So our teaching scripture for this morning is from Luke
chapter 1 verses 67 through 80. It says then his father
Zachariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied.
Blessed be the Lord of God of Israel, for he has looked
favorably on his people and redeemed them.
He has raised up a mighty Savior for us in the House of His child
David, as He spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets of
old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of
all who hate us. Thus He has shown the mercy
promise to our ancestors and has remembered His holy covenant,
the oath that He swore to our ancestor Abraham to grant us
that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might
serve Him without fear and holiness and righteousness in
His presence. All our days in you, child,
shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go
before the Lord to repair His ways, to give His people
knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.
Because of the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high
will break upon us to shine on those who sit in darkness and in
the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of
peace. The child grew and became strong
in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he
appeared publicly to Israel. This is the word of the Lord.
Great. Good morning, everybody.
How was your snow day last week? Good.
I'm glad. I know you're you're all
grateful. So most pop songs tell you
exactly what they're doing almost immediately.
Sometimes it's in the very first line.
I'm walking on sunshine. I'm on top of the world.
Tonight's going to be a good night.
We were both young when I first saw you.
I'm sorry Swifties, but it's it's two on the nose.
There is no suspense about where this thing is headed.
The mood has been announced, the emotional range is set from the
very beginning, and the payoff is already baked in.
We spend the next 2 1/2 minutes reiterating the point that has
already effectively been made in the 1st 2 seconds.
Everything about these songs is clear right away.
You don't have to sit with these for very long to know exactly
how they are trying to make you feel.
I have been listening to Dylan's Blonde on Blonde quite a lot
lately, and what I love about that record is many things, but
particularly how uninterested he is in doing any of this.
So for the uninitiated, this is the one you're looking for this
afternoon. When you go to listen to it,
it's long, it's wordy, it takes its time, and it refuses to sort
of hurry you toward clarity. It's not making an obvious
point. The final track, Sad Eyed Lady
of the Lowlands, is almost 12 minutes long.
So what we're doing here is sitting with thoughts, pictures,
ideas. It's patient, and Dylan seems to
trust that something happens to you.
If you stay with these songs long enough, you don't need to
listen to that record to extract a point as quickly as possible.
The whole idea is that we're we're painting a broad picture
and we're kind of going somewhere creative together.
And as we've spent the last four weeks teaching through Luke
chapter one, I've been thinking about how the gospels open in a
number of different ways, and you can almost sort of feel
their personalities right away. The Gospel of Mark opens with a
headline, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.
I'm not trying to compare the Gospel of Mark to a pop song,
but the opening is pretty on the nose.
The Gospel of Matthew starts with the genealogy of Jesus the
Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
So again, abundantly clear where we're going with this thing.
The Gospel of John, a little bit more esoteric, a little bit more
mysterious, but it's clearly about the cosmic Christ.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God. And then there's the Gospel of
Luke. After a brief dedication to the
patron who funded the writing of Luke Acts.
Luke begins like this. In the days of King Herod of
Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah.
No thesis statement, no immediate mention of Jesus.
Just a rural priest and his wife and a long standing 8 that they
both hold. Luke seems to sort of trust that
if you stay with the story that he's telling long enough, the
meaning will begin to emerge through the different threads
that he's starting to weave through his book.
And so in the passage that we're looking at today, Zechariah has
been silenced after an Angel announces that he and Elizabeth
will have a son. And for nine months, a priest
whose life is effectively shaped by communicating with words is
silenced, and he's carrying a promise that he can't yet
explain. Luke is teaching us something
important here by the way that he frames the story that waiting
is one of the ways that the love of God is formed inside of us.
Not the only way, but a very real way.
Sometimes faith responds immediately.
So last week on our our snow day, I was supposed to preach on
Mary's magnificent and I we actually still recorded the
sermon and it's going to be available on the podcast because
I just felt like I had something to say both weeks.
So you can enjoy that on your own time.
But what's happening here is we begin to see the ways that
sometimes what God's doing takes a little bit of time to unfold.
Mary sings her song a few verses earlier.
Almost immediately upon having this realization of what's
happening in her life, Zechariah takes his time, nine months of
silence. And so in both cases, God is
shaping people so that when they speak, their words carry trust
rather than fear. Their words carry some measure
of security, some measure of the knowledge of the love of God for
them. And so that raises a question
for us this morning as we look at this text.
Most of us know seasons where we want to act or speak or respond
decisively and faithfully, but we're not really sure how yet.
