by: Anna Hall, Director of Research and Development
Advent is a season of waiting. Unlike our cultural messages about the days leading up to Christmas, which emphasize activity and purchasing, the liturgical season of Advent is about prayerfully anticipating the inbreaking of God.
Waiting time can be stressful, a vacuum to be filled with activity. It is easy to give ourselves over to cultural busyness instead of sitting with the discomfort of waiting. Yet God calls us during Advent to get comfortable with the uncertainty of staying, sitting, and being.
I have a favorite Bible text on waiting. I love it at least partly because it contains a prophetess with my name. Simeon and Anna were known for their faithfulness. In Anna’s case, she had been at the temple day after day, night after night, for decades. Simeon was in the temple because he had faith in a revelation that he would not die before meeting the Messiah who would heal Israel from the violence and dictatorship of Roman rule.
One thing I love about Simeon and Anna is that they didn’t try to work harder and harder to speed things up. At least not in this story. They also didn’t wait until they had done enough or had time to do it themselves to claim this dream of one who would bring healing and justice. They trusted in God’s promises and appeared to be in a position for their hope to become reality. Day after day. Year after year. They showed up in the places where they believed their God to be working. And in the place they believed God’s promised future would someday arrive.
They probably felt lost at times, wondering if their long-awaited future would ever come. They knew where and how to show up, due to their religious tradition, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t seem uncertain and endless to them. Did they wonder if they would die before that day came? Did they doubt if they had heard God’s calling and promise correctly? Did they grow weary of the wait?
Or did they find that waiting eventually settled into a quiet center, an internal place of communing with a God that was bigger than any discomfort?
They would continue to need that center of faith, even after the birth of Jesus. While Anna, upon meeting the baby Jesus, begins telling those who were long awaiting the healing of their people that the Messiah is here, Simeon proclaims that the road ahead will not be smooth, that many will oppose Jesus, and those in Israel will fall and rise in the days ahead. People’s inner lives will be revealed, including great pain for Mary, Jesus’ mother. After all that waiting, Simeon is here acknowledging that the future has still not arrived in full glory of justice, healing, and radical love. Jesus’ birth is not the end of the book, but the start of a new chapter in God’s story, a chapter that will contain struggle and pain. Jesus is not a quick fix.
I have been reading recently about how we might build resilience in ourselves and our communities in order to survive and thrive during challenging times. One book, Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, by Steven M. Southwick and Dennis S. Charney, draws from neuroscience and interviews with survivors of severe traumas to illustrate how some humans are able to persist and bounce back, even in the worst situations. Several of the resilience principles they discovered bring me back to Simeon and Anna.
To survive the wait for a promised future, Anna and Simeon must have found ways to maintain an optimistic but realistic outlook, rely on their inner moral compasses and their faith, find meaning and purpose in their lives, and accept support from others along the way. They never stopped believing that God would one day bring Good News of a radically different future.
I wonder if, in our current season of waiting, we too can rest on these principles.
- Can we be realistic about the challenges ahead while also resting in the hope and faith that God is with us?
- Can we trust that God has carried God’s people through some of the hardest of times in human history?
- Can we find a firm foundation in our faith and moral compass?
- Can we find meaning and purpose in this season of believing that God will bring about a future of love and justice while existing in present tumult and stress?
- Above all, can we find support for our waiting and faith among those who are on the same journey?
We will not always remain patient and resilient like Simeon and Anna. But we can root ourselves in faith and share our burdens with others (and carry their burdens, too). In the end, resilience relies not only on individual persistence or will but on building beloved communities in which we will remember our faith and journey through hard times together.
I pray that you, like Anna and Simeon, will find your resilience for the journey ahead growing stronger during this Advent season.
