Open Your Heart’s Door To A
Season of Wonder
Luke 1:5-25
On Monday of this week, when the Mars Polar Lander was scheduled to descend through the atmosphere of the Red Planet, deploy it’s parachute, fire it’s landing rockets, and gently touch down on the surface of our nearest planetary neighbor. Even though the Martian atmosphere is much thinner than ours, there was a period of silence while the ship passed through it. Then the scientists in California waited for the ship to signal that it had landed safely. The expected time for reacquisition of signal came and went. The switched over to Australia as the United States spun away from Mars. Still nothing. Days went by. It has now been a week, and no signal from our Mars Lander. This 140 million dollar experiment seems to have either crashed, burned up or perhaps broke an antennae. Whatever the cause, there has been no signal, no digital word from our little Martian robot. All over the world, scientists are training their best listening devices toward the Red Planet, hoping to pick up some faint indicator of what happened. But all they hear are the sounds of silence.
Deafening silence. In all those offices the sound of silence spells trouble for the scientists. Already congressmen are calling for a review of all projected Mars projects. NASA has already postponed the next series of Mars missions until the reason for this loss, and another earlier failure occurred. When a promise is made of results, and millions of dollars are invested, people are not satisfied with silence.
Within
the story of Jesus birth there is an account of two elderly folks. A “story within the story” of a married
couple by the name of Zechariah and Elizabeth.
If you were with us last week, we touched on their story a little, but
this week, I would like us to do a much closer examination of their tale. It is found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1
(page 688). We will be reading from
verse 5 through 25.
In
this story there are three different episodes of silence, one of which is very
obvious, and two others that are less evident, but important none the less.
Read
Text
The
first episode of silence is one that is important here because this is the time
when the silence is broken. When we
read in verse 13 that an angel spoke to Zechariah, and said, “Don’t be afraid,
your prayer has been heard, and you are going to have a son…” it was the first
time that God had spoken to man in over 400 years. The last words of the Old Testament, found in Malachi 4:5-6 read,
Behold I will send you Elijah the
prophet
Before the coming of the great and
dreadful day of the Lord.
And he will turn the hearts of the
fathers to the children,
And the hearts of the children to
their fathers…
When
those words were penned, and the prophet Malachi delivered his message to the
people of Israel, there was loss of signal from heaven. No more prophets. No Jeremiah. No
Isaiah. No Haggai. No Nahum of Habakkuk. Just silence. Loss of signal.
And
the people of Israel waited. They
waited for the prophet to show up that God had promised in his last
message. They waited as Alexander the
Great conquered and ruled over them.
They waited through the Ptolomies and Seleucid dynasties. They waited while their temple was
desecrated by Antiochus Epiphanes, who sacrificed a pig in the temple at
Jerusalem. They waited when the Romans
swept in and set up rule over them, oppressive and degrading.
But
there was no word. Only silence.
It
got to be silent for so long, that people began to actually doubt that God had
ever really spoken. They began to get
cynical about His supposed promise.
Some began to view it as nothing more than a crutch for week minded
people.
God
had been silent to long. The deafening
sounds of silence had crushed the spirit of even the faithful.
Even
the upright and righteous began to have some doubts in their minds. Witness Zechariah. Here was a priest of Israel.
He is described in verse 6 as “righteous before God, walking in all the
commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.” Here he was, participating in the greatest act of worship that a
priest of Israel could perform, and yet when the angel of God appeared to him,
and told him his prayer had been answered, and that the very same prophet
Malachi had promised 400 years earlier was going to be born, he didn’t believe
it.
Which
brings us to our second example of silence.
When
I read the words of Gabriel in verse 19, I always smile. He must have been utterly amazed at Zechariah. Here’s a guy who has seen and been talked to
by an angel, and he responds by saying, “How can I be sure?”
Gabriel’s
response is sharp. “Do you have any
idea who I am. I am Gabriel! I stand regularly in the presence of
God! And I was sent here to give you
this great news. But since you have
doubted the word of God, you will be silent from now until the day your child
is born!”
