Faces of Our Faith: Anna | Luke 2:21-38 | 7.26.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is a gift to be with y'all today.

First of all, I want to thank you for your support.

This past week I got to attend a continuing education event with the Direct Action and Research Training Center.

And I was refreshed and inspired as I learned more about what organizations like Justice Knox do to help churches live out our biblical mandate to do justice together.

I left inspired by the way people of faith, when connected in relationship and organized around shared values, when what they can do, what we can do together to make our communities more equitable and accessible places.

It was good to build relationships with other ministers and leaders here in Knoxville.

There were a gaggle of us who got to go together.

And it was good to meet other people who are committed to living out their faith and doing justice in our communities so that we might be a better mirror for God's vision of the beloved community.

So thank you.

And I'm looking forward to sharing more about that in the coming weeks.

We'll also be setting up some listening sessions in the fall, so be on the lookout for that.

But today we are continuing our summer worship series on faces of our faith, revisiting folks from Scripture and from church history who lived out their unique callings that might help us discern our own vocations as followers of Jesus.

And before we meet our character for this week, let's pray and ask God to bless our time in the scripture this morning.

Will you pray with me?

Living God, help us so to hear your holy word that we might truly understand, that in understanding we may believe, and in believing we may follow in all faithfulness, seeking your honor and glory in all we do.

Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Last week we remembered the story of Jonah, the reluctant and resistant, depending on your own metric, maybe the worst prophet ever, but who was still quite successful in his own right.

Remembering that God's grace is stronger and more foundational than our anger and resentment.

And today we have another prophetic figure, this time from the New Testament in the Gospel of Luke.

If you'll remember with me, Luke opens his gospel not with a king in a palace, but with two women, Elizabeth and Mary, both pregnant against all odds, and both singing songs of hope and prophetic upending, before their children ever drew their first breath.

Elizabeth carries the one who will be known as John the Baptist.

And Mary, a young unwed girl from Nazareth, carries the Messiah.

And when Mary sings her magnificating, God has scattered the proud and brought down the rulers and lifted up the lowly.

She's naming from the very start exactly what this inbreaking reign of God brings with it: humility for the powerful and for the mighty, and then dignity and uplift for the poor and the forgotten.

And then the familiar scenes unfold.

There's no room at the inn, there's the manger, and there's a birth announced to not emperors but shepherds working the night shift.

The angels split the sky with good news for the lowest people around.

Heaven, it turns out, has a habit of showing up in unexpected places and to the folks who've often had it hardest.

And when the time comes for Mary and Joseph, faithful Jewish parents as they are, to present the baby Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem.

They go.

And when they arrive, someone is waiting for them named Simon.

Sorry, Simeon.

Simeon was an old man, righteous and devout, and he was promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he saw the Lord's Messiah with his own eyes.

And when he sees the child, he takes him in his arms and he blesses God, and he sings his own song, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for God's people.

And he tells Mary that this child is destined to reveal the thoughts of many hearts.

I like that phrase.

Now let's listen together for God's word to us today in just three short verses from the second chapter of Luke, verses 36 to 38.

Luke writes, There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Fanuel, of the tribe of Asher.

She was of great age.

Having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four.

She never left the temple, but worshipped there with fasting and prayer night and day.

At that moment, she came and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

There they are.

Those are the three verses we have about Anna the prophet.

So who was she?

Who was this woman of faith and witness so prominent and well remembered that Luke, in his telling of the story to a wider audience, could not leave her out.

Even though the casual reader might pass her over as a footnote, scholars understand that for Luke in particular, when women of faith make their way into the text, particularly when, like Anna, the actual plot line might not be changed had they been left out, right?

If those three verses weren't in there, the major plot still holds.

But Luke has to put her in there.

We can't leave women like this out.

Women like Joanna and Susanna, who supported Jesus' ministry in Luke chapter 8, or Demaris, who gets a brief mention in Acts, chapter 17.

Luke 8 · chapter mention Acts 17 · chapter mention

Scholars note that Luke describes his purpose for writing this gospel.

He says, I want to give a well-ordered and believable account.

And bringing women and their experiences into the story, as much as I wish culture were different back then, bringing women into the story would not have increased its believability necessarily.