Times when silence doesn't feel particularly spiritual or
particularly chosen, but like, it's kind of been thrust upon us
a little bit in some kind of waiting period that we didn't
necessarily ask for. There are moments in our lives
where pushing for clarity seems to only increase our anxiety
rather than resolve it. Can you relate?
Have you ever had an experience like that?
And so for some of you, that waiting might be close to home.
You might be facing challenges in your work or as a parent
where the next faithful step for you and the wisdom that you need
seems just out of reach. And others of you might be
carrying difficult family situations into the holidays,
where conversations are tense and people are at each other's
throats and you can see what's wrong, but you are just not
quite sure how to become a person of peace in that room or
at that table. And for many in our city this
week, the waiting is heavier still.
Some of you are lying awake at night with anxiety knotted in
your chest because of the reality of unjust immigration
enforcement that has moved from being an abstract issue to
something that is directly impacting your neighbors and
people you love. We're worried about people we
love. We want to respond with courage.
But maybe we are not quite sure what faithfulness looks like in
this moment. And Zechariah's song helps us
here. Because Zechariah is someone who
has been confronted with something overwhelming and
disorienting to him that he did not expect.
He's given news that upends everything that he thought about
how his life was going to go, his future, his limits.
He struggles to believe it and as a result he is silenced until
the promise unfolds. And so for nine months, he lives
with something true and life altering that he can't yet
articulate or even act on in the way that maybe he would hope to.
And what's striking to me as I've sat with this text is that
when the time finally comes for Zechariah to speak, his words
are not remotely panicked or reactionary.
They're not defensive. They're not self protective.
They're clearly born of the love of God.
His mouth is filled with praise and clarity and mercy, and the
waiting has done something to him.
It has formed him so that in the beginning he's skeptical about
what's about to happen to his family.
But he's been formed so that when his speech is finally given
back, what comes out reflects the love of God rather than the
fear of the moment. And so Luke is inviting us to
trust that God works this way for us, too.
There are moments when faithful action comes immediately.
God does this by his Spirit. When we pray that prayer, come
Holy Spirit. We're anticipating that God
would give us clarity and wisdom in moments where we need to act
decisively. We have an important decision to
make, and not much time to make it, or there's something going
on in our sort of sphere of influence.
We're put in a position to act, and God is asking us to do
something. There are moments where that
action comes immediately, as it does with Mary and her song.
And there are other moments where love is formed in US
slowly, in prayer and attention and restraint until the right
words and actions can emerge. Waiting doesn't mean passivity.
It means that God is shaping us so that when the moment comes
for us to speak or act, what we offer is going to be grounded in
love rather than in the anxiety of the moment.
And so in talking about this text this way, what I don't want
to do is I don't want to be prescriptive about where you
might be at in this process. What I want to do is just sort
of center this idea of Advent waiting and the way that God
forms us while we wait so that when the opportunity comes for
us to act or to speak, we can trust that God will fill our
mouths with words that reflect the gracious love of Christ.
And so I just want to ask, where, where does that show up
in your life right now? And what might it mean for you
to trust that God is already at work in you in that place,
forming the love and the wisdom and the courage that you will
need when the time comes for you to act?
Zechariah begins where faithful worship always begins, with who
God is rather than what God is about to do.
He opens his song, Blessed Be the Lord God of Israel.
And that opening matters because Zechariah doesn't begin with
plans or projections. He doesn't begin with this
beautiful prophecy that he delivers about his son John the
Baptist. He begins with praise, and as
the song unfolds, God is remembered and God is named as
present, and the promises of God from centuries before are
recalled and recounted. He's the one who has acted
faithfully over time, and before Zechariah imagines the future,
he rehearses the past to himself and to the people who are
listening, and the same pattern actually appears in Mary's song.
In both cases, God's character comes before God's acts, and so
their hope is grounded in what God has already done, not in
speculation about what God may or may not do next.
So after nine months of this sort of imposed silence, praise
is how Zechariah re enters the world with language.
He doesn't take the opportunity to explain himself or narrate
what has happened. That would be my first instinct
if I had sort of mysteriously been silent for nine months
after an Angel miraculously shut my mouth in some way, I would
think that the first thing that I would want to do would be to
explain to the people around me why that had taken place,
because that's a strange way to behave.
But Zechariah says that this work of God is ordered toward a
life lived without fear. Mary's song names upheaval and
reversal and the interruption of the status quo.
