Deacons frequently get a chance to preach on the feast of the Holy Family, and I think that is for a couple of reasons. First, it happens on a relatively quiet Sunday in between some major holidays, so if a pastor is like the manager of a baseball team, it seems like a good day to run your fourth or fifth starting pitcher out to the mound and the team won’t take too much of a hit. More seriously, since most deacons are married, it’s thought that we might know something about families, or even holy families. What people should realize, is that while that’s logical, really until there are women who are deacons, and the pope says maybe someday, until that happens you’re not hearing from at least half the people who would actually do a good job on that topic.
But on this particular feast of the Holy Family, the assignment is a little different. Because this year the scripture readings are very unexpected. The readings are not about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and they’re not about anything we might be able to speculate about their life together as a family. Instead, today’s readings are about old people, and I can identify. They are people who thought everything was winding down for them, that maybe there wasn’t anything left to come they hadn’t seen already, and yet who had their lives fulfilled by something they had almost, almost but not quite, given up looking for.
In that first reading we heard the story of Abraham, singled out by God to be the father of our faith, chosen in the way God does things, always seemingly the wrong person. Because he chose an old man, not a young man full of potential, and yet God promised him that he would have descendants as countless as the stars. Abraham heard and believed that promise, and yet since he first was promised that, even more time has passed, and nothing, no descendants. As the letter to the Hebrews said today, Abraham was so old he was as good as dead, which is harsh, but accurate, from the standpoint of descendants. But then, well past the last possible hour that seems reasonable, it turns out that God did give Abraham children — and did it on a timetable that made no sense to anyone else except God. Suddenly, the future for Abraham was there in way that had seemed impossible.
And in the gospel, Simeon and Anna, two more old people, they knew it had been hundreds upon hundreds of years since the prophet Isaiah had a vision of God coming as a servant to liberate his people, hundreds of years since that vision was articulated in beautiful words that sounded like it would be happening the next day. But since then generations had come and gone and seemingly nothing had been fulfilled. Any reasonable person would have regarded it by this time as beautiful poetry, but not much more than that. But here today, at the last possible minute for them too, they suddenly realize that a child, born in the middle of nowhere, the unexpected person again, that child was the one who, long after they were dead, would somehow deliver on God’s promise. God was still active, it turned out, and they were given the gift of seeing the first hints of it become real.
Really the message of these readings are directed to all of us, no matter what our age is, because they’re not only about being old, or about us at all, really, they are about what God does in this world and can do, and they are about our expectations about whether God can and will do what God has promised. Because everything about this whole season of Advent and Christmas we have been through together, all the angel visitors, and messages sent in dreams, and people like Mary and Joseph having their lives turned upside down and sent in a new direction, old people having their hopes fulfilled at the last minute, it all is to remind us that the boundaries of heaven and earth are not as fixed as we think, that God is active still, on a timetable that is not ours, that is for sure, but still at work in places and in ways that are somehow fulfilling his promise to us, still at work in us, if we allow ourselves to see it and open ourselves to it.
It is not always easy to see this or believe it. The world seems as filled with conflict and violence as ever, religion isn’t doing very well either, generally speaking. Old age can be a burden just as easily as a time for redemption and grace. There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that God is leaving this world alone. But somewhere, in people completely out of the way of the world’s priorities, away from the powerful and away from the wealthy, there are people and places where, as the old hymn says, God is working his purpose out, on a timetable that has nothing to do with how we’d do things. And even those of us old people who feel like we’ve already seen it all and think the world is headed in the wrong direction, even we are going to have to keep our eyes open, looking for signs of God at work that most of the world will not see.
I don’t know where you find yourself on the spectrum of feeling old. Here’s one thing I’ve noticed happening with me. I’ll hear about something people say is going to happen in the future and I do a quick mental calculation of whether I’ll be around long enough to see whatever it is. I saw a beautiful plan for a completely new Penn Station in New York, and quickly calculated that the odds of my taking a train there one day are low. Then there’s that question of women deacons, will I be around for it? I’m not so sure I’ll live to see that either. But no matter how young or old we are if we find ourselves putting limits on what God can do, we have to realize that one of the greatest mistakes we can make in our relationship with God is to set our expectations and hopes for God way too low. So if you ask yourself the question, will we live to see God at work redeeming this world, redeeming and changing us, the answer that one is that even if you’re old, keep your eyes wide open for what is coming.