Advent Letter Week 2 (Zechariah and John)

Zechariah - The vantage point of the world

To the loved ekklesia of God in Tucson, where the light of Christ shines brightly through the gathered saints,

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Grace, peace, and truth be yours in abundance as you live in the light of the knowledge that our King has risen from the dead and will extend this resurrection life to us as well.

We are in the second week of Advent now.

Each week we are going to consider a story or character from the Bible that will help us orient our own hopes to the hope found in the gospel.

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Last week’s letter had the intention of showing us that the Messiah was the hope of Israel. And that the Messiah’s return is the hope of spiritual Israel, which is the church.

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This week we consider a father and son.

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The entire old covenant ends in the book of Malachi with a prophetic promise that the prophet Elijah will come before the Lord and “turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers.”

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This is in fact part of the gospel:

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That the Advent of our Lord has the power to restore broken families and enable them to live in His covenant once again.

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The beauty of this story is that even before this prophet would begin his work (a prophet we will learn to be John the Baptist), God is going to turn the heart of one father to his own son.

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This father was none other Zechariah, a descendant of priests, married to a descendant of priests.

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Now this wasn’t the greatest era of the priesthood in Israel.

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Their ancestors had sacrificed bulls without number to dedicate temples and to cleanse Israel from their sin.

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They had been respected, mediating God to the people.

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Now, they existed and operated at the pleasure of an Emperor who only let them worship out of necessity.

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The religious scene in Israel was horribly compromised by political intrigue and baggage from generations past.

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But in the midst of all that, a faithful few were continuing the work.

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Why did Luke find it necessary to start his Gospel with this account?

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How else should the King of the Universe be introduced but by telling the story of His messenger.

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The sun is rising in Israel.

The promised light is dawning now, right before Zechariah’s old, weary eyes.

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It is time to wake up the sleepers.

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The birth of the Messiah wasn’t the only baby foretold about in centuries past.

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There would be another baby.

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One who would prepare the way for one who would be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

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And in order to show His complete sovereignty in these events, who does God choose to use?

An old, barren couple.

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I find this story to be of great encouragement for the elderly among us.

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Culturally, especially in America, being in your silver years does not come with the respect it is owed.

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Elderly Christians report the isolating effects of ageism, as younger generations charge ahead into the wide blue yonder without a thought that their grandparents did that once too, and have much to share.

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I was speaking with two elderly Christians who I love recently.

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Mike and Marnie Goheen are friends of mine.

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Mike is my seminary professor, and Marnie his wife is my life professor.

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I greatly enjoy their company and the instruction I have received from them.

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As influential and well loved as they are by the church in Arizona and Canada, they too express the withering effects of being sidelined in old age, and frequently share the sentiment that they feel like they might be dinosaurs.

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The last time I heard them say this I told Marnie,

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“Marnie, you guys are dinosaurs, but you’re OUR dinosaurs.”

The effect this had on Marnie was evident.

Elderly Christians among us are not usually afraid of being old,

They are afraid of being forgotten and their wisdom untapped.

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The effect of growing old isn’t difficult simply because one is old.

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We all expect that to happen.

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What we don’t expect is the marginalization as one by one the people who know what you have to offer die and leave you increasingly isolated.

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Who could be more marginalized and isolated than an elderly couple with no children living in Roman occupied Israel?

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They have no children, no country, no Messiah, and no one has heard from God in centuries.

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Where is He?

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We’re lonely Yahweh!

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When are you going to set your people free again?

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Why didn’t you give us a child?

These are the types of questions that we ask ourselves too.

It can be very hard to see God’s plan when we are focused on ourselves.

But in God’s kindness he leads us along despite our insecurities and weaknesses.

Consider how God unfolds the arrival of His own Son.

How would you introduce your child to the world?

If you had unlimited resources, how would you do it?

You love your child!

You’re going to celebrate them with the world!

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It is the supreme delight of God to usher in His kingdom not with 7 foot tall Alpha male soldiers wearing chain armor,

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but through frail people.

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Through people who surely thought that they had no part to play in Israel’s story.

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Loved ones, it cannot be overstated how influential you can be in God’s kingdom.

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God delights in small acts of obedience.

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He doesn’t need you to charge the hill.

He doesn’t need you to claim authority for Him.

He already has it.

‌He needs you to retreat into your prayer closet and wage war from a place of weakness.

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He needs you doing the simple things.

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The baking of the loaves for the widow and orphan,

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The watering of the plants when your neighbor Fred is on vacation,

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the taking on the knee of the littlest children and with a twinkle in your eye, telling them of how King Jesus is coming to harvest His wheat one day.

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These acts, done in faith, are the true victories.

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And so it should not surprise us that God sends His angel Gabriel to meet Zechariah in the quiet place.

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The job that Zechariah performs in the temple was one in which they would tie a rope around the waist of the priest entering the sanctuary of the Lord.

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Why the rope?

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In the event that the priest were to enter in an unholy manner, he could be struck down by God’s holiness,

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and they would use the rope to pull out his dead body.

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This wasn’t an imaginary fear.

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The very first priests to God, the sons of Aaron the High Priest had made this very same fatal mistake at the inception of Israel’s tabernacle worship in the wilderness.

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But herein lies the beauty of the gospel.

