Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commcommons.church for more information. Hope

Last week, Jeremy started a conversation that we are having before Christmas as we feel our way through Advent. And then looking at the story of Joseph last time around, we tried to pay attention to the worry and to the anxiety that are present in the months and moments leading up to the birth of Jesus in the gospels. How Joseph had plenty of justifiable reasons to be concerned and overwhelmed. I don't know if you know this, but there are there's all kinds of emotion and angst there between the lines in the gospel. And you might be asking, Scott, how can you assume that?

To which I say, well, there's a few reasons, but one of them is based on the experience of my wife telling me more than seventeen years ago now that she was pregnant for the first time and how I had to lay down, which sounds very dramatic. Frankly, it was dramatic. Just roll with me. I can still remember how overwhelmed I felt when unlike Joseph, I played a slightly different role in the process, which is super weird. And this is why attending to all of the social impact and fallout of the story, when we look at this, we see that Joseph, he faced some significant challenge.

And in doing this, we attend to the worries and the pressures of the characters. And this has a way of bringing Christmas into focus. Jeremy described it this way, how in Joseph accepting Mary's story and making it part of his, he demonstrates God's posture toward us. How the divine accepts all of the scandal and the challenge of our human experience. How in Jesus, the divine makes our story its own.

And I think that's something that we can come back to again and again. Today, we're gonna look at Zechariah and Elizabeth and how so often we are self conscious in the world. But first, I'm gonna invite you to just pause with me. Let's pray together. God with us, we pause.

For just a moment, we are gonna slow our breathing. We're gonna settle into our bodies, and we're gonna hold some gratitude for this space, for these familiar faces, for the warmth and the light that surround us. And in this season, we also wait. We wait for peace to be made. We wait for peace to be held.

We wait for the change that we're looking for and longing for, and for courage to grow in us. And so we pray, let our eyes and our ears be keen to the sense to sense all the ways that you arrive. Oh, God with us, quiet and unassuming and fragile as an infant, make us ready, we ask. In the name of Christ, our hope. Amen.

Alright. Well, today, we need to discuss return, undetermined endings, dissonance, and an end to stigma. So we're gonna start at the beginning, the beginning of the gospel of Luke. That is, where we are told that there was a priest named Zachariah who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah. And his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron in the priestly caste.

And both of them were righteous in the sight of God, and they observed all of the Lord's commands and decrees blamelessly. But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive and they were both very old. And before we go too far into the story, just a quick thought about Advent here. See, each December, we come back to the same characters, characters like these I've just read to you, these same tales, to the same small snippets of scripture. In fact, a year ago, I stood right here and preached this exact text.

And you might think that preacher pastor types wouldn't like this when this happens, that we might be tempted to just mail it in, just retread some old material. And I leave it to you to remember what I said fifty plus weeks ago. I certainly cannot. But here's what I wanna say before we get going. This repetitive repetitiveness is actually one of the things that I love about this season.

There's something grounding in returning to it here. Because I find that I've changed. I find that I come back to the story as a different person with new scars and perspective that are just part of the deal. And in circling back, I discover each advent that the story of scripture has potency less because I've mastered it and mined all its depths, but rather because it has a way of finding me where I am. And it prompts me to be honest about some current weakness.

And it speaks to me about the future that I face right now. It addresses the feelings that I feel today. So, no. We don't retread Advent so much as find that it returns to us. Now, that said, in the passage I just read to you, we met Zechariah and Elizabeth.

In the text there, it gave us some brief history about them. We're gonna get to that in just a second because first, we need to track with the scene that the gospel writer drops us into. See, Zechariah was a priest, but there's more to it than that. This chapter describes what happened this one time that he was serving in his role. Luke doesn't really explain all of this to us, but the reality is that the Jewish community had way more priests than they needed to conduct the daily rituals, sacrifices, and operations of the temple.

Scholars estimate that there were thousands of them in the community at the time, so priests were divided into 24 groups. Luke calls them divisions, and each division would serve for one week twice a year. So in effect, Zachariah is just a shift worker. He's got a job. He's on one week and off for twenty five, And he commutes into Jerusalem for the week.

And when he's done, he goes out to the hills where he and Elizabeth can afford a place. And he's just a cog. He's literally just a cog in a big spinning wheel of religious industrial complex. Except, verse nine tells us that on this one occasion, he was chosen by lot according to the custom of the priesthood to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense there. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside.

And just to be clear here, this one time, Zechariah has been chosen by the religious equivalent of drawing straws to handle this very important task, the burning of incense. I don't know if you know this, but this happened twice a day. It was done at a specific spot in the temple's interior, and this would be the closest that the average priest would ever get to the holy of holies, to that inner sanctum and heart of Jewish religion in the period. And so this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. This is Zechariah's big break.

It's his his escape from anonymity. And Zechariah's role would have been the last function of the afternoon sacrifice. His assistants would have helped him pick up some coals that were burning on the great altar, and then they would have left him alone in the temple's interior to light the incense, and they would wait outside with the rest of the participating crowd and community. And that's when things went sideways. Because the text says that an angel apparates right in front of him.

