Look! With the Eyes of Faith

Luke 2:21-52

What is happening in our world?

Life is treated with casual disregard. A snarling collegian shoots down his peers at Virginia Tech. Other similar acts of cultural insanity rush to mind beginning with Columbine which initiated our society's sick fad, the murder-suicide.

Science, once the bastion of all that was solid and sure, now ripples with confusion. The realm of constants and laws has been replaced by a world of relativity and chaos. Meanwhile, technology turns on its master more often than we would like: computers threaten to destabilize the very economy that rests upon micro-processing abilities; trains wreck; tunnels collapse; tankers spill; nuclear arms threaten to fall into the hands of rogue nations.

Moral underpinnings are tossed aside with indifference. Network television and film studios race to be first to the outer edges of decency, creating a world where criminals are heroes, violence is art and sex is everything. The Ten Commandments are slipped off our courtroom walls like old wallpaper.

Our planet shudders under a destructive barrage of natural forces. Earthquakes topple buildings like dominoes in Turkey; tornadoes whisk away homes and lives in Bangladesh, while mud slides do the same in Guatemala; hurricanes spin their destruction throughout the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast; years long drought persists in North Africa and seemingly begins in North America.

Truth has given way to opinion. In our postmodern world, we have lost confidence that we can believe anything; everything is a matter of opinion and perspective. And in this climate, the Christian Church finds itself disenfranchised and its truth claims ignored. For centuries we have been the custodians of the culture's moral ground. But there has been a sea change, and the tide no longer goes with us.

What is happening in our world? It seems to be breaking apart before our very eyes: shattered by violence, splintered by unbelief, hammered by sky and sea. It is starting to feel as though we are watching our world dissolve. What is a person of faith supposed to do?

*****

Perhaps what we can do is look to Simeon and Anna as models of faith, for they lived what we now experience. Their world was much like ours, yet somehow they were able to hang on to faith and see the salvation of their God.

Simeon and Anna were people of prayer, whose prayerful lifestyle was well known in the Temple community. They never left the Temple, (or so it must have seemed), because they were waiting for God to encourage Israel, to redeem it, to restore it...to do something! For clearly something needed to be done. Most of us have heard the litany of complaint before, so I will try to be brief.

·        Rome was in power. Before Rome were the Greeks...now they were really bad. Before the Greeks were the Persians. Before the Persians were the Babylonians. Except for a few years during the Maccabean rule, it had been a long time since Israel, the people of the Lord Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, had been a free people. Actually, it had been over four-hundred years.

·        With Roman lordship came Roman taxes and Roman soldiers and Roman laws and Romans ways. Their own land, the land given to them by God himself, was not truly their own. They were a people living in their own houses yet they had no home. The world of Simeon and Anna was a Rome dominated world, a world where the pillars of faith and community had crumbled, a world where God seemed to be unable or unwilling to do anything about it, and so it was a world filled with little hope and much despair...except for Simeon and Anna.

Simeon and Anna were able to endure, to stay the faith, even in the middle of Roman rule and the seeming disappearance of God. This is so because Simeon and Anna were above all else people of prayer. They watched and they waited for God to deliver Israel, to redeem Jerusalem. Their tenacious faith was fed by their prayer and it gave to them a hope that said, "The world we see with our eyes is not all that it's cracked up to be. That we cannot clearly see God in the midst of the world we see with our eyes is not a sign that God is absent, however, but a symptom that we are not looking in the right place. Seeing God depends on where you look."

And so it was that when Joseph and Mary brought Jesus into the Temple, Simeon and Anna were open to the Holy Spirit's leading. They were able to see that in Jesus would be found the salvation of Israel, the redemption of Jerusalem. They knew that they, themselves, were too old to see this salvation with their own eyes. But they knew also that it was enough to be assured of the hope, for what God brings during others' time ultimately extends to all God's people throughout time. And so Simeon and Anna wept in praise at the delight they felt in seeing Jesus, in seeing the future salvation God would bring.

*****

Our world is a shambles too. Here we are watching the world fall into disarray before us. Here we are watching things tumble toward dissolution. How can we celebrate the faithfulness of God as we watch such things and see the people of God stumble through lives of pain, loss, and struggle?

The only appropriate response for a person of faith in today's world is to recognize that God is not concerned first and foremost with our comfortable existence. Rather, God is concerned first and foremost with restoring his very good creation, concerned first and foremost with redeeming a relationship of eternal intimacy between God and humanity, concerned first and foremost with our growing closer to God and our growing more like him.

It is at this deeper level that God is relentlessly, unceasingly, unstoppably at work in our world. God lovingly provides for every need of those who know him and love him. But what he provides for us first and foremost is not ease, or comfort, or success. Rather, it is the gift of himself. "God with us," is the Christmas promise. "God with us" is the mortar that holds the whole of Scripture together. When we cry for help, God with us is the answer to our prayer, God standing by us as a loving ally, standing before us as a protective shield, standing ready to give us what we need when we need it: God gives us himself.

It is so tempting to see ease as God's greatest blessing, peace as his foremost mark of success, and pain and struggle as the most glaring sign of God's failure. But in fact, God allows pain and disorder to keep us from looking to anything short of God to be for us what only God can be do for us what only God can do. God even uses our uncertainty in earthly matters to make us long for the hope that only he can provide.

God remains our only hope in life and in death, the only finger holding back the flood waters of despair and disarray. When we look at God's work in the world around us, we need to let go of the notion that everything will be neat and pretty; it has never been so and never will be so, at least not in this age. It was not so for Simeon and Anna, it is not so for us, it will not be so for those who come after us. It is a new heaven and a new earth that God has promised to make one day, not simply an old one cleaned up and polished a bit.

Certainly God is at work in our world, and so should we be. But fixing the clutch on the old Dodge that is this world is not God's first and foremost goal; nor should it be ours. It is the redemption of his very good creation that most receives God's attention. While we wait for a new world, while we strive to help create it even, it is a new humanity that God is bringing about in us and through us: a new man of God, a new woman of God, a new people of God. And God uses the disintegration of this world to call us to attention. Indeed, he uses our own disintegration to call us to hope. This is the truth that Simeon and Anna understood in their well elderly years.

*****

My colleague was visiting a good friend of his who lay dying in an upstairs bedroom, cared for by friends and the tender mercies of hospice workers. There was not much for the two of them to say. This would be the dying man's last Christmas; they both knew it. He could not move from his bed without help; his prospects were dim; and death was already an intruder in the room. So they sat together, mostly silent, a word passing between them only now and then, not an awkward silence but more the stillness of old friends content to say their farewell in quietness.

Suddenly there was a movement downstairs, sounds of muffled voices, the shuffle of feet. It was a choir from the church come to do some caroling, come to sing songs of hope and comfort of the Christ Child. Upstairs, my colleague and his dying friend heard the choir whispering, trying to decide what to sing. What do you sing to a dying man?

Their voices started, "Lo how a rose o'er blooming..." As they rose up the stairs, their voices became stronger, more present in the room, as if they were ushering in God himself, even though he was already there, "...to show God's love aright...." The man, deep into the midnight darkness of dying, yet agonizing hours away from the dawn of new life, turned away so the choir would not see his tears as they sang. "She bore for us a savior, when half spent was the night."

Theirs was the sound of God's song, the sound of divine laughter, a song of weeping, yet in the weeping a song of praise. And because of this song all of us, though living in a broken world, can cling to the hope that what we long for in life is given to us not in what we see around us, but in the unseen savior within us.

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