Gloria Dei Lutheran Church | Urbandale, Iowa

The Stable to the Temple

Pastor Meyer’s Sermon

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Eight, nine, ten. Ready or not, here I come. Playing hide and seek is one of my favorite games to play with the kids. And especially with my daughter, Abbie, she’s 3 years old now and my other two kids used to do the same thing at her age and that is, whenever you play hide and seek, she always goes to the same place to hide. And so whenever we would play, I would go to different rooms pretending I’m looking for her but I know exactly where to find her. She’s always in the closet in her bedroom, the same place every time.

And part of what makes Christmas so meaningful is not just the decorations that we have, it’s not just the beautiful Christmas carols that we sing or the cards that we receive from our family or friends or the gifts we receive but part of what makes Christmas so meaningful is that it’s easy for us to find Jesus. We know exactly where He is on this day. We know exactly where to look, our Savior is away in a manger. He’s in a lowly cradle, on Mary’s lap sleeping with the oxen standing by.

But what about after Christmas when the angels had left and gone to heaven, when the shepherds have returned to their fields, when the holy child of Bethlehem has left the stable and the manger. The days and weeks following Christmas can leave us disoriented. It can even leave us confused or depressed during this period of holiday celebration because many of us find ourselves reflecting on the year’s end, reflecting on the losses that have been accrued. Maybe it’s the loss of a spouse, whether through death or divorce or separation. Or maybe it’s the loss of a job or the loss of familiar surroundings and moving away from home.

It could be, as you reflect on this past year, you are thinking about the mistakes that you might have made. Or maybe those hopes you had at the beginning of the year, well, they just didn’t come to fruition. And so in the midst of our reflection, sometimes it’s hard for us to find Jesus. Sometimes we just don’t know exactly where to look. And so in our gospel reading for this morning, we see that to learn how to find Jesus, we need to travel with Mary and Joseph from the stable to the temple.

We pick up the gospel reading eight days after Jesus has been born. We know that Mary and Joseph are very devout, religious people and so they followed the Jewish customs and the laws of Moses. And so it called for, on the eighth day, Jesus would be circumcised. And at that time, he was officially given the name Jesus. But also Jesus was their firstborn son and there was a requirement that, after 40 days from the time that Jesus was born, He would be brought to the temple to be brought before God, consecrated before God the Father. And so it must have been special for Joseph and Mary to bring this child, Jesus, who they knew was where God and man met, the true permanent temple of God is brought then into the temporary temple to be consecrated to His Father.

And it’s interesting that, even now, a 40-day-old infant, this Jesus must be in His Father’s house about His Father’s business. And in the process of doing this, they run into two people, important people. Even though there’s not much time spent on them, we learn a lot from these two people. The first one is Simeon. What we know about Simeon is he has been looking for the Messiah. The scriptures say he’s been looking for the consolation of Israel but there’s a little more to that than just a consolation of Israel. It means that he was looking for comfort. He was looking for reassurance. He was looking for relief, to be consoled. And we get a sense in the story that he had been looking in the wrong place and, hence, the Holy Spirit comes to him and tells him to go to the temple to find what he’s looking for. The temple, the sanctuary of the Lord, the center of worship in the Old Testament and now in the New Testament. And Simeon finds his comfort there. He picks up the baby Jesus and, in relief, sings his song of thanksgiving to God.

We also run into another person. Her name is Anna. She’s a prophetess, the only prophetess mentioned in the New Testament. And what do we know about her? We know that she has been devout, she has been obedient. She has been constantly in prayer. She had her home in the temple. She lived there day and night. And she, too, was longing and hoping for the fulfillment of God’s promises and the Holy Spirit moved her, too. She was led by the Holy Spirit to proclaim that, “Yes, this is the fulfillment of the promises God has made, this child.”

And so in these days after Christmas, we, like Simeon and Anna, learn we may always know where to find Jesus. But even though we might be looking in different places, we know there are places where we can find Him always. And those three places where we can always look to find Jesus when we are seeking comfort of who we are in Jesus, when we are seeking to be reassured that things will work out in our lives, when we’re seeking to be relieved by the stresses of this world, there are three places we can go to.