And Zechariah's song names freedom, especially freedom from
the kind of fear that quietly shapes our decisions and our
relationships and even the ways that we pray we are actually
invited to rely on. And I think this is important,
the faithfulness of God, not the measure of our own faith, not
what we can muster up from inside of us, but actually the
testimony of the faithfulness of God to sort of hang our hopes
for the future on. And so that that raises another
question. Zechariah is talking about an
enemy in his song. What kind of enemy is Zechariah
really describing? The threat that he names most
clearly is fear itself, the kind that sort of narrows our view of
the world around us. It shrinks our imagination for
the future, and it shapes the way that we make decisions.
Contemplating God's faithfulness is one of the antidotes for this
kind of fear that can sort of creep in and control our lives.
And so then Zechariah reaches for one of Advents most powerful
images in this song. The dawn from on high will break
upon us. Because of the tender mercy of
our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us.
And so, friends, on this darkest day of the year, if you're not
aware, today is the least daylight.
Yeah, Winter solstice light enters the the shadowed places
of human life. There's an invitation in
Zechariah's song to consider the ways that even in the midst of
things that are difficult, even in the midst of questions that
we don't have answers for, the light of Christ is dawning.
And the light doesn't eliminate the darkness all at once.
Over the last couple of weeks, as I've been preparing to preach
and, and I've just been contemplating, you know, folks
who struggle with mental health in these like, dark weeks and
months of the year. And I, I just want to speak to
you, if that, if that's you, you know, we can often sort of trick
ourselves into thinking that once I get on the other side of
this or once I feel better, I'll experience the presence and the
love of God again in a meaningful way.
And what Zechariah is communicating in this song, one
of the things that the tradition communicates to us through the
centuries in the Advent season, is that the light of Christ
enters into the midst of dark and difficult circumstances.
And so to those of you who might have just sort of walked in here
like struggling a little bit this morning, I want to
encourage you that you don't need to wait until you're on the
other side of the things that you feel uncertainty about or
the things that you feel some sort of inner conflict about to
experience. A, a, a powerful and meaningful
measure of the love of God by the Spirit.
I want to show you a painting that sort of helps us see what
Zechariah is describing. This is the raising of Lazarus
by Rembrandt. I don't know if you can kind of
see it. It's a little hard with the
glare on the screens. Looks like there's more light
than there actually is. But Rembrandt used light with
great intention. And he does this in a lot of his
paintings to sort of direct our attention to where the meaning
in the painting is unfolding. And most of the canvas remains
dark. The the way that this painting
is sort of constructed. Lazarus isn't quite fully alive.
See, he looks a little sleepy as he's still getting up there.
And yet the this sort of narrow beam of light kind of comes in
from the side of the painting right to where Jesus is
standing. And you can even sort of see
some light on his feet right there where he's standing.
Do you see that the light doesn't flood the room?
It doesn't erase the shadows in the painting.
The painting is actually mostly dark, but the light sort of
seems to be part of the main subject matter.
And so it tells you where God is present, and it gives just
enough illumination to sort of move forward with understanding
of what's happening in the painting.
You can see Lazarus kind of getting up out of the tomb.
And so I just want to ask, like, where does darkness feel
ordinary in your life right now? Where does it sort of feel like
just the backdrop for the way that things are unfolding for
you? Where has it become familiar
enough that you've stopped even expecting anything different?
And what might it mean for you in this season to trust that
God's nearness is already present in that place, shaping
you for the next faithful step, so that when the opportunity
comes, you will speak. You will act out of the love of
Christ being formed in you. This is how the arrival of Jesus
in our world reshapes hope for us.
God does not wait for the world to be resolved before entering
it. God comes close, and God stays
in the unresolved middle of human history.
Gregory of Nazianzos described salvation this way.
He talks about God coming gently, at a pace that we can
bear, so that healing happens through presence rather than
being coerced or being overwhelmed.
The light arrives softly because love seeks to restore us rather
than control us. And so if you've been waiting to
sort of get zapped out of like whatever, you know, moment in
life you're in, I pray that you get zapped.
And know that there is just a high level of awareness through
the Christian tradition that one of the primary ways that God
works is by coming slowly into the middle of what it is that we
are working through to gradually move us toward his love.
Zechariah's song then makes this turn in the middle toward his
son, John the Baptist, and the role that he will play.
And what stands out immediately is how clearly this, this new
role is defined with restraint and with direction.
John isn't presented as the light itself.
He never claims that role. He outright refutes it himself
in his own public ministry. And his work is preparatory.
