December 08, 2024
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Luke 1:5-13; 18-20
This past Monday night, St. Luke’s hosted the annual dinner celebrating our administrative leaders. When I picked up my daughter from school, it was gently snowing and magical. By the time we left to drive across town for the dinner, it was decidedly NOT magical. It was a mess! I think NO one knew about the snow. And as Zack and I drove, we kept hitting unmoving lines of traffic. We would try and re-route, but no matter where we went, it was backed up. Google maps of Indianapolis Monday night looked like this:(PICTURE)
So we had to wait. We had to just accept that we wouldn’t move as fast as we wanted to, we were going to be late to the dinner, and we could be mad about it...or just let things play out the way they were going to. No matter what our attitude was about the journey that night, no matter how patient we decided to be (or not), we were going to have to wait.
Waiting is the theme of today, the second week of Advent. During these four weeks leading up to Christmas, we’re going on a journey together, looking at the different locations that play a part in the Advent/Christmas story. Last week we talked about the themes of longing and power and started our journey in Rome, where the decree of an emperor made
a massive impact on history. Today, we’re moving on to Jerusalem. And in Jerusalem, we encounter the theme of waiting, and we meet a man named Zechariah.
Zechariah doesn’t show up in your nativity scene, but he and his wife Elizabeth are really important to the story of Jesus’ birth. They’re actually part of Jesus’ family, with Elizabeth being a cousin to Jesus’ mother, Mary. Zechariah is a faithful priest, and we meet him on a day when he is at the temple, doing priestly duties. He's a seasoned pro by this point and he’s probably pretty well known among his fellow priests. But Zechariah and Elizabeth are known for something else, beyond Zechariah’s career. They’re known for being the couple who cannot have children.
In their context, this was not only something that would have made you unique, but it was something that also made you an outsider. There would have been the assumption that because you did not have children, you were somehow cursed. People would have used the term “barren” to describe you. There would have been talk and whispers and wondering what this couple did to bring such misfortune upon them.
And all this talk, all this stigma, would have created some distance and even awkwardness. I have to imagine that even if Zechariah and Elizabeth were well-respected in their
community, there was probably a relational barrier of some sort between them and many of their neighbors because of the culture of the time.
Whatever people thought about them, whatever stories were being told about the why behind their reality, the fact is that they were people who were very familiar with what it means to wait. For so many years, they had waited on a child. And, as I read this story this time, I found myself wondering about the ways that their waiting might have evolved. I wonder if, for the first several years, if maybe their waiting felt like anticipation. They expected their lives would go a certain way—like so many of their friends and family, they would get married and settle down. Then they would have a baby, probably several babies, and their lives would be chaotic and great and they would have descendants and it would all look a lot like everyone else they knew. Sure, it was taking a little bit longer than some of their friends, but it would happen. They just had to be patient and faithful and keep waiting.
I wonder at what point their experience of waiting started to shift. I wonder how many years it took, how many seemingly unanswered prayers, how many waves of grief and longing they had to go through before the waiting started to feel less temporary and more permanent? I wonder if by the time we
meet Zechariah in this first chapter of Luke...if he and Elizabeth had moved beyond waiting and would have considered themselves to have all but given up.
Because not only has it taken a long time, not only has their community created commentary about their reality, but now they’re finding themselves at the point where time is not on their side anymore. They’re getting older. TOO old for children to be part of their story. TOO old for waiting to make any kind of logical sense.
Maybe you’ve been in a similar place to Zechariah and Elizabeth. Longing, waiting, wondering what God could possibly be up to. Maybe you’ve found yourself in such an extended wait that you don’t know if it’s actually worth waiting for anymore. Maybe the wait has started to feel like foolishness. Maybe you could clearly tell us when your wait went from anticipation to resignation. Maybe the wait you’ve been experiencing has taken a toll on your faith. Maybe it has made it really hard to connect with God.
If you have ever found yourself in that kind of place, or if you’re in that place right now, I hope that this story of Zechariah can bring you some comfort and help you feel a little less alone in that place. Because there is a lot of hope in this story. There’s a really incredible way that God’s presence shows up for these two people.
And it might surprise us what that looks like. Because, yes...they do get what they have been waiting for. That’s true. And that’s a wonderful ending to their story, we can celebrate it, be excited about it, AND! We have to be honest that this isn’t always the ending WE experience when we wait. We don’t always get what we’re waiting for. We don’t always have our longings fulfilled.
But even when that’s true, even if the wait feels like it goes on forever...we can still have an experience of God’s love and presence. And I think what we can really learn from Zechariah and Elizabeth’s story is that (SLIDE) we can experience God's presence even in the middle of our waiting.
In fact, when Zechariah has his big experience of God’s presence, nothing about his story has resolved itself. He is still in the middle of his never-ending wait. He hadn’t had some big spiritual epiphany. He might have honestly been going through the motions, doing the faithful things without feeling much faith at all.
