That Crazy Old Woman
That Crazy Old Lady
Luke 2:36-38
Thirty years ago, when I started here, the church was stuck with me. If you needed a pastor, I was your only option. So, when Kitty Kuhlman died a few weeks after I started, I led her memorial service. I’m sure some long term members were shaking their heads and thinking to themselves, “Well, this ought to be interesting…”. Maybe some of those same people, after the service, thought to themselves, “You know…that was okay.” You have to start somewhere, right?
This is why Tracy and I will be searching in the upcoming months for a new church to attend—because we want your next pastor to have the same chance that I had to get through those “firsts” on their own and take a shot at that long project of building trust with you. I know, though, that our search will be tough. We’re not “mega-church” material. We’re not looking for a “praise band.” (My shoulder still hurts from when I used to be pitcher. The last thing I’m signing up for is an hour of waving my arms around.) If the church is not welcoming to L.G.B.T.Q. people, we’re out. If they don’t allow women to be pastors or leaders or teachers, we’re out.
On the positive side, we’re probably looking for a preacher who is grounded in a “here and now” spirituality and making connections to everyday life—less “just wait till you get to heaven” and more “what are we waiting for?” We definitely are on the outreach/service, “how can we help those in need,” side than team “how many people have we saved today.” We want to be a part of a faith community that strives to be a church family.
If you are reading between the lines, you probably hear that what we are looking for is…the Union Church North, right? When you love someone or love a church, it’s hard not to want replace “like for like,” right? That’s the challenge for all of us right now. Some of what has made this whole thing work is essential and needs to be a part of what makes what’s next work—for this church and for us. However, the equally important truth is that some of what’s next for all of us needs to be different. Change is hard but “new” can also be a lot of fun…if your open to “new” in the first place and if “different” is not only something you don’t reject but you actually embrace.
This morning, I want to introduce you to Anna who is, in fact, a very different character than who we usually meet in the Bible. A set of things make her unique. Here is the first one: she is referred to by name. She is not the only named woman in the Bible but there are not many. Why is this? The old saying is that history is written by the winners. In the ancient world, the “winners” in society were men. Women were restricted in their speech, in their movement in public spaces, in their vocational choices, in their economic status. Women lived on a short leash and that leash was almost always held by some man.
The Bible was written and edited by men. I have no question that women were incredibly important in Jesus’ ministry and in the life of the early church. If you read carefully, you will see that they are not, in fact, totally written out of the story. In fact, as I’ve said many times before, the faithful women are the only people who follow Jesus all the way to the empty tomb. If you want to see what a faithful follower of Jesus looks like, follow those women.
Of course, the tragic thing is that it didn’t take long for a church that was being formed in a patriarchal society to become a patriarchal church, you know, the kind of church where only men are priests or pastors and women have little input at all. And, of course, this patriarchal tradition has continued to this day. There is a very successful church near us this morning in which women can’t lead. The first church recommended to me for Tracy and my next chapter by someone who didn’t know us was a church in which women cannot be in any leadership roles.
Here’s the crazy truth which should stop us all in our tracks. The hardest working people in nearly every church for 2000 years have been…say it with me now… “Women!” I’m going on a retreat with 33 women this week. I’m pretty sure that hell, itself, would freeze over before I got 33 men to go on an overnight retreat. Since we started live-streaming on Facebook, consistently, our viewing audience Is 75% women. In the midst of the current political challenges, I posted something and got 48 positive responses. 47 of them were from women. (Shout out to Jim Moss for being the only guy!)
Maybe men don’t do Facebook. Maybe I’m just terrible at connecting with men. Maybe the church as a whole just hasn’t ever “cracked the code” on speaking to men in a meaningful way. (I do think that the fact that Work Trip has been a deeply meaningful way for some of our men to connect to our church is a clue, here.) Regardless, the people who show up and do the work and help those in need, in pretty much every Christian church are faithful women. I will never understand or tolerate or participate in a church that would exclude faithful women from leadership.
