Of course, he doesn't need to call that boy, and we only know this because they don't call each other now. They just sort of show up at each other's houses and eat each other's food. No problem there, then, is there.
But you and I both know that you don't get the phones these days to make phone calls. You can tell, because if you look at old cell phone commercials, they're always talking about minutes. How many minutes do you get a month. But nobody talks about that now, in fact nobody even uses close to their minutes. We have phones, but we don't use them to make calls. Phones are used for everything else, though. Absolutely everything else. You can have hundreds of apps, each telling you dozens of things about the world. Library apps, apps to check the news, weather, sports, apps to keep you connected, to teach you the guitar, and everything else. But which apps do you use. You know which apps you use. You use facebook and the twitter. You log on to instagram and vine, and what do you do, well, you post pics of yourself, and wait for likes. We spend a lot of our time doing this, working hard to get ourselves out there, and we spend an awful lot of our time looking at ourselves on the internet, on the phone, putting our best self forward even and especially if that person doesn't actually exist.
What you need to know is that the people you see online, they're the same as you. They aren't the people they put forward either. The crazy thing is that we're all liars to each other. But we're not really lying to each other. We're mainly lying to ourselves. We do this, where we fib to ourselves, we construct an elaborate idealized version of ourselves, and put that out there, to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. But you need to know, in case you were wondering, that what people are doing when they are staring lovingly into their cell phones is that they're staring lovingly at themselves. An ideal version of themselves.
Now in most of our communication, we talk about ourselves. We talk about ourselves, what we do, making sure that attention is going to be paid to us almost exclusively. We talk at great length about who we are and what we do, and if we were to have a theme song, it would be all about our best parts, what we bring to the table that is stand out and amazing. In short, it would be about how fantastic we are, and about how the rest of the world needs to know that. But in the gospel reading, we find something completely different. We find the song of Simeon, and the song of Simeon isn't about himself. It's about Jesus.
When Simeon speaks, he talks about Jesus almost exclusively. What do we know about Simeon, only that he's old, but from his own words, he doesn't say too terribly much. But he does talk about Jesus, about the salvation that Jesus promises, about the grace that has been promised to his people. And there's a good reason for that.
If we were to present ourselves to God, standing on our own merits, it wouldn't be like it is on facebook, all carefully arranged selfies under perfect lighting conditions. Nope, it would be nose picking, belching, gossiping, slacking off at work and cheating at password so you can win, even though there's no prize. In short, it would be the real you, coupons attached. Warts and all. And that person would likely be quite different from the you that is posited in all those social media glamour shoots. It would be you as you actually are. And would you want God to see you like that. Heck, you wouldn't even want me to see you like that, and my opinion isn't worth a whole lot.
It's a funny thing, isn't it? The last judgment paints a picture for us of us all being naked before God, figuratively at least. None of us are able to talk our way out of anything, none of us can possibly converse ourselves out of the situation that we are in, and all we can do is to stand there and have our lives recounted. In Matthew 25, Jesus breaks down for us what that final questionnaire will be like, and it ends up being pretty focused on the feeding of the hungry and the care for the sick and imprisoned.
Have you been doing that this whole time? No?
Then your song had better not be about you. It had better be about Christ.
How quick we are to forget this, or to shrug our shoulders and move on from it, how quick we are to talk ourselves up, to speak boldly about how terrific we are, and what a great job we're doing. But it is only when we are honest with ourselves that we realize that our songs, our words, our conversation, can't afford to be about us. You
It's hard to do, and it gets harder to do the more you tune into all the voices out there that are clamouring in your ears. There is and will always be plenty of voices begging for your attention. You will always be facing a torrent of people putting nothing but their best forward to you, showing you their greatness and their wonderfulness, whether you're on social media or not. And you know that even if you try to keep up with it, you will perpetually be unhappy, measuring your real life against everyone else's fake life. The one person who does put forth his best consistently to you, is Jesus, and not only does he do so in that capacity, but he is the only one who doesn't tell you about that stuff to brag, or to boast, or to make you jealous but to invite you to partake in it. He does what he does, he attains perfection, he offers himself freely for you and tells you that it is all for you. it is for you in every way, he gives himself up for you. Everything that he has achieved, his perfection in the sight of God, is for your benefit, not for his. Our joy, our hope, it all rests on that, that our boasting would be as nothing except in Christ, who takes our sins away.
Happy new year, all.
PJ.
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