First Presbyterian Church
Wichita Falls, Texas
Christmas Day 2011
LIGHT TO SEE BY
Isaac Butterworth
Luke 2:25-35 (NIV)
25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. 27 Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:
29 “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised,
you now dismiss your servant in peace.
30 For my eyes have seen your salvation,
31 which you have prepared in the sight of all people,
32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.”
33 The child’s father and mother marveled at what was said about him. 34 Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, 35 so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
I was all alone. I lived with four other guys in a huge, old house just off the campus of Baylor University, but I was the only one home. I must have been twenty-one or twenty-two – a grown man, practically a college graduate – but I was afraid. There was usually a surplus of noise in the house, but, with everyone gone, it was quiet. And that’s when you could hear the creaking and the other sounds.
I tried sleeping with the lights out, but I just lay there, listening. In the dark, the unknown imposed itself on my imagination, and I, who knew better, convinced myself that I would be safer in the light. So, I got up and turned on – not just the light in my room – but every light in the house. Upstairs and downstairs. That old barn was lit up like a Christmas tree!
I lay across the bed, fully clothed – dressed for action, I guess – and I refused to close my eyes. If anything was going to ‘get’ me, it had to show itself in the full light of incandescent splendor. And…it had to catch me!
I lay there, like a child, waiting for the dawn, waiting for morning, waiting for day to come. If only daylight would come, everything would be better.
Simeon was an aged man that we meet here in Luke’s Gospel. He, too, was waiting for the light of day. Only the darkness that settled over his world was a more sinister thing than the mere dark of night. Luke tells us that he was ‘waiting for the consolation of Israel.’ Only one thing would console Israel, and that would be if God would come.
God had been strangely silent for as long as anyone could recall. For centuries now, no prophet had appeared to pronounce a ‘thus saith the Lord.’ Isaiah speaks of ‘people walking in darkness…living in the land of…shadow…’ (Isa. 9:2). Such darkness descends when there is not revelation from God, no light by which to see the ways of God. But Isaiah also tells us that the time would come when ‘the people walking in darkness [will] have seen a great light.’ At one point, he even speaks of it as something that has already happened: ‘Arise,’ he says, ‘shine, for your light has come’ (Isa. 60:1).
God had told Simeon that he would live to see this light. He must have wondered about this promise at times; he had waited through such a long night. It must have seemed as if daybreak would never come.
But it did. On a certain day, moved by the Spirit of God, he went to the temple. And there was, in the form of a tiny child, what Joseph Mohr, in his lovely carol ‘Silent Night,’ called ‘the dawn of redeeming grace.’ He took the child in his arms, and he knew right off that this was the Light of the world, the Sun of righteousness, the bright and Morning Star.
He spoke first to God and then to the child’s parents. To God he said those words we treasure as a late night prayer of our own: ‘Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation…, a light for revelation….’ God, who had been silent for so long, was now again revealing himself. The darkness of many centuries was now about to give way to the light.
Luke says that Mary and Joseph ‘marveled at what was said.’ And then Simeon spoke to Mary. He told her that ‘the thoughts of many hearts [were to be] revealed.’ Light does that, doesn’t it? It exposes; it shows what’s there. So, what is there? When you pull back the curtain of the human heart and look into it, what do you see? You see that not every heart welcomes ‘love’s pure light’ as it ‘radiant beams from [this child’s] holy face.’
Are we surprised? We shouldn’t be. The Scriptures tell us about the darkness that is in us. In Genesis 8:21, God himself said that ‘every inclination of [the human] heart is evil from childhood.’ Again, in Jeremiah God said, ‘I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind’ (ch. 17:10). ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?’ (ch. 17:9). Even Jesus, whose birth we celebrate today, said, ‘Light has come into the world, but men love darkness instead of light…’ (John 3:19).
Christmas reveals our hearts and the darkness in them. We will never understand the need for the light until we grasp the density of our darkness. Simeon told Mary, ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against.’
Can we imagine anyone speaking against this ‘infant holy, infant lowly’? Simeon said they would…and they did. While yet a young man, hardly old enough to die, he would be the victim of a plot to take his life. Believe it or not, there would be those who hated him. Isaiah had said long before that ‘he [would] be a sanctuary’ for some, but for others he would be ‘a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall’ (Isa. 8:14).
Why would God send him into such a hostile world? The answer to that question tells us that Christmas not only reveals our heart, but it reveals the heart of God as well. God is intent on consoling his people, and, remember, we said that the one thing that would console Israel would be if God would come.
There would be those who would love darkness – and love it so desperately – that they would try to extinguish the light. That’s what the cross was all about: human hatred for the ‘salvation…prepared in the sight of all people.’ We don’t want salvation, we say, or we don’t want it on God’s terms. We don’t need the light, we say; our eyes have become accustomed to the dark.
And yet, as John says in his Gospel, ‘The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it’ (John 1:5, mg). The light will expose some, and they will shut their eyes to it. They cannot turn off the light or even dim it, but they can resist it. And they will.
The light will expose others, and they will be healed by it. Many will fall, Simeon says, but many will rise. They will welcome the radiance of this light. Although it discloses their sin, it will awaken them to salvation. In the words of the passage we read earlier from the Old Testament, they will ‘lift up [their] eyes and look about [them].’ They ‘will look and be radiant, [their] heart will throb and swell with joy’ (Isa. 60:4f.). For, like Simeon, they will be able to say, ‘My eyes have seen your salvation….’
That is what we see in the face of the Babe in the manger: the salvation of God. The glow of his countenance reveals the darkness in our hearts. But it also reveals the light in God’s heart, a light that illumines many hearts.
Search your heart, my brother, my sister. Does it prefer the darkness, or does it welcome the light? I urge you: lift up your heart. You need not fear the dark any longer as I did that night years ago. Nor need you love it as many do to this day. Perhaps, like Simeon, you have waited a long time for God to come. I am here to tell you: he has come. He has come in Jesus. May his light be for you light to see by.
Acclamation
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD….
[For] the LORD is God, and he has given us light. Psalm 118:26, 27
Invitation to Christian Discipleship
The angel said to the shepherds:
‘Do not be afraid, for see –
I am bringing you good news of great joy
For all the people:
To you is born this day in the city of David
A Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.’ Luke 2:10f.
And our Lord says to you:
‘Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!
For I am God and there is no other.’ Isa. 45:22
‘I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud,
And your sins like a mist;
Return to me, for I have redeemed you.’ Isa. 44:22