So, that means for us, interpreters today, when these women are named as they are throughout Luke, it's not to add credibility, but to keep him from losing it.

So many folks with connections to Jesus' life and ministry knew about these women, knew their names and how important they were, that Luke could not skip them over.

He had to include them, or else the reader would go, I'm not believing Luke.

He didn't mention Anna.

He didn't mention Demaris.

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

And so to neglect to include her, or Joanna, Rhoda, Lydia, Priscilla, or Philip's daughters for that matter, to neglect their inclusion would be to risk making the gospel unreliable.

According to scholar Barbara E.

Reed, Anna is not a harmless widow whose pious practices didn't disturb anyone.

Yet, despite acknowledging Anna as a prophetic figure, Luke doesn't really give us her words.

Yet this woman who speaks about the child as to all can hardly be seen as being left without words because her message of praise and redemption became well known amongst the whole community.

She overflowed with gospel gratitude after years and years of struggle, of loneliness and displacement.

You see, the text notes that she was of the tribe of Asher.

And I didn't know this before I was doing my research this week.

But Asher was one of the ten northern tribes that had been scattered by the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom, the very empire that Jonah's Nineveh belonged to.

Anna descends from the displaced northern remnant, which means she carries generational displacement from her homeland in her family history before she ever becomes a widow.

And then she finds herself a childless widow from a scattered tribe, meaning she would likely have had no family safety net, no property, no inheritance or protection in a world that ran through husbands and sons.

And so her decades at the temple aren't just piety, they may also have been her very best bet at living a life.

And yet, look at what she made of it.

Eighty-four years old.

And when the moment finally comes, she doesn't shuffle off in silence, she erupts in speech and praise.

She speaks about the child to everyone who will listen.

Grief and loss and displacement did not get the last word in Anna's story.

Anna did.

And that's not unusual, you know.

In my experience, some of the deepest and most uh soul-nourishing gifts we have uh did not come from people who had it easy.

They didn't come from uh people who had too much, they came from folks who had next to nothing and who refused to let that be the end of the story.

And you'll know what I mean by this if you've ever had a good Southern dish, by the way.

Maybe it was your grandma's mac and cheese, or her biscuits and gravy, maybe it was shrimp and grits from the coast, or gumbo, or etuffet.

Folks like to joke about how bad for you Southern food is too greasy, too buttery, too sweet, too spicy.

But there's a history to how our food got to be that way.

How is it that folks took milled dried corn and made it into one of my favorite dishes?

How did they make the most bitter, unwanted leaves off the same plant that grows broccoli and cabbage and turn them into spicy, uncuous colored greens?

People who worked harder than anyone were left with only the cheapest cuts of meat and the cast-off parts of the vegetable, but they refused to settle for food that didn't taste good.

And they wanted more for themselves, so the enslaved people on the plantations, the hillbillies and coal miners and appalachia, the native people of this land took the humble ingredients that they had and generation after generation figured out how to make them delicious.

Adding oil and spice, vinegar and butter, whatever it took, to elevate the toss-off ingredients into the culinary genius you can find celebrated around the world today.

Watch a documentary one time, and there was a guy making colored collard greens in Sweden.

It was awesome.

And it's not just food.

You give a scattered and crushed people almost nothing, and they will still make music out of it.

I think about the Irish, a people colonized, starved half to death and famine, forbidden for generations to speak their own languages in their schools.

And yet Ireland became one of the great wellsprings of poetry and song in the world.

And I think about our African American neighbors, enslaved and then segregated, and who came out of that same crucible of suffering, producing the spirituals and the blues and jazz and RB that infuse and undergird pretty much all popular American music to this day.

Olivia Dean.

You don't have Olivia Dean without African American music.

Struggle doesn't excuse suffering, by the way.

That's not what I'm saying.

It doesn't justify it.

But somehow, when people refuse to be crushed by their circumstances, what rises up out of the wreckage is beauty.

And beauty is contagious.

Scholar Belle Hooks has a name for a particular version of this.

She calls it talking back.

Growing up in the segregated South, she remembered how children, in her experience, especially black girls, were taught that silence was safety.

To speak as an equal, to have an opinion and to give it voice was forbidden, risky, punished.

So when the silenced ones dared to speak anyway, to move, as she put it, from being talked about to being the one who talks, that wasn't just bravery.

