Title: God Has Not Forgotten!
Text: Luke 1:5-25
Thesis: Never give up hope… God is at work in your life.
Introduction
The story is told of an elderly couple who lived together in a nursing home. Though they had been married for 60 years, their relationship was filled with constant arguments, disagreements, and shouting contests. The fights didn’t stop even in the nursing home. In fact, the couple argued and squabbled from the time they got up in the morning until they fell in bed at night.
It became so bad that the nursing home threatened to throw them out if they didn’t change their ways. Even then, the couple couldn’t agree on what to do.
Finally, the wife said to her husband: "I’ll tell you what, Joe, let’s pray that one of us dies. And after the funeral is over, I’ll go live with my sister."
She had a plan.
I once had a staff person who was something less than organized… I would often remind him that, “failure to plan on his part did not constitute an emergency on my part.”
Some of you remember the old “A-Team” television series with Mr. T, Mad Dog Murdock and Col. “Hannibal” Smith played by George Peppard. The signature statement at the end of every episode was Hannibal’s, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
God is a planner who loves it when a plan comes together as well.
“Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.” Ephesians 1:4-5
We mark the Season of Advent during the four weeks leading up to Christmas. Advent is a time for preparing for the celebrations of the birth of Jesus Christ and his anticipated second coming. This morning, as part of our preparation, I want to reflect a bit on God’s plan and preparations for the coming of Christ.
Sometimes we forget that before God sent his Son, he made sure the way was prepared for his arrival. We will begin Advent by reflecting on with the way God executed one piece of his plan through Zechariah and Elizabeth…
It is interesting to note that God pretty much works through ordinary people who are living ordinary lives.
I. Life is lived pretty much in the ordinary. Luke 1:5-7
“Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous in God’s eyes, careful to obey all of the Lord’s commandments… they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and now they were both very old.” Luke 1:5-7
They were two ordinary people with ordinary circumstances
Zechariah and Elizabeth were a married couple. Both were born into the families of priests. They were good people who practiced their faith with consistency and were regarded as righteous in God’s eyes. But, they had a stigma.
A stigma may be a tattoo or a brand. It is sometimes a mark of shame, as in the case of Hester Prynne.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, the setting is mid-1600’s life in Puritan Boston. Hester Prynne, believing her husband is lost at sea has an affair with the Reverend Dimmsdale and is found to be pregnant. When her adultery is discovered she is sentenced to wear a scarlet letter “A” as a stigma, branding her as an adulterous.
A stigma is a mark of shame or it may also be a sign of a disease.
In our story today the stigma was Elizabeth’s inability to have children. In those days, no thought was given to the possibility that the husband might be incapable of fathering a child… if a couple was childless, it was the woman who was socially stigmatized.
In the United States between 6 and 7 million women between the ages of 15-44 have difficulty getting pregnant in a given year. Between 10% and 15% of married couples have difficulty conceiving. In 80% of cases the reason can be medically diagnosed… and half can be helped with medical treatment. But keep in mind, that is today. There were no fertility specialists in the day of Zechariah and Elizabeth.
And then, adding insult to injury, the story notes that both Zechariah and Elizabeth are very old.
So, we have a couple who have been married for along time. They come from respectable families. He has a regular job. They have never had children and they are getting on in years.
I want you to sense the humanness of this story. These folks could be sitting among us today. They had real faces. Their lives were as real as ours. They had families and friends, hopes and dreams, good days and bad days, routines and rituals, and they shared a personal disappointment that hung over them like a dark cloud.
Our text states that Elizabeth regarded her inability to have a child as a disgrace. In her culture, the inability to conceive was considered disgraceful and even justifiable cause for divorce. Society judged a woman without a child harshly, inferring there was something wrong in her life, otherwise, God would bless her with a child.
I make this point to set the stage for understanding the nature of this sadness in the lives of Zechariah and Elizabeth. They had longed for a child for years and years and years. Zechariah had prayed for a child for years and years and years… an now their hopes of parenting were well past.
