Active Waiting
December 2009
by Elyse Nelson Winger
The following is a midrash on Luke 2:36-38 (A midrash is a story that explains a biblical text from an ethical or devotional point of view.)
Sabbath day in the women’s section of our synagogue wouldn’t have been the same without Anna. Any day would have been different without her. She was the women’s section, body and soul. Anna had this holy presence, and she lived in the present. And she spoke with prophetic power. She was our Deborah, our Miriam, our Huldah. It was as if her father’s name, Phanuel (meaning face of God), was incarnated in her. You know nothing of her words of wisdom and hope, and I am sorry for that. But know this: She spent a lifetime waiting—actively waiting—and near the end of her life, she saw what she had been waiting for.
Anna was married as young as a girl could be, “from her virginity,” it’s been said, meaning she was about 12. She spent her blossoming years wedded to a man who died too soon. She spent the remainder of her years worshiping and fasting, conversing with all of us, mothering the children she’d never had.
Anna was of the tribe of Asher, one of Jacob’s sons born to Leah’s maid Zilpah. Leah named the child Asher, or fortunate, for she trusted that despite waiting a lifetime for the love of her husband Jacob, others already knew how fortunate she was to have co-mothered so many children.
Anna knew Leah’s story and lived with her foremother’s hope, though for something much greater even than a husband’s love. She lived awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. But know this: She waited not by staying put and silent, but by proclaiming and praying, by caring and confessing. Anna was a prophet! And when she finally saw what she had been waiting for—this tiny dependent child named Jesus, the one about whom her friend Simeon sang so sweetly—Anna never stopped singing Jesus’ praises.
The month of December ushers in Advent and Christmas, and invites us to meet again the women (like Anna) and men who awaited Christ’s coming, even as we wait Christ’s coming again. I am grateful to the Jewish tradition of midrash. It offers faithful imagining—stories behind and around the biblical stories—that open a path into the living word where our foremothers can be known better.
We often don’t get much to work with: Anna commands only three verses of Scripture. Yet in these verses we meet a prophet who models what a life of active waiting can yet be for us. In this season of promise and incarnation, how might we reclaim the power of active waiting in our lives, for this world, in God’s name?
In Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit, Henri Nouwen, the late spiritual guide, writes:
Most of us consider waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The bus is late? We cannot do anything about it, so we have to sit there and just wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when somebody says, “Just wait.” Words like that push us into passivity.
But there is none of this passivity in Scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. Right here is a secret for us about waiting. If we wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted and that something has already begun, it changes the way we wait. Active waiting implies being fully present to the moment with the conviction that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to it.
Advent has the power to restore our attention to the present. Our Advent lectionary texts are popping with proclamations about being alive and awake in the moment, ready to welcome the face of God both in Christ and in one another. Nouwen lists Anna as such a person, and he’s wise to include her name. Anna had joined the vulnerable ranks of orphans and widows at a young age. We might think that Luke exaggerates her “night and day” presence in the Temple, but chances are that Anna really did live at the Temple and was part of the community of the poor (the anawim) so lifted up in Luke’s Gospel. Anna, known for her family lineage, a daughter of a remembered father, was still a homeless widow awaiting a promise. She prayed and practiced hope as she waited, so much so that she became known as the Prophet Anna.
Living out the promise
To our contemporary senses, Anna’s way may seem impossibly archaic. Are we supposed to pick a pew, plop down, and produce ‘round the clock prayer? Probably not. Anna made the most of her life options as a poor widow, and used her time and her voice in the most public and prophetic ways possible. She, like others, was waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem. She knew the promise, the seed of it planted by the prophets before her, and for her, every moment was a moment full of the promise of redemption.
The way I imagine it, Anna figured she might as well start praying and serving like the redeemed woman she was already becoming! She might as well start being and incarnating her father’s name, face of God, so that others would be able to hear in her words the truth of God’s promises.
