Fortunately for y'all, this is the only time of the month y'all hear me on the microphone up here. Today's reading is 2 Luke 22 to 33. When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, and they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. As it is written in the law of the Lord, every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord.
And they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord. A pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons. Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. This man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel.
And the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he would have seen the Lord's Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple. And when the parents brought into the child Jesus to do for him what was customary under the law.
Simeon took him into his arms and praised God, saying, Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace according to your word. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples. A light to the revelation of Gentiles, and for the glory of your people of Israel. And the child's father and mother were amazed by what was being said about him.
And Simeon blessed him and said to his mother Mary, This child is destined for the following and the rising of many in Israel. And to be a sign that we will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of Simeon will be revealed and a sword will peel your own soul to. This word is true and can't be trusted. I was not sneaky as a child very often.
Was anybody a sneaky kid? There's not that much honesty in this room right now, certainly. Okay. You know, I was, I have a, Mary can tell you about, I have a little bit of an overactive conscience.
So I was not that sneaky as a kid, but I did get sneaky one year at Christmas. I had saved up all of my money, took me like 18 months. This was like 1987, 1998. And I saved up my money for a year and a half my allowance and I bought a Nintendo entertainment system.
You remember when that was the coolest thing you could have out there? And I only had, I only had two games. I had the Mario Duck Hunt that came with the console. And then I somehow conned my grandmother into getting me a subscription to Nintendo Power because it came with a game that month.
And it was a game which Dragon Warrior. And so I was like the kid with the two games and they're like the two least fun games you could have out there. But the hot new video game for that Christmas season was Super Mario Brothers 3. Remember how cool that one was?
Like that was high level stuff right there. And there was a package underneath the Christmas tree with my name on it from my uncle Ken. Now my uncle Ken at that time did not have any children and he had a really fun job. And so me and my sister a lot of times were the beneficiaries of Ken not having kids and having a really fun job.
And tell you what, y'all, that package that said to Chad from Uncle Ken looked a lot like a Nintendo cartridge box. And I thought about it and everything. I was like, I think I know what's in that box. And for a couple of weeks, we brought Christmas presents home for my Mississippi family while we went there for Thanksgiving.
So they're always the first presents under the tree. And for a week, I think just like whispered to me as I laid in bed at night. So I'd kind of go out there and I'd kind of manipulate slowly that wrapping paper on the corner. Just to try and figure out what this is.
And after I'd wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and go out there and I'd just kind of rub it and talk and get a corner up. And I'm not going to notice. And I saw that the box was yellow. And I knew that that was Super Mario Brothers 3.
And so I had to wait just a couple of more weeks until Christmas morning. And I thought, kids in here don't do what Chad did. But waiting. You know, how is waiting part of the holiday season?
I really think that there's so many of our cultural celebrations during Christmas that are about waiting because of Advent's about waiting. I really like to think that that story I just told you all of 9 or 10 year old Chad was about me learning waiting during the holiday season. As we get older, the things we wait for change. We get excited about different things.
We get excited about, and it might be like certain holiday snacks or a trip we're going to take or a person we're going to see. Or a holiday party. But we're always waiting. It's built into this season.
And this morning the passage that Austin read for us was about a certain character in scripture that spent an unusually long time waiting. And it allows us to think about what waiting means as a follower of Jesus. But I want us to think about this. And I think that Cimian's story talks about waiting in a little bit different of a way.
When we jump into the story, I find it to just be like full of mystery and really far from our own culture. You know, the whole setup here of what's going on is different. So we're 40 days off of the birth of Jesus. And Mary and Joseph are there at the temple.
They make the walk from Jerusalem from there in Bethlehem or somewhere else at a very specific time at a specific date. And we find out so much about this by looking at the book that the majority of us absolutely associate with the Christmas holidays. Leviticus, not really. But Leviticus 12, 2, 3, 4, this is what kind of sets the story of what Mary is doing right there.
So give the following instruction to the people of Israel. This is hundreds and hundreds of years ago, like Exodus days, wandering around the desert, that sort of thing. The woman comes pregnant and gives birth to a son. She will be ceremonially unclean for seven days just as she is unclean during her menstrual period.
On the eighth day, the boy's foreskin must be circumcised and after waiting 33 days, she will be purified from the bleeding of childbirth. During this time of purification, she must not touch anything that is set apart as holy and she must not enter the sanctuary until her time of purification is over. So how's that for a bunch of words you don't normally hear in church? But you know, all these rules are going on.
This is where Mary is what's going on. But it's not because of a moral uncleanness. That's the story. We just kind of know what to do with this sometimes.
It's not that. It's what our mind goes to. We hear this. But this is about ritual.
This is about worship. And God's mind with God's people that ritual and worship form an alternative world around us. Where we see different boundaries and different things that we do, different practices, different lifestyles and ideas that we step into by the motions that we take. And we see ritual uncleanness for both men and women.
