Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] We're gonna spend one more message today as we wrap up this Advent season with what is the final bookend of Luke's account, Not just of the birth of Jesus, but the events that surrounded it. And what we're gonna look at today is the story of two elderly people who were in the temple waiting for Messiah to come. A man by the name of Simeon and a prophetess by the name of Anna. What is interesting about Luke's account of the Advent story is that on one end, the final end of the story, you have Simeon and Anna, and on the front end, you have another elderly couple, Zechariah and Elizabeth. And these two kind of mirror images of one another. They're both waiting. Both couples are waiting for. For something from God. Both of these pairs of a man and a woman, they're waiting on God to fulfill what he had promised. But they're not young. They're not looking forward to decades of maybe God will. No, they're at the end of the road. And yet they're still holding on in faithfulness.
[00:01:16] And what I love about Luke's account is that from the beginning to the end, what he's saying is this is for everybody.
[00:01:23] This hope of God coming close, this hope of the child, of the Messiah that might bring salvation. This isn't just for the strong. This isn't just for the revolutionaries who can go out and shake things up. This is for everybody who ever held on to hope while they waited.
[00:01:41] And so this is for you. If you're old today, I'll let you self identify if you're old or not.
[00:01:49] Maybe you feel like the best promises of God have not come to pass in your own experience in your life.
[00:01:57] Today's scripture is going to give us this glimpse into what it looks like to trust that God is never quite done with us. There's a song, I think it says, you know, if you're still breathing, he's not done yet.
[00:02:10] If you're still here, if you're still with us, come on in the room today, if you're still watching online from wherever you're at, in a warmer place, and you didn't have to trudge through the slush this morning. Come on, he's not done with us. And that's the hope that we have in the story this morning. And turn, if you have a Bible, and if not, it's going to be on the screen to Luke, chapter two.
[00:02:34] Luke, chapter two.
[00:02:37] Starting in verse 25, it says, @ that time, there was a man in Jerusalem named Simeon. He was righteous and devout and was eagerly waiting for for the Messiah to come and rescue Israel. The Holy Spirit was upon him and had revealed to him that he would not die until he had seen the Lord's Messiah.
[00:02:57] That day, the Spirit led him to the temple. So when Mary and Joseph came to present the baby Jesus to the Lord as the law required, Simeon was there.
[00:03:07] He took the child in his arms and he praised God, saying, sovereign Lord, now let your servant die in peace, as you have promised. I have seen your salvation which you have prepared for all people. He is a light to reveal God to the nations, and he is the glory of your people, Israel. Jesus parents were amazed at what was being said about him. And then Simeon blessed them and he said to Mary, the baby's mother, this child is destined to cause many in Israel to fall and many others to rise. He has been sent as a sign from God, but many will oppose him. As a result, the deepest thoughts of many hearts will be revealed and a sword will pierce your very soul. So here we have Simeon. He is led by the Spirit. The Spirit speaks to his heart. Hey, today's a good day to go to the temple, Simeon.
[00:03:56] And there he arrives, and he finds this young family doing what the law requires. So as the firstborn child, Jesus needed to be presented temple and a sacrifice needed to be made. And so for wealthier families, they might bring a lamb as a sacrifice at the temple as they presented their firstborn son. We find in this story that Jesus family, they don't have the means to do that. And so instead they bring a lesser offering of turtledoves and they present the child as the law requires. And I love how Jesus is about to upset all the norms of the religious system that had been since Moses day. He's about to turn it on its head. If you remember the story of Passion, week before Easter, Jesus comes into that very temple and begins to overturn the tables of the money changers. And he shakes things up. In fact, it's the last straw of why he is betrayed and turned over to be crucified is because he poses a threat to the temple system.
[00:04:59] And yet here he is as a baby being brought in as the law requires to the temple to be presented before God. And there in the temple is a man who has been waiting for this moment for decades.
[00:05:14] We go on. It says in verse 36, there is another person here in the temple. Anna. A prophet was also there in the Temple. She was the daughter of Phaneuel from the tribe of Asher, and she was very old. Her husband died when they had been married only seven years. And then she lived as a widow to the age of 84.
