Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
For Epiphany, January 6, 2013
What do you hope to see happen in this New Year?
Do you want to see the economy improve?
Do you want to see your child graduate?
Do you want to see someone get married, get a job, or have a baby? Do you want to see this church grow? Do you want to see people draw closer to God
and new people come to Christ? What do
you expect to see happen in this New Year?
Our text today promises us one thing:
We will not see it, if we don’t look for it! What happens in life is not a “closed” system
of already determined fate, which says, “What will happen, must happen”. But “what might happen” will not happen
unless we want it to happen, expect it to happen, or desire it to happen. Let me explain.
As the gospel of Luke begins to tell the good news of Jesus, it reminds
us that the truth of how things really are is not always apparent to everyone. As far back as Isaiah, the Word of God
questioned the human vision of things, saying “Behold I am doing a new thing; Do you not perceive it?”
(43:13). God was at work doing something new, but
people were still expecting the same old thing.
People even pigeon-holed God. The
did not really believe God was free to do things differently, nor did they
believe they could do things differently.
The end result: everything remained the same.
In today’s text, it took an old fellow, an old aged devout gentleman named
Simon, to see something different was about to happen. These were some ‘new’ things about to happen
through Jesus, which even Jesus parents couldn’t see yet. I think there is something about Simon’s
very ‘old eyes’ see that see clearly what God wants us all to see. Isn’t that the way it often happens, you
just start seeing things clearly and then you’re too old to see anymore. You just start figuring out how to make a
living, or how to live, and then, suddenly, your body is too old to go any
more. Don’t you just hate it when that
happens? Sometimes life seems to happen
in reverse. Or are we getting ready for
something more? Do you ever wonder? What is it that God wants us to see, to know,
to understand in this life?
In our text the “consolation of
Israel” is what Simon and Anna have been waiting for, but poor o’ Simon and
Anna are on the way out. But wait a
moment. Simon has just one more thing to
say. He’s been waiting to see this his
whole life. ? Are
we ready to see what Simon saw? Simon
has been praying that God would give him just one more year and one more chance
to see God’s Answer for the problems of his world before his eyes are closed in
death. Now, as Simon sees Jesus, Israel’s Messiah for the first and last time,
this baby is, as the adage says, is a “sight for sore eyes”.
Another ‘oldie goldie’ nearby, is an aged woman with the name of Anna, she
sees the child Jesus in a very similar way.
Now, watch out. Anna is a woman preacher. Women preachers see things differently than
men preachers. They can give us insights
from some very different angles and perspectives. This woman preacher is 84 and she’s too has been
waiting all her life to preach one last sermon.
Our text tells us how she goes out and preaches about this baby to everyone
and all who are looking for the redemption of Jerusalem---for the hope of the
future to become the reality of the present.
But here we need to make a special note about Anna’s preaching. Preacher Anna only preached her message to
those who were looking; wanting and expecting for to God do something. Those who don’t want to see, don’t want to
understand, don’t want to hope or don’t will to believe, dare not apply, listen,
learn or look to see what they see. The target audience of her preaching “those
who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem” (vs. 38), makes me wonder whether or not people in our
own cynical and skeptical age can see still see what they saw or hope what they
hoped. Simon
and Anna’s own faithful expectation of God’s fulfillment should make us question our own view of the how
the future might turn out. Can we, with
the help of these two, aged, wise, biblical characters, learn to expect what
God can do next in our own time and in our own world? Can we see God’s message of hope coming just
around the corner, sooner rather than later, being fulfilled in God’s time rather
being forgotten in our own time? My
question today is simply this: How should we see and hope for the future in a
time when the future doesn’t look so optimistic? Can we see own ‘sight for ‘sore eyes” that is still can
happen? Can we, metaphorically and
physically speaking, hold our eyes open just long enough for one more look into
what God can do with us yet?
I have never been blind, yet, but I’ve observed a few people who are. People who can’t see with their eyes often
compensate with other senses and faculties.
They are able to develop an amazing sense of hearing, a keen sense of
direction, a special sense of touch, of taste or of smell, and often a focused
state of mind. You’ve see that happen,
haven’t you? The eyesight goes dim, but
the mind becomes sharper. I watched on
TV the story of a blind man who traveled all over his neighborhood with his
cane. I’ve meet a few people like that
walking alone on the street and never missing a beat. Once I watch and listen to a blind preacher
who memorized the entire wedding ceremony and performed it perfectly. And we’ve all heard Stevie Wonder and Ray
Charles play and sing with Rhythms and sounds no one else could ever sing or play. Google has even developed an especially
programed GPS car that the blind can drive around town. It’s amazing what you can see, when you
really want to see. It all makes me wonder even more about how and
what Simon and Anna saw in Jesus before anyone else could? How did they do that? How can we?
