Waiting - 3 To die before we die- and find it to be Life!

Waiting - 3 To die before we die- and find it to be Life!

Nunc Dimittis

Luke 2.29

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace :
according to thy word.

For mine eyes have seen :
thy salvation;

Which thou hast prepared :
before the face of all people;

To be a light to lighten the Gentiles :
and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

What does the “normal” Christian life look like?

Someone who is regular in church on Sundays, who is community minded, helpful, has a friendly and un-aggressive manner, and who probably does not do much swearing, drinking or indulge in various naughty activities?

Fair enough.

Except.

What’s the difference between an upright, moral, community minded person who helps their neighbour and avoids activities thought by society to be immoral -but who never goes to church, and perhaps has no belief in God of any kind?

My answer to that is, probably nothing.

Because the “normal” Christian life is not about being moral, acting kindly towards others and so on. Because anybody can do those things, and many do. But hang on - I’m not saying Christians shouldn’t be active. Jesus made this plain - if you did not feed, clothe, visit, the least of my brothers and sisters - you didn’t feed, clothe and visit me. Moral social activity is a given as a result ofChrtisian living. It’s just that the “normal” Christian life is not defined by it.

So what should define it?

Well, it’s simple enough to state - but harder to live out - it’s about allowing ourselves to come closer and closer to God until we disappear.

It’s putting growing in holiness first and discovering all the activities follow on naturally.

It’s about learning about our true selves and then learning to let that self be taken up into God.

That’s what Simeon and Anna had learned. They might not have sung it as a duet but they both knew the words and the tune of the Nunc Dimittis,

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace :

For mine eyes have seen :

They had spent so long just being with God that they could see salvation when it was placed in front of them. They had spent so long just being with God that they were ready. Ready to receive and ready to let go.

The Advent we have thought of the Four Last Things - Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell and realised that they are not a morbid admission of our mortality - but a liberating framework, a quadrilateral, that opens us up to life, because we die,  it opens us us to understanding how things really are because of judgement, opens us up to life in eternity here and now because of heaven, and opens us to understanding we are ourselves only in community, as members of the Body of Christ, set against the loss of the true self that is hell.

We have thought about how the Nunc Dimittis is a song we can sing as we learn how to wait, because waiting is where the meaning is, where we learn to see and discern one thing from another.

In this life it’s important to learn to die before we die. Paul put this bluntly: “I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2.20) That’s the journey we’re on. This is what defines us. 

The Greek word for “I” is “ego”, and we must stand down our ego as we grow closer to God, and after this life I think it will be completely retired!

We are about to celebrate a birth, the birth of God in this world, in which we are caught up and in which we are born again, born into eternity. But the poet T S Eliot recognized the paradox in his lovely Epiphany poem “The Journey of the Magi”

Journey of the Magi

T. S. Eliot 1888 –1965

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

This is what our Advent journey prepares us for, Anna and Simeon tell us. So we can say in faith and joy that this life has the greatest of meanings… as we let it go to be lifted up into God, more alive that we can ever imagine.