Anna

Anna

Luke 2:36-38

Simeon and Anna are eternally paired together.  They both were present the day that Mary and Joseph showed up at the temple to make the required sacrifice on Jesus’ behalf.  They both recognized who that baby was.  They both are remembered by name in the Gospel of Luke.  However, you would be hard pressed to find two more different people.  

Luke tells us that Simeon was a righteous and devout man—a good, upstanding guy.  By virtue of being a man, he would have enjoyed all sorts of rights and freedoms that weren’t afforded Anna.  He was free to go where he wanted to go and do whatever he wanted to do.  He could start a business.  He could talk to strangers. He was free to learn whatever he wanted to learn.  As a righteous and devout man, presumably, Simeon managed this freedom well. But the thing was, he was free to live that life.

With Anna, the question would have been whether she had any life at all.  Luke tells us that she was only married to her husband for seven years before he died.  Most girls were married as early as 13 or 14 years old.  Families increased their wealth this way.  The problem was that Anna’s husband died so soon.  So, by twenty or twenty one, she was alone in a world where a woman, alone, had almost no status.  There were all sorts of rules within the faith about how widows should be cared for.  However, what was called for were acts of charity.  There were no opportunities for a woman to support herself.  If she was lucky, perhaps her late husband had a brother who would feel obliged to marry and care for her.  None of that happened for Anna.  She never remarried.  Now, she’s 84.  Seventy years, alone…

There is room for debate among the translations but it seems that Anna either actually lived at the temple or it just seemed that way because she was there constantly.  I want you to pause and consider that.  A woman’s place was to be quiet.  Imagine her just being present around the margins of that sacred place.  Luke says that she spent a lot of time praying and fasting over all those years.  She must have also spent an awful lot of her time simply listening and observing and taking things in.  When you spend your life pretty much in one place, you notice things.   Undoubtedly, Anna would have seen the temple at its best and at its worst.

As a pastor’s kid, growing up, I spent a lot of time at church.  I saw some of the very best things about a faith community.  The people who cared and showed up for each other in times of need, who grieved together and laughed together and learned together—those people ingrained in me a love of the church that would stay with me for the rest of my life.  They showed me what a church family could be. 

In other moments, they showed me what a church family is at its worst.  Cranky, unreasonable people venting at the latest church meeting.  Petty concerns about this little detail or that little detail without any eye on the sacredness of the big picture.  People with a little too much time on their hands so they used it to share the latest gossip.  There was the lady who counted my father’s dress shirts on the laundry line out back. There was the lady who phoned my mother to tell her that holding hands with a girl on the way home from school might be inappropriate for the pastor’s son.  That stuff happened but it was the exception, not the norm.  It didn’t leave me jaded.  It just left me with a realistic vision of what a church really is, namely, 100 percent human but amazingly infused at the very same time with the presence of God. 

 I’ve always felt that no one would have understood this better than Anna.  You don’t spend seventy years basically living at the temple without getting an eyeful, especially in her day.  Those who ruled the temple were the religious authorities.  Those authorities, along with the government leaders, were in cahoots with the Roman Government.  They had to be to survive!  That’s one whole bin of any church’s life:  the things we do to survive.  It is the tension in which we all live, the tension between our ideals and values and the practical realities and challenges of day-to-day life.

I think Anna would have had plenty of time to watch the young priests who were so idealistic when they started turn into the pragmatic priests whose ideals were either worn down or polished by the years, depending on the priest.  She would have seen the days when the priests phoned it in and the shocking days when it turned out that God could still work through them.  She would have seen the light that returned to even the most worn our priest’s eyes when God surprised them.

She would have had plenty of “bones to pick” with temple policies, too. I bet, on the day that Mary and Joseph showed up, she would have been staring at one of the things that bugged her most.  Namely, I bet it bothered her that the temple, in trying to account for the needs of the poor, set up a sure-fired way to let everyone know exactly who was poor.  So, the poor couldn’t afford to pay for a lamb that had been fed for a year (and the exorbitant temple add- on fees that were attached).  Instead of offering to just give them a lamb so that they could fit in, they made them be different. No lambs for them!  Anna would have known, herself, the price of being poor—the sideways glances and the judgmental comments.  She would have cringed at anyone else being subject to such wounds.