He goes ahead of what God's doing, helping people to become
ready for a work that doesn't belong to him.
John's vocation is shaped by clearing space for what God's
doing in the world rather than arriving with solutions himself.
And his task is to make room for what he cannot bring, orienting
people toward God's action rather than drawing attention to
his own action toward himself. And Zechariah is careful in this
song about how he describes this work that John's going to do.
John will go before the Lord to prepare his way and give people
knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of sins, is what
he says. And Luke is very specific here,
that salvation is experienced through forgiveness.
And that's some Christian language that might feel really
familiar to us and might actually not have a very sharp
meaning because we've heard it so many times.
But that order is important. Forgiveness comes before change
and before obedience, not because growth doesn't matter,
but because transformation cannot happen where fear and
shame are still in control of our lives.
Salvation is described here as a restored relationship rather
than a spiritual achievement, and so this tells us something
essential about how the Kingdom of God works.
In Zechariah's song, God's work begins with mercy.
Grace is the thing that creates the space where change becomes
possible. We're knowing the love of God
becomes possible rather than being something that we earn
once change has already happened.
And so friends, this is applicable to your life.
It's applicable to the world around us, the ways that we sort
of handle ourselves and what God's doing in our in our lives.
We're invited toward a posture of mercy and grace, the mercy
and grace of Christ, even for you, even as you sort out what's
happening inside. And we feel the pull to reverse
the order of these things all the time.
We look for improvement before having patience.
We look for clarity before giving mercy to ourselves or to
others. We look for some sort of proof
of what's happening before we trust.
We look for action before understanding.
And we want people, including ourselves, to have things sorted
out before belonging. But when this kind of gentleness
that we're encouraged toward is withheld, the thing that sets
the terms of our engagement with other people or with the world
is fear, is anxiety. This narrows what feels possible
to us. And the kind of change that
we're hoping for becomes harder to sustain because it becomes
about willpower. It becomes about what we can
sort of force to happen in our lives or in the world around us.
So it's worth asking where that pressure shows up in our lives.
Where are we trying to rush toward growth instead of making
space for the mercy of God to come to us?
Where might forgiveness, freely given to you or from you, do
more than correction would ever be able to?
This is what Advent preparation looks like.
It's a season for making room. It's a season for clearing space
and for receiving forgiveness as the starting point of life with
God, the place where love begins, its work of formation.
And so friends, I would just encourage you, if you are
hearing this and, and you feel a need for that kind of mercy in
your life, that kind of grace to be the starting point for where
you hope to go, I would love to invite you to receive prayer
this morning. We'll have in a little bit,
we'll have prayer people along the sides.
And guys, this is how we do it. It's just one person to another
being able to get proximate to the body of Christ, to the, the
love of one another. And in that, in that space of
prayer, God will do this work. And so, by the end of the song,
Zechariah has clearly emerged a changed person.
He seems more settled, he seems more trusting than when the
Angel had first spoken to him, and he seems more deeply
oriented toward the mercy of God than he was before.
This long stretch of waiting has shaped him, and that shows up in
the way that he speaks. His his voice has returned, and
it carries the marks of the waiting that came before it.
And when he finally speaks, his words are clear and grounded and
generous. Mary shows us what faith looks
like when trust rises immediately.
And Zechariah gives us a helpful picture of what it looks like
when it's formed over time. And together they give us a
fuller picture of what I think this season is sort of meant to
cultivate in us as a church, people who can remain steady in
uncertainty. Remember, truthfully, the
faithfulness of God that's come before us and to speak in ways
that are shaped by the love of Christ rather than fear or
anxiety. I can think of, you know, one of
the hardest seasons that our family has ever lived through.
Back in 2020, great year in the middle of the pandemic and
widespread unrest. The church community that I was
pastoring at the time was under significant strain.
Relationships were fraying both in the congregation and in the
neighborhood. So we're sort of trying to deal
with this on 2 fronts. And while I find my found myself
sort of quietly re examining much of what I had assumed about
faith and ministry, in this time, I'll just call it
deconstruction light. Our family also suffered a deep
personal loss that remains painful and unresolved.
And what made that season so disorienting was not just the
number of challenges, but the lack of clarity about how to
respond faithfully on any of these fronts.
It was like I have 10 or a dozen complicated problems in front of
me, and I don't have the answers to any of them.
And we were faced with a choice that many of you will recognize.
