REPRESSED EXPECTATION
Luke 2:22-40

A sermon given by the Rev. Richard H. Taylor
December 28, 2003 / First Sunday after Christmas

Simeon and Anna represent the kind of people we often find in declining city churches.

Simeon's age is not given, but he is probably an old man, because he has been given a promise that he would see the Messiah before he died. The story implies that he had been waiting a long time, and was now ready to die. Anna is also old. Our translation says she is eighty-four. However, if you read the Greek in a different way, she may have been over a hundred.

Both are very religious, and connected to the worship of the temple. Simeon is "righteous and devout," and has been given a vision from the Holy Spirit. Anna is called a prophet. She is another example of powerful female religious spokespersons that Luke tells about. He also says "she never left the temple but worshipped there with fasting and prayer night and day." They are pious people devoting much of their time to God.

The fact that when Mary and Joseph get to the temple they encounter old people is suggestive. Worship has declined. Young people, for the most part, have fallen away. People in the capital city think of religion as something for the old.

As aged seniors Simeon and Anna's grandparents, and maybe even their parents, remembered the days of the Maccabees. The Maccabees, of Hanukah fame, had led Israel to independence, and enlivened all Jewish practices. But since then things had declined. Even though Herod was a Jew, it was clear he had become a puppet to the Roman Empire. Roman taxes and census requirements were enforced in Judea. Roman armies were stationed in the area. And Herod’s family, it was clear were not very religious. Their criminality and corruptions were wide spread. Some religious leaders had become mouth pieces for the government. An air of cynicism marked the City.

So in this time of religious declension, there are still these few old people "who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem, the consolation of Israel", and are still living devout lives and going to worship in the nearly empty temple.

I guess that in Simeon and Anna I see some of the people that had a profound effect on my upbringing. The church I grew up in was a once famous central city church in a large New Jersey industrial city. But by the time I was a teenager, I was the only young person in the church. We would get twenty-five or thirty people at worship in a large cavernous room. Most of the others were much older than me – like Simeon and Anna. In fact, when I was twenty-nine years old, the Church closed and the building was torn down. The place filled with religious symbols and memories from my youth is no longer there. I can’t go home again, or speak at my home church. While Simeon and Anna did not know it, at the time of Jesus' birth they were only about seventy years from the time when their own house of worship would be torn down and destroyed.

I remember in that big room with the paint peeling devoted old men and women. They were "righteous and devout". They were looking for the "redemption of Israel". They probably were looking for that Church to turn around and grow again as it had in the past. That would never happen. But they showered their kindness and their concern on me. I guess my feeble ministrations are one little piece of what is left of their devotion.

Who are the Simeons and Annas of Beneficent? Who are our old men "righteous and devout", or our old women who worship with "fasting and prayer night and day"? Will our future be like the temple in Jerusalem, or like my home church in New Jersey?

We all know of substantial inner city churches populated by small corps of old men and women.

In my adult life I have often wondered how those people in my home church kept up their hope? As mature adults it was probably more obvious to them than it was to me that the church was in deep trouble. Yet to me they showed hope. Simeon and Anna did the same for Mary, Joseph, and the baby. How do old people who have been disappointed so many times retain hope?

In psychological theory there are two similar, but actually quite different ways that we can deal with our old memories, impulses, desires, or fears, and, I think, hopes.

One is suppression. Suppression means to press down, to destroy. It is a conscious decision to get rid of something. So we can suppress our desire for tobacco or alcohol. We make a conscious decision to get rid of it. Never again, we say.

Many people suppress their hopes. They have become so callous, so broken, that they refuse to imagine that good can happen. They believe it is all futile. This creates a certain simmering, sinister, stinging personality.

But the other concept is repression, which means to hold back. To hold back is not to destroy, but to hold back in the unconscious mind, but to still be there and alive.

The devout old people I knew in my home church were not giddy, type-A optimists. They did not go around spouting impossible fantasies. But when something good happened – to me, or to a family with children in our day nursery – or somewhere, that good would evoke a smile, a fulfillment, a sense of joy. Their eyes could still sparkle and rejoice even if it were not the best of circumstances.

I have found out that if I try to believe every day that today all of my hopes will be fulfilled, I end up most nights going to bed unfulfilled and unhappy. So I try to learn from them how to repress my hopes. I don't destroy those hopes, but instead keep them just beyond the veil of consciousness ready to be redeemed when fulfillment arrives.

So Simeon has been given a vision from the Holy Spirit that he will see the Messiah before he dies. He doesn't go to bed angry because day after day was not the day. After all each day without the Messiah is still a day to live, and a day to live with hope out in front of him.

But then comes the day with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. On this day he reaches back into his consciousness and pulls out his expectation. This is what I have expected, and it is true today.

And Anna the prophet, who has been in some back corner of the place hears the conversation. And "at that moment" she "began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Israel." Something wonderful happens with these faithful old people whose devotion lives in this place of worship.

I pray that each young person, like Jesus did and like I did, may have a Simeon and an Anna in their life.

But I am concerned. I am concerned that in this time of religious declension that not too many families follow in the steps of Mary and Joseph and fulfill the word of the Lord, and bring their children to empty urban temples and speak with elderly people.

And in an age of plush retirements at emerald golf courses, I know few old men "righteous and devout who are looking for the consolation of Israel". Do you know many? Who are they? And I know few widows that "fast and pray night and day".

Perhaps the best I can ask is that we become them.

Perhaps the best I can ask is that in our old age we set out to become righteous and devout and look for the consolation of Israel, and America, and Providence, and Rhode Island, and the whole world.

Perhaps the best that I can ask is that we have a great hope: a hope about peace and morality and justice, and that we repress that hope just enough to do our daily tasks, but keep it ever by, ever vigilant, ever ready to come sparkling though our eyes, or spoken on our lips, or delivered to the rare child where we have opportunity.

I have seen enough temples destroyed. I have hope that there will be no more of such temples. I have seen enough children destroyed, who have had no advocates, and no sponsors, and no old people to praise them. I have hope that there will be no more of such children.

These hopes are expectations held in reach, ever available. May they come. May we rejoice.

Amen