Seriously, that's what the Greek says, apparates. And in one minute there, Zachariah's all by himself. He's feeling pressure, and his sweaty palms are about to drop the thing he's trying to set down, and then there's just an angel there. It's a full on jump scare. And we read, when Zechariah saw this angel, he was startled.

He's gripped with fear. Then the angel says to him, don't be afraid. Zechariah, your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son. You're supposed to call him John.

And John's gonna be a joy and a delight to you, and many are gonna rejoice because of his birth. And on the one hand, you can imagine the fear that Zachariah feels here stemming from his awareness of the waiting crowd outside. He's aware of the storied role that he's been asked to play, how this angel is delaying him, how this angel is not part of the script. Maybe I've done something wrong here, he might be thinking. But that's not the messenger's objective at all.

Don't be afraid. Your prayer has been heard. And in that statement, the angel taps into Zechariah's private self consciousness. Those deepest thoughts and feelings that he had only ever let escape as halting prayer in the dark. And we let those words escape too.

The feelings we have that we are no one, that we take up no space, that we have nothing to offer, or conversely, the feeling that everything rides on us. The pressure to not show weakness or to make a mistake, and then the feeling of crushing guilt when we do. That feeling that no one sees you, that recurring wish to not be seen for once, Zachariah knows these things. He feels them in his desire for a child, in his longing for significance, in his suspicion that he'd somehow messed it all up. And finding these things here should remind you that the story of a God with us arrives so unexpectedly.

With news that your feelings are known, but also with assurance that like Zachariah, there are some undetermined endings yet. Now, to understand how the rest of this conversation with the angel plays out, we need to look back at something quickly. Remember, right at the beginning there, we were reading the introductions that Luke makes. We read this, that both Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous in the sight of God. They observed all of the Lord's commands and decrees blamelessly.

And this phrase is here just to make it clear that Elizabeth and Zechariah are the o g power couple. The Greek terminology is referring to their righteous blamelessness, and it's indicating that they have committed themselves to the just and equitable rhythms of the Jewish law. And in this way, it's not telling us what others think about them. This isn't a comment on their positive workplace reviews. It's not telling us that they were active community volunteers, that they helped out with their nephew's hockey fundraisers and coordinated all the meal trains.

That's not what it's saying. It's giving them a divine endorsement because they've attended to the law completely for love of neighbor, for love of god, for love of enemy alike. They have done all the right things. The problem is that this introduces some significant dissonance into the story. It would have for the ancient Jewish audience of the first century who knew well that Moses' ancient law promised God's people that if they paid attention to the instructions, if they were careful to follow all the guidelines that God would keep covenant with them.

Deuteronomy chapter seven verse 14 gets super specific here. It says, you will be blessed more than all the other people. None of your men or women will be childless, which just means that something doesn't quite add up here for Liz and Zach. But let's be clear, ancient audiences aren't the only ones that see some incongruity here. I think we do too.

We see it in this story, just like we see it every day in the vast gulf between righteous and moral selfless actors, and how they don't always get an easy carefree ride. And it's because of this gap, I'm sure that most of us spend a lot of time and energy making sure that we keep people around us happy. We perform, we sacrifice, we attend to endless demands as professionals, as partners, as parents. We do this in so many ways. And all the while, if we're honest, I think we agonize over whether we're good enough.

I can feel really disjointed, and I know I get self conscious when despite my best efforts, good is long incoming. When the payoffs of being moral and decent don't live up to the measure of my investments. And listen, this dissonance is a key feature of Luke one. We see it here a little later on as this angel, he gets carried away talking about how awesome this child is gonna be. And Zach kinda stops him and replies dryly, wait.

How can I be sure of this? I am an old man, and my wife is well along in years. See how he kinda just compliments her a little bit there? Very smart guy. And so, I appreciate this.

How Zachariah seems to be saying, okay. Okay. Okay. Let's take an evidence based approach. Based on my experience, I don't really see how this is going to work.

And I don't think he's angry or vengeful here. I think Zacchaeus is introspective because he must have been in his head for a long time. He's reconciled himself to how people think he or Elizabeth must have done something to deserve their heartache. He's tried to be okay with who he is. He's found some middle ground between being moral and feeling blessed.

And I can relate to this because I know what it's like to want to trust, but also wanna protect myself. And I know what it's like to try to hope again, but also wanna avoid being let down. And I know what it's like to see how change could happen in my life, but also wanting things to stay the same. And this is why I understand why Zacharias says what he does. And why while the angel does reflect back to him that he's actually questioning God's goodness, and then sends him on a silent retreat until his son is born.

What I love is how the story of Christmas doesn't omit the doubts that its characters carry as they live through the dazzling light and the fulfilled promises. And I need that reminder that this story is good because it admits and it holds its dissonance and mine too, which brings us nearly to the end of this little narrative. Zechariah emerges from the temple that day and everyone knows that something's happened. They just can't hear him saying anything because he can't talk. And at the conclusion of his shift, he goes home.

