THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

HOW SILENTLY, HOW SILENTLY

December 6, 1998
John M. Buchanan

If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it
does not draw us into his superluminous darkness, if it does
not call us out of the little house of our close-hugged truths...
we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.

Karl Rahner

Eternal God, through long generations you prepared a way for
the coming of your Son, and by your Spirit you still bring light
to illuminate our paths. Renew us in faith and hope that we
may welcome Christ to rule our thoughts and claim our love, as
Lord of lords and King of kings, to whom be glory always.
Amen.

A Prayer for Advent

Book of Common Worship

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

HOW SILENTLY, HOW SILENTLY
December 6, 1998
JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Isaiah 11:1-9
Luke 1:5-25
“When he did come out, he could not speak to them, and they realized he had seen a vision
in the sanctuary.” Luke 1:22

Dear God, in the middle of the busiest and noisiest time of year, we come to be
silent in your presence, and to listen for the word you have for us. So silence in us
now any voice but your own. And startle us with the new possibilities created by
your love and your grace and your forgiveness. Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen.

I was never much interested, frankly, in Zechariah and Elizabeth and their peculiar son,
John, who when he grows up, goes around disturbing everybody and eventually gets
himself jailed and executed. I never thought that Elizabeth and Zechariah were nearly as
interesting as Mary and Joseph, and all that business about the Temple and incense and
what happened to Zechariah, losing his voice, never compelled me as much as shepherds
on the hillside and whole choirs of angels and the little town of Bethlehem and the manger.

For my money, you could just drop the whole first chapter of Luke’s gospel and start where
the real story begins, with the birth of Jesus. It took me decades to rediscover Zechariah and
Elizabeth, and each year now my appreciation for them deepens, and each time I read their
story J discover new depth and new meaning.

Part of my interest in them stems from my fascination with the Bible as literature. There are
scholars who examine the biblical texts with the same analytical tools as they use to analyze
Shakespeare or Plato or Homer. And the theory that intrigues me every year when I read
this esoteric stuff is the literary scholar’s conclusion that it looks like the original Gospel of
Luke began with chapter three. Take a look: chapter one is about Elizabeth and Zechariah;
chapter two is about the birth. Chapter three begins with a proper introductory paragraph
for a first century book like Luke . . . “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius.”
it just feels like the beginning of a story—when Jesus of Nazareth is about thirty years old
and wanders out into the wilderness one day and is baptized by his cousin. So the scholars
in their studies, using their computers to compare words, phrases, writing styles, ask that if
the original began with chapter 3, then how did the first two chapters get there—the ones
with the stories of the shepherds and angels and Bethlehem and before that, Zechariah and
Elizabeth? Where did these stories come from? Who wrote them, and why and how? (See
Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, p. 239-285).

The scholars have theories that perhaps Luke himself began to ask about Jesus’ birth and
childhood. Or perhaps someone else wrote down what is called the “oral tradition.” I have
a theory I’ve developed over the years. I’m not sure it is academically respectable, but here
it is; a four-word literary hypothesis: his mother did it.

Luke wrote several decades after Jesus life, maybe around 70 A.D. Jesus’ mother, Mary, was
maybe 85. My theory is that she heard about Luke’s version of the story, or perhaps read
the first draft, summoned the author, and said:

Wait a minute, young man, you’ve forgotten something. You’re forgetting a lot,
actually. This story begins a long time before you arrived on the scene. It begins
with some strange and mysterious events that occurred when | was a young girl, just
a teen-ager.

