Scripture: Luke 1:5-23
The sermon this morning is going to be something of an exercise in free association. As I say in the newsletter this month, I have been thinking about the kinds of non-material gifts not so much that I might desire as gifts but that I think I need, that we all may need, in order to lead us toward the wholeness that the gift of Christ represents. The first thing that occurred to me was quietness. I need, maybe we all need in some way, the gift of quietness. That thought occurred to me rather quickly actually, but because it occurred so quickly, it also occurred without my having carefully thought through why this is an important gift or even what it means exactly, quietness. But I decided to go with it, in a free association sort of way, and see where it leads.
As I reflect on it, I think I know at least partly where the idea came from. It’s pretty common, at least it has been for me, to experience the Christmas season as a kind of overly busy time of year, filled with things to do and places to go, that gives a kind of hectic flavor to life and that doesn’t serve the life of the spirit very well, any kind of life of the spirit. This was especially true for me in the days when I was teaching part time as well as ministering. My daughters were children then too so there were a fair amount of family things, and exams and papers to read and grades to turn in, and of course a busy time of year in the church, churches being one of the chief offenders so far as adding to the busyness of the season and therefore making the life of the spirit more difficult.
Now my life is not as harried at Christmas, but there are always enough things to do to get caught up in a task-oriented mindset that is the enemy of any life of the spirit. Add to that the extra crowds and traffic and the difficulty of finding parking places, the impossibility of parking if you’re at Barracks Road, and it is easy to feel threatened by franticism. That’s franticism as in frantic-ism. Franticism—I think I made the word up. I don’t remember hearing it anywhere. And I’m sort of proud of it actually. Franticism sounds a bit like fanaticism, which is appropriate. I think. It’s getting caught up in some driving need to get things done, to cross things off lists, to go and do—something like fanaticism.
As I say, I don’t think this is uncommon. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who experiences the season this way, at least part of the time, and I don’t have a bah humbug attitude toward Christmas either. I realize it may not be that way for everyone, and I always remind myself that for some people their Christmas is not busy enough—too few places to go and things to do and people to see. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that one reason quietness occurred to me as a gift is the anticipated need to protect against franticism, even the kind, maybe especially the kind that we tend to impose on ourselves. The filled up, busy, driven aspect of our lives consists mostly, after all of things we want to do or have agreed to do, good things mostly, not simply the meeting of burdensome obligations. That said, it would be a great gift for many of us if at times, unexpectedly, a wave of quietness came over us and took hold of us, quietness maybe literally in the sense of peace and quiet, but also quietness in the sense of release from the need to be productive, or the agitation that creeps into us from so many different sources which we may not even be aware of. I know I do treasure moments of quietness during the Christmas season. I see them as gifts, and I wish for them for all of us. Beyond that an even greater gift would be to have a kind of quiet spirit at the center of it all that keeps us from being so affected by whatever franticism there may be in the environment. And of course I wish that gift for us too. But having those kinds of thoughts has led me in some other directions as well.
For one thing it led me to the scripture about Zechariah, because as you heard Zechariah was silenced by an angel for a period of nine months, the time of his wife’s, Elizabeth’s, pregnancy. Zechariah was a priest, performing some priestly duties in the temple when he was visited by the angel and told that Elizabeth would be having a child (who was to turn out to be John the Baptist). Zechariah wanted to know how he could be sure this was true, because after all Elizabeth was getting up there in years, in fact had long since gotten up there in years, and this was somewhat unusual news to say the least. The angel didn’t take kindly, however, to Zechariah’s challenge and told him that because he had not believed the message, he would be mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur, that is until Elizabeth gave birth. Understandably, this has often been read as a punishment the angel was imposing on Zechariah for his skeptical attitude.
I’m not so sure though…about the punishment part, that is. At least I’m not so sure that reading the story as a story about Zechariah’s sin of disbelief and the consequent punishment—I’m not so sure that’s the most helpful way to read the story. Maybe the angel saw Zechariah so immersed in his religious routines and responsibilities that there was no room for a visit by an angel. That can happen, that religious routines and rituals and the saying of religious words can come to take the place of a more direct experience of the Holy. Maybe the angel saw Zechariah as so caught up in a kind of a cynical worldview that he was no longer able to consider the possibilitiy of anything really hopeful happening. That can happen too, falling into the pattern of thinking that things are pretty bad and you can’t really imagine anything is going to help very much. Maybe the angel wasn’t so much saying “you’ve been a bad boy and I’m going to punish you” as “what this man needs is a good healthy dose of silence”, I mean a really healthy dose. I’m going to prescribe nine months. It’ll be my gift to him.