And we learn that Elizabeth becomes pregnant. It's not a surprise given what the angel just said, but also it's not a surprise because Elizabeth is playing a recurring character in the Jewish imagination. See, going all the way back to the earliest stories of the Hebrew Bible, including the story of the great patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah, there are several instances where women are unable to conceive or carry children, and so God intervenes. So when Elizabeth celebrates this new development by saying, the Lord has done this for me. In these days, God has shown God's favor and taken away my disgrace from among the people.

When she says that, Elizabeth is bringing the narrative arc full circle. She's playing her literary part, commemorating how the divine has addressed the source of shame that she's felt. And you could almost think that this kind of tidy ending is what Advent invites us to reflect on each year. Except it's not. It can't be.

Right? Because we don't live in a world where everything works out. Where all the dry places in us flourish, where we can change the things that make others scorn us and shame us. Sometimes we don't get what we long for. Sometimes, it feels like everyone else gets the benefits.

Sometimes, it feels like we age out and we get passed by. And this is why we need a bigger story. And here's what I mean. There's a way to read Elizabeth's tale that doesn't go far enough. See, like some of us, her story is defined by stigma.

It's defined by the assumptions of others that she must have hidden faults. It's defined by how others measure her life by certain arbitrary outputs that she has no control over. And it's defined by how maybe she had come to believe that some of her choices just have consequences. Now, I just have to live with them. And I think we can see in Elizabeth familiar forms of self consciousness, where others opinions and religious expectations and our own thoughts become a prison in which we live like its home.

See, there's this curious line in the narrative where Luke tells us that after Elizabeth becomes pregnant, for five months, she remains in seclusion. And the narrator never explains this. Scholars, most of the men, speculate that it's just there to preserve the narrative sequence. So that when the angel later will go and tell Mary about Elizabeth, the secret's still intact, and this justifies the angel's message to Mary. I have my suspicions about this.

Because you don't just get out from underneath the burden of stigmas like those Elizabeth has carried for decades. You don't just start being able to feel at home in your body that's betrayed you before. You don't just figure out how to look people in the eye when you know they never respected you in the first place, which is why I think Elizabeth's seclusion is far more self conscious than literary. Maybe she's just afraid that it's not gonna play out like the angel said, even how her body changes. And she doesn't know if she can go out and face those people if it doesn't play out.

Maybe she really struggled to believe that she deserved this change of fortune and grappled with how to pick up the pieces of shattered hope one more time. We can't be sure, but this is why I don't think the capstone of the story is in verse 25 when Elizabeth offers her pious gratitude for how God has removed her shame. No. I think you have to keep reading. Or later, we learn that Mary, the Virgin Mary that is, comes to visit Elizabeth because they're relatives.

And how, when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby inside her leaped. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She's inspired and in a loud voice, she exclaims, blessed are you, Mary, among women. Blessed is the child that you are going to bear. And as the sound of your voice greeted my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.

Blessed is she who has believed that God would fulfill God's promises to her. And there's a few things happening here, but what strikes me is how quickly Elizabeth looks at Mary. This young woman facing all kinds of suspicion and stigma and derision herself. A young woman whose pregnancy story departs pretty significantly from the normative and the regulated. And Elizabeth offers a different word.

She calls her blessed even as she allows herself to be truly seen and known for the first time in months. Fragile, uncertain, and for sure, she was fearful. But I love how when she hears Mary's affirming voice, her body bears witness. And I think this robust self awareness is the culmination of the story, which is just to say that Advent has to be about something deeper than holding out hope that all stories end well. I think Advent means for us to hope and work for something more.

A world where stigmas hold no sway, and all our imposed seclusions come to an end. And that begs the question of all of us, what would this look like? And I can't tell you what it looks like in your life, but for some of us, it could mean offering some help to the coworker who's really struggled to perform this year for reasons that you do not know, but you have assumed. It could look like showing some curiosity in what your child's going through instead of viewing everything through the lens of their resistance and their behavior. It might mean trying yet again to understand, yet again, why someone in your circle thinks the way they do, why they like the politician they do, why they care about the causes that they do, rather than assigning them to the bin of lost causes.

It could mean reaching out to someone you care about and assuring them that their love is love, and that they reflect God's goodness when they share it. It could look like opening your home and your schedule to a family whose configuration is different than your own. There are so many ways to go because Christmas is a story of how God has come to be with all of us. And this means that Christmas is a story meant to do more than warm our hearts. It's a story strong enough when we rehearse and we share its goodness to set all the world's self conscious prisoners free.

This is our hope. Let's pray. Loving God, you meet us here in this season that every year returns to find us where we are. Where the mystery of ancient word and image come close to those places in our hearts that have been neglected. It comes close to the assumptions that we've made about how our story is playing out.

It comes right next to our fatigue and our anxiety and all of our unspoken hope. And in this nearness, we sense an invitation to hold our doubts tenderly, knowing that they are part of our wholeness. We feel invited to follow Christ's gentle way in the world knowing that Christ shared this dissonance that we feel. And we, again, hear this invitation to step toward each other's self conscious seclusion this Christmas, to let ourselves be seen and to share the blessing that we find in your welcome embrace. And so we ask, go with us into all we face today, in the days to come this week.

We pray in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen.