During the rule of King Herod of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah. His wife Elizabeth was a descendant of Aaron. 6 They were both righteous before God, blameless in their observance of all the Lord’s commandments and regulations. 7 They had no children because Elizabeth was unable to become pregnant and they both were very old. 8 One day Zechariah was serving as a priest before God because his priestly division was on duty. 9 Following the customs of priestly service, he was chosen by lottery to go into the Lord’s sanctuary and burn incense. 10 All the people who gathered to worship were praying outside during this hour of incense offering. 11 An angel from the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the altar of incense. 12 When Zechariah saw the angel, he was startled and overcome with fear.
13 The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah. Your prayers have been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will give birth to your son and you must name him John. 14 He will be a joy and delight to you, and many people will rejoice at his birth, 15 for he will be great in the Lord’s eyes. He must not drink wine and liquor. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before his birth. 16 He will bring many Israelites back to the Lord their God. 17 He will go forth before the Lord, equipped with the spirit and power of Elijah. He will turn the hearts of fathers[a] back to their children, and he will turn the disobedient to righteous patterns of thinking. He will make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
18 Zechariah said to the angel, “How can I be sure of this? My wife and I are very old.”
19 The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in God’s presence. I was sent to speak to you and to bring this good news to you. 20 Know this: What I have spoken will come true at the proper time. But because you didn’t believe, you will remain silent, unable to speak until the day when these things happen.”
21 Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah, and they wondered why he was in the sanctuary for such a long time. 22 When he came out, he was unable to speak to them. They realized he had seen a vision in the temple, for he gestured to them and couldn’t speak. 23 When he completed the days of his priestly service, he returned home. 24 Afterward, his wife Elizabeth became pregnant. She kept to herself for five months, saying, 25 “This is the Lord’s doing. He has shown his favor to me by removing my disgrace among other people.” (Common English Bible)
“The Other Holy Couple: An Advent with Elizabeth and Zechariah,” Week One
Until very recently, after I began teaching Disciples of Christ history and polity, I did not know the name Samuel Lowery. But I should have. You should.
Samuel Lowery was a Black-Indigenous Disciple of Christ in the 1800s, born to a freed Black father and a Cherokee mother. His mother Ruth died when he was a child, and his father Peter raised him in the Disciples of Christ in Tennessee, where both of them preached until the end of 1856, when anti-Black riots led them to move to Ohio and then to Canada.
When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lowery became an army chaplain, ministering first to Black infantry and then Black artillery units fort the rest of the Civil War. After the war, he returned to Tennessee and then, in 1875, he moved to Alabama, to Huntsville. He was admitted to the bar as a lawyer and became editor of the National Freeman periodical.
Then, in 1880, he became the first Black lawyer to try a case before the Supreme Court of the United States after the first female lawyer to try a case before the Supreme Court recommended his membership to the Supreme Court bar.
All by the time he turned fifty years old. And until a year ago, I had never heard of him.
How can this be, Zechariah asks the archangel.
How can it be that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a child, as old as they are?
How can this be, that the child they will have will be so remarkable that Gospel chapters will be written about him, untold children will be named after him, and we will know his name today?
And, how can this be that this child’s spiritual heirs, who, like the Baptist were trailbreakers who turned the disobedient to righteous ways of thinking and make ready a people for the Lord, how can this be that we do not know all their names today?
Because our own sins and shortcomings keep us from seeing what God sees—what God has always seen. What we might have a chance at seeing, if we hear the words of the Baptist when he grows up and preaches on how he has been sent to make way for the Lord, and to make His paths straight.
How can this be, Zechariah asks Gabriel, and Gabriel rebukes
him. For the answer was always there. It is up to us to find it.
This is a sermon series for the church season of Advent, or, in much of popular American culture, the “Christmas season.” But the Christmas season does not traditionally begin until Christmas Day. The four weeks leading up to Christmas are set aside in the church calendar to be a time of preparing the way for the Lord, and in that spirit, the origin story of John the Baptist, who preached that message of preparing the way for the Lord, seems an appropriate sermon series for now. So, for this Advent, we will be walking alongside the other Holy Couple of Luke’s Gospel—not Mary and Joseph (though we will of course be at their side on Christmas Eve), but Mary’s relative Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah. They end up overshadowed by Mary and Joseph’s dramatic saga in the end, but there is much in Luke’s telling of their story to capture and hold our attention as well.