[00:05:33] If you're 84 in the room and you're, like, very old. Come on, Luke. It was different times. They didn't live as long back then. She never left the Temple, but stayed there day and night, worshiping God with fasting and prayer. And she came along just as Simeon was talking with Mary and Joseph. And she began praising God. She talked about the child to everyone who had been waiting expectantly for God to rescue Jerusalem. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you today for these stories of faithfulness.
[00:06:03] We thank you that as we find ourselves in their story today, that it might spur in us and start in us a desire to keep showing up in the waiting, to keep showing up on the lookout for your faithfulness and your promise. We pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.
[00:06:24] Interesting. The timing and how Luke makes a point to Note her age.
[00:06:31] 84 years would have put her alive. At the time when the Romans marched into Judea and sieged Jerusalem and took over the Temple, there was a Roman journal, a Roman general named Pompey, who led the Roman legions into Jerusalem, and they besieged the city for three months.
[00:06:54] And during the battle that ensued before Rome actually took over the city and the Temple, and the general would actually march into the holiest place, the Holy of Holies, in the temple, desecrating the Jewish seat of God's presence among them.
[00:07:10] 12,000 Jewish people would be slaughtered in that siege and war.
[00:07:17] And so, by putting Anna in the temple in the narrative and mentioning she's 84 years old, that means she was around 63 BC when Rome came and sacked the temple. And so we have this full story of this young girl who is witnessing the fall of her nation, the fall of her temple, and watching as Rome comes in, desecrates the temple, and then takes over and becomes the occupying force. And then she gives her life after her husband dies. We don't know where or when, but she gives the rest of her days to the service of this promise that one day God would come and make it right.
[00:08:03] And so when Anna is waiting for the Messiah, you can imagine what she is hoping for is that a revolutionary would rise up to do what? To kick Rome out of there, to restore what they had before Rome desecrated the holiest places, to leave them alone so they can get back to what they had when they were God's people, unencumbered by this occupying force of Rome. That is her hope and her desire.
[00:08:33] And what Simeon and what Anna can't see and don't understand is that the plan and the promise of God is not only that it would outlast and that it would be a new kingdom that would take over the Roman Empire, but it would be greater than that, that salvation would come to everyone for all time because of this child.
[00:08:55] So the child is brought in and is blessed by Anna.
[00:09:00] And isn't it interesting that Anna becomes the very first Christian evangelist in history?
[00:09:07] It says she talked about the child to everyone who had been waiting expectantly for God to rescue Jerusalem.
[00:09:16] These two figures are part of a generational story of waiting for God's promises.
[00:09:23] And to be waiting for a new king to come to upset the empire would have been a dangerous thing.
[00:09:31] If you remember the story, when the wise men come looking for the child, right, they follow the star and they come from the east and they're looking for this child that they've read about and heard about. So they go to King Herod and they say, king Herod, we've seen the stars in the sky. And they're telling us that there is a child that's born king. And Herod, who is a maniacal ruler, has killed his own sons because they were a threat to his power. I mean, this is the level of crazy that Herod is operating under.
[00:10:08] Herod gathers his scholars around him. He says, what do the scriptures say? And they say, well, the child is to be born in Bethlehem. You know the story. And so the wise men go out, and through this process, Herod becomes so enraged that a child might come who becomes king and usurps his power that he puts out the order that all the baby boys and the toddlers under 2 should be killed in Bethlehem and the surrounding area. I mean, this is a dangerous thing to be going around saying, hey, we're waiting for the king. We're waiting for a new king to be born.
[00:10:44] And so what I want us to look at when we think about Simeon and Anna is not just too sweet elderly folks that are slowly moving around the temple handing out cookies, which is a good thing to do, by the way, if you're on the greeting team, you're older and you're giving out cookies today. God bless you. That's a good thing to do.
[00:11:02] But I also want to catch in the narrative that what they are doing is they are operating as enemies of the state, holding onto a dangerous promise that God's kingdom was going to come and shake things up.
[00:11:16] And I think oftentimes we want to make our faith in the hope of Christ so palatable that oftentimes we are afraid to risk anything for it.
[00:11:31] And the challenge I have is that sometimes faithfulness to the promise of God will put us in a place where we have to risk something for it, where there is a cost to believing in the promises of God, that to be faithful to God's promise and His Word is something that doesn't just make us the most pleasant people in the room, but oftentimes it makes us those who are willing to risk and to pay a cost to follow after.
