Sermon Cloud

Elizabeth Remembers John

My name is Elizabeth.  It means, “God has promised.”  I am the mother of the prophet John - the man you call John the Baptist, as though Baptist was his last name.  When he was born, it bothered our families that we didn’t name him after Zechariah, his father – but John is a very good name – it means “God is gracious.” 

Everyone today is in such a hurry to get to Christmas…the stores start you singing about it in October, lots of people have their homes decorated before Thanksgiving, and some of you even had your presents bought and wrapped last summer.  People who aren’t so well prepared are running around like mad, trying to get ready for just one day.  Those people tell me the days before Christmas are so jam-packed they just fly by.

But I can tell you that in the days before the first Christmas, there was no excited anticipation, no music, no presents.  The days didn’t fly by, they crawled along and dragged us behind them.  God’s people, Israel, were crushed under the heel of Roman bondage.  Even our own religious leaders had turned God’s house of prayer into an institution that was more concerned with getting and keeping enough of the people’s money to keep the high priest and his cronies in plenty of gold and incense and dress them in tunics with bells and tassels.

The twisted thing the temple had become was something that pained both my husband and me.  Zechariah, you see, was a priest in the order of Abijah, and I am the daughter of a priest in the line of Aaron, the brother of Moses.  My people have been in charge of the temple sacrifices in Israel for a thousand years.  We should have been able to take pride in having families with histories of such important service to God, but instead, we were ashamed that people might think we were taking part in robbing God’s people.

But even though some ministers today fall into sin and abuse the trust of their congregations and tarnish the church in the eyes of the world, not all pastors are like that – many of them are good people –even very good people.  And it was the same with the priests who served in the temple – there were 18,000 of them in 24 different orders – and many, many were good, God-fearing men, like my Zechariah. 

Because there were so many priests, most priests and their families lived outside Jerusalem and worked at other trades, and only came to town for one week a year, when their order was scheduled to offer the sacrifices for the people.  And because there weren’t enough jobs for all those priests, they would gather every morning and cast lots – you call it rolling dice – to see which priest would offer the sacrifice each day.  So you can see that it was possible to be born into a priestly family and die a priest without ever having served inside the temple.

But I have heard your preacher say before that “God’s dice are always loaded,” and she’s right!  Because on one day when the Order of Abijah was serving, my Zechariah was chosen to offer the incense to God inside the Holy of Holies – the inner sanctum of the temple where God’s glory lived!  Neither of us could believe it at first – we had waited all of our lives, and now we were old, but in the eyes of God no one is too old to serve.

In the first days of the temple the Holy of Holies was thought to be a dangerous place – so dangerous for a priest, that before going behind the veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the outer courts of the temple, the priest would tie a rope around his waist and leave one end outside, just in case God struck him dead and he had to be pulled out! 

But that was then, when God was with Israel, and spoke to us through the prophets – before the people rebelled and rejected God and God’s laws, doing whatever they wanted to do, calling good things evil and evil things good, following after foreign gods, almost everyone sinning with abandon and telling each other that “God hasn’t struck us dead, so he must not care.”  It was like the scriptures said the world was like in the days of Noah – a lot like the world is for you now.

Yes, it was before that that the priests needed a rope to save them from God’s wrath, before God abandoned us to exile and bondage to teach us that God would not be mocked.  So even if the priests still tied the rope around them, for 400 years there had been no reason to do so.  God was no longer inside the Holy of Holies; there was no prophet in Israel to give us a word of hope from the LORD of hosts.  Take it from me – the silence of God is much, much worse than the wrath of God.

Imagine – today God’s people can receive a fresh word from God every day – any minute of every day!  You have the presence of the Holy Spirit with you all of the time, enlightening your minds, explaining the scripture to you.  You have many blessings and answer-after-answer to your prayers.  We had nothing.  Ten generations had been born and gone to their graves never knowing the joy of the presence of God.  Never having their “hearts strangely warmed.”  Never. 

How can I make you understand what it was like – you, who are able to wait for God as you sing Christmas carols in front of sparkling lights?  We had only silence and coldness of heart and darkness of soul.  Some of you know something about the darkness of the soul that comes when God is silent and it seems like he’s left you.  But as awful as that is, you can stand it, because you know that silence is only temporary, that joy will return and you will be comforted.

But for us – it never ended.  It seemed as though God had forgotten God’s covenant promise to us:  to be our God, to deliver us from trouble and to keep us free in our own land.  Instead of a God we had No-god.  But still we prayed, and still the priests prayed for Israel and offered sacrifices for the sins of the people. 

 Most of you think that God’s plan of salvation was announced first by an angel to Mary the mother of Jesus.  But the truth is that God’s first announcement of deliverance was not to my young cousin Mary – it was a word in answer to my prayer for a child and the prayer of my Zechariah in the temple.