There were, no doubt, a lot of other people living in Jerusalem on that
day when Jesus was brought to the temple.
But the only ones who saw him, as we can note, were only the ones who
were faithfully waiting, looking, still hoping and expecting to see God fulfill
his promise. Do we want to see hope happen? No matter how old or how young, are we content
to settle for how things are, or can we still see hope on the way? Are our eyes looking straight into the path what
is still coming, or have our eyes already become too tired, too lazy or too
sore to look up any more?
Sometimes we have to train our eyes to see, what we can’t see, don’t
we? And it is possible, isn’t it? Remember those 2 D photographs that were
popular a few years ago? You could stare
at them and if you looked at them correctly, if you trained you eye to see, they
were turned into 3 D images. But again, you
had to develop the eyes to see. It did
not come easily, or at least it didn’t come easily for me. You had to have patience, and you had to make
your eyes want to see. If you didn’t,
you ended up seeing only what was easy to see, the scrambled 2 D image. This illustrates well what I want to say
about having faith, hope and love when the prospect doesn’t look faithful,
hopeful or loving. There are some things
in life you can’t see, have, or believe in, unless you really want to. Many things pass by the untrained,
unwilling, impatient eye, or overly critical eye. But the trained eye, and the believing heart
can not only see “new” and different things, it can almost be haunted by
everything it sees as possible and hopeful.
Haven’t you also been around people who could see things you couldn’t?
I used to watch my father-in-law, while we sat around in a room. He was a skilled carpenter. While in conversation, his eye would often wander
and you could see him checking out the shape of a line or sizing up the line of
a wall. He was both gifted and trained so
that his eye could see what most of us never notice. He could see what was square, what was plumb
and what wasn’t. He could see even when
he didn’t try to see it. It became
automatic. It became not just what he saw,
but part of who he was. You could even
say that it was not just a matter of seeing, but it was a matter of being. He could not do his job, live his life, or
make his living, without the ability to see what others couldn’t. I guess, if we wanted, we could all train
our eyes to see a lot of new things like that.
We humans have the capacity to train ourselves to see what we want to
see, what we need to see, and what we might still see, if we really try.
We are told exactly what trained Simon’s and Anna’s eyes. It was the Holy Spirit. Now don’t get too nervous about what I’m
going to say about the Holy Spirit. I recently heard that a certain Lutheran
church in a nearby city fired their preacher for just mentioning the Holy the
Spirit in a sermon. Don’t get the wrong
idea. I’m not talking about seeing
ghosts or seeing strange things happening or hearing things go “bump” in the
night. People are superstitious by
nature, but I don’t want to appeal to superstitions. By talking about the work of the Holy
Spirit, I’m talking about how God’s Spirit is at work in us, around us, through
us, even outside of us, to bring about a more hopeful , caring, and loving
reality in our lives and in the world.
The same kind of “hopeful” things Simon and Anna saw, I believe we can
still see, if we want to see them. But
it will take some well-trained, well-focused, and well-matured eyes to see these
hopeful things, especially when everything looks bad around you right now. Do you want to see what they saw?
TO SEE RIGHTLY WE MUST LIVE
RIGHTLY ---THEN THE SPIRIT WILL REST
UPON US
First we are given the insight that Simon was righteous and devout, so
that the Holy Spirit rested on him. We also read about Anna, that she ‘devoted’ so that she ‘worshipped’ in the temple and ‘prayed
day and night’. Here we already see
something about how to train ourselves to have hope. You can only see what you are preparing
yourself to see. What Simon did with his life, and what Anna
was doing with hers, is that they were living as if they really wanted God’s
work to be fulfilled in their world.
Their witness to faith is a witness of their faith---at work, real,
being practice in their own lives---their whole lives.
Isn’t the same true for us? Especially
when it comes to spiritual matters, to seeing what can’t yet be seen, you don’t
see what you don’t want to see. You will
not see anything, until you put your whole life into it. When I studied psychology in college, we
came to a very interesting subject of Hypnosis.
I was captivated by the idea that you could put a person into a trance
and get them to do things while they were unconscious and asleep. Under Hypnosis, something that was blocking
a person’s healing in their unconscious mind, could be moved. Sometimes a person who could not overcome an
addiction could be retrained while asleep.