The first one we learn from Simeon and Anna is we can find Jesus in His Word. Now it seems so simple, even some say Sunday Schoolish to hear but yes, okay, we find Jesus in His Word. But it’s important for us to keep that in mind when we look at Simeon and Anna. Because, you see, they had been looking in different places but who came to them? The Holy Spirit came to them and said and revealed that Jesus was their Messiah. John 1 tells us that Jesus is the Word, the Word made flesh. And we read the Word whether it’s here, we can read the Word in our homes. We can carry that Word in our memories, in our thoughts and in our prayers. Because the definition of a temple is a habitation of God and, hence, it’s then signified all places where God is present. And scripture tells us in 2 Timothy 3:16 that scripture is God-breathed, that God’s dwelling there in the Word. And so it signifies that the scriptures are a place where we can go to find Jesus.

Martin Luther has a wonderful quote. He says, “The statement of the prophets of the Old Testament take their place warmly next to the baby Jesus. They take Him up in their arms and say with great joy that this is the man of whom we have spoken. Now our words have come to their end with peace and joy and, right there, they begin to give the most beautiful testimony of how this Christ is the Savior, the life, the consolation and glory of Israel and everything else that Simeon is saying and preaching.” To find Jesus, to find comfort in our lives, we can go to His Word. And His Word is specific. When we look at 2 Corinthians 1, it says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles so we can comfort those in any trouble with a comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.” Seeking Jesus in His Word is one thing we learned from Simeon and Anna. And I encourage that we take where we can find Jesus, His Word, into our arms and we lift it up with thanksgiving and praise, that we embrace and we hold it and we hold onto the life and the promises that it gives, just as Simeon and Anna did.

Now in the midst of finding comfort or reassurance or being relieved of the stress that we’re dealing with, a second place that we find from Simeon and Anna’s story is that we can find Jesus in this place. I’m not talking about the building itself. I’m talking about the body of Christ, us together. When you hear the words of absolution, when you hear the words of forgiveness, when you hear the words through our worship, the Good News, Jesus promises where two or more are gathered in His name, He is here with us. And just like Simeon and Anna, where were they directed to by the Holy Spirit? They were directed to go to the temple where the people of God congregated and were brought together and it is there, too, that we can find His peace, we can find Him when we need Him the most.

One of our old hymns says, “While your minister proclaims peace and pardon in your name, through their voice by faith may I hear you, Father, speaking from the sky.” And afterwards, that good news that we hear in here, that we hear while we are here, we can take out then into our lives. We can go into our homes and into our workplaces and all the promises that are contained in Simeon’s song, all the promises he rejoices that have come true, we can sing those same songs because God has kept His promises to us, too, perfectly and wonderfully fulfilled through Jesus. And just as Simeon and Anna were led to find Jesus in God’s temple, we, too, know that this is a place that we can look and find Him.

And the third place we learn from Simeon and Anna is we can find Jesus in the sacraments. Through our confession and absolution we do here, we are strengthened in that baptismal unity we have with Jesus and we are assured, once again, that he who believes and is baptized shall be saved. And in the Lord’s supper, we find our Savior in the most concrete way. Simeon and Anna found their Savior in a concrete way in the form of a baby, of a human baby but, for us, we find Jesus in a concrete way also, in, with and under the bread and the wine giving us His body and blood. We find Him incarnate in the bread and the wine. And so we partake of that very body and blood given and shed for us for the forgiveness of all of our sins.

And so, my friends, it will not be long before the Christmas decorations will be taken down and those beautiful Christmas carols will fade away into the next Christmas season but their absence need not lead us to confusion or to concern as to where to find Jesus because we know where to look. God is called Emmanuel. God is with us. He is incarnate in His Son, Jesus Christ, who is with us through the Word. He is with us where He promises two or more are gathered among us here in our worship service and He promises that He is there in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. He, this Jesus, the true permanent temple bringing the light of His salvation here to His temporary temple but He is here for all who are searching and the Spirit leads us to where we can embrace the Messiah, we can praise Him, we can bring our needs before Him and we can bear witness to others about Him.

And so in these weeks ahead, we might find ourselves wondering if Jesus is playing hide and seek, take heart and don’t worry, for we always know where to find Him. Amen.