God’s holiness wasn’t always dangerous to humans.

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It is not God’s ultimate plan that a fixed location would be His most Holy place,

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but that every human heart would be a most Holy Place.

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This was His intention in the garden, as Adam and Eve are made in His image and then sent to go explore the creation, bringing the Most Holy place with them, wherever they went.

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The holiness of Eden was meant to be spread over the whole earth.

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This is God’s plan for His future city as well.

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A city that you are already citizens of my friends.

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This is WHY you have been given God’s Spirit.

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So that you can even now extend Eden holiness wherever you go,

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so that our world can receive a genuine foretaste of what this world will look like when it is restored.

The Advent of Christ isn’t JUST an invasion against the kingdom of darkness.

The negation of sin and death is simply step one of restoring humanity to the trajectory that God set them on in the garden.

A trajectory of dominion and discipleship.

Of cultivating the creation, and filling it with God’s children.

The Advent of Christ means that this is now your vocation, Christians.

It is God’s gift to you that you are enabled to actually obey these God given missions.

Dominion, a word that sounds like dominate, is nothing of the sort.

Domination is the sinful direction away from God’s created norm that humans would exercise dominion over the creation.

That they would exercise lordship over it.

And how does our Lord exercise authority?

By self-giving love.

Through covenant love.

To exercise dominion over the creation is to be radically committed to God’s creation.

Dominion is the daily practice of treating God’s world and the people and animals that populate it like it belongs to God and not you.

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Discipleship, a word that brings to mind theories of how to make people better christians, can also be informed greatly by the Advent of Christ.

If there had never been sin, there would still have been discipleship.

But it would have happened almost entirely in the context of families as children were born and taught about God and His world.

There would have been no unbelievers.

All throughout history, God has made it clear that parents are to raise their children to know, love, and obey Him.

What Christ’s Advent does so powerfully is exactly what we see being fulfilled in tonight’s story.

The turning of hearts from parent to child, and child to parent.

If you are single, you have work to do too.

Not only are you covenantally committed to the children in your church too,

But God has children all over our world starting with your next door neighbor that are in desperate need of adoption.

There are people walking by you every day that are someday going to be your brothers and sisters in Christ, but right now they are in bondage to the prince of darkness.

Tell them who can release them.

Tell them who will adopt them.

Tell them about your Elder Brother who has liberated YOU.

These twin missions of dominion and discipleship go together like the sun and the moon.

While you are daily caring for, exercising dominion over the creation,

You are looking for those God is calling. Those God is justifying. Those God is sanctifying. Those God will glorify.

It’s your kids.

It’s your neighbor.

It’s the nations.

This story of Zechariah, his bride Elizabeth, and their son John,

Is a story about how God is able to give grace.

Zechariah and Elizabeth didn’t deserve a child.

But God gave them one anyway.

Zechariah didn’t have the right to question God and live to tell of the encounter.

But God sustained him.

Through these events, God, like a master mechanic, was beginning to tune the hearts of the people of Israel to the rhythm of receiving grace unmeasured and untold.

Jesus IS the grace of God.

And the grace that flowed from His side on the cross is the grace that sustains the world.

I’ve been studying Norse mythology lately.

Like many ancient mythologies, the Norse gods put themselves before others.

These mythologies are almost disturbingly predictable.

They share common ground with the biblical story:

Images of chaos before order, floods and ice, Adam and Eve like characters.

But the main thing to note about Norse, Greek, Indian, Roman, and Ancient Near Eastern mythologies, is there is always violence required to build the world.

This paints a clear picture of how Satan would have told the story of the world.

Because every time he does tell the story through pagan mythology, it sounds the same. Just with different characters.

They committed acts of violence against people to further their own goals.

Selfishness could be a good overarching word to describe the general attitude of the Norse pantheon.

My ancestors worshiped these deities.

The stark difference between my ancestor’s gods, and the God that we serve,

Is that where they commit acts of violence against others to build the world they want to see,

Our God allows an act of violence to be committed against himself to SERVE the world that He loves.

There is no comparison.

The events surrounding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth are the most astonishing thing we could ever hear.

We must work hard to recapture the wonder of these events and not slip into complacency.

We too, like Zechariah, Eizabeth, and all of Israel, need our hearts to be tuned to the rhythms of grace, so that we may receive grace in our time of need. Which is now. Now is your time of need.

Let me remind and encourage you that we should not be people who listen but do not respond.

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Listen to the message of John and his Father Zechariah.

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“Make straight the paths, because the King is here.”

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John’s message was truly a gospel.

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It was truly good news.

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But it is not good news for those who will reject the King.

The King is coming,

The paths have been made straight and He walked on them.

Jesus walked a straight path right into Jerusalem.

He walked a straight path to Pilates courtroom.

He walked a straight path to a hill with a cross on His back.

And he walked a straight path right on out of the tomb that He was sealed in.

He walked a straight path to the throne of God where He is seated, reigning over His creation with a rod and a staff.

Do not reject the Lamb that was slain for you.

Because He is going to walk a straight path directly into your world one day.

And He will either invite you to dine at his table,

Or He will banish you form His kingdom.

Place your faith in the only man to defeat death.

Place your faith in the only God who loves you.

He will not lose you.

He will not betray you.

We await the Advent of His return.