Anna waited. But she was already living in and living out the promise she was awaiting. That’s the key for Anna and for us. The practice of active waiting lives in this promise: “We wait for the One and we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Think of it like “law and gospel” or “saint and sinner” or “free and bound.” We cannot point to the reality of God and the truth of our condition and calling without these terms in tension and conversation. The same is true here: “We wait for the One and we are the ones.”
Called and equipped
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” I first saw those words in 2006 at the ELCA Youth Gathering in San Antonio. They were printed in white on the black T-shirts worn by Lutheran teenagers gleaming with purpose. I later learned that this phrase originated with the South African poet June Jordan, written for women as encouragement to fight apartheid and build a just society. (It also serves as the title of one of Alice Walker’s many books and has inspired our current president.) Jordan’s poetry is potent with possibility for many people in many places. But what spoke to me immediately—and what I think was inspiring kids (and this tired chaperone) to shell out 10 bucks to wear it—was the pronouncement that we are part of a promise and we are called and equipped to be Christ in this world.
The biblical scholar Raymond Brown notes that in his portrayal of the prophet Anna, Luke is “anticipating the atmosphere of Pentecost,” foreshadowing the coming down of the Spirit on all flesh, when daughters and sons shall prophesy. And where do we celebrate the Spirit’s coming down? In baptism. “We are the ones we have been waiting for” because from the moment water in three doses doused our heads, from the moment oil in cruciform strokes soaked into our foreheads, from the moment fire joined fire in paschal candle and baptismal taper, we were welcomed into a life of faithful waiting and faithful action.
A time to wait
The prophet Anna didn’t live a simple, pain-free life. None of us do. And while the book of Ecclesiastes doesn’t include this exact phrase in its famous poem, it must be true: There is a time to wait. And the way we wait makes all the difference. The way we wait, as baptized and called children of God, begins in knowing that we are a part of a promise that is now and not yet, seed and flower, Christ with us and Christ coming again.
I know another widow who waited. She spent years incarcerated, awaiting release and awaiting redemption. She waited, but not like someone at a bus stop, not like a passive nobody without a plan. Her waiting was active, enlivened at times by the wonder and sheer gift of God’s forgiveness and grace. As she awaited redemption and release, she reclaimed her vocation. She used her God-given gifts as a musician, as a teacher, and as a friend. She tutored women younger than her daughters as they prepared for their GEDs. She shared music with those who worshiped together in the chapel. She became and received strength from peers devastated by tragedy that led to their own prison time. She actively awaited release from the state and from her own sorrow and despair.
And the way she waited, centered in the cross of Christ, allowed those of us who loved her to wait as well. We waited for mercy, for compassion, for reunion. During those years, we started families and new jobs; we made moves and missed what had been.
During those years, we experienced what can only be the mystery of grace and forgiveness that led indeed to reunion and an ongoing process of reconciliation and relationship. We know that we are part of what Nouwen described as that planted seed, in process, becoming, awaiting the full promise of redemption.
Wake up! . . . and wait
One of the privileges of serving as a pastor is presiding at baptism. And on a recent Sunday, I was struck with the spirituality of active waiting alive in the baptismal rite. There we were: pastor, family, and sponsors in a semicircle around a font, welcoming a wee one into this life of faith, grace, and service. And in baptizing this tiny dependent child, we committed ourselves to awaiting the ways in which he would grow to know and trust God, to care for others, to work for justice and peace.
And yet, already this small child—with his bright eyes sparkling with each baptismal shell-full of water—stirred in us hope and confirmation that love is truly the only force for healing in our battered world. In this baptism, like all others, I found myself remembering again that it is worth actively awaiting Christ’s coming again when death and doom will be swallowed up forever and when, by God’s grace alone, all—and I mean all—will see God face to face.
Where do you find yourself waiting this Advent season? How will you wait for the One, knowing that by baptism you are one of the ones the world is waiting for?
The Rev. Elyse Nelson Winger serves as associate pastor for worship and music at St. John’s Lutheran in Bloomington, Ill.