Ordinary people live with disappointments. Ordinary people pray that God will intervene and change their circumstances. Ordinary people get tired of praying and give up their hopes as lost causes.
Ordinary folks find themselves alone in life. They are single, divorced or have lost a spouse to death… ordinary folks may or may not like being alone and may hope for companionship. Their loneliness is a disappointing circumstance in their lives. I am always heartened when I hear of yet another wedding out at the Village. In the last ten years, fifteen men and women, who have lost their spouses, have found each other and gotten married.
Ordinary folks work at wearisome jobs and have little or no opportunity for advancement. Ordinary people hope for greater fulfillment and more rewarding careers.
Ordinary people work hard all their lives and never seem to get ahead. Ordinary people invest money and their lives in a business, only see it slip away. Ordinary folks loose their jobs or their pensions and their plans for retirement go out the window. Ordinary people experience disappointment and loss. Dreams die.
In our story today, Zechariah, just one of an estimated 24,000 priests who worked their shift down at the temple in Jerusalem, is on the job offering up incense to God.
In the course of what was very ordinary, God showed up.
II. God breaks into our ordinary in extraordinary ways.
“On the day Zechariah was serving God in the Temple, for his order was on duty that week. While the incense was being burned… an angel of the Lord appeared, standing to the right of the incense altar. And Zechariah was overwhelmed with fear.” Luke 1:8-12
I have already stated that Zechariah was just one of as many as 24,000 priests who were divided into 24 orders or groups that were rotated in and out of the temple for one week, twice each year. Verse nine hints that because there were so many priests, they drew straws to see who, from among their order, would go to Jerusalem to serve. Our story says that Zechariah was chosen by lot to go and offer incense in the Lord’s presence for this particular week.
This was an incredibly ordinary occurrence. For hundreds of years the orders had drawn lots to determine who would go to the temple to participate in the sacred rituals of the temple. Every day for hundreds of years, one from among 24,000 priests had gone into the sanctuary to offer incense to the Lord. It as just another day… or was it?
I wonder just how many ways a priest can burn incense? CollegeRecruiter.com reports the most boring jobs are human resources, accounting, administration/secretarial, manufacturing and sales employees. They say the least bored are teachers and healthcare workers.
Boredom seems to be related to how little control workers have over how they do their jobs… those who are regular readers of the Dilbert cartoon strip can appreciate this kind of dilemma. Studies indicate that employees who are bored with their work have an increased risk of death from any cause than those who find their work interesting and challenging. I’m not sure we can make those kinds of blanket statements… I think being a tollbooth collector would be very interesting. Just think of all the people you would meet every day. It would be a study in reading faces and personalities…
However, my point is not that Zechariah had a boring job, though one might wonder if it was the meaningfulness of the job that outweighed the menial nature of the job. He was honored to have been chosen to do the offering of incense… some priests served their entire lives without ever being chosen for this place of service. The point is, God showed up in the ordinary course of daily life. It just so happened that God came to Zechariah’s workplace.
I think there is a lesson in this for all of us in that we ought never think of any aspect of our lives as being so ordinary that God cannot break in at any moment, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Hear what the angel Gabriel said to Zechariah…
“”Zechariah, God has heard your prayer and you wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son! And you are to name him John. You will have great joy and gladness, and many will rejoice with you at his birth…and he will precede the coming of the Lord, preparing the people for his arrival.” Luke 1:13-17
This was good news!
After Bonnie and I received the call to serve here at Heritage, we arranged to meet with a realtor in hopes of finding a house before we flew back to Iowa. We had gotten approval for a loan and knew what we wanted… we just had to find it. Otherwise, we would have the time and expense of another trip to the Front Range to hunt for a house.
Our realtor did a whirlwind tour for us… she had arranged for us to look at several houses in our price range. However, nothing was working. The realtor dropped us off for lunch while she went back to her office to review what was on the market in the area. Bonnie and I sat there in Piccolos wondering how there could be so many homes for sale and none of them suitable. We were both discouraged, but feeling some urgency, we considered making an offer on a nice but very small townhouse we had looked at earlier.
