Zechariah's Song

I am not preaching anywhere today. This is an edited version of a sermon I preached nine years ago, however, on the Second Sunday in Advent at St. Francis Church in Holden. The canticle for today is the Song of Zechariah, from the first chapter of Luke's Gospel. (It can be found here.)

In the time I spend with couples who are preparing for marriage, we usually try to look beyond their wedding and to the joys and challenges not only of married life but the joys and challenges, when it is God’s will, of becoming parents. I sometimes share with the couple my own experience that parenthood brings about an even bigger change in one’s life and self-perception than marriage does. For those of us called to the vocation of parenthood, the birth of a child forever changes our lives.

That is even more profoundly true about the birth of the child whose coming we await and prepare for during the Season of Advent, a season which encapsulates all of the emotions of moving through nine months of pregnancy: expectancy, waiting, hope, wonder, joy and a healthy dose of fear as well. All rolled into four short weeks.  

Before we get to Bethlehem, however, there is another birth narrative that Luke wants to share with us. In the days of King Herod, he writes, there was this priest named Zechariah who was married to the daughter of a priest, Elizabeth. They were both righteous people, both faithful people, both decent and well-loved. But…

Why does there always have to be a “but?” Life isn’t easy. It comes with plenty of bumps in the road—layoffs and deaths, illness, divorce, struggles at school or at work. And here is the thing: the Bible is about life. Sometimes we are prone to think that because the people we encounter in the Bible lived a long time ago, they must be very different from us. But take away our cell phones and text messages and you tend to discover that reading the Bible can be like looking in a mirror. People are people, and across generations and cultures, the core challenges of being human—love and loss, fear and hope, doubt and the capacity to dream—remain basically the same from generation to generation.   

So perhaps you have known a couple like Elizabeth and Zechariah or maybe even faced the same challenge they did: good people committed to God who would make excellent parents. But they are getting “advanced in years.” That is the Bible’s politically correct way of saying they are getting old! And they have no children. Because, as Luke puts it, Elizabeth was barren.

Those words are like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard even two thousand years after they were first written. Tradition sometimes claims Luke was a physician, which is far from certain. But even if he was, he was a first-century physician who knew nothing about infertility. Like all of us, he was a product of his time. In a world before fertility clinics, he believed what everyone in his day believed, including Elizabeth and Zechariah: if a couple couldn’t get pregnant then it must be the woman’s “fault.” The theology that goes along with that is even more embarrassing from where we stand in the early part of the twenty-first century: if the woman was “barren”, then somehow this reflected God’s displeasure. So on top of the sadness and loss a couple might feel if they weren’t able to have a child was also added no small measure of guilt and blame and shame as well. The way Elizabeth poignantly describes it in retrospect, once she learns that she is in fact pregnant, is to say that she has endured disgrace among her people. (Lk. 1:25)

What is interesting, however, and not unlike our own context is that there is sometimes a chasm between what conventional piety says and what Biblical faith actually claims. People attribute all kinds of horrible things to God, then and now: infertility, earthquakes, disease, acts of terrorism. But the God of the Bible is constantly challenging conventional piety by favoring the despised and rejected, not by punishing them. God notices women and men who can’t seem to get pregnant and acts on their behalf: God is the one who makes all things possible.

The God we encounter in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel is the same God who made poor old Sarah laugh when she got pregnant in her old age, the same one who blessed Rebekah and Rachel and Hannah with children when they thought they were past all of that. All of them had no doubt endured no small amount of disgrace from their families and neighbors. Like Sarah and Rebekah and Rachel and Hannah before her, just thirteen verses into the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, Elizabeth learns that she is pregnant. And then the angel, Gabriel, comes to deliver the good news to Zechariah while he is at work. Even though he is a priest and a righteous man and even though he has been praying for this, he is absolutely dumbfounded. I suspect he thought that these things only happened in the Bible, back in the Old Testament, a long, long time ago; and no one has told either Zechariah or Elizabeth that their story is about to become part of some new testament.

