The Song of Simeon

Ellen Tift had a young son who absolutely loved his next-door neighbor's dog. And the dog was named Bogart, which is a great name for a dog in my opinion. In fact, you could say that Ellen's young son and Bogart were best buddies until his neighbor had to move to another state. And she took her dog with her, and after that Ellen says her little boy prayed for Bogart every single night for a year. Prayed for Bogart to be okay and prayed for a possible reunion with Bogart.

And then, after one year, right around Christmas time, the neighbor moved back. Now, Ellen's little boy did not know until this moment that his prayers had been answered. Watch this. Come back! Bogie, come here. You're my friend. Jump on in. I love those tears of joy, right? Have you ever prayed for something for so long that you thought, "This prayer's probably never going to be answered," and then it was? Well, take that kind of feeling and multiply it by about a thousand, and you will start to feel the emotion in this morning's Bible study.

Good morning. My name is René, one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. And in this series Advent Playlist, what we're doing is we're looking at the very first songs of Christmas, which are in the Gospel of Luke. And today we're looking at the song of Simeon in Luke 2, which you just heard Calvin read in our Advent reading. And in this Bible story, a very old man named Simeon has been praying his whole life to see the Messiah. And when he does see the Messiah as a newborn baby, he just erupts in joy and tears and gratitude toward God.

Now, in case you think, "René, we're already at the baby Jesus, you skipped the birth of Jesus and the manger and the angels and the shepherds and nester the lonier donkey. What's going on here?" We are going to look at all of that except for nester next weekend in our candlelight services Friday and Saturday. As Mark said, grab one of those invitation cards, invite family or friends, neighbors. It's really going to be so beautiful.

Now, in today's passage, we're skipping a little bit past that. Jesus has already been born. It's now 40 days later. And Mary and Joseph go to dedicate their baby at the temple in Jerusalem, very close to Bethlehem. In fact, it's less than the distance from Santa Cruz to Capitola. It's only about five miles. And something happens at the temple in Jerusalem that they never expected.

Look at verse 25 of Luke 2. Now, there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel. Now, first of all, Simeon was a very old man. And that's apparent because of the way he says a couple of times, "I'm ready to go, Lord. You can take me now." Right? But secondly, it says he was waiting for the consolation of Israel. And when Luke uses the verb "waiting" there, it's in the present tense. In other words, he wasn't just waiting that day. It was his constant way of life. He was always present tense, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Other translations try to capture this by rendering it. He was eagerly waiting. He was always looking forward. This is how he was waiting for God's promise of Messiah to be fulfilled. Now, later in this story, right after the passage you just heard Calvin read, we meet another very old person named Anna. And Anna is also at the temple. She's 84 years old. And it says this, "Anna talked about the child to everyone who had been waiting expectantly." So there was a group of people, there was a remnant hanging out in the temple in Jerusalem that remembered those centuries-old promises about a Messiah. And they always had this forward lean, "It's going to happen. I know it's going to happen. I know it's going to happen."

The idea, the picture that's being painted here is that biblical hope means living with eager expectation. And around this time of year, you see a lot of eager expectation right on the faces of children waiting to open their Christmas presents. And when we live this way as believers, we're living with the expectation that today God will fulfill his promises in some way, that today God is up to something, that today God is always working. That's what it means to live with eager expectation.

In fact, say those two words, eager expectation, out loud with me so you don't forget it. Here we go. Eager expectation. This is such an important mental health, spiritual health way to live. I'd encourage you to even write these two words down, eager expectation, on a piece of paper or a rock or something and put it somewhere in your house, maybe on your fridge or put it somewhere in your office to remind you to live this way.

Once we had an admin who still attends church here, Liz Bishop, she's retired, but she actually put these two words, eager expectation, on paper and she put them above the door in our office that leads out so that we could always live with this sense of biblical hope about what God was up to in the world.

