Those Who Dream Will Not Keep Silent
Luke 2:22-40
January 7, 2024
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU-Adtgb5nI
Anna and Simeon are doubters. They have to be. Luke tells us about one particular day when they seem full of faith and confidence, but that’s just one day. I have to believe that they had other days, different days. We don’t know Simeon’s age, but he is always pictured as old. At some earlier point, he received a word from God that he would not die until he saw the Messiah. He might have received that word at 20 and now be in his 30’s. But, on this day, he says “I can die now because I have seen God’s salvation.” And that suggests he is old enough to be close to death. But think about it. If you had become convinced that you were going to see the Messiah in your lifetime, could you really sustain that belief every day? Wouldn’t there be times of doubt? Especially when you witness, as Simeon did, the violence being visited on his country, the religious and political factions among his people. Perhaps he has lost a beloved spouse or been alienated from his children. Maybe he deals with chronic pain. We don’t know any of the details that make up his life, but I expect that he has the same kinds of worries and hardships that all people face. And that’s why I say he has to have his doubts.
Anna has been a widow for most of her eighty-four years. Widows are dependent on other people’s charity. They are often poor and treated unjustly. Anna knows suffering. She is from the university of life, the school of hard knocks. She’s among the company of those who suffer in this world and among those who create space in their hearts to pray. I do not know any praying person who does not also sometimes doubt.
Fred Buechner said “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don't have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”[1]
I’m belaboring this point because sometimes we separate ourselves from people in the Bible. Sometimes we think that we could never be like them, never speak or act as boldly as they did, because we see them as totally confident and faithful and we know that we are not. So I want to remind us that what we see is one extraordinary day which has probably been a long time in coming. Anna and Simeon are able to speak and act as they do because they have lived through the cycles of doubt and trust many, many times.
When Simeon and Anna became aware of Jesus’ presence in the temple, they could not keep silent. They were compelled to speak up. God’s dreams were not for them alone. Like them, we should not keep silent, but keep speaking and acting to share God’s dream.
Doug Pagitt was the founding pastor of a church in Minneapolis called Solomon’s Porch. That church went out of existence last year at age 23. Doug was also a leader in the Emerging Church Movement. That movement and the example of Solomon’s Porch were formative for thousands of Christians and church leaders of my generation.
Before Doug got involved in that movement, he was considered a highly successful pastor. He served as youth minister at nationally known church running a very large youth ministry. And then he worked for a private foundation where his job was to find the next generation of church leaders and his funding for that was virtually unlimited. But there came a day when he realized that a voice inside him was saying that there was a different kind of church world he wanted to see happen. Some might call that a dream. So he left his fully-funded job and set off to plant a church without any money and little support. In a recent interview, he said “you know one of the things that happens when you do something like this and that other people consider to be brave or heroic, often in the moment it doesn't feel that way. It’s not a self-narrative of I'm being brave. It’s normally a sense of “I don't have another choice right now.” I was serious enough about my Christian spirituality and my vocation to say “there is not a future for me that I see as preferable inside this [church] world.” [2] He was compelled to speak and to act, to share God’s dream as he understood it with people who were not receiving it.
This week, I had the incredible privilege to be part of an interfaith group, Christians, Muslims and Jews together, who were lobbying for a ceasefire in Gaza. I was in the presence of some extraordinary people who were compelled to speak up. There was an Israeli woman whose grandparents and other family members were killed by Nazis in Poland during the Holocaust. Her father narrowly survived at age 11. She recognizes genocide when she sees it. She had her 9-month-old baby with her. She said that she cannot look at her own child without seeing the images of Palestinian children being killed and she cannot keep silent. She was articulate and persistent and kept speaking even when her voice shook with emotion.
I heard the testimony of a woman from Gaza who has lived here for decades. On October 21, sixteen members of her immediate family in Gaza were killed by an airstrike. Sixteen people. All at once, she lost her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law, two nephews, the losses go on and on. There are some members of the family still alive, she thinks, but she doesn’t know where they are and can’t contact them. She weeps every day. Her husband has also lost family members. They say that they have to speak up, to plead for the bombs and the killing to stop, for the sake of those who are still alive.
I heard from first generation Palestinian- Americans, US citizens who believe that they do no matter, that no one who looks like them is valued in this country, which is their homeland. Even so, they cannot keep silent. This was not their first meeting with this elected official. They keep raising their voices, even though they often think no one cares, no one is listening.
I wonder how many people heard Anna and Simeon in the temple that day? It probably would have been easy to dismiss them. They were strangers, old people, probably talking nonsense. I wonder how it was that Simeon got to hold baby Jesus. Most new parents don’t hand over their newborns to strangers in crowded public places. Did he just grab the baby from Mary’s arms? Or did Mary recognize something important was happening? I don’t know. But someone listened. Someone was paying attention or else we wouldn’t know the story.
The Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie said, “Stories matter. [Multiple] stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”[3]
God’s dream of shalom, of intense pervasive well-being for all creation, is not for us alone. We must share it. We must tell our stories about Jesus, about ourselves, about the world we live in. There is a time to speak and also a time to keep silent so that we can listen to others. When we lobbied earlier this week, the meeting scheduled for 30 minutes lasted 45 minutes. And in all of that time, I spoke for less than a minute, just to introduce myself. My default, you might have noticed, is to talk, but what I might have said did not compare to the stories and voices that needed to be heard.
Friends, we live in a time of great change, a time when one world is dying and another is struggling to be born. That may make us fearful. It may increase our doubts. But we cannot lose hope. We must keep dreaming. On the threshold of this new year, this is my prayer for myself and for all of us – that we will speak up when necessary, for ourselves and on behalf of others to share God’s dream, and that we will also be silent to hear the stories of strangers and friends who “dare to seek to dream God’s reign anew.”
May it be so for me and for you. Amen.
[1] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, (New York: HarperCollins, 1973), p 20.
[2] https://trippfuller.com/2023/12/18/doug-pagitt-the-emerging-church-the-end-of-solomons-porch/
[3] TED Talk: The Danger of a Single Story, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en