A New (Real) Hope

A New (Real) Hope--January 1, 2018

"Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too'." [Luke 2:34-35]

Beginnings are funny things.  

We have a way of projecting all sort of things onto them, of seeing the raw potential in the newness of a thing, and putting our hopes onto them.  We do it every year between December 31 and this morning, the first of a new year, as you hear people whisper to themselves, "This will be the year that it all comes together for me..." or "This will be the year when the business will take off," or "This will be the year I can finally put my feet up and relax!" Wishes about getting the promotion, or losing the weight, or making the team, or finding romance, or whatever else--we can't help putting our hopes on the blank slate of a new calendar.

And that's understandable.  A new beginning has a beauty to it like a blanket of freshly fallen snow before it gets sludged up by traffic and ash. New Year's Day is too early for disappointment, too full of possibility for us to hold back from pinning our wishes onto it. 

But we also know better, too.  We have lived through enough New Year's Eves and New Year's Days, to know that the freshness gets stale soon enough. We have lived through enough years coming and going to know that a simple change of numerals in the year or the turning of a page in the calendar doesn't, by itself, have the power to fuel all those wishes.   After all, the change from one year to another is still a rather arbitrary date--there is no finish line in space marking where the Earth has completed another lap around the sun, only our choice to use January 1 as a signpost that we have gone around again.

Other moments of potential newness have a way of letting us down, too.  The Browns and their fans held such hope in the start of a new game--maybe this one would be the win they had been waiting for all season!  Ah, but no--my dear old hometown team found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and made for a winless season.  Turns out the kickoff that starts a new game doesn't necessarily make for real newness.

We have seen it all our lives with changes in leaders and ruling political parties, all of whom make big promises of new beginnings and all of whom just as surely disappoint and divide.  For whatever hopes we have had that "This time, things will be different--it really will be GREAT!" we have been soon enough let down to see it was all bluster and braggadocio, the same big talk dressed up in a different suit and tie. At some point you just learn to see through all the nonsense and give up on believing the big, loud voices promising that they, and only they, are worthy of our hopes for newness.  They never are--just some you can tell in advance they are full of hot air, and some disappoint you slowly and sadly over time.

Truly new beginnings, with real freshness and hope, are harder to come by.  They are moments and events that sneak up on you. They rarely announce themselves.  They come when we are least expecting them, and often we don't realize our lives are changed until we look back in hindsight and see again the moment at which everything began to shift.  The kinds of beginnings that are worthy of our hope have a way of quietly walking into the room like a baby carried in his mother's arms, going unnoticed by most except for a precious few who knew to be looking.

That's what stands out about Simeon's story here in Luke's Gospel.  He senses the presence of newness in the child Jesus, but it is a quiet sort of arrival.  Most other folks are so busy with their own religious business in the temple that they don't notice anything unusual about the baby and his mother walking in for the customary rites and rituals after a birth.  There's not a trumpet blast or a twitter storm announcing their arrival, and there's no press conference calling everyone's attention to witness the entry of the Promised Child.

And that, in and of itself, is part of the real wonder, the real new-ness, of what this child brings.  Messiah comes, but under the radar.  The Savior arrives, but needs no imperial edict to make everybody turn their heads and notice.  The Promised One enters onto the scene, but doesn't require a parade of fawning onlookers.  The Christ does not toot his own horn--he doesn't need to.  After all of history's self-promoting, self-congratulating would-be saviors, the real newness of the child Simeon takes in arms is that his greatness doesn't need advertising.  (Like Thatcher's old line that being powerful is like being a lady--if you have to tell people you are, you are not; Jesus doesn't have to tell the world how "great" he is.)  The newness has already begun, even while Jesus is a baby held in arms.  He requires neither pomp nor circumstance, and nobody has to wear any funny glasses.  Faith in a God who keeps promises is the only necessary lens to see it.

This child is different--perhaps exactly because he is a child like anybody else.  The wonder, after all, of the Incarnation, is that God doesn't blush to wear our humanity as fully as we do, without any gold foil or tailored suits.  The world's past empty-promisers-of-newness all had to convince us that they were "different," that they were "special," that they were somehow better, or smarter, or richer, or cleverer than the rest of us--as if their specialness was how they would at last bring real new-ness.  And that was why they have always failed to deliver--we are tired of the same old game of King-of-the-Hill, with contenders pushing each other from the top of the heap and stepping on whomever they must to get there.  Real newness comes from below--from right in our midst.  

And in the new order of things--what we have learned from Jesus to call the "Reign of God" or "the Kingdom"--what God does is to end all of our silly, futile game-playing, by setting a table where there is room for all.  The lowly and unacceptable are lifted up and led to their seats, and the proud and puffed up are deflated so that, humbled, they can share at the same meal.  Simeon sees it, too--he sees that the child is destined for "the falling and rising" of many--not just that he will climb his way up to greatness for himself, but that in the coming of Jesus, there is a new way of life together, where the high and mighty are brought down, and the nobodies are told they are precious.   And unlike all of the false newness that has let us down before, the difference with Jesus is that he doesn't just keep the old system of dog-eat-dog and put a new dog in the Alpha spot.  Jesus' new way of life rearranges all of our old priorities and relationships so that we no longer scramble to be "better than" or "greater than" or even to rush to put "me and my group first."  Jesus' new way trains the muscles of our souls to bend to one another as we take turns putting one another before ourselves, so that, as the old Shaker hymn puts it, "to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed."

That is what makes the child in Simeon's arms the bringer of something truly new, even though this moment is more than two thousand years in the past.  This is what makes Jesus worthy of our hope, in a way that the Times Square ball and blank calendars cannot.  They only ever reset the same old order of things and tell us to try it again. 

Jesus reorders everything--his is a beginning that at long last finally feels... new.

Lord Jesus, come and reorder our lives, our hearts, our communities, our politics, our thoughts, and our loves--that is, come and let your re-ordering Reign come among us.