Sometimes a person who could not move an arm or leg, for no physical
reason, but for an emotional one, could learn to move that part of their body
while in a trance. It was kind of like
“mind over matter” instructions.
Sometimes, you could even train a mind that was afraid, not to be afraid
anymore. When the person would wake up,
they would lose their fear. But
Hypnosis doesn’t work on everybody. That’s why I used the word: “Sometimes”. You have to want to be hypnotized in order
to be hypnotized. It does not always work, nor does the person
always respond to the therapy. One very
important thing I learned about hypnosis, was that you could never make a
hypnotized person, who was in a trance, wake up to do something they would not do
normally do. For example, you could not tell them to shot
someone, and they would do it, if it was against their belief or values. The
only things you could get them to do, were they things they wanted to do, but
could only do, when you helped them release their mind to do it (I often wondered
who tested this theory).
Whether you think hypnosis works or not, for me the theory is very similar
to what it means to say that because Simon was devout and righteous that the Holy
Spirit rested on him. It does not mean
that Simon was able to hear things he didn’t normally hear, nor that Simon was
special, unique or strange. What this text
means is that when Simon was righteous, he wanted what God wanted and he was
devoted to what God desired for the world.
When you want what God wants, new things happen. As,
William Temple used to say, “When I pray coincidence happen, but when I don’t
pray coincidences don’t happen.” I don’t
think Temple believed that pray works by coincidence, but I don’t believe he
intended to help us realize, if we don’t pray, things most often don’t
change. We must wish them, want them,
desire them, and this must not just be a matter of our heart, but it must be a
matter of how we live our live. God
loves to do a new thing, the Scripture clearly says. The Spirit blows where it will. The Spirit rests on people who are open to
him. But before the Spirit abides on us
or in us, we must first want what the Spirit wants. We must be what God wants us to be. New hope and new help begins with our
openness to God’s Spirit which is prepared for by living our lives in the right
direction and way. So let me ask you, how will you open yourself
to God’s new work of the Spirit by living your life in the best and right way
in this New Year? What is that ‘right
way’? I’m glad you asked.
TO LIVE RIGHTLY WE MUST LISTEN
TO GOD’S SPIRIT—THE SPIRIT REVEALS WHAT WE NEED TO SEE, KNOW AND DO
We are also told in this text that it had been ‘revealed to him by the
Spirit that Simon would not see death until he saw the Lord’s Messiah. We are also told that Anna was a ‘prophet’—a person
who listens for the voice of God before they speak for the voice of God. This was how it was with them, but how does
the Spirit “reveal” truth to us?
This brings us to beyond the “want to” to the “how to” of knowing spiritual
things. The point here is that not only
do we have to want the spirit to rest on us as we give our lives fully and
freely to God, but we also have to train ourselves to be able to hear what the
Spirit is truly saying, both to us and in the world. Can you even learn to do this? Well, Simon did. He was not a preacher like Anna was, but he
was able to gain the Spirit’s revelation of truth. So if Simon can do, I believe anyone can get
their heart in tune with the will and work of God. I can.
You can. For the Spirit of God is
always revealing and speaking in this world, but we are not all tuned in to
understand it.
This ability to listen to the Spirit is something like that old school question
about the sound of the tree falling in the forest. If the tree falls, and no one is there to
hear it, does the tree still make a sound?
I finally figured out that the right answer is that it depends on how you
define the word ‘sound.’ If you only define
sound as something making a noise, then it the tree did make a sound. But if you define a sound as someone hearing
the noise, then the tree didn’t make a sound because no one heard it. The work of the Spirit can be understood
just as simple as that. What we all know
is there are all kinds of noise, sounds, and clatter in this world, but it’s
not all really saying anything; at least nothing important. In order to hear what needs to be heard we need
to change channels. Sometimes we need
to open ourselves up to deeper understandings of truth. Likewise, if we want to see God at work, we too
must train ourselves to see, understand and know what this means. We must also train ourselves to hear and see
what most people don’t see, but what the Spirit is actually saying and
revealing to us and to the world.
One thing that I’ve been noticing lately is the upswing of reports of
NDE, or Near Death Experiences in the news media. Have you noticed it? First there was a child, then a woman doctor;
both who wrote books. But then, the
latest of these came from a Neurosurgeon who said that he knows that his brain
had no activity, yet after he woke up, he knows that he visited a place of
peace where an unknown sister (he was adopted), escorted him around through a
place that was filled with the most pleasant sights illuminated by a most
amazing, unexplainable light. Now, after
that experience, this doctor, who is now laughed at by most of his peers, has
totally changed his life. He prays. He goes to church. He spends time with his family. His life is more than his job. His attitude about everything in life and
death is different. It is as if his life
has been charged and changed by a life-giving vision and by a life-giving
Spirit.