Do we cling tightly to certainty and control and try to
manipulate an outcome, or do we remain faithful to what God's
given us to do and stay even though much of what we had hoped
for sort of remained unclear? And so there were long stretches
where I didn't have the words to explain what was happening to
me, and I didn't have the words to help the community that I was
a part of. And honestly, I didn't even
trust myself to speak well in that season.
And looking back, what stands out about that moment in our
lives was that God was present, but in quiet and faithful ways
that were not abundantly obvious at first glance.
But staying attentive to what God was doing in that season
slowly sort of formed something in me.
And coming out of that really trying time of probably about 18
months, words eventually returned to describe what was
happening inside of me. And they carried less
explanation and more presence to myself, to the people around me.
And the change wasn't that the pain that we were wrestling with
had disappeared, but that something had sort of been
loosened. And trusting the faithfulness of
God had taken a little bit deeper root because we remain
focused on what God was inviting us to.
The novelist and essayist Marilyn Robertson Robinson,
Excuse Me, has written that love is learned through faithful
attention over time. That love grows as we stay
present, even when clarity comes slowly.
And I think that's the kind of love that Zechariah's song is
giving voice to, a love that's formed in patience and released
when the moment is right. And so, friends, I just want to
reiterate this again. You know, all this talk about
waiting, I want to be open to the possibility that the moment
is right right now in your life, that that the previous season
that's that's sort of preceded everything that's going on right
now in your life or in in our community has prepared you for
this moment. And when you open your mouth,
God will fill it with words of hope and promise and presence to
the people around you. And it's also entirely possible
that you're somewhere in the middle of that that process.
And so if you feel like things are a little bit quiet right now
and you maybe don't have the words or the presence that you
would hope for, stay in it, keep, keep after it.
You know, this is this is where the gospel becomes clear that
this way of life is not, it's not a personality trait, It's
not a coping strategy. It's the shape of the Kingdom of
Christ coming into the world that Jesus doesn't announce a
quick fix. He doesn't promise that
everything will move steadily up and to the right.
He invites people into a life that's shaped over time by self
giving love and a love that is willing to enter into
uncertainty and engage suffering and be in unresolved places
without withdrawing from them or hardening up against them.
This is the love that we see in Jesus himself, who meets the
world patiently and stays present in its pain and gives
himself for the healing of the world.
And so that's the invitation that this season holds out to
us, that to remain present in what's not yet resolved,
trusting God is at work in us in that place, shaping the words
and the actions that we will need when the time comes.
The call of the gospel, the good news of Jesus, is not to have
everything figured out, but to entrust our lives to Christ and
allow his Spirit to form us in love that is steady and merciful
and courageous, and to remain present to what God is asking of
us in real time. So I want to ask you to give
some thought to this question. What kind of voice is God
forming in you right now? And I want to suggest that it is
likely not one that's driven by urgency or fear, but that's
marked by patience and mercy and trust.
And how might our worship, when it's offered simply and
honestly, begin to sort of shape the way that we speak in the
moment that God is presenting you with?
So Zechariah's song isn't sung once everything is settled or
the future has become clear. It's sung in the middle of the
story. Rome is still in power.
Life is complicated. Nothing has outwardly changed
for his people. Zechariah blesses God because he
trusts that God has remained present and faithful even while
the shape of the future is still unclear.
And so the story is just inviting us to pay attention to
how faith responds in moments like that.
One trust doesn't wait for resolution.
It takes shape in the middle of the story, as people learn to
rely on God's nearness before the clarity about what that
nearness looks like arrives. So some of you may be in a
season where things just don't really add up.
You're doing what you know how to do.
You're showing up, you're staying faithful, but you can't
see how sort of coherence or resolution is going to come.
I want to encourage you that staying present to God in that
place is already an act of faith.
And for some of you, life might look relatively stable on the
surface, but your hope has quietly sort of thinned out.
And you're not in crisis, but you have just sort of stopped
believing that things could be different.
And I want to encourage you that God's light often meets us in
that place, not with sudden solutions, but just with the
next step becoming barely visible in front of us.
And so as we move into ministry time, I'm going to invite our
worship team back up. And we just want to make space
for prayer and for you to respond to this story together.
So you're welcome to come out to the sides for prayer or remain
where you are and just receive as we worship.
There's no pressure to feel anything in particular, but if
joy is really being born in the middle of the ache of being
human, then there might already be light breaking in in places
that feel a little bit unfinished for you.
So I would just encourage you if there are things that are coming
to mind, to come and receive prayer.