Scripture:  Luke 2:22-40

Merry Christmas once again.  Today is the eighth of our twelve days of Christmas—the day for “eight maids a-milking” if you’re somehow still looking for gift suggestions.  Christmas was a week ago, but the Christmastide carries us on into the new year, and so for a few more days, we can legitimately say, “Merry Christmas,” though the trees are coming down and the decorations boxed up for next year.

 I’d like to begin today with a YouTube recommendation for you.  Over the past couple of weeks, the events of 2011 have been highlighted in the media, reflecting with some perspective the year behind us.  Google has gotten in on the act with an interesting way to capture a calendar year—to see what the world was searching for most on Google.  Here it is...

Looking back, it’s amazing to think that all of that and more happened in just one year.  But it did, and it’s gotten me wondering about what’s in store for 2012.  Of course, we know some of what the year will hold.  Elections, summer Olympics, according to some the end of the world, and just maybe some snow, but there is much we cannot predict or plan for. 

Hopefully 2012 has come into your life with promise and a good sense of possibility, but perhaps it’s arrived with some uneasiness about the months ahead. Looking around in this family of faith, we can be sure that we’ll all blink and before we know it, our kids will be up here putting on another Christmas pageant.  What we don’t know is how our battles with cancer, heart disease, and depression will play out. 

This year we don’t know how we’ll be stretched emotionally and spiritually.  We don’t know how we’ll handle all the bumps and potholes on the road ahead.  Of course, we do know a few things:  there will be birth and there will be death.  There will be hardship and there will be joy.  Pain and recovery, grief and laughter, consolation and celebration—we will likely have it all in the year ahead, and most of it will not come as we could ever have imagined it coming.  Rather, 2012 will unravel as life often does—with certain mystery and unplanned meaning.

So, a question for us to consider as we pass “Go” and embark on another trip around the sun.  What gives you promise for the coming year?  What gives you promise? 

I brought a visual aid with me today.  As visual aids go, it’s horrible, really, because it’s small and you can’t really see it from where you’re sitting.  It’s a C-clamp.  An old, worn C-clamp. Everybody’s got 2 or 3 of these in the basement shop or out in the garage.  It’s what you use to hold together something you just glued or to pin down something you’re trying to cut or file or sand.  I’m actually a big fan of C-clamps.  They become your third, fourth, fifth, and sixth hands when you’re working on a project.  But this C-clamp is my favorite.  It belonged to my grandfather, who died a few years back. 

On the weekend of his funeral, a handful of us gathered in the basement shop of his home.  I had been there many times before with Grandpa, watching and helping him fix things and make things.  Grandpa was a machinist.  He’d never earned a university degree.  His “college” was a plant in Ohio where he crafted parts for the war effort.  And he was an artisan with his tools.  There weren’t many things he couldn’t repair or just make from scratch.

Now I don’t know if you can see this, but this C-clamp has been welded together.  Somewhere, somehow, it became useless, having broken right here along the longest stretch of metal.  These days, C-clamps are cheap.  You can get one this size for just a few dollars at the hardware store.    But my grandpa wasn’t the kind of guy who threw things out just because they were broken.  (I’m sure a few of you can relate.)  Instead, he looked at this broken piece of metal and said, “Well, now that’s a perfectly good C-clamp,” and proceeded to weld it back together.  Probably saved him twenty cents at the time. 

He was part of a generation that could look at something and see the promise in it.  I thought of him this past week when I reread our story from Luke’s gospel about Simeon and Anna.  Luke doesn’t tell us how old Simeon is, but he says that Anna is eighty-four—“of a great age,” he writes, which is a wonderful way to think about your eighties.  Certainly they are both old enough and wise enough to see the promise in things.  Mary and Joseph arrive at the temple in Jerusalem, where Simeon and Anna each get a chance to see the promise in the infant Christ.

The family was there out of obligation to Jewish law, which required the couple to present their newborn child in the Temple.  This was both an act of dedication for the baby and of purification for the mother.  What they didn’t expect was Simeon, who scooped Jesus up in his arms and said, essentially, “Now I’ve seen it all.  Now I can leave this world, knowing that I have seen the face of God.” 

Luke says, then, that the prophet Anna arrived, and that upon seeing Jesus, she praised God and spoke about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.  We might say that Anna was like a new grandmother who’s just spent a weekend with her first grandson.  She’s got pictures in her purse and on her phone and she simply cannot contain her joy or stop talking about him!

Simeon and Anna saw the promise in things.  They looked at the baby Jesus and saw promise, possibility, and hope, which is pretty amazing because at that stage in the game, Jesus wasn’t doing very much.  He wasn’t eloquent, compassionate, or powerful.  He was just a baby.  One day he’d preach in Galilee, but then he was just babbling and gurgling and crying.  Still, they saw the promise in him, and they were overjoyed with wonder and hope.

What gives you promise for the coming year?  What gives you promise?  Or maybe, put another way, what is the symbol of your hope for the months ahead?  Is it the Dow Jones climbing?  Or the unemployment rate falling?  To what do you look for hope in 2012? 

Simeon and Anna saw hope in a helpless infant.  Somehow they saw healing and compassion, and they saw a man standing up to Rome as no one else had.  They saw justice and peace.  They could see the promise in things.

Back to my grandfather’s shop.  I kept a number of tools from his collection, and I’m always thrilled when I find occasion to use them.  But there’s something that I kept that I have never used.  It’s a steel bar—just a big, unwieldy piece of steel.  After all the tools were taken, that steel bar was still sitting there under his tool bench.  And on my way out, I grabbed it. At first I think I took it because I wondered why my grandpa kept it.  But now I know.  He could see the promise in things.

I read not too long ago that bar of iron is worth about $5.  If you take that bar of iron, though, and make it into horseshoes, they’re worth about $12.  If you make the iron into sewing needles, they’re worth about $3,500.  And if you make it into balance springs for pocket watches, it’s worth $300,000. 

Who knows what my grandpa was saving that metal for.  Horseshoes and balance springs?  Not likely, but he saw promise in it, and so now I do too.

Simeon and Anna saw promise in an infant child, and that promise changed their lives.  Their story stands today as a reminder to us, to establish promise in the little things and to believe in God’s transformative power to grow promises in us, though us, and around us.  May it be so this year.  Amen.