Advent 2C
Text: Luke 1:35-79
Sermon by Carla Benard
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
December 5, 2021
Prophecy, Praise, and Power
Please pray with me. Holy Spirit, empower us with the courage to be the voices crying out in the wilderness, the energy to be the ones preparing the way for your coming, the resolve to continue providing a light to those who sit in darkness, and the faith to keep working to direct the feet of all people into the way of peace.
One writer describes the song of Zechariah as. . . “a prophetic song. . . of the Holy Spirit.” Further, he says, “Luke’s narrative makes the point. . . in the first chapter that everything occurring in, with, and under the births of John and Jesus was “of the Holy Spirit. . . that. . .the speech itself was a spirit-event, a moment of God’s Holy Spirit breaking into the ordinary, mundane world, and bringing with it God’s preferred and promised future. That Spirit-breaking-in reality is what the entirety of the whole Jesus event was about, according to Luke.” Are we ready for that?
In Luke, Chapter One, we experience the earliest gender reveals in history, The angel Gabriel informs Zechariah that he and his wife, Elizabeth, both of whom are, well. . .old, will have a son. Stunned, Zechariah makes the mistake of questioning the angel and is struck mute for the duration of his wife’s pregnancy. This seems a bit harsh. If an angel visited Dennis, or most of the rest of you fellows, with that message, the response would be the same. Doubt would be the least of it; for goodness sakes, Den might just pass out on the spot! And have you ever taken that incident to its logical conclusion? Having just heard what can only be called life-changing news, Zechariah must now go home and share it with Elizabeth. Except, that he can’t speak and must instead do it in writing. In Elizabeth’s place, after about five minutes of Dennis trying to pull that off, I’d be asking him who he met for lunch and what he’d had to drink! Eventually, he manages, and Elizabeth seems to take the news well, but I’ll bet that was an interesting, uncertain, quiet, and thoughtful nine months.
Six months later Gabriel appears again, with a similar message for Mary. Now Mary, yet unmarried, is faced with a pregnancy which in that culture could have meant immediate censure, and loss of respectability, and must also come to terms with the knowledge that God himself, through the Holy Spirit, is responsible for the child within her. Talk about a challenge. She had one. The individual pregnancies are noteworthy, but the prophecies of who these unborn boys would become; one a great prophet who would lead people toward God in preparation for the coming of a savior, and the other, no less than the Son of God, well, those go well beyond how we paint the room, or what baby things do we buy. Parents are awed and a bit overwhelmed by the responsibility of nurturing their children toward whatever it is the world has in store for them, but this, this is of a whole different magnitude. There’s a lot of Spirit-breaking-in reality going on right there, and we know, because we have the benefit of history, that those parents don’t know the half of it yet. I don’t know…maybe that’s a good thing. Parenting is full of surprises, and it’s often a good thing some of them stay surprises until they happen. If we knew all of what was coming. . .well, I think you understand. And for these parents, well, what was coming was both awesome and terrifying.
Picture John’s naming ceremony. The usual friends and family are gathered, but hub bub ensues when contrary to the custom of naming the boy after his father, Zechariah fulfills the prophesy and says, his name will be John. Zechariah’s first spoken words after those long months of silence, are words of praise for a God who has done great things for his people: raised up a savior, shown them mercy, rescued them from their enemies and those that would hate them, so that they might serve him without fear forever in righteousness. We could claim all the same things, right? I mean look around. Here we sit in this beautiful sanctuary, in peace and safety, able to worship without fear, to live without the threat of war, famine, poverty, and in most, but certainly not all cases, without oppression. In this, we are like those gathered around Zechariah—the chosen people of God. We too, have reason to sing the praises of an almighty God, to raise our voices in gratitude for all the ways God has redeemed us.
I wonder what Zechariah’s friends and neighbors did/talked about after the event? We all do it—the post-event debriefing. The food, the wine, someone’s presence or absence, but throw in a bit of praise and prophecy, that would make for an interesting trip home. We are told that “fear came over them and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea.” But what did they do? Well, I have no way of knowing their response, so because I always look for us in these texts, because otherwise they are just amazing stories, and since we have been blessed in the same way, what is our response? Would God find a world filled with people empowered by the Holy Spirit and serving without fear in righteousness forever? Would the promised Savior find the way prepared? I fear the answers do not reflect well on God’s people.
The United States is the most heavily armed society in the world according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. In our country there are currently 121 firearms in circulation for every 100 residents. As of October, of this year there were 470 shooting events in this country that fit the criterion created by the Mass Shooting Tracker project, leaving 482 people dead and another 1,927 injured, for a total of 2,409 victims. Further, through just the first five months of 2021, the total number of people killed by all types of gunfire, was 8,100, or 54 lives lost each day. That’s more than at any time during the past six years. As a side note, these figures, written only a few days ago, are already obsolete. These are the numbers reported in an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday: Mass shootings-652, school shootings-29, a total of 41,000 lives lost to all types of gun-related deaths, and finally because of a preponderance of what police believe are copycat calls, but which must be taken seriously because of the current climate in this country, dozens of schools in Michigan were closed much of last week because of the threat of gun violence. And just to be clear, the numbers of deaths, reported just this past Friday, are again already obsolete.