There is a truth here. The words of religion sometimes get in the way of religion. The words of religious people sometimes get in the way of their honest to God relationship to God. This is true in a number of ways, but one way it seems to me true is in the area of prayer. We fill up our prayers with words. So much so that we assume prayers are made out of words. If someone says let us pray, we expect words to follow. That is because we assume that what prayer is is our speaking to God. Whatever it is we may have to say. We bring prayers of petition, prayers that request things of God, or maybe just the cares and concerns and worries without the requests, but we bring all of that to God. And we bring prayers of thanksgiving. And maybe we bring prayers of confession. Whatever the prayers we bring, we are bringing something to God and often when people don’t have the words for what they want to bring to God, they feel like they don’t know how to pray, when all that they really don’t know how to do is find just the right words. And so we stumble through our prayers maybe feeling inadequate to the task and maybe with other words rummaging around in the back of our minds wondering what kinds of prayers we ought to be saying, whether our prayers are worthy or whether God is listening or whether God responds to prayers or how prayer is answered. Maybe sometimes, for some people those kinds of words get all mixed in with our prayers too.
None of this is wrong. None of this should be looked on as a punishable offense. Not our stumbling prayers nor the questions that surround them. But all those words can get in the way of a different and perhaps purer form of prayer which is to try to silence all the words, the words of our needs and hopes and agendas and petitions and thanksgivings, and the words of our doubts and internal discussions about the nature of prayer—to silence all the words, simply let go of them and to enter prayer not as an activity where we talk to God but where we listen for God.
I don’t say that of course with any guarantees that God will speak in some clear and compelling way, or even in some not so clear and compelling way, or in any way at all. It could be, it could well be, that we would listen for God and receive back nothing but silence. What I do think though is that when people talk about the silence of God, very often it is not really the silence of God we are experiencing. We don’t hear anything from God because we are not listening. We don’t give God a chance to get a word in edgewise. We have too much to say ourselves, even if we don’t have the right words for it. We fill our prayer life up with words. Or some of us may give up on prayer, feeling that there is something not right about all these words we bombard God with.
But for both pray-ers and non-pray-ers there is this other alternative: to just try to be quiet in the presence of God and listen for what God or the Spirit may have to say. And if there is silence at the other end, that is not such a bad thing after all. That silence, I believe, will deepen our relationship to God—to God whose word and will for us is not already known and ready to be spoken by us before we have listened. Experiencing the silence of God, the silence that is “of God” will draw us into deeper relationship with the God who is both beyond and at the heart of everything. Indeed if we try to enter into communion with that God, not the God whose word and will people think they have a handle on and can speak easily about, if we try to approach with fear and trembling the God at the heart of life itself, we should be wary if there is not silence.
And then of course there is the listening we do on a human level. I’m not here this morning to tell you that being a good listener is a good thing. I don’t need to say that. I think we pretty much agree that it’s a good thing. I’ve never heard anyone say that someone is a good listener and mean it as a criticism. We know that’s a gift to be a good listener, and it’s a gift to have the quietness of spirit that allows for being a good listener, being free of the need to say what you need to say, or thinking about what you want to say, to be concerned about the point you want to get across, and so forth. It’s a gift to have the quietness of spirit that allows us to be present to listen to what someone else has to say, and not to be figuring out whether we like or agree with what they’re saying or how we’re going to respond, just the ability to be quiet and listen.
But I’m also thinking about this in connection with religion and with the church. There’s an approach to religion that’s essentially aggressive: go tell the good news, share the good news, make converts, proclaim the faith. And the important holidays of the faith, like Easter and Christmas, are the times I suppose it is natural to want to proclaim the truths of the Christian faith. God is with us—Emmanuel. God chose to dwell on earth in the form of Christ. I bring you good news of a great joy for all the people: to you is born in the city of David a savior, who is the messiah, the Lord. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace. We can say it lots of ways, need to say it lots of ways. Every year I wonder if there is some new way, some fresh way to say what Christmas is about. What will the sermon be this year that tries to proclaim what this celebration is really all about?
But Advent reminds us that it can be a gift for the church too to be less impressed with its own words. There is a need for humility among Christians, a need for the church, which means you and me, to be less sure of itself, less needing to get our point across, less concerned with what it has to say and more concerned with cultivating a quietness of spirit that allows us as Christians to listen. The need of the church is not so much to proclaim its own truth as to listen with a compassionate heart—I would say to listen with the heart of Christ—to the truths people have to tell us all around.
Zechariah was supposed to emerge from the temple and give a blessing to the people who were waiting for him. He came out, but he could not speak. He could not give the blessing he was supposed to give. Maybe because the angel who had silenced him knew that some of the words of faith had gone stale, that they needed not to be said louder and more frequently but more slowly and with greater authenticity. There was no blessing from Zechariah that day. And Advent may be a time when we forego the quick blessing, even though God knows we need blessings. Advent may be a time to forego quick blessing, the easy assurance, what some people refer to as cheap grace. To just be quiet and to wait and to listen, not knowing what we expect to gain or learn from it all, but just to be quiet and to know that if we can be granted that quietness of spirit, it would truly be a gift, a very welcome gift. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 3, 2006