Emery was sick, so I wasn’t able to give this sermon. But here’s the one I wrote for the past Sunday based on the reflections I shared earlier in the week.
In 1969, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel gave a lecture on prayer, insisting that prayer at its heart is song—delighted, admiring praise:
First we praise, then we believe… To worship is to join the cosmos in praising God. The whole cosmos, every living being sings, the Psalmists insist… We live for the sake of a song. We praise for the privilege of being… At the beginning was the song, and praise is humanity’s response to the never-ending beginning.
Luke’s Gospel opens with the story of a surprise. The priest Zechariah, who, like his wife, is honorable and irreproachable—but nonetheless childless and “well-stricken in years”—, stands at the altar of incense, dutifully offering his “sacrifice of praise.” Suddenly, the angel of the Lord interrupts his prayers, terrible in glory, shining with the word of assurance and promise (Lk 1:13-17):
Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
We expect elation, a song of thanksgiving. But Zechariah is only frightened, unbelieving: “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years” (Lk 1:18). He has lived a blameless life. He is a man of prayer. He is truly righteous. Yet, in the moment of truth, he staggers. The only answer he is given for his question is a word of reproof: “But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur” (Lk 1:20).
It’s tempting to be frightened by Zechariah’s doubting. If someone so loyal, so proven can fall so suddenly into disbelief, then what of you or me? But perhaps his doubts should not surprise us? Perhaps it is precisely because he is so devout and so mature that he responds as he does? Perhaps those who are closest to God are most at risk of acting in ways least like God?
In one sense, of course, Zechariah’s doubts hardly seem to matter. Gabriel assures him that despite his wavering the promise will be fulfilled in its time. And we should not be surprised by this: the Creator Spirit is not so easily stymied, after all! But if his doubts did not matter, then why does judgment fall on him?
Long before, Malachi had prophesied the coming of the Lord as the falling of judgment:
See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years. Then I will draw near to you for judgement… (Mal. 3:1-5).
We cannot overstate this truth: the Spirit truly is graceful—always exactly as forceful or as gentle as we need, undoing all that is not-right without in any way harming us. When needed, God comes as a refiner’s fire, raging away every vestige of corruption and impurity. But God also most often comes as fuller’s soap, washing away the stains—always without tearing the fabric of our lives, without wearing us thin. God’s work can be violent at times, but it never violates. And so he comes to Zechariah, not as fire but as soap.
Still, we have to ask why Zechariah is punished at all. Mary responds to Gabriel’s promise with a similar question— “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” (Lk. 1.34)—and she is given an explanation! Zechariah is punished—remember this word, I’ll come back to it in a moment—because he, a priest in Israel, standing at the altar, has forgotten his story, the truth of his past, and so is offering unmindful, forgetful prayers.
Israel’s history, remember, is made possible only by God’s faithfulness to the agéd and hopeless, the pathetic and the barren. If there are mothers in Israel, if there are fathers, it is only because God is the God of the impossible. This is why the psalmist dances: “He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children. Praise the Lord” (Ps. 113:9). And this is why the prophet erupts in praise: “Sing, O barren one who did not bear; burst into song and shout, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate woman will be more than the children of her that is married, says the Lord” (Isa. 54.1).
How can Zechariah of all people have forgotten this? Perhaps he had become “weary in well doing,” worn down not by the cares of this life so much as by care for those whose lives have been lost or broken. Whatever the reason, he has forgotten, at least for a moment. And so, God affords him stillness, the reserve he needs to calm and quiet his own soul (Ps. 131:2).
A moment ago, I asked why he was “punished.” But in truth he was not punished—he was settled, secured, given rest. Zechariah is not blinded or exiled or struck with leprosy. He does not fall down dead. Instead, he is drawn into the settled quietness of the Triune life, given time to come to terms with the overwhelming goodness of God’s promise, a promise he had for whatever reason come to fear too good to be true. Not yet ready to sing, he is left speechless.
At the beginning of his talk on prayer, Heschel confesses that he prays “because God, the Shekinah, is in exile.”
I pray because God is in exile, because we all conspire to blur all signs of His presence in the present or in the past. I pray because I refuse to despair, because extreme denials and defiance are refuted in the confrontation of my own presumption and the mystery all around me. I pray because I am unable to pray. And suddenly I am forced to do what I seem unable to do. Even callousness to the mystery is not immortal. There are moments when the clamor of all sirens dies, presumption is depleted, and even the bricks in the walls are waiting for a song. The door is closed, the key is lost. Yet the new sadness of my soul is about to open the door.
What opens the door for Zechariah is not sadness, however. It is the thrill of joy! His song is the song of glad recollection, the song of happy expectation. In the moment of John’s birth—which, as promised, happened right on time—Zechariah is carried away in the Spirit. The priest becomes a prophet. The prophet becomes praise. He does not only sing, he sings. He blesses God, the God of Israel, the God of David, the God of Abraham. And he blesses his son, speaking the faithfulness of God, shown again and again in Israel’s past, into the suddenly bright future.
And his song is sung over us, even now. Advent is for us as it was for him a time of silence, a time of settling into the quietness of God. In this time, we are not waiting for a God who’s left us behind, isolated in our punishments. We await the God who is already present, always at hand, nearer to us than our own being. God is coming, yes! But God is not absent! We are waiting for God in God and with God. That is why the waiting is holy and sanctifying, washing or burning away all those grown-up, religious anxieties that have diseased our prayers and rotted our hopes.
And in the womb of our quiet, a song begins to grow.