Advent 2C
December 8, 2024
Luke 1:68-70
Luke 3:1-6
INTRODUCTION
Here is some Pastor Johanna trivia for you: My favorite Gospel is… the Gospel of Luke. One reason for this is that, as you know, I love music, and packed into these first two chapters are no fewer than four gorgeous canticles, or scriptural songs: there is Zechariah’s song, which we hear today; and Mary’s song, which we’ll hear in two weeks; the Gloria, which we will hear the angels sing on Christmas; and finally Simeon’s song, which we will hear in February on the day of the “Presentation of our Lord.” In fact, so beautiful are these songs, that they have been incorporated into the Church’s liturgies since liturgies existed, and you can find them throughout our hymnal. I included in the bulletin a guide for where you can find them all – have a look!
Today, as I said, we will hear Zechariah’s song as our Psalm, and we will be using the version that is a part of our Lutheran Morning Prayer liturgy. Just a quick note on that – after the choir introduces the refrain, you are invited to sing the whole thing (in harmony, if you are so moved!), but if you find that too confusing, then just sing the refrain whenever it comes up, and follow along with the verses.
So that’s the Psalm, but it connects directly to our Gospel reading, which features John the Baptist, who always shows up this 2nd Sunday of Advent. John, you may recall, is a relative of Jesus, the son of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth and Zechariah (of canticle fame!). I will tell you more of that story in my sermon, but for now, I want you to know that John was also a person specially selected by God since his conception. The song Zechariah sings, that we will sing as the Psalm, is a prophetic one that his dad sings on the day John is presented in the Temple. He declares: “And you, child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way, to give God’s people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.” And that is what the Baptist will do in our reading today from Luke.
Ah, I just love how the Advent texts all connect – it is so obvious in Advent because this moment for which we wait, when Christ comes, is the fulfillment of promises made from the beginning. And Advent is when we see all the pieces falling into place. As you listen, watch for those connections (between readings and with our various hymns and prayers), even as you consider how those connections extend to us still today. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from the one who is and who was and who is to come. Amen.
We are all pretty familiar with the story of Jesus’ birth – the angel Gabriel coming to Mary to tell her she would bear God’s son, Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem and Jesus born in a manger, an angel choir singing praise. Maybe you also remember that before going to Bethlehem, Mary traveled while pregnant to see her relative Elizabeth, who was also miraculously pregnant in her old age. But there is a lot more than that to Elizabeth’s story, which is woven all throughout the Mary story, and today it takes center stage.
Allow me to fill in the gaps. At the start of Luke’s Gospel, after a brief introduction, Luke tells us about an elderly couple, Zechariah and Elizabeth. Both are devout Jews, both from priestly families. But, to their dismay, Elizabeth has been unable to conceive, and they are childless. One day, Zechariah is selected to be the priest who gets to go all the way into the Holy of Holies, the very center of the Temple where God was thought to dwell. While he is in there, who should show up but the angel Gabriel! Zechariah is terrified – angels are not like the sweet cherubs that hang from Christmas trees and adorn shop window displays. There is a reason they always begin their messages with, “Do not be afraid,” and this was no exception. Gabriel goes on to tell him that he and Elizabeth are going to have a baby. Zechariah is understandably stunned by this news, and says as much. “But how? I’m old, and my wife is no spring chicken either!” Gabriel has no time for such nonsense. “Dude,” he says (and I’m paraphrasing the Greek here), “I’m Gabriel. You think I’d make this up? You know what? Since you didn’t believe me, how about this: you will be mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.” And so, when Zechariah comes out of the sanctuary to an impatient crowd wondering what took him so long in there, he can only flap his arms about, but no sound comes out.
Why didn’t Zechariah believe Gabriel’s good news?
Perhaps it’s because Zechariah was so stuck in his own story, or his own version of his story, that his ears and heart were already closed to the possibility that God might have a different story in mind for him. He may not have liked his reality, but still, he was so comfortable in what he told himself, and what others told him, that he struggled to be open to the story that God wanted to tell with Zechariah’s life.
I don’t blame him at all for this. I think we all fall victim to this from time to time! Even if we pray and pray for something to change, when the possibility of a different story is put right in front of us, we find ourselves unable to perceive or accept it. The old story is just so familiar and worn in, like an old pair of shoes, and stepping into new shoes is so uncomfortable.
Maybe that’s why God imposed a nine-month silence upon Zechariah! Nine months for him to just keep his mouth shut, and listen to what God is doing. For nine months, his wife’s belly grew, and he couldn’t talk, but could only receive that gift. When Mary came to visit, announcing her own miraculous pregnancy, and when his own child leapt in his wife’s womb, he could only receive. As a new era, and two Spirit-filled boys, gestated in these two unlikely wombs, an elderly woman and an unwed teenager, Zechariah could not add his own words to the story – he could only receive it.
Could this be an invitation to us, too? To keep our mouths shut, and just listen not to the story we tell ourselves, but to the story that God is trying to tell us? To listen to God’s new story, or perhaps a whole new way of understanding the old one?
What old stories am I talking about? Perhaps it is the one about your string of co-dependent relationships, a pattern that you have unwillingly taken on yourself because that’s what you saw in your own parents. Or, the story where you assume something must be terribly wrong with you because of your sexuality or your abilities or your past, and so you believe yourself to be unworthy of love. Or, the one where you can’t show any vulnerability because that would be admitting you are weak, or worse, not in control. Or the story where your faith isn’t enough, your gifts aren’t enough, you aren’t enough. These, and so many others, are the old, worn stories I’m talking about.
So what would happen if we could put aside our pride, or expectations, or assumptions about what we deserve or not, and instead took a page out of Zechariah’s book, stopped talking for a while, and sat in the quiet of this Advent time, and just listened for the chance that something else, a new story, might be possible? Might we hear of something new waiting to be born? Or something needing to die? Might we hear something resembling the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ himself?
That’s really the essence of the Jesus story, and all its various characters: it is the story of God telling the world, in no uncertain terms, that a different story, a new life, is possible. That new birth is possible where there was none. That hope is possible where there was only despair. That love is possible where there was only hate and fear. That relationship is possible even when we have done everything in our power to break it. And these are new stories that we can perceive if we just shut up for a while, and let God’s telling of our story gestate in our beings, and grow into something that becomes so much our own, that it becomes the story that bursts forth from our own mouths.
That’s what happens to Zechariah. Eight days after John is born, he is brought to the Temple, as was the custom, to be circumcised and named. Elizabeth says he is John, but they want to name him Zechariah after his father. Zechariah, still unable to speak, scrawls onto a writing tablet, “His name is John,” and suddenly the story that has taken root in his heart and mind these nine months bursts forth in the form of praise – and he sings this new song, now memorialized in our liturgies, the Benedictus. “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel. He has come to his people and set them free!” Free from their old stories that bore no fruit. Free from that which held us back from being the people God made us to be. Free from “the hands of our enemies.” “Free to worship God without fear” – fear that we were not good enough, not faithful enough. God’s story for us, you see, is a story of freedom.
This is God’s tender compassion for us: that things do not have to stay how they were. That we do not have to be victims of our old stories, in which we have to do something to earn God’s love or favor. This is the dawn from on high that breaks upon us, shining on those of us who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, unable to see a way out. This story, God’s story, is the one that guides our feet into the way of peace.
Let us pray… God of newness and life, we sometimes get so stuck in our own, old stories that we cannot see a way out. Enter into our stories, that the dawn would break upon us, free us from all that holds us bound, and guide our feet into the way of peace. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
