Silence and Darkness

Luke 1:5-13, 57-80

I want to talk today about two of the things we fear about this season: Silence and darkness. Both of these things that seem at first like things to be avoided at all costs are also necessary to give this season the depth of meaning that it has.

            I’m not just talking about silent moments, either. I was editing this sermon last night after watching the kids all day, and I was desperate for silence, but Elias was still awake, Kate was watching TV, I was overwhelmed by noise and touch. Seriously, why do the kids have to always be touching me? I mean, I love snuggling on the couch for an hour, but why does one of them need to be sitting on my chest for the next five?

            Anyway, that reprieve of silence at the end of the day is obviously good, but there is something even more meaningful about silence that takes us from relief into uncertainty before encroaching even upon discomfort. Silence, like darkness, provides depth to the human experience, it forces us to confront things as they really are; it turns our autopilot off and forces us to think, to feel, and to live in the uncertainty.

            Yesterday was the shortest day of the year—the winter solstice. For six months, things have been getting darker and darker. With the encroaching darkness comes a weightiness to the season, a certain gravitas that we can feel whenever we wrest ourselves away from the shiny lights of commercialism and the busy-ness of responsibility. Perhaps this is why we fill our lives with so much this time of year. We fear the heaviness of the dark and the pregnant silence that comes with it. It is a season that bears the hopes and fears of all the years, as the hymn (O Little Town of Bethlehem) says.

            God doesn’t show up in a light, airy moment. The Gospel accounts of the lead up to Jesus’ birth, the birth itself, and its repercussions all bear witness to a world in the throes of a long night. A petulant king fights back against a dangerous child—it sounds like The Mandalorian… or America 2019; history just circles back in on itself. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

            Today we read about Zechariah, the father of the John, who would become known as John the Baptist, cousin to Jesus. Zechariah receives a promise from an angel that he and his wife will have a son in their old age. Sound familiar? History circles back around—Abraham and Sarah become Zechariah and Elizabeth. But she couldn’t have been that old; after all, her sister, Mary, must have only been a teenager. So, in Zechariah’s case, his lack of belief seems like it has less to do with biological impossibility and more to do with mistrust of the unknown. Who doesn’t, really? Whose first reaction to angels wouldn’t be that they were being punked? Who doesn’t doubt?

            Still, because of his response, Zechariah is rendered mute. He can’t speak from the time the angel proclaims the coming child to the moment of his naming. That silence is itself a theological statement on how we are to wait. Zechariah is not being punished. He is being forced, like so many before and after him, to experience the silence between words where God moves.

Real comfort

Isaiah 40:1-11

“Comfort, comfort my people!” says Isaiah. Then, also, “The people are grass.”

            Isaiah hasn’t had a lot of pastoral training. Few prophets have. That’s not really their job, to be completely honest. Prophets are free agents, who are really just God’s agents, subject to nobody. It’s actually a bit strange that Isaiah leads with comfort, because so often the prophets burst onto the stage and can’t seem to help themselves but proclaim judgment and justice and all those things. Comfort is a softer kind of word, more a pastoral word than a prophetic one.

            But Isaiah is also bringing a different kind of message. For the last several weeks now I’ve been preaching on the change in the prophetic imagination as we leave behind old covenants and discover the new covenant. This new covenant is whispered in first Isaiah—an earlier prophet known as Isaiah, who we read about even before Harvest Festival—then in the reforms of Josiah, then in Jeremiah, and today, finally in second Isaiah. These are, in fact, the first words of 2^nd Isaiah, and it is the first time we hear in the book of Isaiah that Jerusalem has been destroyed.

            Perhaps that gives some clue why Isaiah leads with comfort. You preach comfort to people who need it, not to people who need to know about the impending judgment looming over them. No, these people have experienced the trauma of losing their homeland, of the desecration of their religious capitol, and the loss of their history in that place. These are people that need comfort, and, yet, that comfort comes not in a promise that they will one day return home.

The new covenant you won't believe

Jeremiah 31:31-34, 33:14-18

Two readings from Jeremiah today, three chapters apart, and both begin with the words “The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will… 1) make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah, and 2) fulfill my gracious promise.

            This gracious promise—this new covenant—will not be like the covenants of old… which is kind of weird if we’re being completely honest, because God makes these covenants with a people forever. God said to Noah, “I will never again destroy the world by flood, and here’s a rainbow as a sign of my covenant.” And God said to Abraham, “You will have descendants and land. This is my covenant.” These are supposed to be eternal promises, but these eternal promises are dependent on the people responding correctly. And there’s the really obvious flaw that Noah and Abraham and Moses seem to be missing: People absolutely never respond correctly. So, what good are these covenants, really?

            God makes a promise, says you get this nice thing as long as you obey, and about five minutes later people are like, “You know what would be really fun to worship? A golden cow!” A covenant that requires human beings to be something other than sinners is a worthless covenant, because we won’t be, we never been, and we never will be. Give us any length of rope whatsoever and we will manage to hang ourselves. Just because we have Jesus does not mean we have left this kind of thinking behind. The predominant view of God, even in Christian circles, is as one who gives us nice things when we obey him. Perhaps you’ve seen the Joel Osteen clip going around where he says, “When you are poor, broke, and defeated all that proves is that you are poor, broke, and defeated. It doesn’t bring any honor to God.”

            This, of course, is fundamentally opposed to everything Jesus said—blessed are the meek, become like children, etc—but it doesn’t matter. Osteen can get 40,000 people in a stadium to give him a standing ovation for saying it, because it is a sexy lie. We want to believe that we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and earn the covenant, like the Israelites were supposed to keep up with their end of the bargain. We want to believe we are different despite the fact that the entire history of the human race is marked by the failure to be even halfway decent followers of God the moment we provided with even a single alternative thing to worship. Osteen is low-hanging fruit, but he is a perfect example because the prosperity Gospel would be the best possible Gospel if it were possible.

            The problem is sin. The problem is us. God tried this prosperity business. That was essentially what happened with Noah and Abraham, with Moses and eventually with David. God tried to give us the possibility of living up to the expectations. Just be good, said God a hundred times, like the parent who feels obligated to parent in this way even when we know deep down that our children are going to not be the perfect little angels we expect them to be.

            So, when we come to Jeremiah, God has reached the stage of parenting where he throws up his hands and says, “Fine! Don’t be good then! See if I care!”

            But on the other side of this despairing over the behavior of God’s children—on the other side of exile and lots of death—comes this:

³¹ The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. ³² It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant with me even though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ³⁴ They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.