A. Donald MacLeod

There’s A Song In The Air!

(1) A Song For The Comfortless

“The ransomed of the LORD will enter Zion with singing”
(Isaiah 51:11)

The ransomed of the LORD will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

In the locker room of the Cobourg YMCA, which I frequent early each morning, there is only one person - other than myself - who whistles and sings. He’s a strapping, muscular young man who (until recently) had a long pony tail and lifts weights every day with great discipline. He’s in construction and seemed to be a most unlikely person to be musicallly - or religiously - inclined.

At the Good Friday service this year I mentioned that that very morning I had heard, coming out of the shower, a full rendering of that old gospel hymn “Years I spent in vanity and pride

“Caring not my Lord was crucified

Til at last my soul found peace

Knowing not it was for me He died

At Calvary.

Mercy there was great and grace free

Pardon there was multiplied to me;

There my burdened soul found liberty,

At Calvary.”

The other day - when I stopped to inquire as to how his preschoolers were doing - our hidden identities emerged. He found out that I was a preacher and I discovered that he’s a Christian, worshipping regularly in an evangelical church. The reality that he was a fellow believer had never previously emerged. I have to admit that I never imagined that somehow he didn’t fit the stereotype of a Christian in Canada today - young, male, athletic, and Anglo-Saxon.

We got into conversation as to why folks no longer sing - in the shower, in the locker room, on their way to work, as they drive, wherever. Why has singing disappeared from most people’s radar? We finally agreed that it’s because most people are just too stressed, too self-conscious, too preoccupied, to whistle that happy tune that will show - as the popular song has it - that they’re not afraid. I can remember how I struggled to learn - from my grandmother - how to whistle when I was eight years old and how proud I was when I finally managed to get a tune out of my pursed lips.

(1) People without a song

The people to whom Isaiah addresses our words are exiles without a song. Their only music, according to our text, is “sorrow and sighing.” As we read in the plaintive Psalm 137:

“How can we sing the songs of the Lord

while in a foreign land?”

Their only music is a plaintive dirge, the lament that pierces the air with its sorrow and its pathos. The wail of those who have been forced out of their land, now left a ruin, a desert, a wasteland, to use the words of verse 3. Ripped away from their land, victims of injustice, their children snatched from their breasts and dashed against the rocks, the old and the weak left beside the road to die.

And God has, they allege, forsaken them. Their plight is desperate and the God of Israel does not seem to be there for them. They have sought justice from Him for all the wrongs they have endured and He has been silent. No longer are there songs in the night, the singing of the great assembly chanting the old psalms. Music is no longer heard in the streets of Jerusalem which are a ruin.

Perhaps you can relate to that this morning. The music has gone out of your life. You are weary with the struggle. Things have not worked out for you. And as you grow older - as loved ones go on ahead of you, as you age, there seems to be no song in the darkness. Or you may be younger and in the high noon of life, but there are so many distractions, life is so full, and somehow things are just not working out for you. In our crazy world, we are left without music.

(2) The music of the coming of the Lord

Advent is a season of song. It is the coming of the Lord, the anointed One, the Messiah, whom Isaiah anticipates will give His people a new song. The Lord Who, according to the preceding verse, dried up the Red Sea and brought His children into the land of promise, is the same God will do a new thing for them.

How? The ones who are the object of his love are described here in two ways: “the redeemed” and “the ransomed.” God has redeemed them - or will redeem them - as He delivers them from bondage as He did of old in Egypt. He is a liberating God who calls them out and leads them on. They have been - literally - “bought back,” redeemed from slavery, restored to their rightful heritage. The gates of God’s holy city, Zion, will open to them.

And there will be singing as they enter. No longer will they cover themselves from their crown to their toes with ashes, the traditional sign of mourning. Rather,. “everlasting joy will crown their heads.” They will come, singing, into the city of the Lord. As David said when the Temple was dedicated:

“You turned my wailing into dancing;

you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,

that my heart may sing to you and not be silent.