God, you see, had never opened my womb.  To our great sadness and my shame, I was barren and Zechariah and I had no child.  Over the years, I had showered most of my mother-love and attention on my young cousin, Mary and we had become very close, but it was not the same as having a child of my own.  Now Zechariah and I had both become old, and I had stopped praying for what I believed was impossible? 

I thought God had abandoned me, and Zechariah thought God had abandoned Israel, and yet, as soon as my husband threw the incense onto the coals and offered up the first prayers, an angel appeared to him – he said his name was Gabriel, the same one my cousin Mary later told me had spoken to her - and it  almost frightened him to death!  That day he almost needed the rope after all!

But the angel told him not to be afraid, that God had heard our prayers and that I would bear a son we should name John!  He told him, too, that the boy would be filled with the Holy Spirit from birth and that he would bring many of the people of Israel back to God, to make them ready and prepare the way for the Messiah.

Well, afraid or not, it was all too much for Zechariah and he blurted out, “How can this be?” Then the angel said that because he didn’t believe the Word of the Lord, my husband would be unable to speak for nine long months. 

It wasn’t long, though, before we were sure it was true – I was pregnant.  But because of my age, I stayed in seclusion for almost five months because, after all, what could I say?  And besides, the angel said I would bear a child with the same Spirit as Elijah, the great prophet of Israel.  How would we raise such a child?  How could we prepare?  At our age, would we even live to see him grown? 

A few months before he was born, Mary came to visit me.  I knew she was engaged to Joseph, but there had been no wedding yet and I had no idea she was pregnant – but John knew in my womb!  As soon as I heard Mary’s greeting, the Holy Spirit in my child recognized the Holy Spirit in the child Mary carried, and leapt for joy!  It is difficult to explain what it was like – it wasn’t just a baby’s ordinary kick, the presence of God was so overwhelming to me, that I cried out a blessing on Mary and her child. 

From the distant 400-year silence of a No-god, to the Word of God spoken to my husband in the temple, to the presence of the Holy Spirit of God inside me and inside Mary – this was the beginning of the first Christmas.

In a little while my secret was out, and when John was born, the neighbors were amazed.  He was the sort of child where anyone could look into his eyes and see that this was a child with a destiny – we’ve all seen them – some people call them children with “old souls” – and people asked each other “What then, is this child going to be?”

Yeshua ha’Mashia - Jesus the Messiah – answered their question when he said of my John that there was “no greater prophet born of a woman”; that he was the Elijah who was to come and preach repentance to the people to prepare the way for Messiah.  John was no respecter of persons – he called everyone to turn from their sinful ways and repent, and baptized everyone who did.  It was his baptism that revealed Jesus as Messiah and began his ministry on earth.  Even after Jesus began to preach, John continued to drive men and women towards him, like a sheepdog herding and turning the sheep to their shepherd. 

How his father and I would have loved to have lived long enough to see our son work and speak with such power!  But God acted in mercy towards us, and we died before we knew the pain of knowing that our beloved son was beheaded by Governor Herod after John spoke the truth to him that that it was unlawful for him to be living in adultery with his brother Phillip’s wife. 

None of this was easy – none of it – not for me or Zechariah, or Mary or John or Jesus.  It was not easy, but it was not for nothing, for Jesus said that “from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing.”[1] 

“Forcefully advancing.”  When we thought God was silent, the kingdom of heaven was moving forward.  While we grew old and remained childless, the kingdom of heaven was forcefully advancing in spite of nature’s inevitable decay.  When Herod killed my John, he didn’t stop the kingdom of heaven from forcefully advancing.  When Jesus hung helpless on the cross, the kingdom of heaven forcefully advanced.

Waiting in the Kingdom of God is always active.  Life happens while we wait, and God is moving while we wait, whether we can see movement or not. 

And in the Kingdom of God waiting is never a movement from nothing to something.  It’s always a movement from something to something more.  The promise is always there.  It is the promise that allows us to wait, that helps us to bear the waiting.  It is the seed of the promise received that starts to grow.  We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun in us. 

The secret of waiting, you see, is the knowledge that what we wait for is growing in the ground on which we are standing.  The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun.[2]

 When we wait this way, we can be fully present in the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where we are – right here, where you are, in Guymon, America!  Something is happening here that we want to be present for when it happens.

From Noah and Abraham to Zachariah, John, Mary and me - all of the people of God who have ever lived - all of us here today are living with a promise:  the promise of god’s covenant with us – the promise of Emmanuel, God-With-Us – the covenant of salvation realized through the birth of my child who came into the world to prepare the way for the child who came into the world to show us the Way.

©2009 Deborah Hollifield