Luke
In the name of Jesus,
Did you ever wonder what life would be like if life were like a musical? What if people, at any given time and for any reason would break into song? When I read the opening chapters of Luke's Gospel, it sometimes appears that way to me. Mary's soul magnified the Lord. Zechariah praised the Lord, the God of Israel. Angels from heaven glorified God on the highest. In those days, it seems songs of praise were happening everywhere.
Simeon was a
"righteous and devout" man who was "waiting for the consolation
of
Simeon's Song of Salvation
I.
Salvation
worth singing about
II.
Salvation
worth seeing for yourself
Most people assume that
Simeon was an old man since God told him he would see the Christ before he
died. Now that he had seen Jesus, Simeon asked God, his lord and master, to
allow his servant to depart. Either Simeon was asking God to now let him depart
this life, or he was simply asking for release from his time of waiting. More important
is the reason he gives: "my eyes have seen your salvation."
Anytime I talk to someone
getting up there in years, I'm always intrigued by the thought of all the
sights that that person has beheld over their many years. Especially in the last 100 years, imagine
seeing all the changes that have occurred!
So I, too, wonder what Simeon's eyes had actually seen in his lifetime.
Luke tells us that Simeon
was righteous and devout--so he had certainly studied and read God's laws. He
had seen God's law, but did he see it kept? When he looked at himself in the
mirror of God's law--as devout as he was--did he ever look and see a blameless,
perfectly law-abiding man? No. Simeon's eyes had seen disobedience, in himself
and in those around him. And if Simeon was
like anyone else on the face of the earth, he had seen plenty of sin. He had
witnessed and experienced an unlimited capacity for evil among his own people
and among the Gentiles who lived among them. He saw the leaders of the
Jews--their religious leaders--become corrupt and acting as though they alone
kept God's law.
Simeon knew that the world
needed salvation! They needed rescue
from lives of sin. They needed rescue from the devastating results of the sin
that was all around them and even deep inside each person. They needed rescue from the penalty of death,
which threatened all who disobeyed. They needed someone to conquer the power of
sin and death.
And now he sings, "My
eyes have seen your salvation." Simeon knew that salvation was not going to
happen by the efforts of the Jewish leaders.
It wasn't going to come through someone who could send the Romans home
and unite
"my
eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all
people." God's promise of a Savior was no secret. God announced his plan to his people. To
Moses he said "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like
me from among your own brothers" (Dt 18:15)
This prophet would be from the Jews but for all people. God said through the prophet Isaiah, "It
is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob
and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my
salvation to the ends of the earth" (Is 49:6).
God promised to bring
salvation to all the world. God would
use his almighty power to defeat Satan once and for all, swallowing death up in
victory, overcoming the world, with all its troubles, sorrows, and pain. Simeon
knew that if the whole world was to be rescued it had to be God's
salvation.
Have your eyes seen
anything different than Simeon's? You, too, have seen God's law. I know that when you look around you'll see
God's law, not kept, but disobeyed. And if you are anything like Simeon, and
me, when you've looked into the mirror you often see a person you don't like
very much. You look deeper and you see a
heart that sometimes is filled with greed and
burns with hatred and envy. You don't like it, but nevertheless, that's
what you see. And you know what this
sinful heart deserves. You know it belongs with all hearts opposed to God and
his will. You know it deserves God's anger and justice. You know that if it is
to be rescued, it must come from God, because it's not happening here (in
your heart).
Listen to Simeon sing: "My
eyes have seen your salvation." All of God's power and wisdom and
might, everything God needed to accomplish the salvation of sinful man was
right there in front of Simeon's eyes. Simeon sang of salvation from God,
salvation for all. He sang of salvation for you, rescuing you from the sin your
eyes have seen and from the hell your sins deserve. Simeon saw salvation worth
singing about.
Simeon sang about this
salvation as he stood holding and gazing upon the Christchild.