O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever.”¹

We associate Julia Ward Howe’s hymn with the Civil War, not with Advent. But the Advent theme is very much there:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the lightening of His terrible swift sword

His truth is marching on.”

(3) Prepare for the songs of Advent!

Her hymn continues:

“O be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!”

The coming of the Lord then is the climax of human history: we must be ready for the wonder of the incarnation. One commentator² translates this verse’s description of the emotion of those who are singing as they enter Zion as “a once-in-an-age kind of joy.” It has transformed their sorrow and sighing once and for all.

The music of the season we call Advent must find us prepared to take in its harmonies, its beauties. The arrival of the Messiah - the first time in a manger and the second on clouds of glory - is an event so great and so all-encompassing that only those who are ready for the mystery and marvel of the coming of the Christ, will be able to greet Him, come Christmas, with the full faith and confidence that one who is ransomed and redeemed by His grace can fully appreciate. Only when our hearts are ready can we join in perfect harmony with Mary as she sings her Magnificat, with Zechariah as he sings his Benedictus, with Simeon as he sings his Nunc dimittis.

It is four weeks ago yesterday that Kathy Percy, wife of Anglican minister Harold Percy, was driving up to Kingston to see their daughter at Queen’s. Harold is minister of Trinity Anglican Church in Mississauga and has had a remarkable ministry there for the past seventeen years. Kathy was a guidance counsellor at Central Peel Secondary School in Mississauga. As Kathy sped along 401 travelling east, at highway 427, she was rear ended by another car in the early morning fog. She got out of the car and then collapsed on the highway and was dead two days later, a seatbelt having severed her aortic artery “The Bible speaks about being pure of heart. Kathy was the living example of that. Kathy was so good, it kind of took your breath away,” one friend said later in tribute. Over a thousand people thronged her funeral, coming from as far away as Vancouver.

I caught up with my friend Harold at a dinner ten days ago. Courageously he was attending social functions, now without his wife of over thirty years. We met, embraced, and he said simply to me: “Keep praying for me. The Lord is faithful. The Lord is good.” But what kind of a Christmas will he and their four children have this year? Will the anchor still hold, will everlasting joy be on their heads, will sorrow and sighing flee away?

My friends, if Advent means anything to us at all it is that the coming of the Lord represents a promise that God is indeed faithful, as He will be to Harold Percy. That the Lord will keep His Word, that He is there for us in our sorrows, and that He will come, and He will wipe away all tears from our eyes. For the last enemy to be destroyed is death. And He will come.

Prepare for the coming of the Lord with a song!

“The ransomed of the LORD will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away. ”

There’s A Song In The Air!

(2) Mary’s Song

(Luke 1:46-55)

Over the past two millennia many artists have tried to picture Mary, the mother of our Lord, as the word first came to her that she was to be the mother of the Son of God. What emotions went through this teenager’s mind as the enormity of the news came upon her?

For young Michelangelo, twenty-one at the time, painting the annunciation was his major assignment. The dark trees and flowers made Sir Kenneth Clark, as a child “feel the poetry and, as it were, the closeness of nature.” There is stately grandeur to the woman as the angel gives her deference.

A hundred and fifty years later Caraveggio, as an old man, pictures a Virgin who does not even look at the angel messenger so self-absorbed is she, and seems unable to comprehend the word that has been brought her, absorbed as she is in fear and anguish.

It was Dante Gabriel Rosetti that picked up the theme of Mary’s holiness and purity. White predominates in his painting as the angel offers a lily, emblem of virginity and chastity.

The theme of impending doom is paradoxically picked up in Mikhail Nesterov’s Annunciation, a gift from Czar Nicolas II to the Czarina. She hung it in the Mauve Room of the Palace so that she could gaze at it in reverential devotion from her couch. It seems to suggest the fragility of life, the surprise and suspense of the unknown, all too tragically fulfilled when her brains would be blown out by a Bolshevik gun at Ekaterinburg twenty years later.

