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Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text comes from the Gospel reading. There are three parts to this three-week Advent. The first part is tonight about the promise. And the promise is tied directly into, as you heard, the birth or the conception as well of the one forerunner of Christ, John the Baptist.
John the Baptist. Now, if they were both advanced in years, which is what the text said, they had been praying for decades, decades to have a child. And every month came and went, and there was no conception. Do the math. Decades times 12, and you realize how many times they were hopeful and disappointed. Hopeful and disappointed. And they continued to pray. But if the text said that they were advanced in years, at what point in their life, after they began to notice the normal biological things that take place when man and woman are advanced in years, that they looked at one another and said, you know, honey, this isn’t going to happen for us? And they stopped praying, because physiologically it just was not possible anymore.
It does not mean that they doubted their God. They were just looking at the reality of their lives and their bodies as well. Surely Abraham and Sarah did the same thing at their age too, having prayed for decades and then finally come to the point when you realize and accept that must be God’s will for us. But remember what was proclaimed Sunday from the Isaiah text, how God is able and does do more than we can ask or imagine, especially for those who wait for him. Zechariah and Elizabeth, righteous and faithful though they were, did wait. And God did answer in his time, according to his will. And he acted.
And he acted in a way that far exceeded Abraham and Sarah. And the miraculous birth of Isaac. Isaac. It far exceeded Hannah’s conception of Samuel and Rachel’s conception. All of those miracle births does John the Baptist’s conception and birth eclipse. Let’s look at this. The angel that will come and talk to Mary is the same angel that comes and talks to, but not Elizabeth, to Zechariah. And in talking to Zechariah, he tells him some very important things that far exceed what happened with Isaac and Samuel and so forth.
First of all, God never told Sarah and Abraham to name the son Isaac. That was what they decided to do. Same with Samuel, but not this boy. Zechariah is told by the angel Gabriel that he is to name him John. That’s unique. That’s unique. No other place does it. And having named him John, which means the Lord has been gracious. And in the life of Elizabeth and Zechariah, joy is the central theme. In fact, if you look at verse 14 in the text, joy is mentioned not just once, not just twice, but three times. Joy, gladness, and rejoice.
Again, to exceed their expectations and God’s ability to answer their prayers, even possibly after they stopped praying, does God bless them even more and say that He will not just be a miracle child, He will be great in the sight of the Lord, and He will be filled with the Holy Spirit, first time this is ever mentioned, from His conception. He will be given a message to proclaim about the one who is to come and that message will be what brings people to salvation. Because he’s going to come in the spirit and power of the great prophet of old Elijah, preparing a people for the coming of the Messiah.
All that was what Gabriel had told Zechariah and you would think—you would think Zechariah would fixate and focus on all of those wondrous and great things that have to do with the offspring coming from his loins. But he’s not focused on the offspring. He’s focused right back here. Now there possibly could have been a standard set at that time, but we do not. But for Zechariah’s sake, he became deaf, as it were. He used sign language. For nine long months did he use sign language. And I’m sure that he and Elizabeth figured out pretty quick how to communicate as best that they could. All because he did not believe and trust in.
It was not God’s way of punishing him. It was God’s way of testifying. This is far exceeding anything that you could imagine. At the end of the text, Elizabeth has this most beautiful statement of faith, like Hannah. Thus the Lord has done for me, in the days when He looked on me, to take away my reproach among people. More than she could have asked. Because whether we want to admit this or not, we all think this, what’s wrong with him or what’s wrong with her, if they can’t get pregnant? Or we think, what’s wrong with me if we can’t get pregnant? And God gives her this great gift of removing that.
Now blow your minds for a little bit. If you’re well advanced in years and beyond the age of childbearing, and all of a sudden you are given the gift of a child old enough to be their great-grandparent possibly, it’s a little embarrassing in a cultural setting. Would you not think that? So she hid herself for five months before we talk about what happens next week at the meetings. But for now, here’s the other bigger way that God answered the prayers of Elizabeth and Zechariah.
Elizabeth and Zechariah would peacefully go to their graves with joy long before John ever came onto the scene and began to preach and proclaim. Elizabeth and Zechariah would never see John’s message rejected and John himself rejected by not just the Jewish people as the majority, but also the religious leaders of the day. They would never have to bear that heartache. And they would never have to bury their headless son. They were spared that. But. Did not God answer the prayers of Elizabeth and Zachariah in a far more grand way than you and I, or they, most importantly, could have ever imagined?
And all of this done for the sake of the message about Jesus. Such a promise. Jesus was born for one purpose and one purpose only, to be the sacrifice, the pleasing sacrifice for the sins of the people. John was just supposed to be the one purpose of his life, to point to the Lamb of God and proclaim Him to be the one who takes away the sin of the world.
Now you and I have been given multiple vocations as husband or wife or as daughter or son, as mother or father, as grandparent or great-grandparent or brother or sister or cousin. Fellow church member, co-worker, you keep going. There’s a bushel load of vocations that God has placed you in, but the one that never changes throughout your life, regardless of who you are married to or not, whether you have children or not, the one vocation that’s common to all of God’s people baptized into Christ that always will be there in that bushel basket is the same vocation as John’s.
Confessing Jesus to this world, pointing to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, building the kingdom as God will do only through you who have been given that vocation. Now your and my birth, granted, is not the miraculous one of John’s, but it was all a part of pointing the world to the one who is to come. And now we are going to celebrate the one who has come and whose second coming we’re still awaiting.
And as we wait, we are continually reminded that God has given us this confession of faith to give to other people. And God will do far more than we can ask or imagine, as He did for His servants Elizabeth and Zechariah.
In the name of Jesus, amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
