Luke 2: 22 – 40. The
presentation of Jesus at the temple.
Sometimes the blind can see better.
Sermon
preached at Christchurch, 30th January 2000
I
once heard the story of a monkey at the zoo, which had a Bible in one hand and a
copy of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in the other. When asked by the zoo
keeper what he was doing, the monkey responded, “I’m trying to decide whether
I’m my brother’s keeper, or my keeper’s brother.”
Now I don’t intend to get
into an argument about evolution this morning.
But basically it illustrates that a lot of people would find the idea of
a monkey trying to discover its own identity as slightly mad. But if you think that monkey is mad, you
should be aware that a lot of people would view what we’re doing here today as
slightly peculiar. You who are bringing
your children for baptism are in a big minority. Most people have no desire or wish to take part in a ceremony
like this. But today you are in good
company, because Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to church. And children, at least you can take comfort
from the fact that you have not had to be circumcized before you came here!
I don’t know if you have
ever met someone who is so obsessed with something, that everyone else thinks they are a bit loopy. Apparently, some vicars are obsessed with
football and other sports like that.
You might know something about extreme sports. The purpose of extreme sport is to take a sport as far as it can
go, to get the ultimate thrill. In our
reading we have heard about two old people who all their lives were extreme
like that – they were waiting and watching for one thing. Simeon and Anna were
after seeing God, and they were determined not to do anything until they had
seen God’s salvation. They had been
there for years. Anna had been a widow
for at least 55 years, and all that time it says she only wanted this one
thing. Simeon had been hanging round
the temple, probably going up to people
asking if he could hold their child to see if this was the one whom God
had promised.
They were religious
fanatics, but probably the kind that of the people despised. Probably the kind that the religious leaders
got a bit fed up of. They weren’t
people of great influence in the temple, they weren’t great movers or
shakers. But they were the ones who
finally saw God’s plan come into being.
People might think that
what we do here is ridiculous. They
might look down on our commitment to seeing God work. They might see us as religious fanatics. But what Simeon and Anna show us is that
sometimes it is the mad who are sane, the blind who can see, and that it takes
on the arrival of a child in our lives to show us what is really important, to
finally turn us into adults.
This last week has been a
week of prayer for Christian unity and on Wednesday we went to the church of
the first born to pray. Now I don’t
know if you have ever heard Caribbean people pray, but what they do is they
stand up and they start off really quietly, but then they get going and after 10
minutes of praying, lots of hallelujahs and glories, they finally sit down
again, usually after having told you the whole of the Gospel! Well I was quite taken aback by this style
of praying, and I don’t know whether,
being English, I could ever pray like that. I doubt whether many of us would try it in this church. But what I did think was that maybe I can’t
pray like that, with that kind of passion, but I certainly want to be someone
who lives like that, with that passion,
with that obsession for God.
What I am trying to say I
suppose is that I hope that nobody ever sees my commitment to Jesus as
something that is only respectable.
Something that never makes anybody think that I am a little bit loopy. The Bible says that God chose what the world
sees as foolish to shame the wise. It’s
easy to be nuts about our kids, and maybe even you’ve found that your kids can
drive you nuts! But God wants us to be
nuts about him as well, to be prepared to be seen as a little bit foolish, a
little bit unhinged.
The Psalm we had read this
morning, was written by King David. In
it he said that those who will really see God are those who have clean hands
and pure hearts. King David was
someone who was so obsessed with God,
that he danced naked before his people when he worshipped. Simon, do you think we should introduce
this at Christchurch? Maybe not. But if we want to know the presence of
God’s love and his saving forgiveness more and more, then can we seek him, can
we keep ourselves pure with the same kind of passion that kept an old lady and
an old man praying away for years, and made a king completely forget himself.
This God who asks us to
become obsessed with him, to purify our hearts for him to lay our lives and the
lives of our children in his care, is a God who is completely obsessed with
us. He is crazy about us, he has even
given up this baby who was dedicated In the Temple to be crucified, to be
abandoned, because he wants us so much.
There is nothing that we can do which will make him love us any more,
and there is nothing we can do which can make him love us any less. He wants us all to know his salvation. That is why he is worth us getting so fanatical
about.
God make us into people who
will still be pursuing to the end of our lives like Simeon and Anna did. God keep us from being seen as respectable
in our commitment to him. And then we
will be the ones who truly know what it
is to be truly loved.