Anytime they encounter anything that either brings about life or brings about death. Anytime they physically encounter death, that's when you find ritual unclean. When we talk just a couple weeks back about the story of the Good Samaritan. Like the prohibitions that were there, the reason is that the priest probably justified acting like jerks was because of ritual unclean.
But we also learn in this story the whole reason they're going to the temple. It's not for Jesus. How many times we read this story, we might have heard this morning and we assume they're making this journey to the temple for Jesus. They're not.
They're making it for Mary. We find in the beginning of the story that Jesus' family is very devout and they take their relationship with God seriously. Back to Leviticus, chapter 12, verse 8. We find a little bit more about what's going on.
It says, if a woman cannot afford to bring a lamb, she must bring two turtle doves or two young pigeons. One will be for the burnt offering and the other for the purification offering. The priest will sacrifice them to purify her and she will ceremonially be clean. So here we find out more about Jesus' family.
It says that if a person cannot provide the lamb for this offering, if they're too poor, then they're going to bring these two doves. And so we see Luke just kind of building back in that pattern of Jesus' family being lowly, of God's power entering in this world, not through like human ideas of power or control, but intering with gentle and lowly. God came to this earth willfully weak. So they go to the temple to take care of the things that every good Jewish woman who gives birth to a firstborn son has done for hundreds of years.
And they meet Simeon while they're there. Moms, how many times do you enjoy random strangers coming up to your babies? Okay, so you've got random old guy coming up to your baby and being like very interested in what's going on. Simeon is this mysterious character.
There's not that much. We know he just shows up right here. And I wish I had cool stuff to tell you about Simeon, but I don't because we just don't know anything. The only kind of cool thing is the Eastern Orthodox Church called Simeon the God receiver.
But they always have the best names for people in the Bible anyway. But we read that he is righteous and devout. Josh Matthews said this about Simeon. Simeon is not witnessing a political movement or military revolt overthrow Rome.
He does not experience a revival of strict law keeping led by the Jewish religious leaders of the day. Nor is that kind of fulfillment he has been expecting. All Simeon has longed for is wrapped up in this baby. He now holds in his arms.
Simeon is expected. He had internal spiritual and supernatural trust in this deeply personal message that God had given him. He was waiting on a unique visitation from God. And we don't know how long ago this happened.
We don't know where this happened. We don't know who Simeon was with Simeon a priest. We just some random guy who was in the temple. We don't know anything.
All we know is God had given him as an individual, as a person, a very specific promise. And we see the fulfillment of this today. We find that Simeon is waiting for the consolation of Israel. And that's a word that we don't use very much.
It's about God fulfilling his promise to Israel, to all of his people. And we can't think about Advent and Christmas without thinking about Israel and about the Old Testament prophets. We read this in the book of Isaiah chapter 51. Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord.
Look to the rock from which you were cune, and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you. For he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many. For the Lord will comfort Zion.
He will comfort all of her waste places. And he will make her wilderness like Eden. Her desert like the Garden of the Lord. Joy and Gladys will be found in her, Thanksgiving and the voice of the song.
And Simeon is a testimony here and is a witness to God fulfilling these promises. And this is where the story can take a turn for us. And I think it really should take a turn for us. We can either see the story as just tremendous holiness and personal fulfillment.
Because Simeon probably had to be pretty holy for this to happen to him, right? And we can step back and be like, well, you know, something really cool happened to him, but he was a nice guy, so he deserved it. Now we could take the story at that level. Or we can look at the words that Simeon used to see the character of his heart and to see where we can journey and grow this Advent.
We see a person who was committed to prayer for the larger life of the world. Simeon wasn't waiting on the consolation of himself. Simeon was waiting for the consolation of all of God's people. The ones who had lived before him, the ones who had lived after him.
He was praying and waiting for the consolation that we receive and that we are experiencing right now. You know, consolation is kind of complicated. We don't use that word. How often do you have to use the word consolation in everyday conversation?
We don't think about it. You know, consolation carries this idea of redemption. But biblically consolation, this word's interesting. It carries this idea of repenting comfort.
Now consolation is a word that we can use to describe movement through the stages of grief. But kind of specifically, you know, think about that moment where things aren't going well and they're kind of starting to get better and you begin to realize what you did wrong and you realize you kind of see the air of your ways and what's going, okay, okay, this is the thing I need to fix in my life. This is my name, I need to rectify. This might be an apology anyway.
Like when that journey through grief happens, you're waiting for doors to get unlocked, but you realize one of those doors that has to be unlocked is one that you have to unlock and step through because it's your own actions. Like that is the way the Old Testament talks about the comfort and the consolation of God, that when we go through the tough work of realizing where we have been complicit in our issues and we step through that in a proper way and we begin to experience grace and forgiveness through it. That's consolation. And Simeon has taken on the burden of this prayerfully, not for his own sake, but for the sake of the world.
