Luke 1:67-80 "He Has Come, He Will Shine" Scott Hoezee

Some years ago in my first church, I knew a dear man who had been stricken with a stroke. As strokes go, this was a bad one, rendering him unable to walk and making a good many other physical skills difficult at best. Perhaps worst of all, however, it rendered him totally mute. Because he was unable to talk or write, it was highly difficult to discern how well his mind was still functioning. It was one of those situations in which I found it difficult to know what to think. Which possibility was worse: that his mental faculties had fled the same as so many physical abilities or that his mind was functioning quite normally but was trapped inside a body that could no longer speak? In my visits with him--including times when I brought the Lord's Supper to his bedside--there were many times when his eyes flashed with what looked to be a keen intelligence and even some good wit. I was glad to see that, and yet was haunted by the thought of his having much to say but being forever unable to do so. Such a situation must be torturous indeed.

Zechariah's muteness was temporary, and there is every indication that he knew that. This did not, however, make it a snap for him to endure that period of silence. If a doctor had to put you into a special form of traction in which you were largely immobilized with your face down toward the floor, it might be comforting to know that this would be for only two weeks, but I'd wager those would nevertheless be a very long two weeks for you! And so just imagine that someone came up to you on this very evening, December 15, 2002, and informed you that you would be unable to say another syllable until sometime in mid-September 2003. All this coming winter, spring, and summer, you would be consigned to silence. Surely, such a prospect would induce panic and a feeling of dread. We love to talk. We need to talk. It's how we connect with the larger world.

Garrison Keillor recently recounted a train trip he took from Philadelphia to Washington D.C., a trip which was delayed a bit along the way by some snow. He noted that the people around him on the train used their cellphones to give their friends updates on the train's progress, and quite a few of them did this every 10 minutes or so. Keillor then wryly observed that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic without a radio, yet some folks today can't resist phoning in every other mile when they travel!

We like to talk and so the prospect of nine months without talking chills us. But suppose it happened. What would you do during all that time? And suppose you lived in an age when there was no email, no postal service, no books to read, no ink pens, and very little paper. Suppose that even when it came to writing something down, you were limited to a slate tablet. What would you do with all that silence?

Well, I know I'd surely feel sorry for myself a good bit of the time. I'd probably have fits of anger borne of sheer frustration. I'd internally rage against how slowly the time was passing. And in all likelihood there would be dozens of times every day when I would start to say something, only to catch myself and despair all over again. It would be like the way you catch yourself flipping on a light switch even when you know full well you are experiencing a power failure! Old habits die hard. And talking is very much a habit for us.

What would you do with nine months of silence? In Zechariah's case we know the answer: during his prolonged period of enforced silence, Zechariah composed in his head a gorgeous poem of praise. Zechariah wrote what could almost be called Psalm 151. Indeed, the Canticle of Zechariah has become one of the more famous passages from the New Testament and is a regular fixture in traditional liturgies all over the world. On this night of singing, it is fitting that we ponder this lovely song, this first-ever Christmas carol.

What amazes you about this song is how biblically rich it is. Almost every word is loaded, freighted, with power. In fact, the key words raise whole clouds of deeper meaning from the course of salvation history. Let me try a musical analogy of what I mean: my parents have an antique pump organ that I used to play around with when I was younger. I remember that there is one particular stop on that organ that, if you pull the stop out, the organ will sound accompanying chords for you. If that stop is out, then when you play certain notes from the treble cleft above middle-C, a corresponding set of keys automatically go down to play some appropriate chord in the bass cleft below middle-C.

The words of Zechariah's song are a little like that. Each word sounds not simply a single note but entire biblical chords. Zechariah may be singing this in what we call Luke 1, but as he sings, there are all kinds of "keys" going down way back in Genesis 12, in Exodus, Deuteronomy, the entire Book of Psalms, and the prophets. Zechariah put his months of silence to good use in summoning to mind vast tracks of biblical imagery, language, and history. And it all now comes into play in this richly embroidered canticle. "Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel." You hear that opening line, and instantly a battery of Old Testament psalms come to mind.