I personally have a lot of reservations about such claims, but so did
this doctor until he had the experience himself. For him it was real. It was unexplainable, but it is proven true
and real, not by explanation, but by how he has, in fact, changed his life
through what was revealed to him or to her.
Again, I can’t say whether this experience was a physical one or a work
of the Spirit, but I can say that the spiritual isn’t any less than the
physical we now know. If anything, the
spiritual is even more. This doctor and
others today, are being awakened to the matters of the spirit and the limits of
human life, which many have been paying very little attention to. Seeing
the limits of human life or human logic can do that kind of thing to you. It can make you want to understand, to know,
or to hear more. Are we getting
older? Are people paying more
attention? Why are people having these
revelations, these NDE, and these very spiritual experiences of mind beyond
body? What enables them to know what
others don’t yet know?
Another interesting question of human limit, also, strangely enough can
help us to see more potential and possibilities for life. Have you ever noticed your own limits in
life and been amazed at what someone else knows or can do? Have you see how some people are ‘gifted’ to
have knowledge or talents no one else has?
In news spot on a TV news program, they told about several young prodigies
who were playing the piano or violin as good as Mozart, Bach, or
Beethoven. One child, read music and at
age 3, an entire year before Mozart did.
He also played the piano at age 4, an entire year before Mozart did, and
by the time this child was 7, he wrote an entire Orchestra piece, at age 7,
again, an entire year before Mozart did.
How did this child do this? Was
there something exceptional about their mind---about their training and
environment---or was it a gift from God---or were they a freak of nature? Maybe it was not one, but all of the
above. Spiritual things that have not
happened in many years can happen again.
There are still things that can happen that cannot be explained any
other way than a ‘gift’ of the God. Are we, in these days of realizing our own
human limits, about to enter a completely new day and a new age, as religious scholar
from Harvard has named as, the age of
the Spirit? The point being, that only
when we realize our human limits, can we train ourselves to see what God has
for us to understand and see.
I can’t say exactly what it means to know that the Spirit reveals
something to you or me, but I can tell you what the Spirit does, what the
Spirit is always doing, and I can tell you what it looks like when it
happens. I can tell you this because we
have been told in Scripture what the Holy Spirit reveals and does. We may not always know where the Spirit is
blowing (John 3.8), Jesus told Nicodemus, but we can know and witness to what
we have seen (John 3:11) and should be able to see when the true Spirit of God
is at work. The Spirit reveals truth. The Spirit reveals sin. And the Spirit reveals reason and
judgment. It is this Spirit, which is
nothing less than God’s Spirit, even the Spirit that has been breathed into us,
that enables the human person to rise
above their animal instincts. It is this
same the Spirit that can enable us to see beyond and rise above our current
situation. It is the Spirit that opens
us up to new understandings, new revelations and new avenues of possibility and
hope. These are the kinds of things the
Spirit did and still does. We can’t know
everything about where the Spirit is going, but we can know for sure where the
Spirit wants us to take us and wants us to go.
TO HEAR THE SPIRIT’S REVELATION,
WE MUST BE GUIDED BY THE SPIRIT---WE MUST LIFT UP JESUS
Where does the Spirit want to take us?
What does the Spirit want to reveal to us? Our text tell us specifically that Simon was
guided by the Spirit as he entered
the temple and saw the child brought in.
If Simon had not wanted to be guided by the Spirit, it would not have
happened. If Simon had not been trained
in the things of the Spirit, he would not have seen what he needed to see. The
same was true of the prophet Anna. She
wanted it. She trained herself in it
through her praying and fasting in the temple.
She was ready to speak because she too had been guided by this same
Spirit. The Spirit ‘guided’ her in the
very same direction.
So, now what did the ‘Spirit’ guide them to do, to see, and to know,
which the whole world needed to know?
This is not hard to see is it?
What Simon and Anna do in these text, in their own ways, is what we too must
do, if we want to be guided by the right Spirit in this new year. Do you see especially how a great truth was
made into a very teachable, trainable, graphic and very specific image for us when
Simon took up the child up into his arms and start praising God! Anna
did the same, even in a more spiritual sense, as she began to “speak about the
child”, not just praising him for herself, but speaking about the child to any
who wanted to see ‘the redemption of
Jerusalem’.