And finally there is a modern Annunciation painted by American graduating art student Bill Burg in 1998. Not a believer, he finds in the Biblical narrative an opportunity for “connectedness” with the past. Mary is at her bedside, praying, a Bible on her desk behind and a lily on her bureau. The “angel”, a young man, is slipping out an open window. An unexpected pregnancy, perhaps, finding the young woman anxiously seeking the God she had previously ignored?

Many people ignore God, particularly at this season of the year. We are so busy: cards to be mailed, baking to be done, gifts to be bought, parties to enjoy, festivities to share in. God gets squeezed out of our lives.

And then, as Mary (probably aged about fourteen) discovered that day when the angel appeared to her, God sometimes crashes in on us. It may not be an angel visitor - though there are more around than one would imagine. And the question Mary had to answer, and that we are also forced to respond to, is simply this. Are we ready for the coming of the Lord?

Yes, Mary was ready. Indeed she responds with a song that has echoed and reechoed down through the centuries as a joyous celebration of the coming of the Lord. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary sings. God’s salvation has been revealed first to a young woman in a remote province of an alien empire. The wonder of the incarnation is first disclosed to the woman whom the Holy Spirit had overpowered and who would give birth to the King of kings and Lord of lords.

She stands at the beginning of God’s new self-disclosure. “My soul,” she says, “has begun to delight in God my maker.” She realizes that the Child she carries is bringing in a new era of God’s redemptive purposes. Justice and peace have come, particularly to the poor, the needy, the oppressed. God is no longer silent: He has spoken. And Mary sings with joy at the coming of the Lord.

(1) He comes personally to Mary (vs 46 - 50)

“My soul magnifies the Lord.” Mary begins with the personal. It is her spirit that rejoices in God who is her Saviour. Why is it that she wishes to magnify the Lord? She provides two reasons for her praise:

(a) God has chosen her. She did not anticipate such a choice for she was “of low status” the handmaiden of the Lord. All nations will call her blessed, an example of someone who has been singularly blessed. She did not expect such special attention from the Lord for she is of “low status”

(b) the Mighty One has acted on her behalf and on behalf of all who fear the Lord. He is mighty because He has created this Child and he has given Mary a unique responsibility in birthing this infant in her womb. From God’s holiness the emphasis passes to His mercy. To those “who fear God from generation to generation” His mercy has been revealed.”

Verse 50 - as Luther reminded Zwingli in a famous exchange - Mary’s personal testimony is broadened to include everyone. The witness of a changed life is one of the most compelling reasons why other people come to faith. Would to God even one person would come to faith in our congregation, testify publicly that “Once I was blind, now I can see, the light of the world is Jesus” and then inevitably draw others to the Master.

(2) He comes powerfully to everyone (vs 51 - 53)

The next stanza then is a reminder to the whole community that God, having acted powerfully in the experience in Mary, can likewise do for others what He has done for her. There are six verbs that describe what God has done:

(1) He has performed mighty deeds with his arm.

(2) he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.

(3) he has brought down rulers from their thrones.

(4) has lifted up the humble.

(5) He has filled the hungry with good things.

(6) but has sent the rich away empty.

(3) He comes as promised to His own (vs 54-55)

Mary concludes her hymn with a dramatic confirmation from the word of the Lord given to her people. “He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever.” God, Mary says, always keeps His word. He has pledged himself to His people over the generations. He can be relied on.

The word of God is our surety. Worship must always be founded on the Scriptures. This hymn is based on the prayer of Hannah, though where Hannah is angry and resentful this resonates with joy at the fulfillment of the covenant given to Abraham two thousand years earlier. The whole of the Magnificat resonates with expressions out of the Old Testament. It is a distillation of Mary’s years of listening to, and learning from memory, the Bible.

