Patiently Waiting: The Song of Simeon (and Anna)

A Sermon for the People of First Baptist Church of Austin

December 31, 2023

from the collection "Book of Gospels" by Laura James

"Patiently Waiting"

Luke 2:22-40

 

Well, we’ve made it! We’ve made it to the last day of the year.  There is a buzz in the air. A buzz of excitement, of expectations, of champagne glasses and confetti.  Parties with old friends and parties with new ones. Parents letting their kids stay up to watch the ball drop, which they will end up regretting because it will be way too late. Parents forcing themselves to stay awake to watch the ball drop, which they will end up regretting because it will be way too late.

Fireworks. Noise makers. Party hats. Those ill fitting 2-0-2-4 glasses that haven't quite looked right over our eyes since 2009.  Televised scenes of thousands of strangers standing shoulder to shoulder in the streets of new york city cheering for the inevitable new start a new year brings. A midnight kiss from a new love or from one you’ve cherished for most of your lifetime.  It’s the same ritual every year, something we do to put a stamp of “complete” on the old year and turn the page to the new one. 

A new year is a buzz of possibilities.  We are told it’s our chance to start over. To create something new. To commit to something to better yourself.  To take on a new habit. Yet somehow we are expected to live a completely different life than just a few hours before. marketers love to take advantage of our culture’s expectation that we start down the journey of altering ourselves on new years day. The “diet starts tomorrow” attitude, the ads of 25% off supplements and protein powders and $10/a month gym memberships, influencers sharing their wellness routines and strength training plans invades our social media platforms. Get organized! Reduce clutter! Commit to read 100 books! Wake up earlier! Sleep more! 

Today feels like a lot. 

Not only is it the final day of the calendar year, it’s also the first Sunday after Christmas. We’ve reached the pinnacle of all we’ve been waiting for in advent.  Christ is finally born in Bethlehem in a manger, to the very young mother Mary and father Joseph.  The are weary from their travels, not unlike the young couple carting their new born child to their in-laws house in an attempt to appease unwritten expectations that the entire family be at Christmas dinner at 5pm. 

Christmas-time is a time of deep joy and togetherness, to be with loved ones you choose and cherish, creating new memories and excitement for the season. Feeling safe knowing that who you are is enough. There’s no need to try to impress or showboat around people who have and will love you forever. 

But it can also be a time of deep grief that cuts to the core of your being, making it hard to sleep, eat, or enjoy anything that you once did because the chair he always sat in is empty this year.  It’s the grief for all the “firsts” that she will miss in that first year.  It’s the changes in the family dynamics that bring out deep pain or remorse.  It’s the feelings of being alienated from a group of people that changed their mind about you when you finally became brave enough to be your true self.  It’s the felt disappointment from a parent that you never really lived up to their expectations for your life. It’s the expectations for a perfect Christmas experience falling short. 

The Christmas season is sometimes more than we can bear. And we bring it all into this space, in this dead week where the world exists in the time between Christmas and a new year, where you’re not exactly sure what day it is, or what you’re supposed to do with your time. It’s a bit disorienting, celebrating something big and then everything stops to wait for the new to begin.  It’s knowing it’s not here yet and you just have to stick it out.  It’s a restless time of waiting for the “thing” to happen and the preparation it takes to bring it forth. 

We really don’t like to wait. We want to move to the next thing, fill the space with activity. To keep busy. We are taught to be productive, to make every day count. Waiting seems counterproductive, like we are missing out on a potential achievement or success. Why slow down to wait when we can keep running? Shouldn’t we be starting something new right now? 

What are we supposed to do with our time as we wait in the in between? And how long is this going to take?

For Simeon, it was an entire lifetime. 

Simeon, a Jewish man living in Jerusalem, was a righteous and devout man.  He had an extraordinary devotion to God, so extraordinary that the holy spirit rested on him and told him that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. He was living with a vivid expectation of the consolation to Israel… and he was waiting.  Waiting his whole life….because he believed the Lord’s words.   This was one very long advent. 

He was old. Very old, in fact.  Wrinkled hands, knees that ached when he walked, eyesight that was blurring more and more each day. Yet still alive well past his peers. Waiting for what was coming, waiting for the world to change. Waiting for a Messiah.

And on this day, a day like the day before, like the week before that, and the month and years before that, Simeon waits, trapped in his own personal groundhog’s day, when the holy spirit leads him to the temple. I wonder what was going on in his head as he journeyed there. Did he know what what about to happen? Was this what he had been waiting for? Did the Holy Spirit give him any clues or was he supposed to figure it out when he got there?

Simeon arrives at the temple, buzzing with life. The temple is enormous-  the courtyard is the size of several football fields. It would be difficult to find anything there! But the holy spirit leads Simeon exactly to the place where a mother, father and 40 day old child arrive at the temple to participate in an obedient ritual of purification after childbirth and the sacrifice of two turtledoves. 

This is it! This is what he’d been promised- the messiah has arrived! And Simeon must go to the baby.

When we meet a newborn baby for the first time, why is our first instinct to reach out and touch them…to touch their feet or pinch their cheeks or pat their head or squeeze their little hands.  The amount of strangers I encountered in Ella’s first days that wanted to touch her was something I was not prepared for. “I do not know you! Please do not touch my baby!” And now with Covid everywhere……Now I understand why new mothers attach “do not touch” signs to car seats and strollers. 