Now, my question is, how did Anna and Simeon live with eager expectation when really they didn't have much to hope for in their lives? I want to put this story in historical context. In 167 BC, the Syrian Greeks, and that's a, you know, Gentiles, the way, the Jewish term, Gentiles, that means anybody who's not Jewish. And I want you to look at all the ways that the Gentiles, in the centuries before this story happens in the Bible, just did the Jewish people wrong.

So the Syrian Greeks, one group of Gentiles, tried to wipe out the Jews and the Jewish religion. They took over Jerusalem, they took over the Temple Mount, they defiled the Temple by sacrificing pigs there, they put a statue of Jupiter in the Temple, and that inspired the Maccabean Revolt. The Maccabees were a family in Israel that inspired revolt, led revolt, against these Greeks, and they were successful. And their victory is commemorated starting today in an annual Jewish holiday. Does anybody know what it's called? Hanukkah. That's right. And in fact, in the Bible, Jesus celebrated Hanukkah.

This was a pretty big deal that they threw out these Gentiles who were defiling the Temple. However, the Maccabean dynasty almost immediately descended into a bunch of feuds, which led within about a hundred years to a horrible Jewish civil war. The whole society was thrown into turmoil, and the Romans, sensing, "Oh, nobody's guarding their backs," they come in and they conquer Jerusalem. But the Parthians, or Persians, sensing the Romans don't have a real grip on Jerusalem. We want it too. They come in, and so now there's a Jewish civil war, and the Romans and the Parthians are also fighting each other in Jerusalem, and there's a ton of bloodshed.

Finally, in 37 BC, the Romans win the war, and they install the infamous King Herod as ruler over Jerusalem. And Judea, King Herod, was bloodthirsty. He would kill his opponents, including his own wife, and two of his own sons, and all kinds of other rebels. And so from about here, this was about when Simeon and Anna were about in their 20s. So for their entire adult lives, what they have seen is civil war and war from Gentiles and bloodshed. Pretty grim. Not much to hope for. And yet, they're eagerly expecting, "Oh, God's at work." How is that possible?

My question is, how do two elderly people maintain their hope when times were so dark? And this is a pretty relevant question for our society today. I saw an article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson from 2009 to 2021. Watch this. The share of American high schoolers, these are teenagers. You know, like, who should have all the—their bright future ahead of them, who say they feel persistent feelings of hopelessness, rose from 26 percent to 44 percent. That's the highest level ever recorded. And it's not just teens. The University of Chicago published a study that said there's a normalized sense of hopelessness in American society right now. It's like now that's the baseline. Everybody's just hopeless.

And what's horrible about that is when you feel hopeless, you neglect self-care, you get more angry, and you yourself are more easily played by people who want to leverage your sense of hopelessness and anger and frustration and despair for their own agendas. So a real relevant question for us, especially as believers, is how can you stay hopeful? Raise your hand if you want to be a hopeful person. Anybody here want to be hopeful? I hope so. Here's the thing. Hope doesn't just happen. And hope isn't just a personality trait. You can't go, "Well, I'm just not a positive person. I just see the glass half empty every time." No, hope is intentionally developed. And you can be a more hopeful person.

And everybody I know in this church, like Edemay, who is a hopeful person, they developed their hope the same way you see Simeon and Anna develop their hope in this story. What do you see in this story? How can you? Because I want to be a more hopeful person. I don't want to descend into cynicism. And I've been seeing it in myself in the last couple of years. I want to resist that. And here is how to do it. Long lasting hope is Jot this down. Number one, developed by daily practice, developed by daily practice, daily spiritual habits.

It says Simeon was righteous and devout. And devout doesn't just mean he believed. It means he was devoted, comes from the same word, to the regular spiritual practices of his Jewish faith. For example, for him that would have been daily prayer several times a day. It would have been weekly Sabbath practice. It would have been annual religious holidays that he observed, like Hanukkah in his era and in ours, giving charity to the poor. And so on. Those were part of his regular practices that he was devoted to.