Back to my initial point, though…if Anna had spent 70 years living in the temple, she may have had a realistic view of the place and the people, but she must have truly been a faithful woman.  She saw the “joint” for what it was and yet, she still believed.  She still believed in what happened in the best moments there:  people’s faith was renewed; people found a connection to God; people were moved to kindness.  If the promise to faithful people is that they will see, “The goodness of the Lord in the land of the living,”  I bet she did, on a pretty regular basis, even on the days when she wanted to give that one priest a good slap on the back of his head.

To put this whole matter differently, it is easy as a child or even as an adult who has just lately returned to the church to want to worship the church community, or the church building, or the church leaders.  “I love these people!”  “I love these stained glass windows!” “I just love our pastors!”  Sooner or later, such things disappoint because, well…they’re not the point.  The question is, when that day of disappointment comes, do you shake your head and walk away or do you dig in and dig deeper?  The people, the pastors, even the building can all be a part of what’s sacred in life but what is sacred that shines through them, when they don’t get in the way, is God’s presence.  At some point, the pastors and the people and the building all might be just fine but what you love is God—end of story.

I think this is the deep seated, mature faith of Anna.  She had seen it all and all that she had seen had brought her to a vision of God’s presence.  She had done it all and discovered that the most important thing to do was to stay open to the amazing God who loves nothing more than a great surprise.  She may have been 84 but she was awake!  She may have been elderly but she was not jaded.  She just never knew what was going to happen next.  Therefore, she was on her toes and paying attention.

I think this faith over the years had already made Anna a prophetess.  Let’s remind ourselves that a prophet is a person who acts as God’s spokesperson, God’s mouthpiece to the world.  Prophets were almost always outsiders because it was hard to be an insider and not have your vision clouded over.  (This is why most pastors are not prophets because when push comes to shove and we have to decide whether to tell a hard truth, we struggle mightily because we don’t want to hurt the people who might need to hear that truth.  We love them.)

What was even more rare than a true prophet of God was a prophetess.  By most counts, there are only five women who play this role and are named as prophetesses in the whole Bible.  This makes a widow who hung out in the shadows of the temple more extraordinary than any high priest or Sadducee gathered in the temple.  I suspect she had told plenty of hard truths before Mary and Joseph showed up and been discounted in exactly the way that just about every other prophet or prophetess had been discounted.   It’s hard to hear the truth that you need to hear.  It’s especially hard to hear if the one who is telling you that truth is part of a group deemed, “People not worth listening to at any time!”

There were some clues that people missed.  (There are always clues which we usually see in hindsight, ourselves.)   Anna’s name meant, “Grace.”  She was the daughter of Phanuel, whose name meant, “The Face of God.”  Names don’t define us.  However, names in the Bible are a big deal.  Anna and Phanuel’s family were a part of the tribe of Asher.  What everyone would have known in that day that we don’t know today is that the tribe of Asher was one of the lost tribes of Israel.  Also, what folks would have known was that this particular tribe was one of the most prosperous tribes, inhabiting a part of the land in ancient times that was incredibly fertile farm territory and was famous for its orchards and its olive oils.  In other words, this Anna may look like a poor widow but she is a direct connection to the very best days of Israel, a nation which pretty much hadn’t had any good days for a very long time.  So, Anna not only practices her faith more than pretty much anyone else, Anna is firmly grounded in the very best of Israel’s history.

Here’s the odd thing.  Mary and Joseph show up with the baby, Jesus.  Simeon spots them.  He takes the child and holds him and announces that now he can die in peace because he has seen the Messiah with his own eyes.  Then, he announces that this child will show the world who is faithful and who is not and he tells Mary that this child will break her heart.  Then, Simeon leaves. He has seen what he came to see.  He has said what he has to say.

Then, Anna shows up right when Simeon is in the midst of his pronouncements.  She never even holds the baby—the one thing that you would expect an elderly woman to do, right?  Not a word of what she actually says is recorded—which is about par for a culture who didn’t think women should be speaking in public anyway, right?  Her first response is not to explain to the crowd what they are seeing.  No…her first response is to praise God, which makes so much sense because, through all that prayer and fasting, a relationship with God is exactly what she’s built.  She doesn’t need a priest to intercede.  She doesn’t need a man to explain things.  She just urgently needs to thank God for what she is seeing.  She also doesn’t say to God, “By the way, I can die happy now” either.  This moment isn’t about her at all.  Imagine that…

Anna looks into the eyes of the people around her—the ones who were dying for change.  Then, one-by-one, she goes to work.  She ministers to them.  She tells them that change is going to come and it is this child who will grow up and bring that change to life.