I well remember the first time I heard the soaring lines of the Magnificat. My parents and I were returning to China, taking a P & O liner through Suez. We had a two-day stopover in Penang and left the boat to attend Evensong at an Anglican church there. As any Anglican will know, the Magnificat is the centerpiece of that service, and I listened to the chant we heard the choir sing this morning. I was entranced, at the age of ten hooked for life on this magnificent hymn of Mary’s. As a teenager, a few years later, each Sunday evening my father and I would attend St Andrew’s Church on Kowloon’s main street, Nathan Road. I still believe Evensong to be the purest form of worship that has ever been drawn up by humankind.

Henry Martyn, that intrepid missionary who before he was thirty, translated the Scriptures into three languages, had his life changed one Evensong. At the age of nineteen he received word at university that his father had died suddenly and unexpectedly. He went to a service at his college and there he records that “the first whisper of the call of Christ came to him in the joy of the Magnificat as its strains pealed through the chapel.”

My friend, what Christ has done for me, for Henry Martyn, through the Magnificat He can do for you. Join Mary this Advent in magnifying the Lord this morning. For

“His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.”

There’s A Song In The Air!

(3) Zechariah’s Song:

‘Blessed be the Lord!’

(Luke 1:68-79)

An older minister, whom I know well, has been placed on notice that he will lose his central vision. He has macular degeneration and knows that, to all intents and purposes, he will be unable to see. Since he is a reader, enjoys his grandchildren, and loves to look at sunsets, he finds the reality of this diagnosis at times overpowering. Its reality has been known to cause depression and anxiety. You never know, he has been told, when it will come. It is the anticipation of that moment in time that makes him fearful.

He was asked recently what would happen when he lost his sight. He replied simply: “Then I will have more time to do the praying that I should have done throughout my ministry.” Perhaps everyone beyond a certain age should reflect on what they can still do. Self-pity is terribly destructive thing, especially for those beyond a certain age.

It is a savage irony that, at the end of life when one needs to be in touch with one’s fellow humans, those faculties which make such contact possible become less and less able to function well. Seniors find it difficult to hear: so they cannot converse with other people and often retreat into isolation and withdrawal. Seniors often have failing vision: so they cannot see things that make them alert and able to participate fully in life. No wonder so many become withdrawn and even angry.

A bright centenarian in my congregation in Boston with a marvelous sense of humor, used to say, with a twinkle in her eye: “I don’t miss my eyes, I don’t miss my ears, but lordy, I miss my mind.” Growing old is not for softies.

The second song of Advent that Luke gives us is a hymn that took the writer nine months and eight days to compose. In the silence that enveloped him after that day of days in the Temple when the angel came and informed him that, after years of pleading with God, his prayer would be answered and he would have a child in his old age. His response was: “How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.”

The angel speaks to him a word of judgment for his disbelief. “I have been sent to you from the presence of God to tell you good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak , because you did not believe my words, which will come true in their proper time.” As Beethoven never heard his ninth symphony - arguably the greatest music the world has ever listened to - so Zechariah (deaf as well as dumb because the angel in verse 62 uses sign language) composes a hymn which may ring in his struck-dumb ears.

For nine months Zechariah must have asked himself over and over: “Why did I not believe God? Why did I not welcome the good news? Why was I so skeptical? Why on that one day as a priest for which I had prepared all my life was I not ready for God to speak, to intervene, to act powerfully in answer to my prayers?”

“Be still and know that I am God.” Being still before the Lord, as Zechariah was forced to do, is a wonderful exercise. More silence and less noise, more listening and less speaking, more time spent alone in prayer, and less meaningless God-chatter, would do our souls good. And we might be able to compose a hymn like the Benedictus.

Let’s listen now to what Zechariah learned and wrote in those lonely months of silence:

(1) GOD HAS POWERFULLY INTERVENED (vs 68-69)

Nine months earlier Zechariah could not believe that God could give him a child. Now he puts God’s redemptive work in the past tense, as though it had already happened! “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed His people.” God has accomplished this great task of liberating His people from their bondage, as He had done of old. Zechariah has had a long time to ponder over the intervention of God in his life, in human history. Once he had doubted whether God would ever answer his prayer. Now he can speak of His redemptive work in the past tense.

