Feb 2, 2025
Have you ever gone looking for something and realized that you probably wouldn’t recognize it if you found it? Something like this happened to me when I went to the craft store last Christmas to buy some yarn for Christine. “I’d love some jewel colors”, she said. Now, understand that I have no eye for color. One of the best things about being a priest is that the uniform is black shirt with white collar. So I picked out some sapphire, and some emerald, and some ruby yarn. Imagine my disappointment on Christmas morning when Christine told me, very gently, that those weren’t the colors she’d been telling me about.
The problem was that I didn’t have the knowledge or experience to figure out what to look for. Many of us have that same challenge when it comes to something called “discernment” – figuring out God’s preferred course of action. We have vague idea of what it might be, but we struggle to recognize it in real time.
Today we’re celebrating the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord. Luke’s Gospel tells us that among all the people in the Temple that day, two in particular – Simeon and Anna – had special insight. They recognized the Messiah’s visitation when so many others missed it. How did they manage to figure out who that baby was? What can we learn from them? So today, I want us to be thinking about how we might become better at discernment.
It's a lot easier to see myself in Simeon and Anna’s shoes than in the shoes of most others in the Gospels who encounter Jesus. Tens of thousands witness Jesus perform a miracle, like a healing or the feeding of the 5,000. And many others hear Jesus speak wise words of truth about the Scripture and about God. I’m jealous of them and their amazing experiences of the Lord. It’s totally outside anything I’ve ever witnessed.
But Simeon and Anna? I can relate. And I’m also in awe. They cross paths in the Temple with two nobodies and a month-old baby from the backwaters of Galilee. There’s nothing outwardly special about the baby – if there was, everyone would have noticed. Here’s Jesus just sleeping and eating and crying, like any other baby. It’s all very ordinary – just like when I’m trying to discern. But somehow – somehow – Simeon and Anna discern who Jesus really is. The Messiah – the one sent by God to rescue Israel from its oppressors. How in the world did they know?
Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit led Simeon through a gigantic Temple complex –the size of several football fields - right to the place where Mary and Joseph were standing with Jesus making their sacrificial offerings. But Luke also tells us two other important things about Simeon. He was righteous – meaning he was careful to obey God’s commandments. And he was devout – meaning he led a God-focused life. Simeon walked in God’s ways and was serious about doing so. And this is deeply connected to his being led by the Spirit.
Luke tells us that Anna, too, is a devout woman who loved to be in God’s house. In fact, this widow never left the Temple complex, spending her time there deepening her relationship with God through important practices like prayer and fasting.
The fact is that these practices that patterned their lives after God’s commandments enabled them to focus their lives on God helped Simeon and Anna to know what they were looking for. It helped them to realize one of the basic truths of Scripture – that God makes promises, and God keeps those promises. Being steeped in the stories of Scripture – of cultivating life-long spiritual practices – has sharpened their ability to discern when those promises have been fulfilled. So when they encounter the Messiah, their hearts are – to borrow a phrase from John Wesley – “strangely warmed” by the Spirit.
Believing in incarnation – that God has taken human form – means we have to take the reality of God seriously. We have to take seriously the ongoing presence of Christ in our midst and the movement of the Holy Spirit that Jesus sent to be with us. If we’re not fully present in the present of each moment – if we don’t engage in practices that help us see and name God’s activity in our lives and in the life of our congregation – then all the daily incarnations – all the moments of God revealing God’s self in our midst – will slip past us. Just as they slipped past all those other faithful people in the Temple that day when the Messiah came.
So what does this mean for our discernment – for our prayerful exploration of God’s call to us? How do we go looking for God in the world when we’re not exactly sure what to look for? How do we know the signs of the Spirit’s work in the world? Part of it is to be like Simeon and Anna – to soak ourselves in life-long daily practices that open our hearts to being strangely warmed.
The cultural waters of secularism and modernity in which we’ve been swimming for decades have pressured Christians to cut many important day-to-day practices out of our lives. Busy schedules and after-school activities, for example, mean that fewer families eat meals together – and with that go opportunities for prayer before meals or to share our stories of the day, where others might help us see God at work. Without these practices, our capacity to understand God as an active agent in the world and in our lives is eroded, impoverishing our daily lives as the space we hold for mystery and wonder disappears.
The challenge Luke’s Gospel gives us today is to find effective ways for recognizing and celebrating God’s presence in the ordinary. And we do this by making one small change at a time. We learn to greet the morning with gratitude. We celebrate the goodness of food, family, and friendship at meals. We recognize mystery in beauty. Those of us who came to adult formation last week learned practices to help see the world around us with the eyes of compassion.
Lives of devotion make us sensitive to God’s presence in our world. Today let us go forth dedicated to making those small changes that will help us celebrate the goodness and mystery of life as we discern where God is keeping God’s promises of healing and reconciliation and new life for all the world. As we discern those times and place where the Messiah is visiting us. Amen.