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“Nunc Dimittis”

Date: December 30, 2024/Speaker: Sharla Hulsey

December 29, 2024 (1st Sunday of Christmas)

Nunc Dimittis

Luke 2:21-38



Do you remember the ads, some years ago, with the two guys who introduced themselves like this?

“Hello, I’m a Mac.”

“And I’m a PC.”[1]

PC is buttoned up, nearly always in a suit and tie, while Mac is generally much more casual.

These ads came out around the time Windows Vista appeared in 2007 or thereabouts…and quickly disappeared as folks discovered it was awful.[2]  The ads were actually for Macs, so they really played up some real problems Windows computers often had—viruses, crashes at random times, weird error messages that a layperson couldn’t decipher, and Vista’s incompatibility with printers and other peripherals, you name it.

The two actors in the ads were John Hodgman, the PC; and Justin Long, the Mac.  Justin Long has been in tons of movies and TV episodes, beginning with Galaxy Quest in 1999; Hodgman used to show up on The Daily Show regularly, and spoke at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner.

Over the course of the speech he described many different kinds of nerds, challenging the new president, Barack Obama, as to his nerdy credentials.[3]  The speech stuck in my mind, largely because I could identify myself in what he said.

He called himself a “typeface nerd.”  So am I.  The very idea of using Times New Roman in a document is foreign to me.  I prefer Adobe Garamond.  And I probably notice more than ordinary people when a typeface (or font, since most of us don’t type or use offset printing these days) is trendy and becomes wildly overused.  It drove me absolutely to distraction when our regional minister years ago used Comic Sans for all his official correspondence.

He made reference many times to Star Trek—and of course we Trekkies are a special kind of nerds.

He didn’t mention, either because it’s not familiar to him or because it wasn’t totally germane to what he was trying to say, another one I would identify with:  the hymn nerd.

When I was growing up, listening to an excellent preacher whose words nevertheless sailed over my head as often as not, when I couldn’t follow a sermon, I would pick up the hymnal and go through it.  This was the 1950s Baptist Hymnal, which we used clear through the 1980s, at which point I moved away so I don’t know what they did after that.  (And yes, as you can see, my hymn-nerd bona fides are proven by the fact that all the hymnals I consult in my office have these tabs on them—all the different indexes, as well as responsive readings and psalters and such.)

I knew what the oldest hymn in the book was.  I knew what the odd combinations of letters and numbers that appear on the pages, either right under the title or, like in our Chalice Hymnal, at the bottom of each page, mean.  You know:  SM, LM, CM, CMD, 87.87, 12.9.12.12.9,[4] and so on.  I knew why there was another name for each hymn that showed up in capital letters:  New Britain for “Amazing Grace,” for instance.  I am a hymn nerd.  On my bookshelves I have two books of hymn stories, more than two dozen hymnals and songbooks—including a “Worship Leader’s Companion” to the Chalice Hymnal and an oblong shape note book in German.

That’s probably why—besides the obvious, that they contain the Christmas story—I find the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel especially appealing.  In those two chapters, we have four songs, hymns, canticles, whatever you want to call them.

The first, of course, is the Magnificat of Mary—the titles are taken from the first words of each song’s Latin version, in this case Magnificat anima mea Dominum (my soul magnifies the Lord).  I know of at least two modern hymn settings of the Magnificat in modern hymnals, “My Soul Gives Glory to My God” in the Chalice Hymnal and the “Canticle of the Turning” that appears in the new Presbyterian hymnal called Glory to God.  That last one is set to the Irish folk tune we folk-music nerds know as “Star of the County Down.”

The second is Zechariah’s song after his voice is returned to him upon the naming of his son, John the Baptist.  It’s called the Benedictus.  In the Chalice Hymnal we have Arlo Duba’s version of that, set to Hal Hopson’s tune named after his sister Merle, who was his first piano teacher.[5]

The third is the angels’ song, which forms the refrain of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” the Gloria in Excelsis—Glory to God in the highest.

And the fourth is part of our Scripture reading for today.  In Latin it’s called the Nunc Dimittis—now you are dismissing.  It’s the song of Simeon, in recognition that he is holding in his arms the Savior for whom he has been tasked to wait and watch.  Many Christians include it as part of their evening prayers; we just read responsively a version of it from The Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican and Episcopal church.

A lot of folks have understood the “dismissal” Simeon gives thanks for to be his death.  It had been made known to him that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah, so it isn’t unreasonable to think that, when he is “dismissed” from waiting, it means now he can die a happy man.  But the language tells us something different.  “Now you are dismissing your servant” (In Greek the word is doulos, which can be translated as slave) “in peace…”  It’s the language of a slave being set free, of a watchman relieved of his post.

Simeon was not literally a slave, but this is one of the many places where the New Testament, especially Luke and Paul, interpret Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection within the framework of the Exodus—of Israel being set free from bondage in Egypt.[6]  We get a much fuller understanding of who Jesus was and what he did when we are familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, most especially the Exodus story.

The second aged prophet who comes to see the Holy Family at the temple is the widow Anna—the Greek version of the Hebrew name Hannah.  Hannah is another character who informs the stories of Jesus’ birth and infancy:  Mary’s Magnificat is actually based on the song of the first Hannah, Samuel’s mother, back in 1 Samuel 2.