And then later it describes Anna this way. It says, there was also a prophet, Anna. She was very old. She'd lived with her husband seven years after their marriage. And then she was a widow till she was 84 years old. Now watch this. She never left the temple. So she was in fellowship all the time, stayed there day and night, worshipping God. So she's always worshipping both privately and also in public with other people, attending church, so to speak, fasting and prayer. Their hope was not accidental. It was intentionally developed. It didn't spring from the air. They cultivated it in these ways.

So how can you do this? Well, a thousand different ways. I've told many of you how at the very start of the pandemic, I started the habit of praying the Lord's prayer every single morning, silently from memory when I first wake up. And I still do it today, nearly three years later, every day. And I mentioned that not because it's some big deal, but because it's so simple. It's easy. It's free. I cannot tell you how much it has changed every day of my life and how finally, after years of trying and failing, I've developed a consistent daily quiet time because I don't have to get up and crack open some book or devotional book.

I don't have to go find it and find my reading glasses or whatever. I can just lay there in bed and quote from memory the Lord's prayer and I pray through it. Like how is it relevant to my what's the daily bread I'm asking for today and so on. And then I pray through the fruit of the spirit in the book of Galatians. Lord, help me reflect these character qualities in my life. It's just revolutionized my prayer life. Now you can do that or you can pick up a daily devotional book. We have a ton of options in our lobby. In fact, here's an option for Christmas daily guideposts 25 devotions for Advent. Anybody interested in this? Would you like this? Here you go. And so there's lots more options as we say she gets it free. The rest of you have to pay. No, I those are all very inexpensive. Also apps. There's all kinds of free apps. You version our daily bread devotional apps. Listen to worship music attend church regularly. This is the kind of thing Simeon and Anna did.

Now in case you're going, yeah, yeah, this is such a pastry thing to say. Of course you're telling us to come to church and pray blah blah blah. Heard it a million times. Don't take it from me. So two days ago I'm on the Stanford website and there's a researcher there named Tanya Lerman. And she has an interesting relatively new book out called How God Becomes Real. Now she's not writing as a religious believer. She is writing as a scientist. And here's what this book is about fascinating. She says research has repeatedly shown that people of faith feel better and healthier. They have better immune function, reduced loneliness. They have less anxiety and depression. And these differences are not incremental. Get this.

She says that people who attend church regularly and are religious believers, there's in every study it shows the benefit of this to the point where the average lifespan for people who attend church regularly is seven years longer than people who don't. Yeah, give yourselves a hand. You're extending your lifespan. And for different groups it's even more so for black Americans the lifespan extension on average is 14 years. So these differences are exceptional. Now she does not even crack a clue as to whether or not she is religious herself. But she goes, this is unassailable. All the evidence shows this.

So she says what I want to know as an anthropologist is how does, what does it mean to be devout? How do you get these results? And in her research she's seen it's not just if you say you believe. Anybody can say they believe anything. You know, sure I'm a Christian. That doesn't mean you're going to live seven years longer. She says what the, if you look at the evidence, it's people who have regular religious practices. They pray daily. They read the Bible. They serve somewhere as a volunteer. They attend church regularly. That's when the benefits start kicking in. As she puts it, the combination of beliefs and practices together kindles a sense of divine presence and reality. And that is how she puts it, God becomes real to us. And she's just describing what we see here in Simeon and Anna. Right?

Now just to clarify, I don't do all these things to earn God's gifts. God has mercy for you in Christ whether you do these things or not, of course. You're not saved by works. I do them to see God's gifts. I mean there were a lot of other people around the temple that day only Simeon and Anna saw Jesus. Right? Now there's a second way hope is nurtured and that's with God's promises, really staying aware and believing in God's promises for the future. It says Simeon was waiting for the consolation of Israel and the word used for consolation there, the Greek word used for comfort is the same word in the Greek translation of Isaiah 40, comfort, comfort my people says you're God. This was the consolation of Israel, this whole chapter is about God sending a Messiah to deliver Israel.