We were desperately praying for wisdom and guidance when our realtor called to tell us that a new listing had come online over the lunch hour… it was within a mile of church, within our price range, had room in the basement that could be converted into living space, was in a nice community, and looked like what we were envisioning for a home. We made an offer. It was accepted and we were on the plane by four o’clock that afternoon.
I believe that sometimes, God breaks into the ordinary of our lives in extraordinary ways. We were just a couple doing what all people do when they house hunt… and God was just God doing what God does when God gets involved in the ordinariness of our lives.
How should we respond when God shows up in our ordinary?
III. It is important that we welcome the extraordinary as gifts from God.
“Zechariah said to the angel, ‘How can I know this will happen? I am an old man now and my wife is also well along in years.’” Luke 1:18
His question seems reasonable doesn’t it? I guess the most obvious way is to wait and see if his wife, Elizabeth, became pregnant. However, Zechariah, wants a sign. The essence of his questions is, “Can you show me a sign so I can know that what you say is true?”
Perhaps one of the reasons Zechariah seems so shell-shocked is that though he had prayed for a son for years and years… he had stopped praying long ago. The last thing on his mind these days was pregnancy and parenting. But God had not forgotten his prayers and God’s intent was to use these very ordinary folks in an extraordinary way.
So when the angel approached Zechariah with the news of this extraordinary gift from God and when his reaction was less than jumping for joy belief, the angel seemed to get a little steamed.
The angel responded… “I am Gabriel! I stand in the very presence of God. It was he who sent me to bring you this good news! And now, since you didn’t believe what I said, you won’t be able to speak until the child is born.” Luke 1:19-20
The moral of the story could be, don’t mess with a mad angel… but I suspect a better way to look at this story is to see that God does what God plans to do and does the extraordinary, despite the doubts of ordinary people.
The story concludes with Zechariah, speechless as speechless can be. He finishes up his duties on his shift at the temple and hurries home. He is excited. He stops by the florist and picks up a dozen roses. He drops into the Jerusalem branch of The House of Fine Chocolates for a box of truffles. And, then with roses in one hand, fine chocolates in the other and fire in the boiler, he goes home.
“Soon afterward his wife, Elizabeth, became pregnant and went into seclusion for five months. ‘How kind the Lord is!’ she exclaimed. ‘He has taken away my disgrace of having no children!’” Luke 1:24-25
The son that was born to Zechariah and Elizabeth was the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 40 that speaks of “the voice of one shouting in the wilderness, ‘make a way for the coming of the Lord.’” We know their son as John the Baptist.
Conclusion:
There’s another story of an unlikely hero whose name is Simon Birch. Simon Birch is a boy with stunted growth who has a clear sense that God has an important plan for his life. Little Simon is often met with obstacles and opposition, but he plods on through life until he really does become a hero.
Simon and his friend Joe do everything together, even though they are an odd pair. The unlikely Simon is always talking about the great plans God has for his life, but Joe is always doubtful.
Early in the story, Simon and Joe are heading home from the swimming hole. As Simon and Joe wander through a field of wildflowers, they turn to discussing destiny and the role of faith.
Simon: But things will be different…once God makes me a hero.
Joe: You know, you shouldn’t talk about this hero stuff, Simon.
Simon: Why not?
Joe: Because it’s weird. The other kids tease you enough as it is.
Simon: I don’t care. It’s the truth.
Joe: But you don’t have any proof.
Simon: I don’t need proof, I have faith…
In the end, Simon does become a great hero, even though it leads to his death. Many years later, as Joe reflects on Simon’s life, he can’t help but finally move to a place of faith as well as he realizes the extraordinary activity of God in a very ordinary life.
In reflecting on the story today I want to leave you with four observations about God and faith.
1. God’s unchanging plan has always been our adoption into his family through Jesus Christ.
2. God works in and through the lives of ordinary people to accomplish his purposes.
3. God’s ability to show up in extraordinary ways is not to be underestimated.
4. God’s activity brings hope to every circumstance.
