Hilton Head Island, SC – December 2, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 1:5-20; 26-38
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text –“And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth.” – Luke 1:14 (RSV)
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The word “Advent” is taken from a Latin root which means “Coming.” During Advent, which always begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and includes however many days there are in the actual week preceding Christmas Day, we prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. And so to be forewarned is to be forearmed: these “Christmas Song sermons” will be expository. That is, their essence will be an exposition of the verses upon which they are based. Not much more, and not much less. So, as they say in the Boy Scouts, Be Prepared.
This Advent, we will be investigating some of the liturgical poetry which is included in the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke. Within those first five pages of Luke’s Gospel there are eight distinct poetic passages which perhaps were already familiar to New Testament Christians as part of the musical liturgy of the earliest Church. Whether or not these poems were actually sung we shall probably never know. But we do know some of them have been set to music in later centuries. There are, for instance, numerous settings of “The Magnificat.” It is the song of Mary which begins, “My soul magnifies the Lord,” which is derived from the Latin word magnificat. There also are several compositions based on the so-called Benedictus of Zechariah: “Blessed (benedictus) be the Lord God of Israel” (Luke 1:67ff.), and the Nunc Dimittis of Simeon (“Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace” (Luke 2:29ff.).
These six poetic utterances are found only in Luke’s Gospel. However they came to be included in Luke’s narrative of the birth of Jesus, and however they may have been used among New Testament Christians, they obviously must have had special significance, if only because they are written as poetry. Poetry is easier to remember than prose. “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all” springs more readily to mind than does “Four-score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” They are all outstanding words, but the poem is easier to recite than the prose. Probably it is because so many poems have rimes in them.
After his introduction in the first four verses of Chapter One, Luke starts a narrative about an elderly couple named Zechariah and Elizabeth, who had no children. Instantly, those who first heard this narrative would think back to three other elderly couples in the Bible who had no children: Abraham and Sarah, Elkanah and Hannah, and Manoah and his wife (who, alas, was never identified by name). In advanced, post-child-bearing age, Sarah gave birth to Isaac, Hannah to Samuel, and Mrs. Manoah to Samson. All three of those sons were pivotal people.
What do these strange obstetrical goings-on mean? Increasingly we hear about egg donors, sperm donors, in-vitro fertilization, and such. The three sets elderly biblical parents had no such technological boosts. They simply gave birth when neither they nor anyone else would have – you should pardon the expression -- conceived such a thing possible. In all three cases the births were attributed to the direct intervention of God. In fact, with two of the births (Samuel and Samson), the young boys were raised as Nazarites, about which I shall say more later. For now suffice it to say that the parents believed that if their son was a special blessing from God, he should be reared in a special way to declare God’s grace to the world.
Thus early in the first chapter of Luke are we introduced to Zechariah and Elizabeth. And we are told that “they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.” And yet they had no children. In those days, when every child was needed to perpetuate the children of Israel, not to have children was considered a curse, even a curse from God. Thus the friends and neighbors of Elizabeth and Zechariah may have thought them to be major secret sinners, despite their outward appearance of righteousness.
Zechariah happened to be a priest. From that we may deduce he was of the tribe of Levi. The Levites were automatically priests by birth. No one who was not born of the tribe of Levi could be a priest, and every male born a Levite was ipso facto a priest, whether he liked it or not. Elizabeth also was descended from the tribe of Levi, but she couldn’t be a priest, because she was a female. (Little did either of them know then what we know now about the Christian Church having female clergy, and all the ruckus it has caused over the past fifty years or so.)
The Levites traced their ancestry back to Aaron, the brother of Moses, who was the chief priest during the Exodus years. But Aaron and Moses lived twelve centuries before Zechariah, so by the time Zechariah was a priest, the geometry of demographics meant there were tens of thousands of priests. That being the case, a Levite might serve in the temple only a few days or a week during an entire year. The rest of the time he would have a secular occupation. We learn that when the angel Gabriel came to speak to Zechariah, he was burning incense in the temple. It is noted that ritual privilege of the priests was so rare it occurred only by casting lots. Just one priest could burn incense on any given day, and a Levite might never have the opportunity, because the burning of incense was determined only by the casting of lots, and there were far too many priests. So it was indeed unique when Zechariah was in the temple burning the incense. And, as we heard, it was made all the more rare by the appearance of an angel before him.
And now for a word about angels. The Bible knew nothing of angels until the 6th century Before the Common Era, which is to say, about 550 BC. During the so-called Babylonian Captivity, which lasted from 587 to 532 BC, for the first time the Jews were exposed to the Persian religion known as Zoroastrianism. It was founded by a man named Zarathustra, but very little is known about him. Scholars can’t even agree on when he was born within three or four centuries. But one of the things Zarathustra talked about in his religion was angels.
The word “angel” means messenger, or more specifically, a messenger of God. It is said that angels are neither male nor female, and that they live in the very presence of God. There aren’t many angels who show up in the Bible, but when they do, either they are not identified by name or sex or they are identified by name and sex, and in those instances they are always male. Go figure. It’s a puzzlement, as the king said in The King and I.
Most angels with names are either extra-biblical or post-biblical; that is, they aren’t mentioned in the Bible. But various written sources tell us about Raphael, Michael (or Micah-el), Uriel, and today’s angel, Gabriel, who is named in scripture. All these names end in “-el,” which is the Hebrew word that means “God.” Thus Gabriel means “Man of God,” and Michael means “Who Is Like God?,” and Raphael means “God Has Healed.”