[00:12:07] And I do think this, that the mark of a strong faith is oftentimes less about how well you can recite good theology and more about your willingness to show up in God's presence.
[00:12:22] We know 2024, so many good things, amazing, beautiful things that God is doing in this community. Some really high highs, some amazing stories of God's faithfulness, and also some heartbreak and some loss.
[00:12:37] We walked with you, many of you, through the loss of loved ones and the loss of jobs and marriages.
[00:12:47] And it's the highs and the lows. And when we show up in the midst of all of those things, on the best days and the worst days, what that is, is faithfulness.
[00:12:57] It's what Jesus talked to his disciples about when he said, hey, here's what I want you to do. I want you to abide in me. That's it. I want you to keep showing up.
[00:13:07] Peter, you're a little crazy. And your ideas about me are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and you're all over the place. Just keep showing up. Abide in me. Be faithful to my words.
[00:13:21] It's in the faithfulness that we find God is meeting us.
[00:13:26] But oftentimes, faithfulness looks a lot like waiting.
[00:13:30] Do you like waiting?
[00:13:31] We went on this cruise from my parents 50th a few months ago, a month ago, and hadn't been on a cruise in a long time.
[00:13:41] Sounds really nice.
[00:13:43] Apologies to the cruise lines, but it's just. It's a lot of. It's like a floating mall that you can't leave, you know?
[00:13:51] And so us and 5,000 of our closest friends were on this little boat together.
[00:13:56] And I realized, like, oh, this is just lines. That's all it is.
[00:14:03] Like, you wait for your food. You wait to walk down the hallway. You wait. And it's just waiting and waiting and waiting. And if I'm going to wait that long, I need the payoff to be really good.
[00:14:16] Instead, it's an average lido bar buffet. You know, at the end of the waiting, what I want to say to us is waiting can be really, really hard when we're waiting on the promises of God.
[00:14:35] But what is on the other end of that waiting is always worth it. I believe that and my hope and my pastor's heart for us that we would be really willing to stay in the waiting because we understand the goodness of God that is on the other side of that waiting.
[00:14:59] As Paul would say, no eye is seen and no ear has heard what God has prepared.
[00:15:04] And so in this waiting, we have more of an expectation of the goodness. And we know this kind of holy waiting. We see it when getting married. And as a husband, I'm standing at the front of the altar and waiting for my bride to walk down, that it's a holy waiting or waiting for a child to be born. And those long, difficult months, Moms, where you're waiting for this child. There's a holiness in the waiting, but also in the waiting is a vulnerability because we open ourselves up to the possibility of disappointment.
[00:15:48] I was at a prayer event a couple years back, and we were talking about the power of prayer and the practices of prayer.
[00:15:59] And there was a time with the pastor who was leading the session on prayer and talking about just questions we had about prayer and its effect. And so I raised my hand and I asked him, because at the time, my wife had just been diagnosed with a really, really bad diagnosis.
[00:16:21] And as I raised my hand, I said, you know, how do we pray for really big, impossible things?
[00:16:33] Also knowing that oftentimes people have prayed for the same things and it hasn't worked out.
[00:16:40] And the pastor responded and he said, the God who is good enough to hear our prayers is big enough to handle our disappointments.
[00:16:52] And I thought that is a profound, profound invitation into the risk of disappointment when we go before God in times of waiting, where the way that God meets us, when we engage in the waiting, regardless of outcome, the peace and the power and the grace that is ministered through his Holy Spirit in those moments outweighs the potential of disappointment on the other side. You hear me?
[00:17:23] And so what this does for us when we are waiting on the promises of God, and maybe we've been waiting not for weeks or months, but years or decades, is it reminds us that if we keep showing up that there is a meeting of God's presence in our lives, that happens.
[00:17:44] The fact that Simeon and Anna are waiting in the temple for A Messiah to come, that they are waiting for the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy about one who would come and be God with us. The Messiah means that for 700 years, there were others before them that were also waiting, that were also carrying that torch of hope, so that when Jesus finally does show up, someone is there to greet him.
[00:18:15] And isn't it a beautiful thing when generations go by and hope is the thread that ties all that together?