Old Zechariah is so freaked out by this news that he becomes speechless. Literally. For nine months this priest doesn’t speak a word. Now this isn’t in the Bible, but I have sometimes wondered if this wasn’t an answered prayer of Elizabeth’s: because what pregnant woman hasn’t prayed that her husband would just shut up for nine months until the child is born, especially if he keeps saying "we" are pregnant? Or perhaps it’s an answer to the prayers of Zechariah’s congregation. Either way, the man is speechless for nine months!

Six months into Elizabeth’s pregnancy, as she is just about to transition into her third trimester, her cousin, Mary, comes to call on her and to share the extraordinary news that she, too, is pregnant and she, too, has received a message from Gabriel. And the child in Elizabeth’s tummy kicks her with joy. The lives of these two women and their two sons will be inextricably linked as the story of God’s work in the world continues to unfold.

So the child is born—the child of Elizabeth and Zechariah, I mean. We have to wait a couple more weeks to celebrate the birth of that other child!  Zechariah’s son is born, and still Zechariah hasn’t spoken a word. The eighth day comes, the day when little Jewish boys are circumcised and given a name and everybody knows that there is only one name to give such a long-awaited child, and that is to call him Zechariah Jr. His aunts and uncles can call him Zecky. But Elizabeth says, “no, he is to be called John.” Now everyone goes speechless. It’s like one of those old E.F. Hutton commercials. Such things are not done and it seems an insult to the father. But of course it is the name that was given to them by the angel and they know that this child is, like every child, a gift from God. So the neighbors turn to the man of the house to set his wife straight. Only he still can’t speak. So he writes it down: “His name is John.” 

And immediately, Luke tells us (channeling his inner Mark who loves that word) his tongue was loosed. He could speak again after nine months of silence. And what do you think he says? Well we heard it already because we sang it along with him—this father’s song—praise to God and in thanksgiving for this child.

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 hand of all who hate us. Thus he has shown the mercy promised 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, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the   forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Notice, with me, that this song has a past, present, and future tense to it. Zechariah blesses the God who has looked favorably on him and his wife and beyond them to this redeemed people to whom God has been faithful from generation to generation. Zechariah is filled with doxology and grateful for all God has done, for the ways that God has spoken through the prophets and shown mercy and remembered the covenant and rescued his people in days gone by. But all that good stuff is not confined to some distant past. That is the great insight of Zechariah and of people of faith in every age who encounter the living God, who refuses to become a mere memory on the pages of the Bible. God’s best days are not in the past and this old priest has remembered that as he gazes at his beautiful baby boy. It evokes a sense of awe and wonder in Zechariah, who prays that he might respond to God by serving God on this day in holiness and righteousness. The gift of his son rekindles in him an experience of the holy God. (Babies have a tendency to do that to us!)

And then as old Zechariah stands there looking at the face of his little boy, John, he not only feels joy in the present but he also glimpses a future that gives him hope. That hope surely must be for him and his wife who must feel young again, but it extends beyond them. This child of theirs (who will be called “the Baptist”) gives them hope for the world: you will be called a prophet, you will prepare the way, and the dawn from on high will break upon us.

On this second Sunday of Advent we are so used to seeing little Johnny all grown up and preparing the way for his cousin at the Jordan River. He is a central figure in the Advent season. But he’ll be back again next week, still at the Jordan River, so we’ll reflect then on the man that he grew up to be. For today, I wonder if it isn’t enough to linger a bit as we look at these baby pictures and see his father singing over his cradle, decades before he would grow up to become that wild-haired man eating locusts and dressed in funny clothes.

It seems to me that it would completely and utterly miss the point if we heard this story today and sang this song only in the past tense—as if God did this amazing thing through the birth of John the Baptist and then the birth of Jesus, but then that was it: God retired soon afterwards to some nice condo in Florida. If we truly dare to make Zechariah’s Song our own, then it is incumbent upon us to discover that our faith, too, has a past, present, and future tense.  Whether or not we are members of the music ministry here, we have a song to sing to the children of this parish, whether they are biologically ours or not. We are called to pass these old stories and songs along to our children and grandchildren by singing the paschal mystery: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. For our faith, too, has a past, present, and future tense.  May that song inspire all of us to sing at the top of our lungs and to share the work that John the Baptist did by preparing the way, and making paths straight, and by allowing our lives to point beyond ourselves to the One who has come, who is here, and who is still to come.