Luke 2:36-40 Anna Worships

 

Christmas is over and many people have already moved on and are looking forward to New Years and saying good-bye to 2020, I guess I can understand some of that thinking! Yet Christmas is more than a one-day celebration, it’s a turning point in history, a turning point in our own lives when we make the decision to actually follow Jesus as our Lord and Saviour. That leads to new ways of living, a new way of seeing the world around, a new relationship with God and Jesus through the Holy Spirit. What Christmas does is it introduces us to Jesus, to our Messiah, to the one who shapes our day-to-day living out loud lives.

Christmas leads us to lives shaped by worship, lives that look like Romans 12, especially the way Eugene Peterson translates it in The Message, “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.”

What does this all have to do with our passage this morning, you might ask? Luke introduces us to Anna, a prophetess who has been a widow for a really long time after her husband died after only seven years of marriage. Rather then get married and find life security that way, a woman without a husband or children to look after her usually found themselves in really hard places, Anna chooses instead to spend her time in the temple worshipping day and night, fasting and praying. Likely Anna became a temple worker, one of those people who did the quiet behind the scenes work that kept the temple functioning, such as cleaning, cooking for the priests, and organizing the different things that went on in the temple area. This allowed her to spend most of her time in the one place known to be where God meets his people, a place of worship, allowing her to take her everyday, ordinary life and place it before God as an offering. Anna’s soul and life are shaped by worship.

Luke also emphasizes that Anna is a prophet. This is an important theme for Luke, that the coming back of prophecy is a sign of the coming of the Messiah after about 400 years of quietness on God’s part. Luke emphasizes prophecy to take away any doubt about who Jesus is, that he is the promised Messiah, that he is the Son of God as the angel said, that Jesus has come to save his people, as his name itself tells people. Because of how Anna’s life is shaped around worship, shaped by being centred on God and the Scriptures, shaped by prayer and fasting, her soul is very open and sensitive to the moving of the Holy Spirit and the presence of God.

There are three things that we can learn from Anna. We learn perseverance. Ever since her husband died, Anna dedicated herself to a life of worship. Now spending all her time in the temple is not for everyone, even the priests only stayed for weeks at a time and in-between their shifts at the temple, they would return home to be with their families. I’ve often wondered if Anna knew Simeon and that he had been told that he would see the Messiah before he died. There’s a patience and a perseverance that grows out of that patience that helped Anna continue to center her life on worship even though there must have been temptations to go back to a more regular life. Anna stays focused on God even though she has not been given an easy life. There must have been times of loneliness, times of questioning God’s plans for her life, even times of doubt, hurt and tiredness, and yet she kept her zeal for the Lord.

The second thing we learn from Anna is about worship. Anna’s life is centered on worship. Now worship is more than coming to church on Sunday or temple on Saturday, worship is a way of life. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Colossians, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” This is what day-to-day worship looks like: doing everything as if you’re doing it for Jesus. That makes sense if we call Jesus King.

There’s another approach to worship that I discovered on a Catholic website in a homily. The writer says that in worship we rediscover our greatest treasure. This greatest treasure is our Lord, it’s finding a place where we belong because in worship we come home, we rediscover forgiveness and restoration. The writer reminds us that in worship we return to the place where we are most welcomed and cared for: our Father’s home. When I read this, I immediately thought of the scene in the parable of the Prodigal Son where the father is standing in the roadway waiting for his son to come home, and once he sees his son, he gathers up his robe and runs to greet him, embracing him with deep unconditional love! When our lives are centered on worship, when we arrive in church to worship with each other, it’s coming home and being embraced by our Father.

The third thing we learn from Anna is that a life centered on worship leads directly to sharing our faith enthusiastically. After seeing Jesus and hearing Simeon’s blessing and warning for Mary and Joseph, she goes off giving thanks to God. What a moment for her, to see the promised Messiah! We go all crazy seeing some sports, music, or movie star, Jesus, the promised Messiah is so much more than any human star, no matter how famous or important they think they are.

Anna’s response to seeing Jesus is to talk to everyone looking for redemption of Jerusalem about Jesus. These people are looking for someone to bring them freedom, salvation from their oppressors and Anna has good news for them! In Anna’s response, we hear the echo of the shepherds’ response, right after they went to see the child born who is the saviour of the world, they talked to everyone they met about the baby they had seen and the message the angel gave about the child. When you get good news, amazing news, you want to tell everyone!

Worship doesn’t end when the pastor says “Amen” after the blessing and we sing the last song, worship goes with us out of the building and into our lives. It flows into our day-to-day relationships, our homes and workplaces, our neighbourhoods and communities, compelling us to share the good news of Jesus; the salvation he brings, the new life he offers because of his death on the cross for our sins and his resurrection from the grave as he defeats sin and death. As followers of Jesus and children of God, we also participate in Jesus’ resurrection. This means we live in hope, it means the brokenness and hurt of our past doesn’t need to shape who we are anymore, our identity now comes from Jesus and we can move forward knowing that Jesus can bring us healing, give us a new life rooted in him.

A while back, our family invited a woman to live with us who had found herself homeless. She was a stripper and had sold herself in the past to take care of her children. When she accepted Jesus as her Lord and Saviour, it was like a whole new beginning for her. She was able to experience what healthy love felt like, she was able to see that she was more than what people had believed, that she was loved by God and precious. Life changed for her immediately and at the same time, the consequences of her past took years to over come, but with the help of the Holy Spirit reminding her who she now was, with the help of a group of people in the church who befriended her and walked with her, she was able to enter the new life Jesus offers and today is a lover of God and shares her faith freely with others. She found that coming to worship every week reshaped her soul and keeps her centered on God.

So, during a time where worshipping together is limited, it’s wise to remember that we can worship God in whatever we’re doing by focusing on doing it for Jesus while waiting eagerly for the day we can all gather together to worship God all together as a Bethel Church family again. Until then, keep sharing your love of God and Jesus’ offer of new life and hope with everyone you know!