But Luke doesn’t tell us specifically what his Hannah, or Anna, says to Joseph and Mary.  He does let us know that she is, to use a modern term, homeless.  She was a widow in a time and place where a widow who had no adult children to support her was left in desperate straits; so she has made her home in a corner of the women’s court in the temple, because she had nowhere else to go.

The text isn’t totally clear whether Anna was widowed and lived to the age of 84 before the event Luke describes, or whether, after her husband died, she lived on for 84 years.  If it’s the latter, she is very old indeed, probably around 100 or even older.

The question we have to think about this morning is why Luke tells us about the Holy Family’s visit to the temple and their encounter with Simeon and Anna there.  The text as we have it actually describes three rituals taking place during two separate visits to the temple in Jerusalem. 

The first is Jesus’ circumcision and naming.  Presumably Mary wasn’t present for this, since it happened eight days after Jesus was born and the Law said she had to isolate for forty days after bearing a son.  (It would be eighty days when she later bore a daughter.)

The second trip happened after that forty days ended, when she was to make a sacrifice for her purification.  We discover something about the family at that point when we refer back to Leviticus 12, which describes this period of purification and the sacrifice at its conclusion.  The offering for the sacrifice was to be a yearling lamb and a pigeon or turtledove.  But if a woman could not afford a lamb, she could instead bring two pigeons or turtledoves—which is what Mary brought.

Jesus was born not just to a human family, but to a poor human family.

But they were also an observant Jewish family.  Next week’s reading from the end of Luke 2 describes yet another trip the family makes to the temple, in that case Passover—but the trip is remarkable because of what Jesus did during it, not because the family made the trip, since Luke tells us that they went to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover every year.  (And, of course, that’s another reference to the Exodus story.)  We learn later that it was Jesus’ custom to attend synagogue on the Sabbath.  It’s important to Luke that Jesus was born, raised, and lived in the Jewish faith.

But why do we find Simeon and Anna there?  They are both quite elderly, and both are described as being prophets who were devoted to waiting for the coming of the Christ, or in Hebrew the Messiah.  (The two words mean the same thing:  anointed one.)  As we go through Luke from now through Easter, we will discover that he likes to pair male and female characters in his own narrative, as well as in Jesus’ parables, like the lost sheep and lost coin in chapter 15.  He also populates his Gospel—to say nothing of the sequel, Acts—with a great variety of people, and elevates folks who are generally forgotten or ignored.

The good news of Jesus’ birth was first announced to a group of shepherds who lived rough—it doesn’t say they were just taking their turn at watching the sheep overnight, it says they were living in the fields.  The ancient Simeon and the ancient and homeless Anna are the first people other than those shepherds whom Luke describes as encountering and recognizing the baby Jesus.

Later he meets lepers, has his feet washed by a sinful woman, dines and has conversations with Pharisees, who were extremely devout and probably at least somewhat well-off, and is hosted by Zacchaeus, who had made a fortune collecting more tax than Rome required him to turn in.  There are non-Jews in some of the stories of Jesus’ life, and not just people like Pilate, the Roman governor.

All of this is to get one important point across, one that some Christians down through the years have found a tad inconvenient:[7]  Jesus’ coming is good news of great joy, as the angels told the shepherds, for all the people—rich, poor, Jew, Gentile, Pharisee, tax collector, male and female, sinners and those who consider ourselves righteous.

In Jesus we discover that all people are precious in God’s sight, because God is the fullest revelation of who God is.


[1] If you search for these two phrases, you’ll find YouTube videos where many of these ads have been compiled for our enjoyment.

[2] For quite awhile there, every other new operating system from Microsoft was bad, especially Vista (although Windows Me is considered the worst of all).  Most folks who ran Vista reverted to Windows XP fairly quickly.

[3] The full speech can be seen on C-Span’s YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY.

[4] This is the “Captain Kidd” meter, so named because it is a common one in folk ballads, particularly one written in 1701 to mark the execution of that notorious pirate—set to a tune that was already “old” even then.  The most familiar hymn with that meter is “What Wondrous Love Is This,” number 200 in the Chalice Hymnal.

[5] There are four hymns in the Chalice Hymnal set to Merle’s Tune; in addition to “Blessed Be the God of Israel,” there is a setting of the 84th Psalm called “How Lovely, Lord, How Lovely,” a gathering hymn that begins with a paraphrase of a prayer from the Didache, “As Grain on Scattered Hillsides,” and Brian Wren’s Christmas song, “Her Baby, Newly Breathing.”  Apropos of nothing, Arlo Duba was the cousin of one of my colleagues in Iowa.

[6] Only Luke’s version of the Transfiguration story (Luke 9:28-36) tells us what Jesus, Moses, and Elijah talked about:  his “departure,” or in Greek exodus.

[7] One of our associate regional ministers in Iowa was born in Canada and held dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship.  He was once asked by a woman in one of our churches how he could be a Christian if he’s not an American.  Ultimately it’s a silly question because, of course, there are a whole lot of Christians around this world who aren’t Americans.