I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 6, 2012, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke. The text is Luke 2:21-35, the story of Simeon seeing Jesus in the temple. You can read it here.
Virginia Woolf, in her essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” divides our experience of life into two categories: experiences of “being” and “non-being.” Each day, she explains, is made up of much more non-being than being. “A great part of every day,” she writes, “is not lived consciously.” These are the non-being portions of our lives. “One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done. The broken vacuum cleaner, ordering dinner, writing orders to Mabel, washing, cooking dinner.”
It is as if these times of non-being are clouded by a cotton wool, as Woolf describes it, a sort of fuzziness of our activities through which we move, pleasantly enough, but not really...awake.
Then there are moments of being. Exceptional moments in which we are aware: of beauty, connection, meaning, all of it alive. Woolf tells of several moments of being in her experience. A few led to profound despair and hopelessness, another, to satisfaction. As a child she saw a flower in a bed near the house and thought, “that is the whole.” Something was revealed in the most ordinary of places.
When Simeon encounters the eight day old Jesus in the temple, the cotton wool is cleared away. It is a moment of being: a penetrating revelation of truth and beauty. He takes the child in his arms and for a moment the two are like passing ships sailing steadily in opposite directions. The child sailing into life, the old man sailing out of it.
It’s funny, when you think about it, that Jospeh and Mary are “amazed” at what Simeon had to say at the temple. Even now, after everything they’ve seen. After the angel’s annunciation and this unusual pregnancy, after the birth in a manger and the news that that shepherds brought breathlessly, to share. After all these astonishing moments of revelation, they are still amazed. Still taken off guard by Simeon’s words.
Perhaps it was easier for them to recede behind the cotton wool to live for a bit. It’s safer there, and more familiar, easier than these sudden outbursts of angelic proclamations. Every child is a miracle to his mother, but perhaps Mary is wishing that Jesus was just a little bit less of one.
They are beginning to get a develop a picture, however, of another aspect of these lives of being and non-being in which we live, which Virginia Woolf, an atheist, by the way, will write of so many years later. In the same essay she writes, “...I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we -- I mean all human beings -- are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of this work of art.”
A prophet is a person who speaks a truth that no one else can see. And that’s what Simeon does in the temple. For a moment he transcends the cotton wool like an plane erupting through a bank of clouds into the pure, unfiltered sunlight on the other side, and he and all those in his presence know that they have, for just a moment, stepped into the truth, into a reality unseen until just this moment.
Joseph and Mary, the parents of Jesus, this God-child, are beginning to see the pattern behind the cotton. They’re beginning to see what’s been so clearly revealed to Simeon.
I grew up singing this song of Simeon. Grew up singing it so often that I cannot read this text without that melody I learned as a child floating back to me. Without feeling the weight of a choral folder in my hands and remembering the particular slant of the light through the windows of my cathedral where I sang these words as the sun went down.
The Song of Simeon is traditionally a text that is sung at evening prayer, and that is where I sang it. In the tradition I was raised in there are liturgies for so many times in the day, prayers we say when we rise in the morning and prayers we say at noon.
The Song of Simeon is the prayer we say before we go to bed, as the sun retreats and leaves us in darkness, and we pray that God will watch over us one more night. And if I should die before I wake, the old children’s prayer goes.
If each of our days is a life lived in miniature, each nighttime is a death in miniature, and through the texts of evening prayer we face that death. Through the texts of evening prayer, we remember that, whether it comes on this night, or another night many years away, we have seen Christ, each and every day, in the eyes and hearts and hands of others, and so, like Simeon, we can depart in peace.
It is not always clear through the cotton, but whether our days have passed in being or non-being, Christ was there. And so, like Simeon, we can take our leave of this world, for our eyes have seen God’s salvation, prepared for all the world.
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