First, my Aunt Elizabeth. She and her husband Zechariah lived in the hill country.
Both of them were from priestly families. Zechariah was a priest. They had no
children of their own. In those days, having no children was an embarrassment. But
they stayed together over the years, as their affection and respect and love for each
other deepened. The priests in Judah took turns serving in the Temple. Once a year,
Zechariah would leave Elizabeth, walk all the way to Jerusalem, and with the other
priests in his section perform the prescribed duties around the Temple. He lived
there for the week, saw to the lighting of the candles, burning incense, the sacrifices.
Each morning they cast lots to determine who did what, and one glorious day
Zechariah drew the prize everybody wanted—lighting incense in the sanctuary, just
outside the holy of holies, at the end of the day. You were only allowed to do it
once in your lifetime, and many of his fellow priests never got to do it at all. It was
such an honor. Best of all, people gathered outside to watch and wait for the smoke
of the incense to rise in the evening air, to add their prayers to the lovely incense,
rising up to God, and then to receive the blessing which the priest was allowed to
confer on them when he emerged from the sanctuary, a lovely moment. There was
no higher occasion in the life of a priest than that.

Well, on that day Zechariah entered the sanctuary to light the incense, and he didn’t
emerge. People got nervous, worried. Nobody stayed in there for long. And when
he finally came out, he just stood there, with a bewildered look on his face. He
didn’t confer the blessing. He couldn’t speak. People asked him what was wrong,
and he couldn’t say a word; never spoke another word until Elizabeth had a baby
nine months later. J can still remember my parents and all the neighbors laughing
about it. They used to say, “Old Zechariah may not have been able to talk when he
came home from Temple duty, but apparently he could do something else!” (See
Barbara Brown Taylor’s Bread of Angels).

Later, when he could speak, he said that an angel had appeared that day when he
was in the sanctuary and told him about the baby and to name the baby John, and
when he was a little skeptical—and who wouldn’t be?--the angel struck him dumb.

Of course, in the middle of all that, something amazing happened to me, something
so similar that J actually left home and went to stay with my Aunt Elizabeth until her
baby came, by which time my own pregnancy was well along. But, that’s the next
story I want to you to remember. For now, don’t forget dear Elizabeth and
Zechariah and their baby, who, when he grew up, was the first one to recognize my
son as God’s own son; was the first to know and to say it, that God’s redemption was
now among us.”

Well, maybe—probably not. But there’s a lot in this story that is provocative. There’s a lot
in there that compels the attention of clergy people. What happens to Zechariah is the
ultimate clergy nightmare. It’s the highest, holiest, most important moment in his life, and
he can’t talk.

Psychiatrists fell us that every profession has its favorite nightmare, based on the particular
vulnerabilities and fears of the particular profession: a lawyer standing before a judge in an
important case forgets what she wants to say; a basketball player on the free-throw line with
the game tied and no time on the clock and misses the shot. For ministers, it is something
like this: the service is starting and you’ve slept in; or you’re not prepared—you’ve
forgotten to write a sermon and it’s Sunday morning; or the ultimate—you’re in the pulpit
and they’re all there looking up expectantly and you suddenly realize that you have your
workout clothes on; or, worst of all, you look at the pulpit where your sermon manuscript is
supposed to be, but it’s gone! You have nothing.

Well, there is Zechariah, coming out of the sanctuary, a crowd awaiting his blessing, the
greatest moment in his professional life, like being invited to preach in St. Peter’s or

St. Giles, and he can’t speak. And, furthermore, the reason he can’t speak is that God has
taken away his voice. “Religious professional silenced by God”—now there’s a pregnant
suggestion, God silencing the preacher; God enforcing a time to stop talking and listen.

I thought about Zechariah’s silence when I read Martin Marty’s editorial in The Christian
Century this week about Jerry Falwell on the Larry King show, going on and on, arguing that
Jesus really did have a position on homosexuality, even though he never mentions it in the
Gospeis, because Jesus is God and God is Jesus, and God inspired the whole Bible, and so
Jesus actually “inspired all 773,000 words of the English Bible,” etc., ete., ad nauseum. (The
Christian Century, 12/2/98).

Barbara Brown Taylor, on this story, wonders, “what would happen if Christians became
very still and quiet, creating oases of silence for people whose ears ache and whose heads
hurt from all the noise? What would happen if we stopped pretending we could read God’s
mind and just sat down somewhere to do nothing together, watching out for whatever new
thing God is doing next?”