Perhaps in the witness of these two worshippers we can see what will
enable us to be guided by the Spirit which can lead us to find new hope and promise
in this New Year ahead: Lift up the
child! Lift Jesus up in both word and
deed. You can’t be guided by the Spirit
until you identify the Spirit. You can’t
identify the Spirit until you are familiar with what the Spirit does. And the Bible tells us that Spirit does only
one true thing: He does not speak about
himself, but the Spirit reveals the truth about Jesus. The truth was fully revealed in the life of
both Simon and Anna, when they physically and spiritually began to lift up,
magnify and glorify, the presence of Jesus Christ in their lives and their
world. Isn’t this what Christian worship is about? And isn’t it the true worship of Jesus that
can bring us the hope and promise we need in our world and in our own
lives?
Near the close of last year, I came across a website that I’m going to
visit a lot in the next year. It’s a
website that can bring a lot of hope to this world. It will challenge you, and I mean really
challenge you. It will make you think
and it might even make some of you mad.
The idea of this web site goes back to what most of us are already
familiar with---red letter Bibles. I don’t
use one anymore, because it can be hard to read from the pulpit. But a red-letter edition of the Bible is a
Bible where the words of Jesus are printed in red ink. What this new website, by Tony Campolo and
Shane Claiborne challenge us to do, is to take and try to live these words of
Jesus, as if they actually are the way we are supposed to live and behave. Now, again, let me warn you. This website challenges you and I to be red-letter
Christians who join a red letter revolution that can bring real hope to our
world. Listen to the Manifesto, as it is
printed:
“Many Bibles
have the words of Jesus written in red to set them apart. Many traditions rise
and stand every time the Gospels are read. It’s not to say that the other words
in the Bible don’t matter. In fact it’s just the opposite – Jesus did not come
to abolish the Old Testament, but to complete it. Jesus is the fulfillment of everything God is
doing in the world, the climax of the Bible, the pinnacle of history. He came
to show the world what God is like with skin on, in a way we can emulate and
follow. Jesus is the lens through
which we understand the Bible… and through which we understand the world we
live in. As you read the words of Jesus, you get the deep sense that he did not
just come to prepare us to die but to teach us how to live.
Sadly,
Christians have not always followed Jesus very well. It’s startling
to think of how easily we forgotten the real Christ of our Christianity. Often we have worshipped Jesus without doing
the things he said. Sometimes we’ve even become known for the very hypocrisy
and arrogance for which Jesus scolded the religious elite of his time, and we
have not always been known for the love and grace that magnetized the
marginalized to Christ…
But there is a
new and beautiful movement stirring around the world. It is a movement of
folks, young and old, who want a Christianity that looks like Jesus again. It
is a movement convinced that Jesus did not just come to prepare us to die, but
to teach us how to live. For us, being a Christian has as much to do with life
before death as life after death. It is a movement that refuses to use our
faith as a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the hells around us. It
is a movement that is committed to building the world Jesus dreamed of – a
world free of violence and poverty, a world where the last are first and the
first are last, where the poor are blessed and the peacemakers are the children
of God. It is a movement that believes in resurrection and lives in light of
the promise that life conquers death and love triumphs over hatred. It is a
movement of people who are reading the Gospels with fresh eyes and saying,
“What if Jesus really meant the stuff he said?” http://redletterchristians.org/redletterrevolutionbook/manifesto/index.html.
We all know that true worship is not just coming to church, setting on
a pew, singing a song or saying a prayer.
But true spiritual worship, said the apostle Paul is to “make your body a living sacrifice, which
is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12: 1-2, NRSV). To lift up Jesus, you must put your whole
life on the line. This is what being a ‘red-letter’
Christian means. Real hope does not
come with half-way commitment to the truth.
Hope only comes when we live rightly, listen to God’s spirit, and when
we are guided by the same Spirit we allow to take control of our own lives.
So, my most important message of the whole year all comes down to your answer on this first Sunday: How will you lift up Jesus with
your life in this New Year? How will you
do right? How will you listen with your
whole heart? How will you make yourself
available to go where the Spirit leads and do what the Spirit says? How will you not just be hopeful, but how
will you bring hope into this world by the faithfulness of your own life? This is just how close real hope is to any
and all of us; it is as close as the very next right, good, and necessary thing
we will do to lift up Jesus for the glory of God who is always able to do a new
thing. Amen.
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