December 8, 2024

by | Dec 8, 2024 | sermons

Scripture: Luke 1:5-24 and 57-79

Sermon

  1. Our book study this fall was Walter Wink’s “The Powers that Be”
    1. In that book, written in the early 90’s, Wink referred to what he called “the Domination System” to describe the world we live in with its hierarchies based on gender, race, class, wealth, education, etc.
      1. And where coercion, force, even violence, keeps the whole system in place to maintain an order that feels kind of like peace—but isn’t.
    2. We know what this type of order looks like:
      1. It has an underlayer of resentment, fear, and anger that poisons relationships between the haves and the have-nots
      2. until it finally boils over—in family feuds, or civil wars
      3. And then the cycles of violence keep occurring over and over
    3. Walter Wink says that Jesus (and a few others in history) taught a different kind of resistance that was neither violent nor submissive to human power structures: A Third Way.
      1. He gives the example of the civil rights movement
      2. And the time he was writing in, 1989, when 13 nations experienced non-violent revolutions and the Berlin Wall came down.
        1. A time of optimism about non-violent power to overturn oppressive regimes
  2. All that seems like a long time ago now
    1. We’re seeing around the world a new leaning toward authoritarian governments, including our own.
    2. But I want to believe, with Walter Wink, that there are other ways besides violent upheaval, to respond to the domination system
    3. So, I’ve been looking at the characters around Jesus’ birth this Advent to see if they have any clues for us about how we should confront the oppressive powers we see around us
    4. Last week we looked at John the Baptist, who shouted his truth to power out in the wilderness
  3. Today we have Zechariah and Elizabeth
    1. They lived in tension with a religious system that fixed their roles in their community AND within their own family.
    2. They were both from priestly families, so deeply entwined with their religious system of rituals and law
    3. And the system taught that, if you were obedient to those rituals and laws, you would be favored by God
    4. For women, God’s favor was defined largely by fertility.
    5. A woman who bore no children must have some sin in her history, for which she was being punished
    6. So while Zechariah, as a priest, upheld that whole reward/punishment ethic, his own wife, Elizabeth had to live in the shadow of that teaching
    7. No matter how devout she was, she couldn’t escape that shame system.
    8. In her infertility, she embodied the contradiction between religious teaching and reality: could a childless woman also be a virtuous woman
      who was valued to her community?

      1. Both husband and wife may have ingested that poisonous assumption that somehow, Elizabeth had failed God.
  4. So, when the Holy Spirit broke in through the visit of an angel, Zechariah heard the good news, but was not quite able to believe it
    1. He was soaked in the old assumptions of his religious culture
    2. So, he responded with bewildered doubt: How can this be? We’re too old! (we’ve heard this familiar response from Abraham and Sarah; laughing at the impossible)
    3. So then the angel decides to render Zechariah temporarily mute.
    4. The way it reads in the bible suggests this is a punishment or curse cast on him because he doubted
    5. But I wonder if the angel understood that Zechariah needed that silence
      1. He needed time for some self-reflection about what was happening to him, and his wife, and the world.
    6. In his muteness, he needed to listen:
      1. to stop preaching and teaching, and to start listening,
        1. maybe especially to voices he hadn’t heard before
      2. Like the voice of that disruptive angel in the Temple
      3. And the voice of his wife who had been the bearer of shame for so long
      4. And later, the voice of her cousin Mary, who would come to visit with her interpretation of her own unlikely pregnancy
    7. The listening, I expect, was hard for Zechariah! Preachers like to talk!
      1. But his muteness gave him time to listen to whatever was said around him, without correction or argument.
      2. And to digest what he heard, instead of planning what he would say next.
  5. We know less about Elizabeth from the story;
    1. We hear she was “righteous” and “blameless” in her religious practice
    2. But her biggest line in the story hints at what her religious obedience has cost her.
    3. On hearing she’s finally pregnant, she says, “This is what {God} has done for me in this time, when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.”
    4. She had “endured disgrace”. That’s a hard burden to live with all those years!
    5. But interestingly, she interprets the favor as coming from God and the disgrace as coming from people.
  6. Together, Elizabeth and Zechariah would display the work of God,
    1. in his silent listening, and her growing belly.
    2. When the child John was born, they were able to work together to help their community understand John would be different, and would have a non-traditional name
    3. And then, when Zechariah was finally able to speak, he sang instead!
      1. About the coming of a Messiah he had probably given up on until now;
      2. About the overcoming of the domination system that kept his people and his own family down
      3. And about his joy in bringing to the world a child who would help overcome that system; a prophet and truth teller
      4. Can you imagine what you would learn if you couldn’t talk for a while, but could only listen?
        1. Who do you think you would learn from that you haven’t listened to much lately?
  7. The Domination system is always with us, in all its concentric circles of control,
    1. It’s within our family systems
    2. In your community, in the nation and between nations,
    3. even in religious communities like Lyndale
    4. It lives in the depth of our psyches
    5. It tells us we are privileged and powerful and more worthy than others
    6. Or it tells us we are worthless and powerless in the face of coercion and violence
    7. A constant jockeying for human power and control
  8. But the stories of Advent tell us that the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit can be more powerful than our human domination systems.
    1. God’s Spirit wins for those who listen to God’s voice and the voices of those who are silenced.
    2. So, how can we listen better to be on the side of God’s alternative power?
  9. Here are a few things Zechariah and Elizabeth did:
    1. They allowed themselves to become vulnerable, and used that vulnerability for deeper listening (especially Zechariah)
    2. They submitted themselves to self-correction and a big change of their lives
    3. They turned from just listening to their religious and cultural systems to listen directly to the Holy Spirit through spiritual practice
    4. They listened to Mary, whose story sounded even crazier than theirs
    5. They shared what they heard, and gave their community new insights that freed everyone to embrace the good news Jesus would bring later.
  10. These are not the best of times for Americans to engage in humble listening.
    1. We’re in a time when everyone has fled to their own ideological corners and closed their ears to the “other side”.
    2. We are losing the ability to listen to and trust each other.
    3. But we are also learning that authoritarian leaders love that kind of division, because it gives them the chance to drive deeper wedges between groups, move in and take control!
    4. If we don’t listen to each other and work for common goals, those domination systems may win the day, at least for now.