Advent Week 4 | The Benedictus

So our teaching scripture for this morning is from Luke

Luke 1:67–80

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.