What this means is Simeon and Anna were leaning forward into these promises that even though things were bleak, God is going to send a Messiah. God's going to make it all work out right. And guess what? You and I have the same kinds of promises in the Bible. And when we lean into them, it gives us hope. So a very candid quote in an old sermon from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Look at how candid he is here. He says, you know, every now and then my friends, I doubt. Every now and then I get disturbed myself. Every now and then I become bewildered about this thing. I begin to despair every now and then. And I wonder why is it that the forces of evil seem to reign supreme and the forces of goodness seem to be trampled over and I can hear something saying, King, you're just in the midst of the transition now. One day, justice will rise up. One day, all of the children of God will be able to stand up on that day and then cry, hallelujah, hallelujah, because it's the resurrection day.

And when I hear that, I don't despair. I can cry out and sing with new meaning. And that is what it looks like to be nurtured by God's promises, to believe that it's not hopeless. History is not an endless cycle of futility. There is an end. Evil does not win. God wins and Jesus will return. Amen. And then number three, and I love this part. This is where it really starts to get emotional and shows us how we need to be energized by the good news. Capital G, capital N, the Gospel. Now look at this. I love this. Verse 27, "Moved by the Spirit, he, Simeon, went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the law required," they're bringing him there for kind of a baby dedication and so on.

"Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, 'Sovereign Lord, now let your servant die in peace, as you have promised. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people, Israel.'" I love it. Now I'm going to get all kind of art history geek on you. Is that okay with you? Rembrandt loved this story in the Bible. It was the subject of one of his earliest paintings. He did it when he was 25 years old. And this moment is right when Simeon says, "This child will be a light." And Rembrandt symbolically is demonstrating that here by making the child the source of illumination in this painting. Can you see that? Of course, that's not realistic, but it's symbolic of the fact that Jesus is the light here.

Now, Rembrandt must have really loved this story because he painted it and drew it and etched it and sketched it a lot. Like this etching made years later, there's Simeon kneeling with the baby and there's a very elderly Anna approaching Mary and Joseph and Mary's kind of got raised eyebrows like, "What are you saying?" And here's yet another sketch of this event. And I love the way Simeon is looking, cradling the baby, looking at it with such awe. And here's another one, a pen and ink drawing that Rembrandt did when he was older, Simeon there on his knees. And I love the style in this one. Very emotional, very, very loose, right? And here's yet another painting he did of this moment. Experts say this actually may have been the very last painting of Rembrandt's life. And they say that because they found it on his easel in his workshop, unfinished the day after he died.

And what I love is how loose all the brushstrokes are. There's very little detail. It's just pure emotion. I love how Simeon looks like he might even be going blind there. His eyes are closed. His hands, if you can tell, they're stiff with arthritis. He is so old and his mouth is opening up and he's about to speak. And I even love how the baby Jesus doesn't have a halo or anything. He just looks natural. And he's got a little bit of look and concern on his face like, "Is this guy going to drop me? I just love that."

Now, why do you think Rembrandt was clearly so enamored of this story, right? Of all things in the Bible, he's just drawing this one over and over and over and over again. I think it's because he himself, you know, he had a kind of a rough life, I mean, a very rough life, and did some rough things himself. And later seems to have come back to a real personal belief in Jesus. And you can see this come through in his later paintings. It's almost like he's putting himself in this moment and he's saying with Simeon, "My eyes have seen your salvation. You've saved me from my sin and forgiven me and given me grace, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations."