The
silence of Zechariah. The silence of unbelief. The silence of doubt.
Imagine
the way he must have felt. God was
doing wondrous things all around him, and Zechariah lived in a world of
silence. I believe that he was not only
smitten with a mute tongue, but he lost his hearing as well. Over in verse 61, after John was born, it
says that the people wanted to know what to name the boy, and it says they made
“signs to [him] – what he would have [the baby] called.” If Zechariah had only lost his speech, he
could have understood their question, but they had to make signs to him, and he
had to write out his response.
Zechariah's
doubt and unbelief caused him to live in a world of deafening silence. The last words his ears heard were the
sounds of the angel Gabriel, sent from God Himself, rebuking him for his lack
of faith. At a time that he and his
wife could have been celebrating this great answer to prayer, a time of wonder
and miracle, he was left in a world of silence, unable to speak to her, unable
to hear her excitement over the first movements she felt in her womb. Unable to hear the sound of that first cry
when his son was born.
His
was a silence of punishment. While
outwardly he had been a godly man, a religious leader, a pious individual, he
had secretly become cynical and filled with doubt. There he was, in the Holy Place at the Temple in Jerusalem,
praying for he deliverance of his people, but it was nothing more than going
through the motions. He didn’t really
expect God to answer his prayer. He was
simply doing what his tradition had taught him.
And
now his lack of genuine faith was a matter of public knowledge. Everyone in the hillside was buzzing about
the priest who had lost his speech in the temple. With each passing day,
Zechariah was left to contemplate the state of his heart in silence.
Zechariah’s
silence, which was imposed on him by God as punishment for his unbelief stands
in stark contrast to the last silence we will consider this morning.
It
is the silence of Elizabeth.
In
verse 24 and 25 we read,
Now after those days his wife Elizabeth conceived;
and she hid herself five months, saying, “Thus the Lord has dealt with me, in
the days when He looked on me, to take away my reproach among people.”
When
Elizabeth heard the wonderful news from her husband, she was surely surprised
and bewildered. And when she found
herself pregnant soon thereafter, she made a decision to secret herself
away. This was indeed a very special
time for her. All her life she had
struggled with the fact that she had not been able to give her husband a
son. In her culture, barrenness was
incorrectly looked on as a judgement from God.
She and Zechariah were godly people.
The kept the law and traditions flawlessly, and yet there were always
the whispers of some hidden sin that must have caused her to be childless. It was cruel and heartbreaking.
But
now God had, in His great grace, chosen to bless her and Zechariah with a
child. The longing in her heart was to
be granted! A miraculous new life was
brought to her body, those organs thought long dead were regenerated in a
wonderful act of grace.
And
Elizabeth’s response was to spend five months in silence, alone with her
thoughts, alone with the growing miracle within her, alone with God. I would imagine that during those months she
did a lot of praying, reading the ancient scriptures concerning her son,
including the text from Malachi that the angel had quoted, “He will turn the
hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to
their fathers.”
The
angel had said that her little boy would grow up with an Elijah-like spirit, so
I’ll bet she re-read some of the stories of Elijah, the great prophet of old,
who had predicted that there would be no rain for three years, and it had been
so. Who had gone during the draught to
the home of a widow and her son, who were just about to make their last meal
with the very last bit of flour and oil, then they were going to wait to die. Elijah had told them to share their flour
and oil with him, and God would provide for them oil and flour every day until
the rain returned. And he did. Elijah had been the prophet who had
challenged 450 prophets of the false god Baal to a duel on mount Carmel. The challenge was this: Each of us will pray to our God, and the one
who sends down fire from heaven will be the real God. The 450 prophets called out to their god. The beat themselves, and cut
themselves. All day long the cried out
to Baal, but nothing happened. Elijah
just sat there and smiled. “Maybe your
god has gone to the bathroom, yell a little louder!” he taunted.