And I wonder if we might learn something from this. If maybe sometimes it’s more about being open and showing up than what we FEEL.When we engage in acts of faith, even if they don’t feel particularly moving; when we pray, even when we don’t feel a great response; when we show up in community
like this, even when we don’t quite know what we’re doing here or what we’re supposed to get out of it...when we do those things, what we’re doing, is we’re positioning ourselves to be encountered by the Holy Spirit. We’re showing up, with whatever kind of faith we have, maybe at the end of our patience, maybe deeply unsure...but still, by showing up, we’re open to how God might move. And when WE show up, we might find ourselves surprised by how GOD shows up.
And if you want to talk about someone who got surprised by how God showed up, Zechariah is a great example. He goes into the temple, and not just any place in the Temple, but an area considered to be the HOLIEST PLACE, where most people would never be allowed to go. And when he enters that place, I don’t know WHAT he expected to see but I am quite certain it WASN’T what was waiting for him!
The text says: (SLIDE)
...there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified, and fear overwhelmed him. (Luke 1:11-12)
Just, let youself be Zechariah for a second. You are at the point where you’ve prayed and prayed and waited and been patient and tried your very best to stay faithful to a God who
seems silent. You’ve probably lost a lot of your hope and you’re at a point where you stopped expecting anything from God...and then, HELLO! Angel of the Lord! In the temple! So much drama!
Zechariah is OVERWHELMED by what he experiences. Because it’s a lot! It’s confusing. And yes, the angel says, “do not be afraid,” which is the pretty standard opening line for these angels, but, hello, he IS afraid, and we would be too! And he’s so overwhelmed that as the angel tells him this amazing news, that he and Elizabeth are finally going to get the thing they’ve been waiting for, it’s hard for him to understand what the angel is saying and it’s even harder to believe it.
And honestly what happens next in this story is really hard for me to understand. Because it makes a lot of logical sense to me that Zechariah doesn't really buy what the angel's trying to sell. They've been waiting for SO long for this that they are past the point of any logical hope that they would ever have a child, and then here is this Angel saying, “Zechariah, it's time. It's going to happen. You're having a baby and I even have the name for you. You need to name him John because this name has special meaning and this baby's going to be VERY special. Basically, all your dreams are coming true!”
And let’s just say, the angel is not particularly receptive to Zechariah’s questions. Actually, he’s pretty annoyed. And so the Angel decides that because of his doubt in this moment, Zechariah is going to be struck with silence until the baby's born.
Let me tell you. As I was putting this sermon together I wondered if I should try to resolve the tension that I feel here. I mean, it’s almost Christmas, that kind of feels like the nice thing to do. But as I sit with this story, and the frustratingly wonderful and mysterious ways that God works, I think we can let this be whatever it is to us. It's OK if you hear the story of Zechariah and have some questions. It’s ok if you just don't quite know why this was the choice that the Angel made. It’s ok if we don’t know why SILENCE was a main part of Zechariah finding his way through this wait.
Because I’m not sure (SLIDE) we have to fully understand the silence to find the value in it. When we encounter God’s silence OR we come before God, like Zechariah, with silence of our own, there’s so much mystery in that. Sometimes we don’t have the words or we don’t NEED the words in order to have a holy moment that changes us. I actually wonder if the silence that Zechariah has imposed upon him here was its own kind of gift. You know, there were
all these people waiting for him outside of the temple, they wanted to know what he experienced in this holy place. They wanted to know if he had a message from God to them. And beyond the temple, he had a whole community that would have LOVED to have overprocessed this unexpected news of a child with him, in a way that might have just gotten so noisy it processed the miracle right out of the whole situation.
And so MAYBE, even though this silence wasn’t his choice, maybe instead of all that noise, Zechariah ends up getting those next several months to really just become a listener, to really just become someone who was open to what God was speaking in his life. To really become someone who could just be in God's presence in a totally different way than he ever had to be before.
Maybe silence is a gift that we could use a bit more of this Advent.
I know that silence is not easy for most us. We live really noisy lives. We’ve become masters at multi-tasking. We can listen to music, be around people talking in public places while working on our phones or computers. We can literally have something going in the background from the moment we wake up to the minute we go to sleep.
And sometimes I wonder, when I look at how we function as a society and especially in my own spiritual life, (SLIDE): Is God not speaking...or am I still talking?
It can be hard to get into a rhythm of silence. It is highly unlikely we’re going to have an angelic encounter that forces us into a place of quiet and active listening. We have to make the choice to cultivate that kind of space. And it can feel vulnerable to hold that kind of space with God. But there are experiences of God that can only happen IN the silence. That can only happen when we let ourselves be still. When we stop speaking, stop producing, stop moving...and really listen.
So I want to give us a chance to close our time today with this practice. I want to offer a few thoughts and questions we might take into our silence. I will give a first one, then allow time to reflect and listen. Then a question, and after that, a final question before we sing our closing song. I’ll actually ask that the band wait until I close us in prayer to come up.
Now, this will probably feel awkward and uncomfortable, it’s literally going to be about 2 minutes...for some of us, it’s going to feel l
uncomfortable, I want to encourage you to try to lean into it and welcome it as a new way to be encountered by God.
Let your body relax. You can close your eyes. You can place your arms on your lap with palms turned up as if you are in a receiving position. Try to release any tension in your body. Breathe deep and exhale slowly…
Begin by telling God what you are waiting for today…
God, what would you say to me?
God, what are you waiting for me to do?
Close in Prayer