Israel is mentioned, giving us continuity with all that has come before in the Bible ever since that daybreak at the River Jabbok when God concluded his wrestling match with Jacob by renaming him "Israel." The House of David gets mentioned, reminding us of God's covenant promise that one day no one less than Messiah would come from the family line of David. "Salvation" is mentioned over and over, reminding us of God's first rescue of Israel from Egypt, which was itself a direct outgrowth of the covenant made with the next person who is mentioned: Abraham. In remarkably swift strokes Zechariah has taken us through the covenental history of Israel right down to that day when the baby who would become John the Baptist was being presented for the rite of circumcision.

Then, beginning in verse 76, Zechariah appears to turn from that ancient past to the present moment by addressing his young son, John, directly. But even here Zechariah continues to allude to the prophets, to Isaiah's well-known words about preparing the way of the Lord. He touches on the precious promise of forgiveness and then roots that grace in nothing less than the tender mercy of God, by which the rising sun from heaven will shine on those living in the shadow of death.

Zechariah had good eyesight as he looked back in time. But when you think about it, he had keen vision as he looked into the future, too. Did you notice that Zechariah sings in the past tense in the first half of this canticle, claiming that God already has saved his people? But since Jesus had not yet been born, much less done anything that looked like salvation, it seems odd for Zechariah to use the past tense.

In a literal sense, at the time Zechariah sang this, God had not yet saved his people. That was still coming, wasn't it? There was no Messiah on the scene yet. The Jews were still under the thumb of Roman occupation. Caesar was god and lord. God had not yet saved his people or raised up some horn of salvation or anything else like it. So maybe that's why in the second half of this song, Zechariah switches to the future tense. John will be called a prophet of the Most High and he will prepare the way for the Lord, and through all that the rising sun from heaven will arise.

But which is it: past tense or future tense? If in the second half of this song Zechariah acknowledges that true light will not shine until some time yet to come, why does the song open as though this were all a done deal, past tense, finished? Maybe the answer has to do with the way time always swirls around in the prophetic imagination. Maybe the answer has to do with the fact that throughout the Bible, any given prophecy may well end up having lots of mini-fulfillments on its way to some grander, final fulfillment. Prophets always looked forward to multiple horizons of fulfillment but in looking ahead to the future, prophets mined the memory of the people to root that future hope in God's past acts.

Typically when we think of prophecy, we think it is a foretelling of the future in the crystal ball sense of making predictions. Switch on any number of religious programs on TV and you'll see that the people who are touted as "modern-day prophets" are the ones who say things like, "I declare to you that in the year 2010, a great cataclysm will happen in the Middle East and this will set off the rapture of God's people." Or, "I was reading Daniel the other day and discovered a Hebrew word that, if you spell it backwards and drop out the middle 4 letters, it spells 'Saddam Hussein,' and that tells me that in the year 2004, Hussein will be the antichirst!"

Aside from the loopiness of much of that, the main problem is that this is not prophecy in the biblical sense. Prophets like Zechariah do not foretell future events but rather they forthtell the truth of God. But forthtelling, telling forth, always involves a look into the past where we see God's faithfulness across the generations. As Walter Brueggemann has so eloquently written, the job of the prophet is lyrically to invoke the language of amazement, daring people to believe in their future on the basis of what God has already accomplished in their collective past. Prophets had the task of energizing people for action and for hope by depicting a future that no one would otherwise think possible.

In that sense, prophetic hope is subversive. True hope in God declares to the powers that be in this present age that they are at best secondary in the realizing of what we believe will come to pass. Thus, prophetic speech, like this song of Zechariah, is audacious, gutsy, and powerful in its ability to evoke a new world. But always, always the prophets grounded all that not in some pie-in-the-sky optimism but in the fact of God's past actions.

