(Malachi 2:17-3:4, 4:5-6; Luke 1:1-25)
There aren’t all that many hymns for Advent. We have a lot of hymns for Christmas, of course, and a lot for Easter, and there are quite a number that work well for Lent, focusing on the sacrifice of Christ; but for Advent, not so many, and very few at all that are widely sung. Really, the only ones you can count on finding in the hymnal are “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” Which, for a season of the church year that lasts four Sundays, is just a little bit short.
I was lamenting this the other week as I was starting to plan the service for this Sunday and next, and I got this comment from my wife: “Our culture is actually anti-waiting, anti- letting things take time and not be instantly resolved . . . I think it might be the same reason that the church is so bad at grieving.” The point about grieving was one that hadn’t occurred to me, but she’s right about our culture. We live in a society that wants to get it decided, get it done, and move on. We have our instant oatmeal, microwave popcorn, and fast food; we have drive-through pharmacies so we don’t have to wait ten minutes while our prescriptions are filled—we can drive off and come back later. Our communications are supposed to be instantaneous—many people derisively refer to physical letters as “snail mail,” because having to wait a day or two is such a burden.
Of course, our ability to do things quickly has its advantages; but to the extent that we’ve taught ourselves to expect quick, easy answers to our needs and our problems, we’ve done ourselves a disservice. Some things just take time; some plants bear fruit slowly, or not at all. Our wounds often take longer to heal than we wish, or realize, and trying to rush the healing process only does more hurt. And all of us, in various ways, at various times, will find ourselves hung betwixt and between—unable to stay where we are, but with no apparent way forward. Even the most fortunate among us have nights of anguish, not knowing, hoping against hope that the worst hasn’t really happened; even the most blessed have times of longing for good news that does not come.
And the fact is, it’s into just such cruxes in our lives that the gospel speaks; they are entry points for the Holy Spirit in our hearts because they are points at which our sense of self-sufficiency breaks down, and we are driven beyond our wants and desires to the true deep need of our souls. Waiting, even when it’s painful, is not an interruption of God’s plan, or something we have to explain away; it’s part of his plan, part of the way he works in us to accomplish his purposes.
In light of that, it’s interesting that we see this theme working at a couple different levels in our passage from Luke this morning. At the big-picture level, of course, Israel had been waiting long for God’s promised Messiah. If you were here this spring, you remember Malachi’s ringing words, proclaiming the coming Day of the Lord . . . but those words had fallen into silence. Where God had so often spoken to his people through his prophets, after Malachi there were no more. “Behold,” God declared, “I am sending my messenger, who will prepare the way before me” . . . and then nothing, for over four centuries. After the Persians came the Greeks, then a brief period of independence, then the Romans, and through it all no sign of God’s messenger.
That’s the big story here, but it’s not the only story Luke is concerned about; indeed, it’s not the story with which he begins. Instead, he begins at the human level. Zechariah was a priest, married to a woman who was a descendant of Aaron, the first of all the priests; they were a devout couple who faithfully obeyed God and sought to please him. No doubt Zechariah prayed for and earnestly desired the coming of the Messiah—but there was something else that weighed more heavily on his heart, for he and Elizabeth had no children. They had prayed and prayed for a child, but it seemed God had ignored their prayers; they had waited so long for a baby, they’d given up, for they were now both too old for such things.
And then came the high point of Zechariah’s priestly career: he was chosen by lot to go into the Holy Place in the heart of the temple during the sacrifice—apparently during the evening sacrifice, because there was a large crowd gathered to pray; since there were some 18,000 priests, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And as he stands there, burning incense before the altar of God, carrying the prayers of the people to heaven with the smoke, an angel appears to him and says, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah. God did hear your prayers for a child; Elizabeth will have a son, and you will call him John. He will be the messenger God promised, the one who will go forth in the spirit and power of Elijah to prepare the way for the Lord.”
God could have chosen any couple he liked to bring John the Baptizer into the world; but as he brought his people’s long wait for their Redeemer to an end, he chose to bring this couple’s long wait to an end as well. To a Jew in those days, being childless was one of the bitterest of sorrows, and usually taken as a sign of God’s judgment. Zechariah and Elizabeth had served God faithfully all their lives, and so her inability to conceive must have been agonizing and perplexing. Had they somehow displeased God? Had God failed them? From everything they understood about God, it didn’t make sense; and yet they remained steadfast in their faith, serving him devotedly even when he had withheld from them the one gift they most desired.
You have to feel for Zechariah here. He’d probably given up any hope of a child long since, and now an angel appears to him and announces that God is going to give him and his wife a son, and it’s all just far too much to process. It’s hard to blame him for asking, “How can I be sure you’re telling me the truth?” The poor man was simply overwhelmed. And yet even so, the angel gives him a sign, but the sign is a punishment for his unbelief—his ability to speak is taken away until the child is born.
It’s hard to blame him, because Zechariah knows that what is happening to him is impossible—and worse, it’s implausible. It’s the stuff delusions are made of. He has a firm grip on how the world works, just as most of us do, and this simply doesn’t fit. He’s a man of faith, but within the bounds of the rational and the limits of what is reasonably possible; he knows the stories of what God has done in the past, but they’re stories, not a part of his present. As such, he can’t quite believe that God could actually do such a thing now; his faith struggles to outgrow the box of his assumptions. And so Gabriel rebukes him, for part of God’s purpose is to teach him, and others, that God is not limited by what we think he can do, or will do.
In conceiving and ultimately giving birth to John, Elizabeth isn’t just giving birth to the one who will bear witness to the Son of God; she is herself bearing witness to the truth that God is capable of doing far more than what we think is possible, and of blessing us far beyond what we can dare to hope. She is bearing witness to the truth that God can turn our mourning into dancing and our sorrow into joy—that he can take our defeats and our losses and use them to bless us in ways we never could have dreamed. She is bearing witness to the truth that just because God makes us wait doesn’t mean he isn’t coming, and just because he doesn’t act on our schedule doesn’t mean he’s too late. He is faithful, ever faithful, and he never fails to act in his good time.