The redemption of which he speaks is not yet fully able to call this Christ, the Messiah, his nephew by marriage Jesus, the Redeemer. He could only dimly see the cross and Calvary. But he now recognized that God does not leave His people alone. As He brought Israel through the Red Sea and into promised land, so He would liberate those who lived in darkness.

And it would be a powerful liberation. The messiah would be “horn of salvation.” The horn was an instrument of strength: the Psalmist (92) speaks of the horn of a wild ox” and says that God will arise and His enemies will perish and evildoers will be scattered. The Messiah would be no weakling. That tiny Babe in the manger would be a mighty instrument in the hands of a powerful God, His Father, to bring justice and salvation to the nations.

(2) GOD HAS KEPT HIS WORD (vs 70 - 73)

Like Mary, Zechariah is impressed by the truth that God always keeps His word. This had been the nub of his disobedience when he had asked “How can these things be?” Zechariah needed to learn the lesson that we also forget to our peril: God always keeps His promises. For nine months Zechariah has been ruminating on the Word of God and realizing, in that split second of disobedience when he challenged the angel, how little he had really taken in of God’s truth, how little he really had understood or trusted His pledge.

Zechariah in verses 70 - 74 cites the various witnesses to the fact that God had committed Himself to bring redemption to His people. There are (70) the prophets of long ago who spoke ot salvation from the hands of those who hate God’s people. There is the holy covenant (72), sworn to Abraham, an oath that they would be rescued from the hand their enemies and enabled to serve God without fear.

“His oath, His covenant, His blood,

Support me in the whelming flood,

When all around my soul gives way,

He then is all my hope and stay.”³

The familiar words of the hymn remind us that, when we least anticipate it, when we most need it, God breaks through and reminds us that we can secure our hopes on Christ the solid rock, for “All other ground is sinking sand.”

(3) GOD HAS EXPECTATIONS OF US (vs 74-75)

So what does God expect of us? We are called to “serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” God’s pledge to us must meet with a corresponding response. Zechariah is a changed man, a person who realized (perhaps for the first time) that God demands consistency of us in holy living. We spend our days in His presence, even though sometimes (like Zechariah) we forget He’s there alongside of us. And we must do so “all our days,” step by step, to journey’s end

(4) PREPARING THE WAY FOR THE COMING OF THE LORD (VS 76-79)

The final stanza of his hymn looks away from his personal experience to the coming of the Messiah. First he focuses on his own son John and his mission and then the One whose way he is preparing.

John - whose name means “God is merciful” - will be the one who readies people for the coming of the Lord. The “knowledge of salvation” and the “forgiveness of sins” is too great and too mind-boggling for an individual to comprehend. The coming of the Baptizer will be the opening ray of light from the skies that the dawn is breaking, that those who live in darkness (Isaiah in chapter 40, the great Advent passage) will see a great light, and those who live in the shadow of death will be guided into the pathway of peace.

My favourite Canadian poet, as you will know from the number of times I have quoted her, is my former parishioner Margaret Avison. Now 86 and living in a seniors apartment in downtown Toronto, she has lost most of her central vision. But she still has the capacity to see truths that are hid from the fully sighted. She writes of Zechariah in her poet. “Christmas Anticipation”:

“The patient years in the appointed place

brought Zecharias, dumb with unbelieving,

flame-touched, to front

the new sky,

the ancient desert ways

rustling with grasshoppers’ thighs, yield

from dry, spikey place,

wild honey, and a brook starting.

The buyers wedge in doorways waiting for lights, lifts, taxis,

The boy lonely in love moves with the wind

through electric bright, through fading, light.

The old man with his censer, dazed down the

centuries, rays his

dry-socketed eyes, dimming

still, till he could believe, towards,

with joy.

Down falling whispers

stir in the lopped firs, waiting.”⁴

What are you waiting for? An angel visitant? God to unstop your tongue-tied speech so that, with Zechariah, you may hymn His praises?

