Sunday morning I had the privilege of preaching at the baptism of Joshua Banner. It always a privilege to be asked to do something by friends.

The text was the story of Simeon and Anna in the temple when Jesus is presented by Mary and Joseph from Luke 2. There is so much in this passage to pull out that I was struggling what to share of relevance in a ten minute slot.

Rather than opt for 3 points, I chose one and concentrated on the fact that both Simeon and Anna recognised Jesus as the Messiah and how so many others that were close to him seemed to miss that point.

I wonder if that is due to familiarity. Certainly I was challenged myself as I looked at the text and wondered ‘if I was there would I have recognised Jesus?’ Would I have been with the seeing minority or the blind majority?

2000 years on, when we know the rest of the story, and we understand some of the OT prophecies it is really easy to say ‘yes … of course I would have reognised Jesus – it’s obvious!’ If I am honest I am not so sure.

People seem not to recognise Jesus for who he is in Luke for some interesting reasons which are a challenge to me for this week in particular:

parents – the sense of wonder has been lost through the everyday stuff like nappies etc. Despite angelic visitations and immaculate conception the everyday has squeezed out the wonder.

disciples – they have got used to being with Jesus. They see him eat, drink, get tired, sleep – not things you equate with divinity. Their familiarity with him has clouded their view.

priest – they seem to fall foul of the fact that Jesus does not fit the mould of what they were looking for. They were looking and waiting, but they had decided what the Messiah would look like, and being born to a poor couple from Nazareth was not in their thinking. They were restricting God with their preconceived ideas.

I wonder if during my life, my everyday moving about, I look for Jesus in the wrong places, in the spectacular and in doing so restrict my mind into looking where I think he should be. So often, Jesus can be found in the common – at an occurance rate of 5 times a second you can’t get much more common than birth.

Maybe, we should be looking more in the common for our God, for it seems our spectatcular God loves to inhabit the common, after all – it is there that God meets his people.