God’s Word concludes with a beginning.  It seems fitting to conclude our time with Luke, to conclude this liturgical year, with words from the beginning of Luke’s telling of the Jesus story.  We well remember the words from the second chapter, the Christmas chapter.  In Luke’s first chapter, he fills in some background.  God sends the messenger angel Gabriel, with Good News for Mary.  She receives the news in awe and wonder.  Before that, though, God had sent Gabriel to a man rather past middle age, named Zechariah.  This Zechariah was a priest serving in the Temple, in Jerusalem.  Gabriel has Good News for Zechariah, too: his wife, Elizabeth, will give birth to a son, their first child, after all the years, like Sarah the wife of Abraham long before.  Once more, God was about to demonstrate His power to fulfill His promise to His people.  Gabriel tells Zechariah their son will be a mighty proclaimer of the Word.  Now, for her part, Mary—confused, stunned, and willing—responded with awe, wonder, and consent.  Zechariah responds with doubt: really?  It doesn’t seem likely.  It seems sort of preposterous.  “How can I be sure of this?” he asks (1:18).  Not “I know God can, though I don’t know how,” but “C’mon, man!”

A future, a hope?  That’s for other people, long ago.  There are times when we feel as if we must at last close the door on some long-cherished hope, an old dream.  Some old dreams die hard.  Someday never comes.  Why be foolish?  Why keep your heart open to more hurt?  Time to move on.  We don’t like to have the matter brought up, afterwards.  It’s too painful, reminding us of when we were young and inexperienced and could still feel excited, still had some zest for life and the fullness of the future so close.  Zechariah and Elizabeth had made their adjustments long before, their accommodations to the facts.  Now, this, this, person, young man—whoever he is—is telling Zechariah not to be afraid: God is going to act now, just as you had prayed all those years ago, though for many years you haven’t.  God’s acting does not depend upon our praying, and our praying should not depend upon God’s acting, or not acting.  But we don’t always behave that way.  Why pray for things God hasn’t given?  Why keep that hurting wound in our hearts open?  Let it close; let it scar over.  Get over it.  Move on.

Sounds like wisdom for living, but the wisdom of faith is another sort of wisdom.  It’s clear to Gabriel that Zechariah needs to be reconnected with the fulness of faith.  O he of little faith, just like so many here below, this morning of our celebration of Christ’s current rule over all things, below and above.  Christ is alive.  Christ is powerful.  Christ is acting for our blessing.  It can be difficult to see, until it isn’t.  It can be difficult to hear, until he sings the truth into our hearts.

So Gabriel tells Zechariah that he will be unable to speak until everything told him had happened, until it becomes absolutely clear to Zechariah that God was indeed powerfully at work fulfilling His promise, whether or not Zechariah could see or believe it from one moment to the next over all the years.  The irony is that the priest’s very name means “God remembers.”

Unable to speak for a time set by God, Zechariah will have ample opportunity to listen.  It’s amazing what we can hear when we aren’t talking.  When God restores Zechariah’s power of speech, he sings to God, sings his renewed faith in God, joyful, bright.  In Bible circles, this song is known as the Song of Zechariah.

The first words out of Zechariah’s newly opened mouth, his newly opened heart, are words of praise.  Amen!  “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them” (1:68).  He has come, just as He said He would, just as He always has, just as He always will, because He is faithful, a faithful God.  And why is He faithful?  Because He’s God!  And God, as we remember so beautifully, God is love.  God is faithful because He loves.  Love keeps faith.  Zechariah knew it but had forgotten, hadn’t lived it in . . . how long?

God is lovingly working redemption for His beloved people.  We speak of our Redeemer.  That’s Christ.  That’s God.  What is redemption?  To make the payment, to recover what had been lost, to fulfill a promise.  With the birth of John, several months before the birth of Jesus, Zechariah is singing of God having already redeemed His people: “he has come to his people and redeemed them.”  John is as sure a sign of the truth, the reality, the undeniable fact of this redemption as Jesus is, because it is all God’s Word.  Zechariah, the priest serving routinely for decades in the Temple—doing the proper things in the proper way at the proper time, saying the proper things in the proper way at the proper time—fulfilling his duty, doing his work—Zechariah finds his faith renewed, refreshed, reinvigorated.  God tears through the routine to lift us into reality.