Now, look at what Simeon says here. "A light for revelation to the Gentiles." Wait a minute. The Gentiles? The Gentiles were the problem. The Gentiles, the Greeks, the Romans, the Parthians, etc., etc., they were the ones who destroyed Jerusalem. They were the ones who made the Jewish people slaves. They were the ones who had been hammering and battering and attacking and massacring the Jewish people for centuries. The Gentiles were the enemy. But Simeon says, "No, this child is going to bring salvation for all people, even the Gentiles." And that is an amazing statement. Amazing! Because it means no one is ever beyond the pale of God's salvation. Not the worst person, not the worst group of people, not even you. Are you still just completely amazed at this? Salvation is for the whole world!

Because God so loves the whole world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. Amen? Does that still amaze you? You know, Karl Barth was a very famous Brainiac academic philosopher-theologian, and he was probably the greatest theologian of the 20th century. And he was giving a guest lecture at a university, and somebody asked him, "You know, in all of your academic research and thinking, what's the most profound truth about God that you have ever been able to come across?" And he thought for a while and looked up with tears rolling down his face and said this, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." And hopeful people maintain this level of amazement. They look at Jesus with wonder and think, "My! Me! I've seen your salvation for me!"

You know, I came to a point in my own life, even as a pastor, where I felt this way, where suddenly it was like, "Wow, I get it!" And it was like the world turned from black and white into color. I wrote about it in a book, Grace Immersion, if you want to read more about it. But I pray and hope that you never get tired of the Gospel. Never let anybody distract you from it. Not politics, not pop culture, not anything else. Keep rejoicing in the grace of God, His loving kindness, His mercy, His lavish gifts to you, because that is one of the things that sustains lasting hope.

But this story is not over. It ends with kind of a strange twist, which explains point four, which is hopeful people remain truthful about trouble. Look at this, verse 33, "Jesus' parents were amazed at what was being said about Him." All of these amazing, cool things. And you almost, when you're reading this, you almost feel like, "Simeon, just stop talking right now. It's good. It's all good right now." But Simeon, after he blesses them, said to Mary, the baby's mother, "You know, 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 be revealed." In other words, this child's gonna have a lot of enemies. Not everybody's gonna love your baby.

How'd you like it if I, during a baby dedication, I pulled that off, you know? Sweet kids, sweet kids, "Oh, your kid's gonna have a lot of enemies. Woo! This one's gonna be a lightning rod!" But that's exactly where he goes with this. And I love, I don't know if you noticed on a picture that Rembrandt painted of this, do you see the foreshadowing, literally, that Mary's like, "Yay!" And all these other people, they're not so thrilled about this, kind of anticipating that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And Simeon turns to Mary, and a sword will pierce your own soul, too. Michelangelo captured that moment, didn't he, in his famous Pieta, where Mary, at the moment after the crucifixion, Jesus's dead body has been removed, and she is cradling her adult son.

And he very deliberately made Mary look like a teenager again, because she would have been right around 50 when this happened, right? Because Jesus was 33. And if she was 15, 17 years old when she had the baby, and I think, again, that's symbolic, because Mary, in this moment, is looking down, remembering to when she did look like that, and she cradled her newborn son. And she heard Simeon say these words that are now coming true, and a sword is piercing her heart as she holds her dead son, who had just died on the cross for our sins.

Now, you ask yourself, probably, when you read this, like, "Man, Simeon, why didn't you just keep that part to yourself?" What a bummer thing to say to Mary, right? That's not going to help her out very much. Actually, it does help her out, because counterintuitively, if all you ever say to people, like all you ever say to your kids, for example, is, "You're just so awesome. Everybody's going to love you. Everything's going to go well for you. It's just going to be so great. You're just all good, all good, all the time in your life. What's going to happen the first time they run out of trouble?" Mom and dad lied to me, first of all, and second, I don't know how to deal with this, because I didn't expect it at all. It was all, "What?" That's what you call toxic positivity.

