This morning, I want to write about my sermon on Sunday. We were off lectionary, so we read about the presentation of Jesus at the temple--I'd prefer to celebrate that festival 40 days after Christmas, but that's not the church I attend. I took a variety of approaches to the text.
I began by talking about how hard it is to know what's true anymore, which is strange considering how much access we have to so much information--but therein lies part of the problem, the overwhelming availability of information. I also talked about how easy it is to create fake knowledge.
I talked about Simeon and Anna, who kept their faith in what had been revealed to them much longer than most of us would--they knew what was true.
I talked about Simeon holding the light of the world in his hands. I talked about my time at Mepkin Abbey and the sermon that discussed Simeon holding Jesus. I talked about this scene as one of many in the Bible where God appears among the folks who are low in the scale of social status. One couldn't get much lower than Anna--a widow, an old woman, a Jew in first century Palestine far away from the power center of Rome.
I talked about the time of transition to the new year as one when many of us do self assessing and come up lacking. But God doesn't see us as lacking. God has invitations for us--and even if we've rejected God's invitations before, God keeps coming back to invite us again.
I then talked about what our pastor had preached in a Christmas Eve sermon years ago, that if we leave Jesus as this cute baby, we're missing the message. Jesus comes to go out into the world, not to be contained by us.
I said, "If we were a smaller congregation, I'd invite you up to the altar, to see what you can't see." I described my spouse on Christmas Eve, blowing out the candles which had been lit for hours, when one of them tipped over and spilled wax over the white marble altar. I held up a sheet of paper and said, "Here's my low tech representation of what you would see if we gathered at the altar":
I had sketched it in the hour before the service, when I got ready for the service, and I thought about a different direction for the sermon.
I talked about the wax splash as a metaphor for what happens with the message of Jesus. It stays concentrated at first, but it can't be contained.
I looked at the congregation and said, "You are part of this wax splash. You have so much to offer. You, too, hold the light of the world in your hands and in your heart. This world needs that light, now more than ever before. Go forth and shine."
Several people came up to tell me that this sermon was the best I had ever preached. It was different than the one I planned to preach--I had planned to preach about Anna and her age and how we may think it's too late for us, but it's not. I included part of that message, but I didn't know I was going to talk about the wax splash until I saw it and thought about it at 9:30, just half an hour before the service started.
I rarely preach from a scripted sermon, and I often don't use notes. I rehearse in my head a lot, but I leave room for the Holy Spirit to intervene. One woman told me after the service that she really needed to hear what I had just preached.
It's a good message for the new year: be the wax splash. The world needs this good news, and if not us, then who will deliver it?
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