So, the first reason Anna matters is that she is a woman. She is the first faithful woman (aside from Mary) whom we meet in the New Testament. We should remember her by name.
Here’s another interesting thing about Anna: she is an elderly woman. The text tells us that she’s 84. In the ancient world in which life expectancies were pretty short, that’s really old. Talk to an older person for long—a man or a woman—and you’ll hear them speak about the feeling that they are treated as if they are irrelevant. I had one older person tell me that they felt, “invisible.” Honestly, the older I get the easier it is to fall into the trap of just thinking about the past and not living in the present. If we do that, we set ourselves up to be overlooked. The happy older folks that I know still think “here and now” is interesting and don’t think every younger person has lost their mind. (That’s the preacher, preaching to the preacher!). However, there is a bias. When you get older you may get to be “cute” and “sweet” but the price you may pay is that your thoughts and ideas and feelings may no longer matter.
So, Anna has these two strikes against her: she’s a woman and she’s very old. Here’s a third strike: she’s a widow. As a widow, she had no economic options. She would have had to rely on the kindness of family and the community. She would have had no other choice than to be a charity case. Also, the text tells us, she’s been a widow forever. She was married for seven years. She’s 84 now. She’s likely been a widow—a charity case—for over 60 years!
So, what did she do to survive? We’re told she lives at the temple. Simeon—whom we met last week—was so faithful that he was always going to church. That’s one thing. Anna is something entirely different: she lives there.
Typically, a lot of sermons lift up this fact—that she lives at church—as a sign of how faithful she is. I see this differently. What other choice did she have? It’s an awful thing that this woman’s only way to survive was to be at the temple all the time. Her presence there is not a sign of how faithful she was—though, again, she is faithful. Rather, she is present at the temple constantly because she is trapped. No one should be trapped like that.
This matters to me because I think many women over the centuries have found a home in the church—a place where they could do work that was meaningful to them—because there were so few other options. If I need a community and need to feel like I’m making a difference and want to put projects together and make them happen, the church has been more than willing to allow women to do this—as long as the women stayed in their lanes. Anna should have had a chance to be a meaningful part of a broader world. So should all of those other women over the centuries. (As a Catholic friend of mine likes to point out, if you want to see faith in action, watch the nuns, not the priests.)
So, Anna is a faithful woman who happens to be a widow and has basically spent forever inside of the temple—which may not be as great of a thing as it’s cracked up to be. Here’s the thing that matters far more about Anna. Luke tells us that she is a prophetess. At this point, Luke’s audience would have cried out, “She’s a what?” They may not have ever even heard the word.
I’ve said before to you that angels were God’s messengers. We focus on the wings and haolos that artists give them when, in fact, angels, themselves are never the point. The message is what matters. Prophets are the earthly equivalent. Prophets speak God’s truth to the world around them. People are meant to take that truth to heart and change their life and their world, accordingly. People, of course, almost never do that. Instead, they attack the prophets. Throughout the Bible, the prophets take a beating.
There are only a handful of prophetesses which makes sense. Who wants to take any prophet seriously? In a patriarchal world, who would especially want to listen to a woman who claimed to be speaking God’s truth? The prophetesses in the Bible? Let’s say their names out loud: Miriam—Moses’ sister; Deborah—a judge in the Book of Judges; Huldah in the Book of Chronicles; Isaiah, the prophet’s wife, who’s name might have been Aya; and, in the Book of Acts. Phillip”s four daughters who are never named at all.
What matters most about Anna is that when the time was right, despite all the strikes against her, she speaks God’s word. She sings God’s praises. She declares that this child is going to be the one that everyone is waiting for. She speaks God’s truth but no one, apparently, bothered to write it down.
I want you to take Anna seriously. She’s a faithful woman. Because of her faith, she recognizes Jesus even as an infant. She speaks God’s truth to everyone. If you make room in you heart for Anna, you might just recognize the faithul women like her who will show us what it means to follow Christ.