  It is your life in Baptism, where you died and were raised with Christ and in Christ.  That is why often times baptismal fonts are eight sided.  Baptism is where the New Creation takes possession of you.  There were eight souls in Noah’s ark during the Flood, a prefiguring of Baptism which now saves you (1 Peter 3:20-21).  Now every day is our Sabbath rest in Jesus, in His forgiving our sins and justifying us before the Father.  We don’t have to work for our salvation.  We can rest knowing that Jesus has done the work.  And we come together every Sunday, every Eighth Day, not because it’s the new Sabbath, but because it is the Lord’s Day, the Day of Resurrection and New Creation, and here the New Creation bursts in by the preaching of the Gospel and the Supper of our Lord’s crucified and risen body and blood!

            Old Simeon perceived prophetically that this earthshaking change had occurred.  He held the little Lord Jesus there in His arms, and He said to Him, prayed to Him, “Lord, YHWH, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace” (cf. Luke 2:29).  Let me die now that I’ve beheld the You with my own eyes, You, the Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the nations.  You sing that song, the Nunc Dimittis, after you have held Jesus, YHWH, in your mouth.  And Anna, too, a widow after only seven years of marriage, worshipping night and day in the temple and waiting for the appearing of our Savior.  Waiting, waiting.  Time.  Now the time has come.  Here He is.  She cannot contain her joy.  New Creation has burst in.  God has come to His temple in the flesh of the little Babe.  She praises and thanks God and tells everyone around about Him.  That’s just like you when Jesus comes to you in His Supper.  We call it the Eucharist, the Thanksgiving.  And we sing praise and we go and tell others.

            On this occasion where we encounter Simeon and Anna, there is another Old Testament ceremony being fulfilled for our sake.  Mary and Joseph are giving the sacrifice for redemption of the first born and the purification of a mother who has given birth.  They give the sacrifice of the poor, “a pair of turtle doves, or two young pigeons” (v. 24).  The sacrifices point to THE Sacrifice for whom they are given.  They shed their blood as a type of our Lord’s shedding His blood on the altar of the cross.  That’s when Simeon sees it.  That is when he realizes that this is not just any mother and child.  This is the One. 

            And it’s strange, what He says to Joseph, and Mary in particular.  He blesses them both.  (Fatherhood and motherhood are blessed of the Lord.  Don’t forget that in our culture of death and anti-marriage, anti-childbirth, anti-parenthood worldview).  But then he turns his attention to Mary in particular, and he makes a prophecy about this Child.  First, the Child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel and for a sign to be opposed.  That is to say, those who reject Him will fall, many of them from great heights, the religious and political leaders, the elite.  Those who reject Him will be condemned.  But those who receive Him will be lifted up.  They will be raised, many of them from great depths.  These are the sinners: The tax collectors, the prostitutes, the unclean, you.  He will raise you quite literally, spiritually by faith, and bodily forevermore on the Last Day.  The thoughts of many hearts will be revealed in this way.  He is the standard of Judgment.  And He will be opposed.  He will be raised as a sign.  He will be lifted up on the cross.  And that leads to His second point.  A sword will pierce Mary’s soul, too.  She will stand at the foot of His cross.  She will watch her Son, her own beloved Son, die for the sins of the world, for her, for you.  Notice how this Child, this Son, given us at Christmas, is marked by blood from the beginning.  He is marked by the blood of His circumcision.  He is marked by Simeon’s prophecy of the cross.  And in this way, in the shedding of His blood, He is Jesus.  YHWH saves you.

            And that redeems all your time.  Your sins of the past are forgiven, covered in the blood of Jesus.  Your future is assured, baptized in the blood of Jesus.  For you, every day is the Eighth Day!  You live in the New Creation.  The time is fulfilled in Jesus.  It has fully come.  Our Lord has been born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem us who are under the Law, so that we receive adoption as sons of the Father, and call upon Him as our own, Our Father, Our Abba, Dad.

            This night we will make merry.  Some of us will stay up late and raise a glass to the year now past and toast the year to come.  Others of us will go so sleep, which is probably a better decision.  But whichever we do, we will do it with joy and confidence because, in the fullness of time, God the Son was born in the flesh, and eight days later He shed His blood for us.  More than that, on the Eighth Day, the Day of days, He rose from the dead.  And our times are in His pierced hand.  Happy New Year, beloved, and blessed Feast of the Circumcision and Name of Jesus!  He really does Jesus us.  YHWH saves us.  He saves you.  We’ll raise a toast, the cup of salvation (Psalm 116:13), to that, and call upon His Name.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.