Today the church marks a strange and ancient feast, Candlemas, Candelaria, the Feast of the Presentation. 40 days have elapsed since Christmas. We come again to light candles in the name of hope for God’s arrival, God’s presence even in our messy world. We are greeted in Luke’s Gospel by Simeon and Anna. This story of Jesus’ presentation, and Anna and Simeon’s response, this morning I want to say invokes perhaps one of the most important elements of the spiritual life. An element I’m going to call “the Great Resilience.”
The great resilience is shown because Simeon and Anna, Luke tells us, have been waiting. They has been waiting for the restoration of Israel. These are people who knows what it is to wish for a different world. Remember Israel was under Roman occupation. Roman armies had marched through the streets through most of Simeon and Anna’s long lives. They were among the last generation who, as children knew Jerusalem before Pompey conquered the city. Taxes were due to the emperor. In the midst of the occupation, under terrible conditions, God’s people were longing. Anna and Simeon long from a specific place, the temple.
We know nothing else about either of the characters. Anna and Simeon appear nowhere else in the Gospels, nowhere else in Scripture, nowhere in the archeological or historical record. All we know about them comes from this chapter of Luke.
And I want to suggest to you this morning, that Luke is less interested in their historical biography than in what Anna and Simeon represent. Luke invites us to read this passage allegorically. Luke invites us to see the power of the great resilience through the eyes of two old and faithful people. There is power in the intergenerational aspect of this story, of the old helping the young to have hope, to see the possibility that Jesus represents. There is a wisdom in Anna and Simeon’s faith, wisdom that has been hard won.
Cultivating Resilience
I spoke about resilience a couple of weeks ago. Cultivating resilience means for Christians, cultivating the inner life, the practice of prayer. Anna and Simeon are both prayerful. Luke doesn’t give us many details about their practices. Simeon is simply “devout.” Anna worships night and day in the temple with fasting and prayers. We get the sense they have been at this inner work a long time. We may not know much about how they cultivated their spiritual life, but we do see the results. This story of the presentation, is a story of how the Spiritual life can help us to see.
Like Anna and Simeon, we are living through days when outrage is common. In Roman occupied Jerusalem, violence was common. Injustice was everywhere. It could have been easy for Anna and Simeon to get stuck in a cycle of outrage. They could have grown angrier with every report of an abuse from a Roman Soldier, a governor, even the emperor himself. Anger and outrage were all around.
Anger can be a useful emotion, if it spurs us to action, if we can find a way to name what we are angry about and to work for change. But every emotional response we have, even outrage, has multiple dimensions. God made us complex creatures. What the spiritual life can help us to do is to turn the prism of our feelings, to look at emotions from another angle. If we are able to turn that prism, we can move from a deeper place than the quick burn of anger.
Because often, often, anger has another dimension. Often anger, especially anger at injustice, if we turn it just slightly in the light, also looks like longing. Anger is the flash in the pan that tells us we are feeling pulled away from what we hoped for, what we’d worked for, from what matters. But Anger can also help us to know our deepest longings. Anger can even help us to know what we believe God wants for our world. Don’t discount anger. Don’t ignore your outrage, but also know that your soul can only handle so much of those emotions. They are hot. They will burn you out. If you want to work for justice, in the long-term, if you want to build resilience, it helps to learn how to transform your anger.
Longing
Simeon and Ana’s spiritual practices have allowed them to stay not in the heat of anger, not in the boiling place of outrage, but to hold the same problems from another angle. Their prayers have shaped their souls to watch for One who is coming.
Simeon, of course, names that longing famously in song:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace
according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen : thy salvation;
Which thou hast prepared : before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles : and to be the glory of thy people Israel.
Those words are sung each night in the services of evening prayer and compline. The church reminds us each night to continue to long for the world as it should be. As Christians, we long for God to come again into our world.
Anna and Simeon have been longing for a sign that despite all the damage worldly leaders can do, despite all the outrage, all the frustration, there is a deeper story, God’s story, a great resilience.
My friends, we are living in days when the urge to panic is strong. Through all of the last two years, the rhetoric of both political parties was dangerously apocalyptic. We were told over and over again that if the other side won, the world was going to be destroyed. Our democracy was at its end.
Shock isn’t sustainable
And yes, let me say, the speed with which the new administration is seeking to remake our country is a shocking. The shock is by design. If we stay in a state of shock, we aren’t able to function, we aren’t able to organize, we aren’t as able to push back. If we stay shocked, and outraged, we aren’t working from the depth required to realize the world for which we must still hope.
There are specific new policies we must push back against, policies which dehumanize: immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, citizens of other nations. Policies which will degrade our environment and harm our ecosystems must be opposed. But please, please, do not let outrage overwhelm you, do not let hatred and anger be where you stop. Find the longing beneath that anger. Find the hope. Take the small concrete steps you can: make art, call your congresspeople, sign a petition. Find ways to witness for God’s reign even now. And when the you’re tired, when you’re frustrated, when you are angry, take a moment to breathe, because when you slow down, you’ll find signs of the great resilience.
Signs of the great resilience
This week there were signs all around. A couple of you sent me the story of a Navajo woman at a factory in Arizona who managed to convince immigration officials that she and her fellow Diné were not undocumented migrants. After the encounter, she brought the community together to comfort one another. In that comforting, and in her willingness to tell the story and to stand up against the indignity, there is great resilience.
There were more local signs too. This week, the kids at our day school learned to share, sang songs about respecting one another, gave hugs and high fives to the adults on campus.
This week, a couple dozen volunteers came to Casa San Miguel, our food pantry early Monday and Tuesday morning to organize supplies and feed over a hundred families. With our guests there were moments of laughter, and gratitude. This week Las Familias volunteers organized donations to bring clothes and supplies to immigration shelters in El Paso. This week I had about a dozen emails, texts, and phone calls from parishioners asking me what more we could do for the immigrants in our community.
And this week needed snow fell in the mountains. Bulbs underground, paying no attention to White House press briefings, pushed roots into the soil, anchoring themselves for showy blossoms in spring. Signs were everywhere.
I’ve told you this story before, but I once ran into our neighbor Richard Rohr over in England. He was talking at a church gathering and told the congregation that his most important spiritual practice was turning off the evening news. He said he found himself getting angry at his TV one night, when he happened to catch a glimpse of an Albuquerque sunset outside his window in the South Valley. He realized that he was missing a quote “important cosmic event.” In Albuquerque, he told those soggy Brits, almost sunset is a cosmic event, much more important than whatever the news is talking about, so he started turning it off and going outside.
Richard is right. If we are to be faithful people in times like ours, if we are to be followers of Jesus, we need to watch for signs that are broadcast on a much slower timeframe, a much more cosmic timeframe, than the 24 hour news cycle or the smartphone scroll. Anna and Simeon, Luke tells us, have found the wisdom to wait for this kind of news, to see the fulfillment of their longing in a two month old child. Some of the best advice I know about God is simple: if you want to have a relationship with God, learn to walk at a slower pace. Learn to work at a slower pace. Advice I need to follow better.
Because all around there are signs of hope, signs that despite our human efforts, the world will go on. To be a spiritual person, in times of outrage, is watch patiently for the signs of hope. To be a spiritual person, in times of outrage, means never letting go of joy. To be a spiritual person, in times of outrage, means never letting the outrage win. We can again light candles against the dark. Like Anna and Simeon we can wait, and watch, and plan for a great resilience.
Mike Angell 