According to the 2020 census, poverty in the U.S. went up by one percentage point from the previous year, becoming the first increase in poverty after five years of declining numbers, and representing 37.2 million of our fellow citizens, and neighbors. The biggest increases were among people of color, people between the ages of 18 & 64, married couples, and female-led households.
The total number of homeless people in our country has increased steadily since 2016, with an estimated 580,000 Americans currently homeless. The lack of affordable housing, rising healthcare costs that bankrupt families, and low or stagnant wages are just some of the reasons for this statistic.
Approximately 38,000,000 Americans experience hunger every day, and
of those, just under 12,000,000 are children. That translates to one out of
every eight people, and one out of every six children.
These are just some of the grim realities of life outside our walls—and for all we know, within them as well. As a community that has been redeemed and looked upon favorably by Almighty God so that we might serve God without fear, that has reason to sing praises as Zechariah sang, that has enjoyed blessing upon blessing, what is our response?
And this is where our position in Zechariah’s song changes. No longer can we merely be the audience who looks on in wonder and goes home to ponder. Nope. Because we are heirs of John through our baptism, we now must become in fact the “child” addressed in verses 76-79, who will eventually become the man preparing the way for the savior. We have everything we need to bring salvation to those who need it. God’s mercy empowers us, so that we…you, me, anyone who has been touched by grace, can “give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,” and by doing so, “guide,” not only their feet, but ours also, “into the way of peace.” Into a world that looks and functions as God might envision. The valleys that need filling, the hills and mountains that need to be made low, the crooked areas that need straightening, and the rough ways that need smoothing, are all those things that separate us from each other and from God. There are still far too many dark corners that need the Light of God that we, as John’s heirs, are tasked with bringing.
Maybe you’ve asked or been asked: If God is Almighty, or if God loves us so much, why do all these bad things happen? Why doesn’t God just take care of it all? In her book, In Search of Belief, Sister Joan Chittister offers this argument; “God does not exist to save us from ourselves. What humans created—nuclear weapons, drugs, marauding armies. . .sexism, racism, hunger, and poverty—humans can refuse to develop, refuse to have, refuse to use, refuse to support, refuse to ignore. The point is not that God is not almighty. The point is that to see the Almighty God, we must wrest ourselves open to the almightiness of God in us, around us, beneath us, before us, in every possibility that impels us to be more than we are.”
That’s the Spirit-breaking-in reality that I mentioned earlier. There sisters and brothers, friends, fellow members of the body of Christ, is where we are in this beautiful event. Our Baptismal liturgy tells us; “. . . We are united with all the baptized in the one body of Christ, anointed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and joined in God’s mission for the life of the world.” So, there it is. That same spirit that filled Zechariah and eventually his son, John, who would prepare the way for the savior even at the cost of his own life. That same spirit that that descended from heaven and filled Jesus on the day of his baptism and sustained him even as he died on the cross. That same crazy-powerful spirit lives in us. That unchecked spirit is just waiting for us to unleash it into this ordinary, mundane, and hurting world so that we might bring about God’s preferred and promised future. Not just for us here in our nice, safe, clean sanctuary, but for any and all outside these walls who need help, who need light shined into their darkness, who want to walk with us on the paths of peace.
The book of Acts recounts the fearful time immediately following the death of Jesus as those in power tried to silence Jesus’s followers. Refusing to be led by fear, they often prayed, and in Acts 4: 31 we read this; “When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God with boldness.” Let’s do it. Let’s pray and feel this place shake. I invite you to stand with me and look again at the reading from Luke Chapter One. Let’s sing God’s praises as Zechariah did. Let’s be those believers in the Book of Acts, who prayed until the place shook. We’re going to read verses 68-75 (in bold print), as if we not only know, but also believe and are guided by their truth. Sing it out!
(Blessed be the Lord 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 servant, David,
as he spoke through the mouth of his
holy prophets from of old,
that we would be saved from
our enemies and from the
hands of all that hate us.
Thus he has shown the mercy
promised to our ancestors,
and has remembered his holy covenant,
the oath he swore to our
ancestor Abraham,
to grant us that we, being
rescued from the hands
of our enemies,
might serve him without fear, in
holiness and righteousness
before him all our days.)
Thank you. As we wait for the birth of a baby who would become the savoir of a world in pain, let’s be full of praise like Zechariah, bold like John, and single-minded like Jesus, not merely preaching the Gospel, but living into it fully wherever we can, with whomever we meet, whatever it takes. That, brothers and sisters, friends, fellow members of the body of Christ, that, is our legacy.