Go and eat: the feast is ready.

There’s A Song In The Air!

(4) The Angelic Chorus

‘Glory to God in the highest!’

(Luke 2:14)

In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles there is a story of fiddler named William who had been coming home from a wedding. Slightly the worse for wear he decided to take a shortcut across the back forty. But unfortunately he crossed a field where a bull was out to grass. The animal decided to take after him. He started to play the fiddle and the bull slowed down and gave him a funny look. But as soon as he stopped the bull went at him again. It was getting past three o’clock in the morning and William was tiring.

Then he remembered that an old legend had it that at twelve on Christmas Eve the animals all bowed down before the manger, and that ever after, as Christmas Day began they would do the same. So he stated to fiddle the Nativity Hymns, a collection of Christmas carols. And there down went the bull on his knees, though it was neither midnight nor Christmas Eve. And William took advantage of the animal’s reverence and jumped over the hedge “before the praying bull had got on his feet again to take after him. William used to say that he’d seen a man look a fool a good many times, but never such a fool as that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had been played upon, and ‘twas not Christmas Eve.”

Music makes many impressions on the human psyche but at no season of the year are we more aware of its impact that during the Advent season. And it all started with that angelic chorus that first Christmas Eve hymning their divine carols to the shepherds on the fields below, keeping watch over their flocks by night. Their “Gloria in excelsis deo” rings over the centuries with good news to humankind, reminding them - and us - of the birth that had been celebrated earlier in song by Mary, the virgin mother, in the Magnificat, and by Zechariah in his Benedictus. The third of Luke’s nativity carols is the shortest, but no carol better summarizes the meaning of Christmas:

“Glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

(1) The Horizontal: “Glory to God in the highest”

Artists over the centuries have attempted to recreate the scene: there is “The Angelic Announcement to the Shepherds” from the Fourteenth Century in a museum in Florence Italy which beautifully catches the supernatural wonder of the event. Then William Blake’s magnificent “The Angels Appearing to the Shepherds” based on Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” gives us a different surrealistic image of the massed angelic chorus. And finally John Field’s modern (1972) portrayal of the event brings a contemporary aura to the age-old wonder of the familiar narrative.

“Glory to God in the highest”: it is said that at creation, as the final act of the divine fiat, the angels burst into a grand chorus of praise at the wonder of what God had done. Now God is about to re-create and reestablish the divine order that humankind had foiled. So the angels again ascribe their “Glory” to the one who had designed redemption’s plan and brought it down to man.

(2) The vertical: “on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

Glory in the heavens, on earth, peace. The vertical first and then the horizontal. So often at this season we reverse that order. Christmas is the demonstration that God takes the initiative, reaches out to us, gives us an unsolicited gift. Christ can be spelt G-R-A-C-E.

What peace, you ask me? As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow despairing wrote:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
Wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head.
"There is no peace on earth I said,
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth good will to men."

The coming of the Christ, the Prince of Peace as Isaiah once foretold, brought peace. The manger led to the cross and to an empty grave. The war that existed between humankind and its creator would once and for all be decisively breached.

How we would like to believe that this war-torn Christmas 2004. In his old age, Thomas Hard relived the earlier legend of the music of Christmas Eve when he wrote some poignant line attempting to recover his lost faith:

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come, see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

The music of Christ still sounds out across this weary planet of ours. It calls us to the manger. It asks to come and worship Christ the new born king.

No, not the angel choir, with its melody “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace good will to men and women.”

Nor Mary singing her Magnificat as she learns she will be the instrument God would use to bring blessing to the whole human race.

This song is the song of salvation, rejoicing that human bondage to sin would now be broken.

It is a song of thanksgiving for an obedient Son who was willing to come to earth to die and in his death bring forgiveness and healing to humankind.

It is a song of triumph, for God knows that in that birth there will be victory over darkness and evil. A tiny, seemingly helpless, Infant, would have a power that no one can destroy.

It is the power of love and there is no hatred, no evil, no injustice, that love cannot conquer. Love never fails.

