Sermon for Sunday, December 2, 2007

BARRENNESS AND WAITING

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture: Luke 1:5-12

⁵ In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. ⁶ Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. ⁷ But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years. ⁸ Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, ⁹ he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. 10 Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. 11 Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. 12 When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him.

We should wish each other a happy new year this Sunday because this day, the first Sunday of Advent, is the beginning of the Christian year, the liturgical year that includes the season of advent—four weeks before Christmas, Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent—the forty days before Easter, the Easter season itself for fifty days or so, and then Pentecost.

Advent is a time of waiting and expectation—from a word meaning the coming near of Christ-and Christians have used devices like Advent calendars with a space or a box representing each day before December 25. I even saw an Advent calendar made for dogs with a little treat inside each of the boxes.

We prepare ourselves during this season with our Advent wreaths of five candles and we light a different number of candles each week to help us wait.

I am going to use the four Sundays of Advent to look at some of the characters of the Christmas story—some are familiar and others not so much. We usually talk more about Mary than Joseph; Joseph stands in the background, but we will take a Sunday to look at Joseph and other people who take a place in the background.

Today and two weeks from today we will look at four old persons—really old persons—who have a role in the Christmas story. You probably don’t know much about two of them—Simeon and Anna—who are mentioned later on in Luke’s gospel just a few days after Jesus birth. They meet Mary and Joseph and the newborn baby in the temple where he is brought to be presented to the Lord.

The old couple we look at today become the parents of John the Baptizer. John is a cousin of Jesus because John’s mother Elizabeth and Jesus’ mother Mary are cousins. John’s father is a priest who takes a turn regularly in the Jewish temple.

The gospel writer tells us that Zechariah and Elizabeth had been waiting for a long time—many, many years—to have a child. So the first Sunday of Advent we look at a good and faithful couple who have been waiting. This season is about waiting.

How good are you at waiting? I am terrible at waiting. I am not good at it at all. I do not like to wait. I get really impatient at waiting especially if I think the reason I am waiting is that someone did not do what they were supposed to do and they are misusing my time because someone just is not doing their job.

Advent is about preparing our hearts and our lives to let Christ be born in us and it is a season of waiting. It is about learning to wait.  It is a discipline that I, and others of us, need to learn and grow in. We even have a statement to describe what this next few weeks feels like as we wait-“Slow as Christmas”. What does that mean?  It probably speaks most to the difficulty children have in waiting for the celebration to come. Slow as Christmas may mean that we will need to get better at waiting and using our waiting time to open our lives and hearts—not for more stuff, but for the birth of Christ.

Zechariah and Elizabeth had been waiting and they had gotten really old. Old people in the Bible often become heroes. Do you think of any others? Abraham and Sarah in the book of Genesis, the patriarch and matriarch of the Jewish people. Abraham was seventy when they pulled up stakes, left their families, and went only God knows where to a land where God had said God would bless them so they could be a blessing and where God said their descendants would be as numerous as the stars. You and I are some of their descendants. So are the people who met this week in Annapolis to try and make progress on living together today in the area that used to be called Palestine. Both the Arabs and the Jews are descendants of Abraham—the Jews through Abraham and Sarah, the Arabs through Abraham and Hagar, Sarah’s slave girl. And perhaps part of our Advent prayers can be that these descendants of Abraham—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—can begin to live together in peace.

We start in Advent looking at people who are really old—Zechariah and Elizabeth, and we will look at the other elderly couple in the Christmas story, Simeon and Anna, in a couple of weeks.

The other thing Luke’s gospel tells us about Zechariah and Elizabeth is that she is barren. It is an ugly word. What do you think of when you hear it? Barren. In ancient times having children meant God was blessing you. If you were childless it was a different story. In fact, after Elizabeth has conceived a few verses after what we read, she says a prayer of thanks that God has taken away the DISGRACE she has endured among her people. Disgrace!

We don’t think of having children and not having children today in that way. We want people to be free to make decisions about whether to have children. We know some more about fertility and infertility. But some of us can still identify with Zechariah and Elizabeth if we have wanted children and that has not happened on our time line, and even with all of our biological and medical knowledge, there is still mystery here, and there is still the waiting.

Luke’s gospel tells us that when Zechariah was in the temple offering incense to God, he encountered the angel Gabriel, the same angel who came later to Mary. Gabriel told him Elizabeth would conceive a son who they were to name John and John would be great in the sight of the Lord. This is the John who would later baptize Jesus his cousin.

Do you remember how Zechariah reacted to this good news? He was “terrified and overwhelmed by fear”. Meeting an angel probably is not pleasant and comfortable. There are lots of angels in the Christmas story. An angel comes to Mary, this same angel. Angels come to the shepherds in the field. An angel comes to Joseph several times in dreams—once to tell him to go ahead and marry Mary after he learns she is pregnant and he is about to divorce her, and again to tell him to flee for Egypt and then later to return from Egypt.

I don’t think these angels were the tiny, bare bottomed, smiling cherubs we see in the Hallmark stores. It must have been more sobering. One commentator says that every time angels show up in the gospels, they scare the living daylights out of people. Wasn’t that Mary’s reaction? She was greatly unsettled. So were the shepherds in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night—they were terrified.

This is how it should be. Hearing that the Messiah is coming is good news, great news, but it is also unsettling, uncomfortable, world changing. It will be and it should be. If you don’t feel some of that as we rehearse the Christmas story, look again.

I want to finish by looking at that theme of barrenness. Most of us can identify with that. My friend Jim Harnish at a church in Tampa Florida tells about the spiritual condition of barrenness:

Barrenness is the condition of our lives and our world when we live as if there is no listening God to hear our prayers, no life giving God bringing new possibilities to birth, no redemptive God who might actually be at work in human history to transform the kingdoms of this earth into the kingdom of our God and to shape our lives into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Barrenness is the biblical description of a life without hope.

Can you identify with any of that? Have you ever felt that spiritual barrenness? Jim goes on:

My guess is that there were days when Zechariah and Elizabeth’s prayers felt just about as barren as Elizabeth’s womb. There must have been long dark nights when they feared that the God to whom they prayed was incapable of intersecting human experience and changing the barrenness of their lives….

Can you identify any yet with ever experiencing those feelings or experiencing the silence of God, the absence of God?

We make our feeble attempts at spiritual discipline, but sometimes we’re not at all sure that it makes a tangible difference. Sometimes it feels as if God has taken an extended vacation and isn’t expected to return to work any time soon.

Whether or not you and I have felt that spiritual barrenness, that desert dryness and distance from God, our hymn writers have—even the carols we sing at Advent and Christmas:

In the bleak mid winter, frosty wind made moan

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone

Snow had fallen snow on snow, snow on snow

In the bleak mid winter long ago.

 

Or the advent hymn we began with:

 

O come thou dayspring, come and cheer

Our spirits by thine advent here

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night

And death’s dark shadows put to flight

Do you know what it feels like to be in a barren and lonely place of the spirit—a spiritual desert?

The gospel writer says when Zechariah and Elizabeth were in the midst of their barrenness, they are given a baby, a sign of hope and new life and rebirth.

And that is what we are promised this season as well.

In this season of waiting and preparation and longing and sometimes focusing on the wrong things, the things that don’t matter and don’t last—into our times of barrenness comes the promise of the Messiah. Stay close to this story these next few weeks. Take time for worship. Take time to read your New Testament and to open your heart and prepare so you won’t miss the birth. Thanks be to God.

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