As he's waiting to see the Messiah, he's carrying the burden of God's people's consolation and praying for that. That makes this story a little bit bigger, doesn't it? There's two ways that we can see this work out in our own life. There's two ways that we can just practically take this on over the next week, that we can learn from Simeon and we can take on his posture.
The first one is this, we see Simeon going into this in his words in his prayer. We praise God for what God has done. You know, it's easy to praise God when we have a lot of good things happening around us, isn't it? Like it's kind of a natural way to do that.
What we see Simeon though is it's kind of tough to praise God for it when things aren't. And Simeon is doing this, we also have to ask ourselves the question, how do we exercise being thankful for God when we feel like it's not even deserved maybe? We think about the conversation, it's repenting comfort. Two things are going on inside the Simeon story that gives us a clue what this practice looks like.
The first is that we realize that our own thanksgiving can happen outside of ourselves. It's not necessarily our own individual experience, but what does it mean to learn to practice corporate thanksgiving? For us to not get too individualistic, but instead for us to realize how these are the things God has done for us. These are things God has done for my family or for my spiritual community.
These things God has done for my church. These things God has done for my friends. When we don't feel like it and we can't put those words out of our mouth on our own, we learn to practice corporate thanksgiving. That's what Simeon has done.
We learn to reorient our minds and our hearts towards gratitude and thanksgiving because we realize that that is a key practice of God's people. That when we're in these moments of struggling practicing corporate thanksgiving, it keeps us in that practice and it's a way that we can be thankful for what God has done, but we can also honor the lament that's going on in our heart and the spaces where we need to see and experience the comfort of God. We claim the wider goodness of God for our life. The second way we can take on this idea of praising God for what he's done is realizing that our own actions of sacred waiting are not just individual, but that we are waiting as individuals for the sake of the world.
Now Simeon had to wake up every morning and make intentional decisions of holiness and righteousness and he knew that it wasn't just for his benefit, but that was for the benefit of everyone else around him. He was willing to take on that responsibility. We as people, we as followers of Jesus, that we wait for the sake of the world, that we realize that our holiness doesn't just affect us but it affects other things. The home sheet this week is an exercise through Isaiah chapter 40 that's thinking all about these sorts of things.
There's copies on the back table. I encourage you to grab one of those, take that home with you this week and use your devotion time. You can also find the home sheet online and we post links to it every Monday. But like that week, that's really about journeying through Isaiah 40 and understanding what does this look like as a Christian practice.
And the last thing that we learned from Simeon is about truth and exposure. The last verse of this reading is the strongest one to me. It says this, as a result, the deepest thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. We cannot honestly encounter the presence of Jesus without him exposing the true character of our heart.
And as we follow the example of Simeon that we read this morning, you know, when we become transformed, we begin seeing our own life as an offering to the world, we realize that we can't offer others the things that haven't been transformed in our own hearts. Now, Jesus talks about how in your weaknesses you will find strengths. This is what this looks like. We cannot take anyone anywhere.
We have not been ourselves. And we cannot offer healing to someone else that we have not personally experienced. You know, we take on, I read this earlier this week, the biblical call to search my heart, O God, and how that is not some sense of self-gestification of proving ourselves right before God. But instead, it's a call like we would give to our doctor.
We call God and say, God, I need you to search my inner life and bring things up to the front. Just like we would go to the doctor saying, hey, I'm having a weird pain. Can we run some tests to figure out what this is so we can fix it? We come to God saying, God, search my heart, raise up my inner thoughts.
We call out God and ask God to do these things, to expose truthfulness to us, for us to be able to work on these things, to repent, to practice that comforting repentance that comes with consolation, for us to go through a biblical path of consolation and a biblical pattern of holiness because we realize that we live our lives as an offering to the world, and our waiting matters and changes things beyond ourselves, just like Simeon did for us. Each of us are encountering, experiencing the presence of Jesus in a unique way, and it's not given to us as a private gift, but it's given for the sake of the world. At Advent, we celebrate the presence of Christ coming among us, and as a church for thousands of years, the way that we celebrate the presence of Christ is by coming together with communion, to realize that Jesus' presence is always here in our midst, that Jesus is a God who has come into our world, is always coming to us, and gives us the responsibility and the privilege and the benefit and the love, and all these things of being wrapped up, of being His presence here. I was reading earlier this morning that Bernard of Corvo, a Catholic mystic, said, there's three ways that Jesus has come into our earth.
He comes into our life and our earth at Advent at Christmas, which we're celebrating now, that He comes back to our world and the second coming in the Eschaton to provide absolute total peacefulness, and the remaking of everything. But then Jesus also comes to our world daily in the lives of those people who follow Him. And when we take communion...