A joyful hymn of salvation, sung by God the Father, announcing a new era of peace and freedom.

Hear the music, listen to Zephaniah 3:17, the so-called “John 3:16 of the Old Testament”:

The love song God sang on Christmas Eve is a powerful one. It is not some silly ditty, repeating meaningless lines, going through mumbo jumbo. It is sung by none other than Yahweh the Lord, who is the God of His people. He wants to be heard as the triumphant Creator of the universe. He has sent His only Son to die on a cruel cross. But He will not be mocked: Immanuel, God with us, is no helpless Babe. He will destroy the last enemy, death: the tiny body will later be scarred with cruel nail prints, and with a sword scar in His side. But that same body will be resurrected and will destroy death. His love conquers all, transforming doubt, challenging disbelief, rousing indifference, wooing and winning me to His side by His powerful Holy Spirit. “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.

The love song God sang on Christmas Eve is an intimate one. The prophet speaks of Almighty as quiet in His love for us, contented as He looks down on us. Over you he will delight, over you he will rejoice with singing, over you will he be quiet in his love. It is personal, it is intimate. God is love (I John 4:8): that the One who hung the stars in space can gaze upon me, wretched sinner that I am, with love, fills me with amazement. As a lover needs no expression for her or his feelings, so God meets our eyes and assures that He does indeed accept and receive us, not because we are lovable, but because His Son went to a cruel cross to prove the depth of His commitment to for me. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

The love song God sang on Christmas Eve is a joy-filled one. Note those words: “he will rejoice over you. “Good tidings of great joy” is what the angels sang that night. The heavens rang out with the good news, the gospel truth. The Desire of all nations has come, God has kept His promise and His pledge: morning dawns, salvation comes. The angelic chorus that rang out over the Judean hills broke the silence of the centuries. The time had fully come and a Child is born, mighty Counsellor, everlasting Father, the Prince of peace.

The love song God sang on Christmas Eve demands a response. “Sing O daughter

of Zion,” “Rejoice with all your heart.” The commands of verse 14 find a response, an echo, in the heart of the God of Israel in verse 17: He rejoices over them - over me - with singing. There is an antiphonal response, the song goes back and forth, the chorus resounds in one mighty crescendo of praise: “For unto us is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.”

The story of the presentation of the infant Jesus to Simeon in the Temple is a story that has made an emotional impact over two millennia. To noone has that appeal been stronger than to the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn.

As a young man at the age of 25 he painted the scene in a way that immediately identified him as a product of the Calvinist Reformation - the contrast between the conventional (albeit brilliant) characters of the medieval Venetian artist Bellini are immediately apparent as you contrast the two.

But Rembrandt went on to paint Simeon and the presentation over and over again. He sold his famous “hundred guilder engravings” when he was down on his luck. The burgomasters rejected his commission for The Night Watchers, appalled by the frankness with which they were portrayed. With his beloved wife dead, and forced to declare bankruptcy, his life was hard scrabble. One picture of the aging Simeon is knwn to have been a Rembrandt self-portrait. A further rendering in 1661 five years before he died depicts the circumcision of Jesus as surrounded by darkening shadows, reflecting 84 year old Anna predicting that the sword would pierce the parents’ hearts. And on his easel, after Rembrandt died at the age of 63, worn out by cares and worries, was yet another picture of Simeon, half finished.

What does a man or a woman have to show for their life, when it is all over? The only record we have of Rembrandt when he was alive - the only scrap of paper from him that survives, other than his magnificent art - is a list of all his possessions when he filed for insolvency. What will I leave behind me, what will remain from all the years of our lives?

That is the question that Simeon’s final advent hymn - the fifth in Luke’s account of the advent of Jesus - raises. Traditionally the priest to whom Jesus is presented is aged, a surmise from the fact that we are told that he had been waiting for the appearance of this Child for a long time. Augustine called him “aged” and “long-lived” in one of his sermons and so the tradition has grown. Indeed the Christian community has generally found in the Nunc Dimittis (as this prayer of Simeon is known) as providing an answer to the concern we all will face, sooner or later, of how to approach impending death. What does this prayer have to say to us the day after Christmas?