It was a kind of liberation.

A refusal to remain only the object of somebody else's story.

That's Anna.

That's a childless widow from a scattered, displaced tribe, 84 years old, with no husband, no child, no property, no legal standing.

About as silenced a position as her world could produce.

And Luke, even while calling her a prophet, doesn't record a single quote that she says, but he tells us that she speaks.

And as Barbara Reed points out, Luke gives her the title, but he withholds her words.

But Anna didn't need Luke's permission to have a voice.

The text says she began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

All.

Everyone.

However, she said it, she said it loud enough and long enough, and to enough people that Luke had to write it down, even if he didn't want to.

That church is talking back.

That's someone refusing to stay a footnote.

That is decades of grief and displacement transformed into liberation.

Not into bitterness, not into silence, but into testimony.

She gave her testimony about what God was doing in her life and in the world.

I think about my own mother when I think about what that testimony looks like up close.

My mom has buried her father and her mother and her only sister.

Stacked grief on grief.

Losses most people don't have to carry all at once, well, just a few years apart.

And she's been through her own health scares and she had some major surgeries that I remember when I was a kid.

And still, for decades, she serves as a deacon in her church.

Which means that in grief, she's walked right alongside dozens of other families too, showing up at hospital bedsides and funeral homes.

In the hardest hours that other folks would prefer not to face.

And she could have let all of that like harden her.

Um she could have let it uh turn her inward or silence her, but which it it can turn her inwards sometimes still, but but inside she drives people to doctor's appointments instead.

She sits with folks in the middle of their grief.

Not because anybody's watching, but because she knows what it's like to need somebody to be there.

And what she has poured into me is an undying and unselfish and unconditional love.

And that has done nothing less than free me to be who I am today.

And that's not despite her grief, right?

Her familiarity with loss.

That's what her grief became when she let love transform it into action and speech and storytelling.

Sometimes you have to ask her to tell it, but she tells a good story.

Each of us has a testimony, friends.

Each of us has an experience of grace and redemption.

Some way that God's love broke into your life, changed it in some small way, and maybe, maybe you've tucked it down a little bit, but there's a story in there of what God has done for you.

A time you were made to feel worthy of being heard, but maybe you didn't feel it originally.

There's a testimony in each of us that aches to be told and to be voiced and to be released into the world.

Maybe it's as simple as this.

Because of a love you did not earn, you don't have to keep abiding the suffering the world has handed you, whatever it looks like.

And that's gospel enough to share.

Because when you know who God is and how much God loves you, you know that the world doesn't have to stay like it is.

It can't.

It must not stay like this, because Christ has come and God is even now stirring up a masterpiece of flavor and harmony that no palace or temple or church or courthouse has tasted yet.

And so here's my here's my invitation to you this morning.

Somewhere in your life there is a grief or a wound that you have been carrying maybe for years, maybe for decades, the way Anna carried hers.

And I'm not going to stand up here and tell you that grief is a gift or that or that uh uh you should make something beautiful out of it because you have to.

You don't have to.

But there's an invitation.

There's an invitation.

Grief uh uh uh isn't foisted upon us because that's what God wants.

God did not want Anna's tribe to be scattered or her community broken, but we live in a world that is still in need of a lot of healing.

And yet when God sees our hurts and the damage we do to one another, God can take it and transform it.

Shake in a little bit of this and a little bit of that, give it one of these.

And God can make something nourishing, powerful.

God can take the worst thing that has ever happened, and given enough time and enough grace and enough of our willingness to let love back in, God can turn it into something that feeds somebody else.

Into a ride to the doctor, into a hand held at a hospital bed, into a balm of healing in this hurting world, whatever form it takes.

God can turn it into a word of hope spoken out loud to a whole temple full of people who had stopped expecting the restoration of Jerusalem.

And you don't have to have it all figured out.

You don't have to have it polished.

Anna didn't have a sermon prepared, she just started praising God and telling anyone who would listen.

Some of you are still in the losing or in the silence, and that's all right.

That's holy ground too.

That's where God meets us.

But when you're ready, whenever that day comes, don't let the world talk you into keeping your story to yourself.

Don't let the world convince you that grief has the final word.

Because you have a testimony.

And it's okay to talk back.

Maybe so.

Amen.