“Maybe,” she says, “it is time for us to claim the angels’ gift of silence again—to stop talking
so much, to stop trying to explain, to shut our own mouths before the terrible mystery of
God and see what the quiet has to teach us.” (p. 94-95).

Zechariah could not speak. He could not explain. He did not have to explain what
happened in the sanctuary, what happened to Elizabeth. What was happening to both of
them. One way to read this story is that his speechless state was punishment for his
disbelief, his lack of trust. I think his silence was a gift. He didn’t have to try to explain.

He had a nine-month reprieve—Kathleen Norris calls it his own private pregnancy, to
ponder what was happening, to reflect on the staggering reality of God doing something new
in his life (Amazing Grace, p. 76).

I think Zechariah’s problem was not disbelief so much as a lack of imagination. He could
not conceive of a future different from the present. He could not imagine that God would
do something new for him, for Elizabeth, for the community, for the world. Spiritually,

3

Zechariah had accommodated to the status quo. He had stopped hoping for much, stopped
expecting anything, stopped believing in a God who actively engages the world.

The word for that is barrenness. It is a cruel word. There was a time when it referred to a
childless woman. Elizabeth’s time was that—her purpose was to have priestly babies. It no
longer means that—in fact, I think this is a subtle story about Zechariah’s barrenness of
imagination, his lack of spirit and hope. And, it is a story of God’s bold-but-quiet creation
of something brand new in the world.

Men must be cautious about this subject and not presume too much. I know someone who
thinks it would be just right if what happened to Zechariah happened to every man who
starts pontificating about women’s reproductive issues. Not a one of us has preached on
this text without learning later of women for whom not having a child feels like a curse or
punishment. And | tracked down something Kathleen Norris said about it, powerfully, in
her recent best seller Amazing Grace. Kathleen is married and does not have children. She
describes it as her own reconciliation. Reflecting on Mary as Virgin and Mother, Norris
wrote:

“What Mary does is to show me how I indeed can be both virgin and mother. Virgin
to the extent that I remain ‘one in myself,’ able to come to things with newness of
heart; mother to the extent that I forget myself in the nurture and service of others,
embracing the ripeness of maturity this requires. This Mary is a gender-bender. She
could do the same for any man.” (Amazing Grace, p. 122).

And I thought about one of the most maternal women I knew, my Aunt Peg, who had no
children of her own, but who was so consistently life-giving and accepting and loving that I
knew with her I was safe and could count on her non-judgmental love; and Mrs. Evans,
elderly, childless Sunday School teacher, who put up with our adolescent foolishness and
then followed all of us into college or the service and wrote to us and tracked us like
Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven,” and mothered us.

Barrenness is not childlessness, [t is an absence of imagination and joyful hope and life-
giving love. And that is exactly what Advent is about. It is the glorious affirmation that
God creates newness—in the world and in your life and mine; that something new is
coming. That is the gift, the miracle of the newness that God will give to those with
imagination enough to receive it. That is new birth that can happen in and for each and
every one of us.

Zechariah had a nine-month silence in which to ponder the new thing God was doing. I
doubt that you and I will have nine hours of waking silence in the busy, noisy weeks to
come. But maybe we could begin our period of gestation, our own God-given silence, in the
nine or ten minutes it takes to distribute the bread and wine of communion this morning.
And maybe, starting today, we will find ways to be silent, speechless, listening. Maybe we
will start the day in quiet prayer—still in bed ... *thank you God for the new love you give
me this day.” Maybe we will walk outside this evening and look up in the starry sky and
silently wonder. Maybe we will just do it this year: find a time each day to be quiet and to
listen and to receive the gift.

Amen.

“How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given.

No ear may hear his coming
But in this world of sin,

where meek souls will receive him still
The dear Christ enters in.”