[00:18:23] And, you know, in 2024, like, everything is so fast and so rapid that we lose sight of what it is to give ourselves to things that won't even come to pass until after we're gone.
[00:18:38] I think about, was it a month ago, Less than a month ago, they reopened the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and they rebuilt essentially the entire roof and structure and refurbished the entire inside in five years.
[00:18:54] That's crazy. The amount of construction and care and artistry that goes into a project like that in five short years. And so I looked it up. Originally, it took almost 200 years to build.
[00:19:09] And so think about that. You have people who are probably the best craftsmen and best artisans anywhere in Europe are brought together at the beginning stages as they're setting foundations and as they're setting the first stones and the masons are coming together, and they all know that they will never see this anywhere near completion. And yet they set the stone, and yet they carve this thing. Whatever the cathedrals have, Evan, you should have done more research on cathedrals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you understand what I'm saying, that as they are beginning to build something that will last generations and centuries, they know we're never going to see the end of this, and yet we are going to throw our heart and soul into it. See, we used to understand this, that there is multiple generations of God working and moving. And I feel it. I feel the modern tendency to think like, well, whatever happens in the next six months is all I can get my head around. So that's what I'm going to throw my life into. And oftentimes God is saying, come on, think longer term, expand your time scale, and understand that what I am doing oftentimes is over generations. And that inspires us to invest in our children, a legacy of faith, to pour into generations that are coming after us this hope and the promises of God.
[00:20:48] These two not only go to the temple every day, but they are representations of the system of worship in the temple, waiting for the Messiah to come and upset everything. And what's interesting about this moment in the temple that Simeon and Anna Are in is historically the Ark of the Covenant, the seat of God's presence. It was lost in the exile way back in Isaiah's day. And so when they build the second temple and they have the holy of holies and all this, it's missing what was the representation of God's actual presence. The ark's not there. It's gone.
[00:21:31] And so by the time Simeon and Anna are there, they are waiting not only for the Messiah, but they're waiting for God's presence to return to the temple.
[00:21:40] And so when Jesus shows up in the arms of his mother Mary, what we find is that what they have waited for has now come, that God's presence has come back to the temple. And what I want to encourage us in this regard, to watch for, is when our worship is missing God's presence.
[00:21:58] The correct response is not to give up on worship. It's to wait patiently for God's presence to come and fill our worship again.
[00:22:06] If you feel like your faith or your worship, your church attendance is void of any kind of real meaning. It's become repetition or rote habits. I would say, don't give up on that. Simply invite the Holy Spirit to come and fill your worship once again. Amen.
[00:22:27] Your worship and mine. It needs the living presence of Jesus.
[00:22:33] I wanted to read Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 31. This might be familiar to you. It says, but those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.
[00:22:45] They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint. I like it in the NLT because commonly, and you might have memorized this maybe in Sunday school, where it says, those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength and the new living. It switches that word for those who trust in the Lord. I think trusting and waiting are actually one and the same when it comes to how we interact with God.
[00:23:11] I think many times waiting feels just like silence. Really hard silence.
[00:23:18] And we live our lives and it feels like God is so far from us and that silence can be like, deafening, like, ah, God, I've done the things, I've tried to be faithful and I've shown up. And it feels like, God, you're not fulfilling your end of the bargain.
[00:23:43] I just, I want to maybe speak this hope over you that Jesus is going to be faithful to his promises in your life.
[00:23:57] And whatever risk of disappointment that we carry in the waiting is outweighed by the grace that he's going to minister to us as we open our hearts and open our hands to his presence.
[00:24:13] Second Peter 3, 9 says, the Lord isn't really being slow about his promises. Some people think, no, he's being patient for your sake.
[00:24:23] And so because Christ has come, we have hope in the waiting.
[00:24:30] We have hope that God has been faithful and he will be faithful. We have hope that waiting is never wasted.
[00:24:40] If seasons of waiting feel like you're doing nothing and you're like, I gotta get something done, understand that waiting is part of the process by which we renew our strength, by which we soar on wings like eagles. We run and not grow weary. We walk and not faint.
[00:24:58] And hope is always worth it.
[00:25:01] Hebrews 6:19 says, we have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.
[00:25:08] I want to invite us to reattach ourselves to the anchor of our soul that is our hope in Jesus today.