“Dismiss your servant in peace.” The words of Zechariah are those of a sentry that has been posted during a long and dark night. He has watched for the coming of the dawn, hoping that Light would shine in the gloom.

Now the Child has been born: God is indeed the “Sovereign Lord.” He has done what He had promised. And Simeon is at peace. No longer the turbulent questions, the doubts, the fears: “Would He come? Would God honour His promise given to the prophets of old.” As with Rembrandt’s image of the scroll behind the Child so the Word has indeed been made flesh and has come among us. Like Mary, Zechariah, the angelic chorus, Simeon sees in the first Advent the promise that God always keeps His promises.

“Lord, I’m ready to go! I am at peace with the world.” Is there a man or woman that can truthfully say that as the time for their departure comes? Are we ever ready for that inevitable hour that will surely come to all of us?

Only if we, with Simeon of old, see Jesus and see in Jesus our salvation. The aging priest, his eyes dimmed, cannot see much, but he says he has one glad and glorious view: “my eyes have seen your salvation.”

Who knows what lies ahead of a newborn infant? Simeon sees the salvation of His God in the tiny infant now before him. He sees beyond the manger, beyond the flight into Egypt, beyond His growing up years in Nazareth, beyond the thirty-three years of His short life, to a hill called Calvary, an old rugged cross, and then Easter and the promised deliverance from sin and evil.

And he is not the only one who can catch a view of God’s purpose in redeeming His people. This salvation has been prepared by God in the sight of all people. The view that Simeon has, with his limited sight, is one that everyone - those with 20/20 vision and those who are blind - can share. For God’s gift in giving us the Christ Child is visible to all.

Happy the person who, like Simeon, as sight declines and vision fades, can still keep their view of Jesus undimmed. “Sirs, we would see Jesus” was the prayer of Greeks who came to the disciples asking to meet the Master (John 12:21). As we grow older sometimes the sight of Jesus becomes more difficult, it is through all the peaks and valleys of our lives, the one Constant: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus the Author and Perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:2)

Simeon is finally able to see where all the bits and pieces of his life fit into God’s vast redemptive plan. He sees what it is all about, is able to make sense of his existence, where and how God fits in. He sees the grand design.

In the coming of Jesus God suddenly pulls the curtain away and assures that life indeed does make sense, that human history - and my small part in it - gathers round that infant in a manger - that Christmas is what life is all about, the incarnation gives us the clue to the mystery of human existence. It all comes back to Jesus.

Happy the man or woman that can put their life in that context, as it comes to a conclusion. I may not understand why God took me down that path, or made me suffer that cruel loss, or allowed me to undergo that sorrow or pain, experience that broken relationship, but I know as I look at the manger that

So Simeon sees in the coming of Jesus light for the Gentiles, glory for Israel. God’s purpose for the whole of humankind revealed and explained. It all fits in. It all makes sense. Fortunate the man or woman who, like Simeon, can die in peace, knowing that they have put their lives in context.

When he was an old man, my father started receiving letters from former students of his. He had taught in a seminary in China until he was expelled by the Communists when they “liberated” the country. The church, he was told at the time, was finished. He had wasted his life in a foolish exercise to introduce a foreign religion to a country that had continuously over its long history rejected it.

Then, when he was almost eighty, thirty years later, he heard a different story. Student after student shared with him how his life had been spent in building a strong and vital Christian community that is now one of the fastest growing in the world. By the time he died, at almost 93, he knew that his life had not been wasted but had fit into God’s grand design for the ages. He had been obedient to God the light of the Gentiles and his faith had been honoured.

Many of us may not have the chance to see how our lives fit into God grand design. But we can trust and with Simeon of old ask God to dismiss us because our eyes, dimmed as they may be, still see clearly to salvation of our God, and know His purposes and His love.