That's why Zechariah can sing in the past tense initially. Of course he knew the Christ was not yet on the scene, had not yet been resurrected from the dead. But when during his nine months of silence Zechariah surveyed the landscape of holy history, he realized that given all that God had already done to stay true to his covenant promises, salvation was as good as accomplished already!

But that firmness of faithful resolve is not unrealistic. Zechariah is not like some person whacked out on crack who can't tell what's what anymore as he swirls in some surreal drug-induced high. That's why the future tense plays a role in this song as well. As a prophet, Zechariah is discerning. Prophecy is not about shutting your eyes to reality. Zechariah knows there is a bright future but that it will not yet come to pass for some time. He knows that for now we are still living in that Psalm 23-like valley of the shadow of death.

He is not ignoring reality but is seeing deeper into it. He is not ignoring the headlines of the newspaper or the fact that things are still in sorry shape, but he is discerning the reality behind the headlines, the truth above the roar of current events. Rooted in the past of God's faithfulness, Zechariah moves beyond the moment in his dual confidence that God already has saved us and will yet complete that salvation in the light of the sun that will rise.

More than we know, this is our Advent task, too. Because we've come here tonight to sing songs and carols but we've done so from the context of a world of war, violence, terrorism, disease. We come here to sing, but our voices are nearly drowned out by talk of weapons inspections and arms declarations, of suicide bombings and saber rattling of all kinds. We've come here tonight to sing lyrics like "Joy to the earth! The Savior reigns!" But we know full well that there is not obviously a Savior reigning over this earth. "He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness." But we know full well that many nations seem out of control, pagan, anti-Christian. Some nations are out to disprove any supposed glories of Jesus' righteousness.

In ways subtle and obvious, our Christmas carols and Advent hymns reflect our bold, audacious, absurd belief that in a baby born long ago, God came down. We stand up and say to any who will listen that because of that, this is a cosmos shot-through with the divine. In the subversive nature of our hope, we stand up to tell every leader, president, prime minister, king, and dictator on earth that they are nothing, that they are ruled and over-ruled by Christ Jesus the Lord of lords and King of kings. What's more, we tell this world's big shots that Jesus' Lordship is true whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not.

In a way, you might think, "What could be more agreeable and pleasant than Christmas music?" And indeed, the Muzak at the mall, the warbling of all those clutches of door-to-door carolers, and the symphony music of any number of holiday specials on TV all indicate that people of many faiths or no faith are more than willing to hear the strains of "Silent Night," "Joy to the World," "O Come, All Ye Faithful." Not only are people not put off or offended by this, they are quite cozy with it. There may be dozens of adjectives or adverbs that people would use to describe traditional Christmas carols, but "subversive" would never be one of them!

Our job as Christian people in Advent is to discern the subversive nature of the hope that is expressed in our carols and hymns. We need to be fully aware that when we sing these songs, we are not cozying up to the powers that be, we are not being all chummy and neighborly, but rather we are articulating the quintessence of our subversive, radical hope in that boy-child of Mary. We may enjoy it when we sense that this is one season of the year when even people outside the church enjoy some of our "church music," but maybe we should not be so happy about that. Because for many in our world, if they like these carols, that's only because they don't understand them. For in our music we declare that our God already has saved us in Christ and he will yet show that salvation to the entire world when at long last the valley of the shadow of death brightens up once and for all. It will happen because it has happened.

Zechariah opened his song by assuring us that our God has come. He concludes by assuring us that he will shine. We know he will shine on us because we know by faith that he has come to us already. As we continue to sing our carols this evening and in the weeks ahead, it is our Christian duty to know that even if we sing these carols with our fellow believers around the world, there is a sense in which we sing these carols against all who want to chalk up our faith as just wishful thinking. Our carols are sung against portions of the world, but by singing them loudly and clearly, we hope that there will be ever-greater numbers of people who eventually will embrace our radical and subversive Christian hope and so will then sing with us in the deepest, truest sense! Amen.