Blessed be the Lord

Advent 2, yr C

December 6, 2009

I sometimes think Advent is like being in a time warp. If you pay close attention to the readings, and the season, it’s very disorienting. First, there’s the fact that Advent is a season about two different comings—the coming of Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, and also about the second coming, Christ coming in majesty. Are we looking backward two thousand years, or looking ahead to who knows how many years? Or are we looking forward just two and a half weeks to Christmas Eve? Which is it?

And then there’s the reality that the world around us is in the midst of Christmas, while we are still in Advent. Advent and Christmas are two quite distinct seasons of the church year. In Advent, we wear purple, a penitential color, while Christmas is festive white, for celebration. We shouldn’t even be saying “Merry Christmas” until Christmas Eve.

If that weren’t enough, Luke adds another layer of time for us in today’s lessons. We are in year C of the three-year lectionary cycle, so we are reading for most of the year from the Gospel of Luke. Luke was written later than the gospel of Mark, which was the focal gospel last year, in year B. Like Matthew, Luke builds on Mark, relies on its overall framework, but adds considerable material. Even more importantly, Luke was not content with only writing a gospel. He wrote what was in essence a two-volume work that includes the book of Acts, and tells the story of Jesus Christ and the early church that is carefully constructed. For example, Luke uses a geographical framework that takes the story from Bethlehem, to Galilee, to Jerusalem, and ultimately to Rome and the world.

Luke is also concerned to connect the story of Jesus Christ and the early church with themes from the Jewish tradition and the Hebrew Bible. Nowhere is that more true than in Luke’s version of the story of Jesus’ birth. There are themes, images, and motifs that return us to the Hebrew Bible again. The song of Mary for example, the magnificat, is by and large a reworking of the song of Hannah from I Samuel, which she sang after giving birth to her longed for son, Samuel.

These themes and resonances come out especially in the story of John the Baptist. Luke depicts him as the last of the Hebrew prophets, dressed as they dressed, delivering a message straight from their works. But perhaps the strongest example of the connection between past and present, between God’s working in the history of Israel and God’s working in the present is the song of Zechariah, which we read together a few minutes ago: “Blessed is the Lord the God of Israel, he has come to his people and set them free.”

These words of Zechariah were the first words he spoke after first hearing that his wife would give birth nine months earlier. It is his response when his son John is circumcised, and one can imagine someone thinking for those nine months of just what to say if he ever got his voice back.

In fact, the words are Luke’s creation and demonstrate Luke’s powers as a writer and poet. Luke ties the birth of John to salvation history, to the story of God’s mighty acts in saving God’s people.

If you are familiar with the Daily Office, especially with the service of Morning Prayer, and I would encourage you to familiarize yourself with it; you would recognize the Song of Zechariah as one of the canticles that are recited or sung on a regular basis. It was in that context that I became familiar with those words, and other wonderful biblical hymns, like the Song of Simeon. As is so often the case, when we repeat things often enough we can memorize them. Sometimes memorization means that we never pay attention to the words, but it can also mean that those words become engraved in our memory, and come back to us often and at random.

Our lessons today, and throughout Advent, are full of such familiar words. “For he is like a refiner’s fire” or “And he shall purify” from the Malachi reading, and of course, Handel’s Messiah. We know them from Messiah but barely notice what they are saying. “Who can endure the day of his coming and who can stand when he appears? The images Malachi presents us with seem full of violence and the promise of the destruction of God’s enemies. Even the words of Zechariah seem directed at the same end. God promised to save God’s people from their enemies. Violence and destruction lurk just beneath the text.

And of course, there is violence to in the imagery used by John the Baptizer. John leaves the settled area of Palestine, leaves Jerusalem for the wilderness, where he takes potshots at the culture he has abandoned and threatens the coming of destruction from God. He demands repentance and promises a world upended by divine intervention: “every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill made low.”

Violence, too, lurks just beyond the world of the text. Luke takes great care to place his narrative in the political context of the Roman Empire. He is writing after Rome has brutally suppressed the Jewish revolt and destroyed the Temple. Luke is writing with those terrible events in mind and one of his goals is to offer an alternative. That may be why he so carefully and completely delineates the powers arrayed against John, and by extension against. He lists seven names, beginning with the emperor Tiberius, and extending downward to Pilate and Herod, and including in the mix the high priest. Seven powers challenged by a voice, crying in the wilderness.

Rome promises violence and oppression, Zechariah hopes for a God who will deliver God’s people, will save them from their enemies. The nature of that salvation isn’t completely clear. Perhaps it will be violent, but the end will be radically different. Zechariah’s hymn ends with the hope that God’s tender compassion will come down from and how and that God will “to guide our feet into the way of peace.” In fact, peace is one of Luke’s central themes. He uses the word more often than all of the other gospels combined.

I couldn’t help thinking of that promise of peace this week. It is a sentiment we hear repeatedly this time of year, the words of the angels in Luke’s gospel easily roll off our tongues “Peace on earth, good will toward all.” Yet we live in a world in which there is no peace; our nation continues to be at war, increasing its military presence in Afghanistan with no end in sight and apparently no real plan nor real hope for bringing stability and order to that part of the world. Apparently, we fight because we fight.

It’s hard for us to take peace seriously in such a world, it’s hard to believe that God’s in-breaking into the world might bring peace. It’s hard to even imagine what it might be like for us to have a faith like Zechariah’s. In some ways, we might understand John a little better. We might imagine ourselves, or a different version of ourselves, getting so tired of everything—the religious establishment, the political establishment, a culture that focuses on White House party crashers and adulterous golfers rather than the intractable problems that face us as a society and a world community—we can imagine getting so sick and tired of everything that we go off into the woods, or go crazy, and start preaching on a street corner or screaming from that wilderness that it’s all going to come to an end.

We might even think that John is somehow more faithful and more responsible than Zechariah, his father. Last week, I talked about the irrelevance and futility of lighting advent candles in the growing December darkness. I spoke of the difficulty of paying attention to that light, of how hard it was to discern the signs of the times.

Zechariah saw, and knew. In the baby that was born to him and Elizabeth in their old age, he recognized the dawn from on high breaking in and he expressed his hope and faith that God would deliver God’s people. His hope was not a hope limited to himself, to his family, or even to his religious and ethnic group. His hope of peace and salvation ultimately extended to the whole world, even to the universe. Such a hope is the hope of Advent. Such hope should be our hope now and always.