“The Prime of Life”
Do you ever get the impression that Christmas is a holiday for children?
The Christmas movies all feature children. Church Christmas pageants all involve girls with angel wings, boys dressed in bathrobes playing the part of shepherds, and an older girl holding a baby.
In the Scriptures, most of the people who were involved in the birth of Jesus were adults, elderly adults in fact. In addition to a young mother and a baby, there were also wise elders. Zachariah, Elizabeth, Simeon, and Anna.
Frederick Buechner in his book Peculiar Treasures, describes how one of these elders named Simeon was involved in the life of the baby Jesus:
Jesus was still in diapers when his parents brought him to the Temple in Jerusalem "to present him to the Lord" (Luke 2:22), as the custom was, and offer a sacrifice, and that's when old Simeon spotted him. Years before, he'd been told he wouldn't die till he'd seen the Messiah with his own two eyes, and time was running out. When the moment finally came, one look through his cataract lenses was all it took. He asked if it would be all right to hold the baby in his arms, and they told him to go ahead but be careful not to drop him.
"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation," he said (Luke 2:29), the baby playing with the fringes of his beard. The parents were pleased as punch, and so he blessed them too for good measure. Then something about the mother stopped him, and his expression changed.
What he saw in her face was a long way off, but it was there so plainly he couldn't pretend. "A sword will pierce through your soul," he said (Luke 2:35).
He would rather have bitten off his tongue than said it, but in that holy place he felt he had no choice. Then he handed her back the baby and departed in something less than the perfect peace he'd dreamed of all the long years of his waiting.
When I was in seminary, one of our professors told us that the prime of life doesn’t start until after we’re 60 years old. That’s when we will have a lifetime of experience to make a significant contribution in the world.
Many of us are now in the prime of life. What do you want to be like at the end of your life? What do you want to have accomplished? You may not have done a lot of thinking about this, but it’s never too late.
I encourage you to invite the Lord to help you discover the answers to these questions. God will enable you to be the wise elder who will be a blessing to the young folks.
In Christ,
Pastor David