We just can’t help ourselves around new life. We want to absorb their newness, to experience their goodness in the hopes that it will rub off on us. They represent hope, new possibilities, a life unmarred by the harshness of the world. And they are just so tiny and little and cuddly and adorable. What’s not to love?

And here Simeon, old man Simeon, has been waiting his whole life for this moment, The day Simeon longed for, that he would endure so many days of waiting, the Lord’s promise to him has finally been fulfilled in this moment. Simeon reaches for Jesus, takes him from his travel weary parents and holds him close, locking eyes with the baby, listens to the coos and soft breaths, strokes his hair, kisses his forehead with tenderness.  He knows he is holding the Messiah who has come to save Israel, God in flesh as a vulnerable human child. 

Simeon can do nothing else but respond with a song of praise: “for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory to your people Israel.” 

I like to imagine he says this prayer of praise to God while looking into the very eyes of Jesus, the infant, the Son of God and the Messiah, in an intimate moment of love, like way a mother overwhelmed with gratitude looks at her new creation. Intoxicating love.

This is the end for Simeon. It’s the conclusion, the fulfillment, of his waiting. He’s ready for it. He’s met the Messiah. His waiting was not in vain. His waiting was worth every breath for this moment with God in flesh appearing. God had kept God’s promise. 

Isn’t this an essential part of the Christian life too?- waiting?  

We just practiced weeks of waiting in the liturgical period of advent where we wait and anticipate the birth of Christ. We pray prayers of petition, waiting for them to be answered.  We wait for peace, for healing, any sign that God is intervening in our lives. 

There’s a lot of waiting for something to happen. 

When I was a teenager, I was desperate to become an adult, not because I was in a hurry to grow up and pay bills and get a job, but because I wanted so badly to be taken seriously and not be considered a kid anymore. Even when I turned 18, I was haunted by the word “teen” at the end of my age. I hated waiting to grow up. And when I became an “adult”, I kept waiting to feel different than when I was a kid. I expected to reach a level of maturity that was magically granted upon reaching a certain age. Spoiler alert- it doesn’t happen that way. After graduating seminary, I had finally secured the degree that proved my “adult-ness”, and craved an opportunity to live out my calling to ministry.  Job after job after job rejection during a recession told me I wasn’t experienced enough, wasn’t Baptist enough, was too baptist, too young, too experienced.  Rejection forced me to have to wait longer. It was a dark season.

Barbara Brown Taylor says,  “Our waiting is not nothing. It is something—a very big something —because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.”  

What are you waiting for? A promotion? A forever relationship? A baby? For peace, wisdom, maturity? For a new job? A career change? A vacation?

We wait for those things that will make us feel whole, to be who we are called to be, what we envision for our lives. We can see the the vision of our future and what we do in the meantime matters.  How we live our lives while in the times of waiting matters.

Sometimes that waiting will last our entire life, like in the case of Simeon, an old man who spent his days waiting but who died in peace knowing God was faithful to God’s promises. 

Other times, it will look like Anna, living out her days as a faithful widow.  She was advanced in age, which is a kinder way to say that she was very old. Some think she was 84 years old while others think she had been a widow for 84 years. If we assume she was married at the customary age of fourteen, that would make her 98 years old when we meet her in this text. Either way, 84 or 98, she was blessed with great health to be able to live as long as she had, seeing as how the age of the elderly in antiquity was typically 60 years old.  (I’ll let that sink in.) 

Luke tells us that Anna was a prophet. In fact, she is the only woman to be considered a prophet in any of the gospel texts. When we meet her, she has been a widow for almost all of her life. Does she even remember what it was like to be married? She lost her husband after only 7 years of marriage, so she didn’t get a lot of practice doing her wifely duties. She never remarried after all of those years and in her Jewish context, this was considered admirable at the time. 

For the remainder of her widowed life, Anna devoted herself to fasting and prayer in the temple.  She never left the outer court. She dedicated her life to daily worship, praying, fasting. Anna was doing more than the usual Monday and Thursday fasting. Her state of fasting signaled a state of mourning, but her mourning was not for her husband, but rather for the people of God. This prophet dedicated herself to worship while she waited.

Like Simeon, she was someone who was close to God. It makes sense then, that Anna would be present when Mary and Jospeh arrive to the temple with Jesus. Anna isn’t just some old women loitering around the temple with nothing better to do.  She’s a woman waiting for the day when God would fulfill the promise of a savior.  This widowed, wise, and experienced woman recognizes who Jesus when she sees him- the redeemer of Jerusalem. Her mourning turns to praise! She becomes the first evangelist, publicly proclaiming Jesus as the redeemer.

God uses Anna and speaks through her. She tells everyone she meets about what God will do through this tiny baby. She might seem like an unlikely person for God to use.  In her society, she didn’t have a lot to offer. She was an old woman, unmarried, no children, no job, no home. You might even consider her to be a burden on society. But what Anna did have was a sure faith, one that was real, and content knowing that what mattered the most was the kingdom of God.

We never know what will come of our waiting.  We can’t always anticipate what we will learn, what the purpose of it is, or what God will do with the time we sit still. It might feel like the waiting will never end, that God has abandoned us.  We might feel like the waves are crashing over us and we can’t get a break to stick our head up for air. We might question if God is even listening to our pleas at all. The days will be long and the nights will be longer.  But through all of our season changes, God promises to show up. In the new year, a year for new beginnings, God promises to be with us as we wait for God to reveal a new truth to us. We just have to be willing to wait and be patient for it to arrive.  Like Simeon and Anna waited for baby Jesus, so too must we.  

Amen