Then
he built an alter, put a sacrifice on it, and had the people standing around
dig a trench around it. Then he had
water poured over it until the alter, the sacrifice and the ground around it
was soaked, and water stood in the in the trench. Then he prayed one simple prayer, and God sent fire from heaven
that consumed the sacrifice, the wood, the stone, even the dirt around the
alter, and all the water that had been poured on it. Elijah was the prophet from God who was taken from earth to
heaven in a chariot of fire.
Perhaps
she read scriptures about the Messiah, whom her son was being sent to prepare
for. She may have read and contemplated
the verses from Isaiah 7:14,
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and
shall call his name Immanuel
For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given;
and the government shall be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called,
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting
Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and peace there
will be no end,
Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,
to order it and establish it with judgement and
justice
from that time forward, even forever.”
For
five months, Elizabeth kept herself alone, away from the attention of neighbors
who would have made a fuss over her, away from the many distractions that could
have flooded her days. A time of
silence in her own home. Her husband
unable to speak or hear her, she spent five months reflecting, contemplating,
worshiping. The Message renders verse 24
this way, “She went off by herself for five months, relishing her
pregnancy. ‘So this is how God acts to
remedy my unfortunate condition!’ she said.”
The
silence of Elizabeth. A silence of
reflection, of thanks, of worship. The
silence of a person who has recognized the grace of God, and who responds by
being still in His holy presence. On
the inserts to your programs you received a this morning is printed a verse
from the book of Job,
“Stand still and consider the
wondrous works of God…”
That
is what Elizabeth chose to do. She
chose to take steps to find quiet times of reflection and thanksgiving in the
midst of preparing for the great gift of God.
Time to consider His wondrous works.
The
sounds of silence.
It
may be that you have experienced what you perceive to be the silence of God in
your life. You have heard the story of
God’s salvation, and it seems to be an ancient story. The first thought that comes to your mind is “sure, but what has
God done for me lately?” You were
brought up hearing about Jesus in stuffy church services that never meant
anything more to you than they did to the people in Zechariah’s time. It was just going through the motions. Truth be known, you really consider it in
the same category as Santa Claus and Hercules – just fables or moral stories –
nothing more. To your mind, God has
been silent.
But
it may just be that you’re really experiencing the silence of Zechariah. If you really were honest, you’d realize
that God has actually somehow reached down from heaven at times in your life
when you knew he was speaking to you.
You felt the pain in your heart for your sinfulness. You stood in wonder at the birth of your
child. You knelt in anguish over the
grave of a family member and knew that there had to be more. God was speaking to you. No, Gabriel didn’t show up, and no, there
was no audible voice, but God was tugging at your heart, and you refused to
believe. And so now you are unable to
worship, unable to speak genuine praise to God, you try to pray, and it seems
like you are speaking and no one hears.
It’s the silence of unbelief, the silence that comes from an unbelieving
heart.
If
that is you, let me tell you that there is a remedy for your silence. You may be hearing the voice of God right
now, speaking to you. The Holy Spirit
may right now be whispering in your ear – “I’m talking to you!” And just as Zechariah had his silence broken
with the birth of his son, even so you can have your silence and muteness
before God shattered by the birth of God’s Son in your heart. Then your heart will be able to sing out
before God like Zechariah’s did:
Praise the Lord, The God of Israel!
He has come to save His people,
Our God has given us a mighty Savior!
You
can experience the true meaning of Christmas by seeing the silence and emptiness
of your heart replaced by the joy and love of God.
If
you are already a person of faith, one who has experienced the love and grace
of God, then let me encourage you to follow the example of Elizabeth. No, you probably can’t take five months to
contemplate God’s gift to you, but could you take five minutes? Could you carve out a five-hour block of
time to read the scriptures regarding the birth of Christ and what it means to
you? Could you spare a few moments each
morning to prepare your hearts for the day ahead? Could you spend 5 minutes around the table each day reviewing the
devotional in the calendar we’ve provided for the season?
The
sounds of silence. For some an
overwhelming sense of loneliness and abandonment. For others an overwhelming sense of worship and praise. But for each and every one of us, an
important part of this season of wonder.
Prayer.