Toxic positivity says, "Good vibes only. No crying ever. Only good stuff's going to happen to you, and if bad stuff happens, well, then it's probably your fault you didn't have enough faith or something like that." Right? I've seen as a pastor so many people have their faith shipwrecked by toxic positivity masquerading as biblical hope, biblical faith. Biblical hope says, "No, it's okay to feel grief. Bad things sometimes do happen, but when they do, God is even going to use that." They call this, there's a word that psychologists use for this, it's called the Stockdale Paradox. That's named after James Stockdale, the famous prisoner of war, one of the longest held prisoners of war in Vietnam. How did he emerge with his hope intact? Very little PTSD. He went on to become a famous professor at Stanford University after he retired from the Navy.

Here's what they've discovered in all their research of POWs. How did some die in prison of hopelessness, and how did some survive relatively healthy mentally? Well, the first ones to wither and die were the optimists who said, "Hey, we're going to be released by Christmas." Oh, well, by Easter, by summer, by Thanksgiving, by next Christmas. And they were the first ones to go. The second were the cynics who said, "Nobody cares about us at home. We're never getting out." The ones who did well were the ones who said, "I believe somehow, someway, this is going to work out, we're going to get freed, but in the meantime, there's going to be a lot of years of suffering, so we've got to bear up for that." In other words, their attitude was stay hopeful about outcomes, but be truthful about trouble, and this is exactly, exactly what Simeon is saying in his prophecy.

This is why Jesus tells his disciples in the upper room. At the beginning of John 16, "I tell you these things so that you won't abandon your faith, and then what does he say for the whole rest of John 16? It's all about trouble. You're going to be kicked out of synagogues, you're going to weep, you're going to mourn, you're going to be killed, you're going to be persecuted. Wow, great pep talk, Jesus." And at the end of that chapter, he says, "I have told you all these things, so you may have peace. Here on earth, you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, I've overcome the world." Exactly the same picture Simeon gives Mary. Hope and ultimate outcomes in the meantime be truthful about trouble.

Now look at these four ways to nurture hope. Simeon and Anna did this waiting for the first advent. We do it waiting for the second advent. You know the difference, right? The first advent, Jesus came in humility. The second, he'll come in glory. The first, few notice. Second, the world will see. The first, he came in a manger. The second, he'll come on a throne. And then what we all have been waiting for will come true. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. All these things will be gone forever, amen?

And that's why at Advent, we're not just celebrating what God's done. We're looking forward to what he will do next. I'll close with this. It struck me when I was studying this this week that Mary, the first time we see her in the Bible, she is waiting for the first advent, right? The birth of her baby. The last time we see her in the Bible, in the book of Acts, also written by Luke, she is waiting for the second advent in the upper room. It says they all met together. We're constantly united in prayer along with Mary, the mother of Jesus, several other women and the brothers of Jesus.

Look at this. Mary is now a middle-aged woman, and she's waiting for the second advent of Jesus, just like you and me. She's waiting for the Holy Spirit and then the second coming of Christ. And look how she waits. Together in fellowship, constantly praying, you know, looking forward to the promise, being realistic about trouble because they're living through it. In other words, exactly how Anna and Sineon waited for the first advent. When you and I go through life and things seem hopeless, like them, we can wait with full-word lean, with eager expectation that today, tomorrow, and long in the future, God's promises will come true. And if we develop it intentionally, we can still live with eager expectation.

Let's pray together. Lord, I pray that every single person in this room would be kind of like Anna and Sineon, that we wouldn't be withered by age, but we would blossom with hope and give people around us hope. And Lord, I just pray if anybody right now is maybe desiring to receive Jesus as their Savior, they've been waiting for that opportunity. I pray that right now they would just pray something like this. Jesus, let your light come into my life. I believe that you are the Savior of the world, the light of the nations, the glory of Israel, as Simeon prophesied. I don't understand it all, but as much as I know, I want to commit myself to you. I receive you now and now help me to daily live with full-word lean, developing my hope in you intentionally through these daily practices, so I don't get sucked into the cynicism of the world. And I pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.