Looking at Jesus, Looking at Each Other
By Cara Taylor, Director of Outreach
Last Sunday I was surprised by grief mixed with joy. Many of you stepped up to my husband and me to receive communion. Person after person, I looked into your faces and gave you a piece of bread and said, “The body of Christ, broken for you.” Waves of awe washed over me as I sensed the depths of God’s ocean of love for each of you and a lump rose in my throat. It was as if you each stepped up to the edge of the water from a foreign land. I don’t know all your stories, and you may not know mine, but the one who gave his life for us does.
This Advent I have been meditating on the person of Simeon (Luke 2:25-35). He is the only one in scripture who Luke specifically tells us got to hold the baby Jesus! I imagine that looking at you last weekend barely touched the surface of how Simeon felt looking at Jesus. We do not know much of his story, really. For some reason, he was waiting for his death. Beyond his personal suffering, he was also longing for the “consolation” of his whole nation, too.
He was holding grief and hope together.
Where did his hope come from? Luke does not tell us that Simeon had any family, like Mary does. No religious or social status, like Zechariah, Joseph and Anna. No miraculous sky full of singing angels like the shepherds. But he had one thing in abundance…the company of the Holy Spirit.
Because of the Spirit, Simeon ordered his whole life around living for God.
Because of the Holy Spirit, the scripture came alive for him, and it filled him with total confidence that God’s rescue was coming any moment now.
And because of the Holy Spirit, he ended up in exactly the right place at the right time to meet Jesus.
When he embraces Jesus, everything falls into total focus for him, quite literally. For his whole life, he waited to see God’s salvation, and in this moment he says, “I see it!” He looks into that little face with awe.
Like Pastor Ellis said last week, if we practice singing when we don’t feel it and looking when we don’t see it, then joy and peace will come. Expect the Spirit to guide you. Wait for Jesus. Count on God’s rescue.
That doesn’t mean we forget our pain. The last bit of Simeon’s story that we get to see is perhaps an even more intimate picture of grief mixed with hope. And it reminds me of the feeling I had serving that communion bread to you.
Simeon looks up from Jesus’ face and fixes his full attention on Mary. He sees how vulnerable love makes her.
All the fanfare in Luke’s first chapters has died down. All the great expectations of bringing this promised son into the temple of God’s presence are held in tension. There is just a giant lump of love stuck in their throats.
When we are all wondering how the rescue will come for ourselves, for our nation, for the world, we can do what Simeon did. Look at Jesus and then look at the pain of the person in front of us with compassion.
Something becomes crystal clear when we do that. We see that Jesus was born to enter our suffering and even to give us permission to inflict it on himself so it can dissolve in the ocean of his love.
I pray that in this season of waiting and grieving and hoping, we can move slowly enough to pay attention to the Holy Spirit and pay attention to one another so that God’s joy and peace can flood right in.
Cara