We Allow Ourselves to Be Amazed: Luke 1:57-66
Advent III
57 When the time came
for Elizabeth to have her child, she gave birth to a boy. 58 Her
neighbors and relatives celebrated with her because they had heard that the
Lord had shown her great mercy. 59 On the eighth
day, it came time to circumcise the child. They wanted to name him Zechariah
because that was his father’s name. 60 But his
mother replied, “No, his name will be John.”
61 They said to her,
“None of your relatives have that name.” 62 Then
they began gesturing to his father to see what he wanted to call him.
63 After asking for a
tablet, he surprised everyone by writing, “His name is John.” 64 At
that moment, Zechariah was able to speak again, and he began praising God.
65 All their neighbors
were filled with awe, and everyone throughout the Judean highlands talked about
what had happened. 66 All who heard about this
considered it carefully. They said, “What then will this child be?” Indeed, the
Lord’s power was with him. (CEB)
In
the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, there are several types of
characters you can be; one of them is a cleric, which doesn’t mean clergy but is,
according to the 5th edition Players’ Guide, a “holy warrior powered
by divine magic.”[1] Clerics use that magic to accomplish things,
roughly like warriors use swords—they’re tools of the trade. The magic shows up in certain kinds of
spells, and yes you are getting your nerd quotient in this sermon today, so
hold tight if this isn’t your thing, I promise there’s a purpose.
One
of the spells a cleric can cast is called thaumaturgy, in which the
player can “manifest a minor wonder” within the range of its casting, somewhat
like an annoying but harmless poltergeist.[2] Examples include changing a fire’s color for
a minute, or making your voice up to three times louder, or causing an unlocked
door to slam shut. They’re small,
short-term bits of the supernatural, deeply minor miracles.
Telling
you this is partly so as to hit bingo in geek homiletics by mentioning Star
Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and video games in various sermons, but
it’s also because the name of the spell matters as we continue our series on
the weary world rejoicing: thaumaturgy comes from thaumazo, to
marvel, wonder, or be amazed.[3] Thaumaturgy is, roughly translated, the “work
of wonder.”
“All
their neighbors were filled with awe,” says Luke of the birth and naming of
John, later the Baptist. It is a large
work of wonder, a flat-out miracle, that this boy is born, but Luke invites us
to recognize that there are so many smaller moments of marvel along the
way. When the time came for the child to
be born, Elizabeth—worn out and tired, most likely, since God may have meddled
with things so she could be pregnant but God didn’t actually make her younger
and pregnancy at any age is rough on the body—Elizabeth is ready to bring this
child into the most respectable standing she can. Brian P. Stoffregen writes, “In the
birth/infancy narratives, Luke emphases the Jewishness of our Christian
origins. Zechariah is a priest serving the temple in Jerusalem. Elizabeth is a
descendant of Aaron—the first priest. They have a priestly heritage. They are
also both described as being ‘righteous before God, living blamelessly
according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord’…As we would
expect from such a couple, they follow the law and have their son circumcised
on the eighth day. Besides fulfilling
the law, this event is also when a child is named. Also, by naming the child,
the father claims him/her as his own.
“‘Zechariah’
is the name of more than thirty people in the Bible. Frequently it is a name
related to the priestly Levite tribe: a Levite gatekeeper, a Levite harpist,
and a trumpet-blowing priest who led David's procession accompanying the Ark of
the Covenant into Jerusalem. There is also a prophet Zechariah, who was the son
of a priest, who was stoned by the people. The name means ‘Yahweh remembers’—a
name that would be quite appropriate for Zechariah and Elizabath as God had
remembered them in their old age and given them a son.”[4]
The family
and friends and gawkers and onlookers at the circumcision, then, think that of
course this will be another Zechariah, carrying forth the legacy. Small miracle, however: Elizabeth says
no. “His name will be John.”
Just a note
to remember: will be. It’s future
passive; this will be true, when the child becomes himself as he grows.[5]
The family
and friends and gawkers are not comfortable with this; there are no Johns in
the family branch, this is unexpected, Elizabeth clearly doesn’t know what
she’s doing, poor thing, old and barren for so long as she was. So they turn to Zechariah, thinking the man
of the household will have some more sense.
Zechariah,
remember, has been mute for nine months.
After responding to the angel who told him Elizabeth was pregnant with
an only slightly more dignified version of “yeah, right,” Zechariah has
functionally been put in the corner to think over his actions “until these
things occur.”[6] And he does; nine months of silence has
taught him to listen, because he doesn’t even have the ability to speak yet. Small miracle: he writes down, “His name is
John.” Is. Present active, right now, this boy is John.[7]
Ethaumasan,[8] and they wondered, they were amazed, they were filled with awe.
This is the
minor miracle, the thaumaturgy, the work of wonder: that Zechariah learned to
listen instead of proclaim, that the neighbors realized that their assumptions
meant nothing here, that God did not come with a roar but the whisper of a
different name to say everything is about to change.
