I

 It has been said there are four stages in a man’s life:

• When you believe in Santa Claus.
• When you don’t believe in Santa Claus.
• When you are Santa Claus.
• When you look like Santa Claus.

As true as that is, I have come to believe there is another stage:  when we look for something that is more permanent and enduring than Santa Claus.  This stage happens for different people at different times.  It is a restless hunger that is often hard to name, but I believe it is the search for God.

And so we come to Simeon.  Simeon was a hungry man.  He was hardly godless; in fact he was the opposite.  He had tasted enough of God to know he wanted and needed even more.  Nothing could satisfy except the patient pursuit of the truest story of all.  And that means there is something is this story for people like us.

II

 It’s hard to imagine a more compelling picture of someone who wanted something more from God, than Simeon.

Driven by the light God has lodged in his heart, he kept going to that cold and cavernous old temple believing that God had yet to show him a new thing.  He was seeking “consolation,” good news for Israel that would release them from their bondage and suffering as a people.

We read that “the Holy Spirit was upon him.” Simeon’s heart was tender and open to what God had to say.  Perhaps he could have never explained why, but he knew he was to see the Lord’s Christ, the one who would come from God to bring light to the world.

How’s your heart?  Is the Spirit upon you?  Perhaps like Simeon you have pursued God in churches, temples, and all the conventional places we call “holy”.  Or maybe the pursuit of God has drawn you to some out of the way places.  Regardless, your heart is open.  Your heart is ready.  Like Simeon you have tasted enough of God to continue to look for something more.

The search for God can be frustrating for many reasons.  But one of the biggest is that many of us aren’t prepared to find our answer in a figure who has grown as ordinary as the Jesus of Christmas.  We were hoping for someone more exciting; someone who promises a few more fireworks.  The author Kathleen Norris has said:

We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing an even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were.

 

So do we have Simeon’s eyes this first Sunday after Christmas?  Are we ready to consider the appearing of God among the ordinary?  Will our hunger allow the birth of Jesus to be the bright revelation of God in the midst of after Christmas sales and while our neighbors make haste to take down their decorations and get back to business as usual?

III

 So Simeon seeks in midst of the ordinary.  But he does more than seek.  He finds something.  He announces that in the birth of Jesus the endless seeking has come to an end.

You are looking at Rembrandt’s Simeon.  (see portrait)  Standing there in the same temple where he had stood countless times.  He had stood expectantly.  Maybe he had uttered what seemed to be a thousand unanswered prayers.  But this time he looks and sees “something more”.  Simeon takes this infant Jesus in his arms and beginning in verse 29 tells us all what we have been seeking:

My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.

 

It’s an amazing claim.  Amazing because this seeker is claiming in Jesus Christ the something more he seeks has been found.  The hunger in our souls actually leads somewhere.  And amazing because it happens in the most ordinary of settings.  It happens in an old temple and arrives in the arms of a young couple doing for their newborn son what the Jewish law required, like countless others before them.  Simeon gazes into the ordinary and finds in it God’s extraordinary.

God has come.  God has come in the flesh.  And God has come in response to the deepest hungers of the human heart.  If you are seeking do you realize it is Jesus that you seek?  Or has your vision become so dimmed by the ordinary, you can’t see the one you seek?

Simeon seeks. And then he finds Jesus.  Could he be the one you are seeking?

IV

That really is the lingering question of Christmas, isn’t it?  What child is this?  Who is this Jesus?

To claim that Jesus is the destination for our seeking hearts can be a scary thing.  Scary, because many of us have made a career of seeking and not finding.  God’s been our hobby.  We’ve been looking for so long, we are frightened by the thought of arriving at our destination.  And let’s be honest.  We live in a time when so many people say with great authority there are many questions but very few answers.  And what will they think of us if we claim to have found one?  Will we be assigned a seat among the simple-minded, never to be taken seriously again?

Simeon is offering us an invitation.  To lift up by faith the ordinary Jesus of Christmas, look into his face, and say:

Sovereign Lord…my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the sight of all people…

You might notice that Rembrandt painted Simeon with his eyes closed.  We can’t be sure why, but many have heard in it Rembrandt’s invitation coming from across the centuries:

We don’t have to see what Simeon saw to know what he knew.

When you look at Jesus, what do you see?

V

There is some gravity, some consequence, as to how we answer Simeon’s invitation.  Simeon doesn’t simply wander off stage to the spiritual retirement home happy, satisfied, and ready to pass on to his reward.  No, he leaves Mary the mother of Jesus with words that should make us all wonder:

This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will revealed.

 

The claim of Christmas is that the seeker’s quest has a destination.  His name is Jesus.  It’s not simply a private matter.  Jesus wasn’t simply Simeon’s personal savior or an upgrade to the Jewish understanding of God.   To come to him has consequences.  To pass him by in search of a more exotic salvation has consequences too.  Maybe Jesus isn’t so painfully ordinary after all.

Simeon said in his time it was about falling or rising.  Christmas is God’s invitation to the many to rise.  To recognize in Jesus that what we seek is nearer than we think.

VI

This Christmas many of us have been rewarded by the sight of people we haven’t seen in a while, and we are glad.  The longing of our sore eyes has been fulfilled.

Once again the world has welcomed the Jesus of Christmas in the ordinary way.  But who have we seen?  What child is this?

Some years ago, in 1992, the Methodist Bishop of Atlanta, James S. Thomas, composed his own Christmas card.  It said simply this:

When time was full and human longing at a strange new height, God came to us to make the wrong the right.   

 

Emmanuel, God is with us in Jesus Christ our Lord.

That is the answer Christmas offers.  It is the answer for Simeon and all his many hungry cousins.  May you look into the face of Jesus and find something more.