But is it a theological necessity that angels must be heavenly beings? If they are messengers of God, do they come directly to earth from heaven, or might an angel be an ordinary person who is chosen by God to be a particular messenger with a particular message? I suspect there have been millions of angels through the history of humanity, and if there are heaven-sent heavenly angelic beings, about whose existence I confess to having considerable skepticism, my guess is they are few and far between. But I don’t know. I do know, however, that Luke tells us about two appearances of Gabriel, first to Zechariah, and then to the Virgin Mary. And as ambivalent as I might be about who or what Gabriel was, I think he has some wonderful Christmas songs, whoever or whatever he was, to which we now turn.
While Zechariah was alone in the temple, Gabriel suddenly appeared to him. The angel told Zechariah that Elizabeth would give birth to a son. The child would bring great joy into the world, and he was to be raised as a Nazarite (“he shall drink no wine nor strong drink.”) Nazarite boys and men never had their hair cut. Curiously, other religions have the same notion: some ultra-Orthodox Jews, some Muslim fundamentalists, and all Sikh males. Gabriel also told Zechariah that his son would “make ready for the Lord a people prepared.” In other words, John the Baptist was chosen by God to proclaim the coming of the Messiah.
When he heard this, Zechariah was, not surprisingly, nonplussed. “How shall I know this? For I am old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” I don’t blame Zechariah for saying that; given his exact same circumstances, who wouldn’t say it? But apparently Gabriel took Zechariah’s understandable incredulity to be outright skepticism or faithlessness, for he told him his doubting spirit would render him unable to speak until the child was born. And that’s exactly what happened.
Having been inside the temple an unusually long time, when Zechariah came out, the people knew he must have had some kind of vision, just by seeing the look on his face. But Zechariah was literally speechless, and he remained speechless for the next nine months.
Tradition says that Elizabeth and Zechariah lived in a village a few miles west of Jerusalem that was called Ein Kerem. The Bible doesn’t say that, but tradition tells it. It was just outside Ein Kerem where a cave was discovered several years ago which some people, especially the discoverer, claim was a cave used for religious purposes by John the Baptist. Maybe so; maybe not; no one will probably ever know for certain. Credulity knows no bounds.
Anyway, Luke then says that in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, the angel Gabriel went to Nazareth in the Galilee, and there he appeared to the Virgin Mary. His greeting to her was, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” From that phrase comes the beginning of the “Ave Maria”: Ave, Maria, gratia plena, Dominus te cum: Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and so on.
As with Zechariah when Gabriel appeared, so also with Mary: she was afraid. Again, who wouldn’t be? How often has a celestial angel manifested him/her/itself before you? If one did, wouldn’t you too be afraid? It wouldn’t be fear, exactly; it would be more like awe, or astonishment, or enormous mystification. It would be how the German philosopher Rudolf Otto described the sense of the holy: mysterium tremendum et fascinans: tremendous mystery and fascination.
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” it says in the letter to the Hebrews (10:31). The same goes for angels too, I expect. I’m almost certain that if any of us was confronted by an angel, we too would be awe-stricken and astonished and astounded and maybe even dumb-struck, like Zechariah.
Mary was remarkably trusting, if also bewildered. She listened as Gabriel announced Jesus’ coming birth to her (this is The Annunciation, The Announcement. Thus the main church in Nazareth is called The Church of the Annunciation.) “You shall call his name Jesus,” said Gabriel, and “Jesus” equates to “Joshua,” or, in Hebrew, Yeshua. The name means “He Saves” or “God Saves” or possibly “Savior.” Then Gabriel told Mary, “He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David/ And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever/ And of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Once more, not surprisingly, Mary said to the angel, “How can all this happen? I don’t even have a husband - - - and you’re telling me I’m going to have a baby?” The Bible is wonderfully honest about people’s incredulity when confronted by angelic or divine visitations. Gabriel explained, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you/ And the power of the Most High will overshadow you/ Therefore the child to be born will be called holy/ The Son of God.” And thus ended the visits of Gabriel to Zechariah and Mary. To Mary and Jesus we shall return next week.
But now to John the Baptist. John was essentially a glorious figure who had a tragic ending. In his time, many Jews thought John himself was the promised Messiah. “O no,” said John, “not I. But one is coming the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” John’s role in life was to be the precursor of the Messiah, the announcer of the Messiah, the forerunner of the Messiah. “He must increase, and I must decrease,” John said of Jesus, when thousands of people were thinking John was the Messiah. This is what Rex Tillerson said of Mike Pompeo, or what Nancy Pelosi may be saying of some as-yet unnamed Democratic Member of Congress. It is Alex Rodriguez to Aaron Judge, Aaron Rodgers to DeShaun Watson, LeBron James to Joel Embiid, Serena Williams to Sloane Stephens, Tiger Woods to Justin Thomas: “He/she must increase, and I must decrease.” Not easy to say, especially when for such a long time for each of these individuals, they were The One.
John the Baptist was a rival to Jesus, as well as the proclaimer of Jesus. It is imperative to understand that. “Are you the one to come, or should we look for another?”, John’s disciples asked Jesus. It is a sad statement, a melancholy statement. They hated to think John himself was not the Mesheach. John was so big for so long, and then he was dead, his head cruelly cut off and sadistically placed on a platter handed to the king. In the Middle East, there is nothing new in under the sun. Beheadings happen. Terrible sorrow is written into Middle Eastern history, and we see it in John the Baptist.
There is great joy in both of the songs of Gabriel. John shall be great, and Jesus shall be greater still. But for each there is violence and hatred and a terrible death at the end. It all starts gloriously, and it all ends so tragically.
But God has plans, Christian people; God always has plans! And His plans always work out in the end! A voice shall soon be crying out, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord!” And another voice shall proclaim, “The kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel.” Humans may knowingly or unknowingly try to thwart the providential plans of God, but in the end, they always come to pass. The songs proclaim it; the Christmas songs declare it. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men!” The message of the messengers shall surely be enacted, because God is God. It cannot be otherwise. Trust God.
Trust Him always.