John—“short
for ‘Johanan’ or ‘Jehohanan’ meaning ‘God shows favor’ or ‘God has been
gracious’”[9]—is
also a suitable name for this unexpected child, but more to the point John is
his own quiet miracle of God refusing to fit into expectations. Here is an older couple well past childbearing
having a son; here is a woman whose social standing as the wife of a priest is
erased by the stigma of her barrenness and yet she speaks out that this child
will not be a continuation of what already is; here is a man used to power and
audience learning humility enough to say, effectively, I have been
corrected, I will trust God’s promises; here is a crowd of people realizing
that something far more significant than a naming ceremony is happening
here. This is wonder-working, and it
comes to those who allow themselves to see it.
The series we’re
using this Advent that asks how a weary world can rejoice points out for this
text that “in this week’s sub-theme, the language ‘allow ourselves’ is
intentional.”[10] In the hustle and bustle of the Christmas
season—of any season, really, in our fast-paced and unstoppable lives, in the
expectations that tower over us such that even this sermon puts my words in the
room with you when I am too ill to be there—we so easily forget to see the tiny
wonders around us, the joy of the small miracles. It is the pink-orange sunrise this morning,
or the way a pine tree smells cold and sharp and solid, or that one college
friend who still sends a Christmas card every year despite the rest of the
relationship having fallen away a decade ago, or the taste of the cookies that
Grandmother only bakes for Christmas Eve, or the thousand and one other moments
that are not big or life-altering in themselves but are the bindings of our relationships
with each other, the things that amaze us when we actually take the time to see
them.
And
John—the boy who is John, the man who will be John—leads us there. He will spend his whole life doing it,
pointing to the everyday miraculous, doing thaumaturgy of his own as he becomes
someone who pushes against empire and tradition to say that God is doing a new
thing. “On the one hand,” writes Professor
Brittany Wilson of Duke Divinity School, “John fulfills the prophet Isaiah’s
words about the one who will ‘prepare the way of the LORD’ (Isaiah 40:3), or
the one who will usher in God’s restoration of Israel. Gabriel speaks of this
restoration when he says that John will ‘make ready a people prepared for the
Lord’ (Luke 1:17), and Zechariah confirms that John will ‘go before the Lord to
prepare his ways’ (1:76). When John grows up, his ministry of baptizing and his
proclamation of repentance bring these words to fruition, and Luke reminds us
of this by quoting these verses from Isaiah in full (Luke 3:4–6; see also
Isaiah 40:3–5).
“On the
other hand, however, John’s fulfillment of Isaiah moves the prophet’s words in
a new direction because of the identity of the one called ‘Lord.’ As the
narrative progresses, we learn that Gabriel’s reference to ‘the Lord’ does not
just refer to God but to Jesus, since ‘the Lord’ (ho kyrios) is one of
Luke’s favorite christological titles (a title that Elizabeth first proclaims
to Mary in 1:43: ‘And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord
comes to me?’). The ‘way’ that John prepares, therefore, is not just for God
but for Jesus, whose identity as kyrios inextricably links him to God’s
own self. With this shockingly high Christology, Luke insists that Jesus,
though born of the virgin Mary, is also inseparably bound to the God of Israel.”[11]
This, too,
is wonder-working: that John will take his cousin born in a manger and speak of
Him as part of God, as God Himself, as the one for whom Israel has been
preparing. This, too, is wonder-working:
that we, here, thousands of years later, still prepare ourselves one week at a
time to hear the news that a child is born in Bethlehem and nothing has ever
been the same again. This, too, is
wonder-working: that a woman spoke her truth and a man backed her up, that a
crowd of neighbors was amazed, and that the question, “What then will this
child be?” had so many unexpected answers.
There is
trouble, and fear, and empire, and violence, and we who stand at the end of
2024 feel an uncomfortable kinship with the world into which John was born, a
world where a woman’s voice was overridden and a tyrant enforced an unpeaceful
peace and joy was something that did not come easily. But we, just as Elizabeth and Zechariah, just
as their neighbors, are called to allow ourselves to be amazed, to do the thaumaturgy,
the wonder-work of noticing God among us.
There is beauty here, and joy, and hope, and peace, and just ahead of us
is another birth, a life lived fully.
May we have
the courage to trust God’s work within us; the wonder to see God’s work around
us; and the joy to allow God to be at work through us. Amen.
[4]
Luke 1.57-80,
CrossMarks
[6]
Luke 1:20
[8]
ἐθαύμασαν,
[9]
Luke 1.57-80,
CrossMarks.
[10]
“How Does a Weary World Rejoice? Sermon Planning Guide,” by Rev. Lisle Gwynn
Garrity. Sanctified Art, https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BEJyD5OZ23ZQNeGVLfkcDaN8HP_lyCvj.
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