God had promised this sight. Simeon waited a long time for this sight. Here it was: a six week old baby. All the
power and grace of God, everything God needed to accomplish man's
salvation--all in someone who could barely hold his own head up. It makes me
wonder how I would have reacted.
"Is this it? You're saying this is my salvation? This child? This
is the one who will defeat sin and death?
This is the one who will be my Savior?"
But notice none of that in
Simeon's song. "My eyes have seen your salvation." It's as if Simeon said, "As I look at
this weak infant I see God's salvation. Granted, he doesn't look like much. He
looks like any ordinary child. Yet God has said that this child is my
salvation, so seeing this child is good enough for me. I have seen God's
salvation."
Of course, we know that
this child grew up to do everything that was written and promised about
him. He fulfilled every one of God's
holy decrees. He resisted every
temptation of the devil. He kept God's law perfectly, all the way up to the
cross, where he exchanged the disobedience of the world for his perfect
obedience. Then he visibly demonstrated to the world that he had surely
conquered death and hell by his resurrection.
We know that he is God's
salvation! He is salvation worth singing
about, because for us that means eternal life. It means a life here and now
that is characterized by thanks and appreciation rather than fear and anxiety.
It means that we, too, can depart in peace--in the peace of knowing and seeing
God's salvation as he carried it out in the person of Jesus Christ. Certainly
the sight of Jesus is worth singing about--especially this season. We confess in the Nicene Creed that "for
us and for our salvation he came down from heaven." So it's very appropriate that we sing with
Simeon of God's salvation.
But with Simeon, let us
also remember that God's salvation is worth seeing for yourself. For Simeon it was worth seeing his salvation
for himself, even though it was wrapped in weakness, in lowliness, in poverty.
It was worth seeing because that is exactly how God said he would be. It was
worth seeing because this child was the Savior, was the Messiah.
When we pause this evening
to look with Simeon upon God's salvation we, too, see it wrapped in
lowliness. But instead of a baby in our
arms, we see lowliness recorded on the pages of Holy Scripture. We see lowliness in the whole life of our
Savior. We see him set aside his glory
and majesty in heaven to come and be one of us.
We see him live a life of humility and service. We see him die a criminal's death. Again, the prophet Isaiah reminds us: "He
had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that
we should desire him." (53:2) Yet we know that this lowly figure is
God's salvation.
We gaze upon this man when
we read the words which tell of him. We
see our salvation even has we hear the words spoken here by ordinary, sinful
men. In the words of Scripture God wraps
his salvation in another lowly form and says it's worth seeing for yourself.
God also wraps his
salvation in lowliness when he tells us to take bread and wine that is the body
and blood of the Savior. Just like Simeon, we look at the body of Christ. Its outward appearance doesn't look like
much, a paper thin wafer, a sip of wine. By itself, nothing powerful,
impressive, or spectacular. But with
Simeon we sing "My eyes have seen your salvation" and that this salvation is worth seeing for
yourself.
God's salvation--wrapped in
lowliness-- is worth seeing for ourselves because God has told what comes with
seeing it. For Simeon, it meant two
things: 1) a promise kept and 2) a peaceful release. For us it means the very same things. Just as
the child Jesus Christ was exactly the Savior God said he was, despite his
lowly appearance, so too God's word, lowly as it is, is exactly the way God has
promised to come to us. God has promised
to come to us in the means of grace - his Word, Baptism, the Lord's
Supper. As lowly as these things are,
they are the means God has given to allow our eyes to see his salvation. They
are the means he uses to give us his gifts of life, peace, and salvation.
Despite its lowly form, it's worth seeing for yourself.
I suppose a visitor to our worship
might get the impression that we are in some kind of musical. The minister says some words, and we start
singing. He says more words, and we sing
again. A little later we come forward and take a bit of bread and a sip of
wine, go back, then start singing, "Lord, now you let your servant…"
But we don't do this just because it's in the script! We're singing about God's
salvation. By doing so we are making the same statement as Simeon. God's
salvation is worth singing about. God's
salvation is worth seeing for yourself.