This sermon examines the story of Anna when she met the child Jesus in the temple. Dan Kent highlights how she waited for the Messiah for decades and the importance of waiting on God to act in our lives and release his gifts through us. 
Anna was a prophet who was a widow. She had only been married for seven years when she was widowed and she then spent the rest of her life praying and fasting in the temple. When she met Jesus as a baby, she was 84 years old. Her life was dedicated to the redemption of Israel, which meant that she was ardently looking forward to the coming of God’s Messiah. The wording of the text implies that she was a well-known and respected devotee to temple life. When she saw Jesus, she immediately recognized him for who he was, the one for whom she had been waiting.
The story of Anna stands out. In that culture, to be a widow was much more than a sorrowful thing. In a male-centric society, it often resulted in a state of despair. But Anna did not fall into that. She turned her suffering into service. She discovered the joy in serving others as she prayed. Her grief and despair did not overcome her. Instead, it became the seedbed from which God spoke through her.
Anna serves as a role-model for us today. For most, life has not turned out as expected. We all have hit a wall in some way that resulted in grief and despair. Anna embraced her situation and pressed through it in a way that freed her to wait for God’s deliverance. And through that waiting on God, she realized that she had a unique role to play. She was a prophet. She had a gift to be a blessing to others. We all have a gift, one that often is hiding beneath the struggles in life that we face. And many times we never press through the situation patiently, like Anna, and realize what God has given us. Even in the midst of her situation, against all odds, she was a prophet who had eyes to see what others did not.
Anna did not merely wait. She also used her situation to nurture her gifts. We too can do this, even in the midst of not having an opportunity to use them. We, like Anna, can develop our gifts so that when the time comes, we are ready to offer them to others. Our gifts do not depend upon opportunities for use. They are present and we can cultivate them in whatever situation we find ourselves in.
Anna’s response to her challenges did not fit the way of the culture. But we are called to walk a different path, one that looks toward a different goal and a different way of life. We can enter this different way, no matter what we are facing.
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A message I never knew I’ve been waiting for! Haven’t had the artisan job I could get conventionally, but that hasn’t stop me from practicing my talent!
That’s great, Sarah. Thanks for sharing.
Dan Kent
Artisans create items such as pottery, stained or blown glass, jewelry, rugs, blankets, other handicrafts, ornamental objects and artistic floral arrangements.
Sadly those sort of folks often leave what they love doing to pursue something they don’t love because it pays a more money but it’s difficult to be good at something you don’t love doing and that can create problems.
Hopefully we are now in a process of correcting these sort of problems.
I’m more into animation, y’know, cartoons. The industry itself has been in recent upheavals, at least in this nation, so I’m currently working independently. I feel empowered when making drawings come to life, and there’s plenty of life-lesson efforts for it such as patience and tediousness.
I’m a computer guy but in the late 90’s I wrote a series of animation games for the Christian radio station KTIS using Macromedia Director and Flash. The most popular was Donuts Boy’s a spoof on the Chuck and John morning show hosts craving’s for Crispy Creams.
KTIS had a vision of being an online web based worldwide radio station. Donut Boys was so much played that one afternoon it overloaded their server’s bandwidth and crashed with the station getting over 400 calls. The truth was the telecommunications sector of the economy wasn’t ready for what AI wanted to deliver to the web. At that time IT payed the big bucks and that attracted lots of folks that IT was NOT their calling, the joy of their heart’s to do. The military industrial complex jumped in going global in search of talent and worked out the lagging sector problem over time but in a less then friendly fashion much like WWII and Vietnam.
So the hopefully we are now in a process of correcting these sort of problems is about Comer’s book ‘Live No Lives – Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace ‘ and the industrial military complex problem he saw, part of the 3rd enemy, and the hopeful demise of it with a more peaceful approach from the results of this this last election.