Sunday December 8th, 2024 Worship

This week I had a little extra time at the end of my Foss Bible Study, so I decided to ask my group what their hopes were for either children in their lives or the children of the world. I asked the same thing of the Wednesday night Vespers group, encouraging them to write out their hopes and spend a minute praying those each day this week. It’s powerful to spend some time reflecting on those hopes, especially when we may not always be thinking about them. Here are just a few: that they would be happy and healthy, that they would have the ability to both dream and follow their dreams, that they are able to just be kids in a world that asks them to grow up too quickly. I don’t even have kids yet, but I think about my niece, the students at Broadview-Thomson and at Emily’s school. I think about the kids living through wars, violence, homelessness, food insecurity. All the additional pressures that make life even more difficult when their priority should be growing, learning, and playing. Remember these hopes as we hear Luke 1 today, what we sang as the Psalm.
Sorry for those of you who were at Vespers on Wednesday night because this will be a little bit of a repeat, but I just absolutely love the reading from Luke 1 this week. It’s often called the Hymn of Zechariah, the hopes and prayers that he has for his son John the Baptist. John has the unique role of being the one who goes before Jesus, pointing the way in the wilderness, preaching, teaching, and baptizing. It’s an important role that he plays, as he is the one who tells people about the one who is coming after him, beginning to tell about Jesus so that people know what to pay attention to. This is John’s main purpose in the mission of God, to act in such a way that he gathers peoples’ attention and then also point them forward to Jesus.
In this season when we want to jump straight to the answer of “Jesus,” this story of John today reminds us to slow down and to prepare our hearts and minds for what is coming next. It’s especially important in this season because these stories are familiar. We hear the same story every year, and it can be easy to forget the details, or even add in details that come from songs and movies that maybe aren’t quite a part of the actual Christmas story. It’s inviting us to really sit back and hear what is being said, to let it impact us. To have Christmas be more than just a holiday of trees and lights and presents. It prepares us to hear again the promises of God in Christ. But again, I’m trying to jump to the end of the story.
This is a story about paying attention, about watching and waiting. And it’s also a prayer that holds so much hope for the peace that will come to these people who have been waiting for that for so long. I don’t want to ignore the fact that we have this hymn today talking about “guiding our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79), when the people in that very same region today still live surrounded by violence, if they are even able to survive at all. The biggest hope we have for those kids right now is that they are able to survive, and then we get to hope for everything else. I know it can seem really easy to forget about that as we prepare for Christmas and the celebrations, as we talk about hope and peace, but this very same region where John was proclaiming these promises and preparing the way need us to think about them as they are today too, not just how they were 2,000 years ago, especially as the two candles that are lit in our Advent wreath this week are the hope and peace candles.
I want to bring us back to the importance of John the Baptist and these readings from Luke today. They tell us more about John’s role in God’s mission in the world, but I also think about how Zechariah must have been feeling as he thought about all that his son was going to do. I’m sure it would be both an honor and also a bit of a terror to release your child to God’s work in this way. To know that they get to be a part of the coming of the Savior, but also to know that this will bring pain and challenges and hardship. Zechariah’s hymn is filled with so much hope, not just for who his son will be, but also for what God is promising to do in the world. For this dawn to break, to bring light and hope to people who are sitting in sadness and pain and the fear of death (Luke 1: 78-79). To be the one preparing the way for the Lord, this long-awaited Messiah who will change the world and improve the lives of the people most desperate for the world to change. 2,000 years later I can still feel this sense of how Zechariah must have been feeling as he wrote this in praise, wonder, and awe. His body likely vibrating because of this newfound excitement and hope. The promises that John gets to prepare the way for are so important to a people in need of hope and salvation.
When we pair these two readings from Luke today, we get both Zechariah’s prayer for John and then John out doing his own proclamations. In two chapters we skip about thirty years of John’s life, but we see and hear him responding to this call from God, accomplishing this task that was set out for him to do. There was never a promise that this work would be easy, but we see John’s confidence in the way that he leads, and he talks, as he is the one who prepares the way so that people can truly see and experience what Jesus is doing too. He kind of gets put into this sidekick role, but it doesn’t matter to him. It’s just important to be the one calling out in the wilderness (Luke 3: 4) so that people can be prepared for all that Christ will bring into the world and their lives. This is especially important when the things he prepares the way for are experiences like baptism, which again, are significantly different than this great military battle that people are expecting when the Messiah comes too.
In this hymn today, Zechariah essentially releases John into God’s hands, trusting that God will take care of his son. I can only imagine how he felt as he wrestled with the fact that his son was going to be the one leading the way for Jesus. Yet, Zechariah has this hymn that is so full of hope that it helps us see who John is, in order that we can trust what he says about the one coming after him. It is ultimately a prayer of love, not only for his son, but for the world. What are our prayers of love for the world? As we end today, whether you were here on Wednesday or not, I encourage you to think of your hopes and prayers for the children in your lives or in the world. Perhaps write those down and take a minute to pray those because the world can be so hard on our kids these days, and we can always use a little bit more hope and a little bit more prayer as we ask for Christ’s peace to dwell among us, especially in the lives of these young ones.