At top as we read this passage, it is vital for us to understand that Zechariah is not unfaithful—as Luke conveys, he serves as a priest in his community, and is serving in that capacity when Gabriel appears. Zechariah’s “how can this be” response to Gabriel’s appearance and words ought to strike us as a very human moment. Zechariah is faithful, but only God is all-knowing. The issue at hand is not that Zechariah is bad, or unfaithful, or anything of the sort. It is that he is human, and unable to see everything God can do or be.
So it may strike us as harsh of Gabriel to silence Zechariah for the months to follow until John’s birth, but Gabriel makes clear why he should have been believed from the start: “I stand in God’s presence, and I was sent to bring this good news to you.”
How often have we doubted the word of people who have confounded our expectations for the better, who have given us good news when we were expecting tragedy, who were sent to lift us up instead of to tear us down? If we allow ourselves to doubt what is good—and even if that doubt is entirely and completely understandable—perhaps that doubt needs a bit of correction and rebuke.
Because we are human, yes, but we are also called to always be striving to become better humans. “Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect,” teaches Christ at the end of Matthew 5 during the Sermon on the Mount. Especially in a year that many, perhaps most, of us have had to struggle through, that strikes us as an impossible teaching. But if we understand perfecting not as absolute, but as incremental, where each day we try to perfect ourselves just a bit more, it becomes doable.
Consider what we say about our various crafts, hobbies, and professions—that we “perfect” our skills in those areas. Of course that does not mean that we think we become perfect at those pursuits, but that our act of perfecting them each day makes us better at them.
Our faith needs to be one of those pursuits that we perfect—not that make us perfect, but that each day we make a little bit more perfect, so that when we wake up in the morning and get to choose whether to be a good Christian, or not, we choose to be that good Christian.
Zechariah was not picked by God to father the Baptist because he was ordinary. On the contrary, he was chosen and called because he was good, and faithful, and devoted. He may have forgotten those qualities of his in a moment of shock and surprise, but as we will see as this story progresses, he regains them in full. He perfects himself over the course of his story in Luke’s Gospel, and while he is rebuked now, he should also very much earn our admiration.
How can this be, Zechariah asks the archangel. The answer was
always there for him, he just needed to know where to find it, and how to find
it. So do we.
We probably know less about Zechariah and Elizabeth than we do about Mary and Joseph, or at least feel less of a familiarity with them, and understandably so. But how can this be, that we do not also know as deeply and well these two other extraordinary people who revealed God in their lives?
How can this be, that we do not also know of so many others, so many other people across our history, that made God manifest in their lives, yet we barely know their names? What of the Zechariahs and the Elizabeths, the Samuel Lowerys of our story as a people? How can this be that we do not know the knowledge of God that they have made known?
The simple answer is that we have, collectively, chosen to
forget such people and their contributions by dint of our own prejudices. We
chose not to see, not to recognize, not to honor, and not to value their life’s
work. But we can also choose to atone for that choice, to give them and their
memories their due. We can choose to learn from them, to appreciate them, and
to let ourselves be perfected by what they have done, and what they have left
for us to do.
We are not called to merely be sufficient, or adequate, or so-so. When God made the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1, that is not the language God used. God saw that it, and we, were good. We were not made to be middling or mediocre. Zechariah was not, Elizabeth was not, and we are not. We are called to deeper dives, higher climbs, and the holy and sacred work of becoming better, of perfecting ourselves in faith.
And so, I believe, part of our spiritual work of perfecting our faith means purposefully seeking out those voices of history, people we were never taught about but absolutely should have been taught about, and taught about more, people who were trailbreakers and trail blazers of the faith in the very truest sense, just like the Baptist.
Honoring them can help prepare us for Christ’s arrival, just
as honoring the Baptist can help prepare us. The Baptist calls us to recognize
the Christ who is to come, and the believers who came before us call us to
recognize the Christ in them.
How can this be, Zechariah asks the archangel.
Because, as the archangel will soon say to Mary, nothing is impossible with God. Not the birth of the Baptist, not the birth of the Christ, not the raising up of their heirs, and not our ability to perfect themselves as they had. The God who created all things is the same God who makes all things new and who guides you in your own spiritual quest to be made anew, each day and every day, as you grow in your faith in Christ Jesus.
This is just week one of our preparations. Keep the faith, beloveds. The Christ child is on His way.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 29, 2020