Now, Jesus hasn’t even been born yet, and Zechariah is singing the glory of God who “has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David” (1:69).  A horn of salvation—is that like a trumpet, calling the people to assemble, declaring victory?  Possibly.  Another translation says, “a power for salvation.”[1]  The horn—like a bull’s horns or a magnificent set of antlers—is an old biblical symbol for a ruler, a king: a king of salvation, our salvation.  Why bring in David?  The man after God’s own heart.  The king God chose, rather than the one the people demanded from God so they could be just like everyone else.  The good-looking though very lowly youngest son, so little thought of that he wasn’t even invited to the feast.  And what Zechariah remembers, now that, for a time, God had compelled him to listen, what Zechariah now remembers is that this king of salvation was promised through God’s “holy prophets of long ago” (1:70).  God is doing a new thing (my is He ever!  Just ask Mary) but this is not a new promise.  It was all foretold—turns out it was true.  Turns out God is really there, really at work.

The Jewish people knew about the Messiah, the Son of David.  Many avidly expected his arrival.  Wouldn’t it be great if he came today, with all our woes and enemies, the decline in religion, the unraveling of faith?  So they said to one another.  But those old words of promise had been spoken half a millennium back.  Who expects anything of a five-hundred-year-old promise?  I suppose those who very keenly feel the oppression of enemies.  I suppose those who, from the depths of their aching hearts and sore souls, are looking for mercy, to be remembered, to know they aren’t forgotten, like miners trapped below two thousand feet of entombing rock.

And now, Zechariah knows—knows!—that God has indeed come, full of mercy, keeping the promise, the holy covenant He made with whom—David? Moses? Jacob? Abraham? Noah? Adam?  Yes.  A covenant—that’s so much more than a promise: that’s a pledge made in blood, binding, bound for life, to bring life and give life, bound willingly, bound in love.  God is love, and He gives us His love in covenant, binding Himself, and binding us to Himself.

In his prayer-song to God, Zechariah comes back to those enemies set against God’s people (1:74).  Back then, I suppose it would have been easy to make the Romans out to be the enemy, but our enemy, as God’s Word reminds us, is not flesh and blood.  No man or woman is our enemy: not those indifferent to God’s Word, not even those who loathe Christians.  Our enemy is the enemy of every man, woman, and child on the planet: sin, that self-centered rebellion against God, perennially, perpetually besetting us.  Zechariah may understand that, too, because in the same breath, he rejoices that this king of salvation—our salvation—will “enable us to serve [God] without fear” (1:74).  The joy of the Good News is that God’s covenant is His promise to save us and bring us into His presence despite our rather sad record.  No, our best isn’t good enough, and God sends His best to be our best for us.  God wants the best for you!  Our enemy, sin, has been vanquished.  Remember, Zechariah is singing this decades before Calvary and Cross.  He already knows.  It’s already done.  Why?  How?  Because God is faithful.

This king of salvation, who removes the burden of our fear with his nail-pierced hands, also gives us the ability to serve God “in holiness and righteousness [. . .] all our days” (1:75).  Life lived for holiness, in righteousness, serves God gloriously.  The holiness isn’t ours but his.  The righteousness isn’t ours but his.  He gives these to us.  Jesus truly is the gift that keeps giving.  Isn’t that, also, the very nature of love?  God is the wellspring of love, the source, origin, and pattern of what this world everywhere sings about and so sorely lacks.  Love isn’t what adults do with one another; love is the cross, bearing ours and helping others bear theirs, too.

Beholding God’s promise being fulfilled in Zechariah’s newborn child, that priest past his prime is wonderstruck that this tiny child will give God’s people “the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins” (1:77).  Pause a moment, there.  Salvation comes through forgiveness; no salvation without forgiveness.  How to receive forgiveness, though?  Faith, of course, but there’s something prior: confession.  Which means there is something to confess: our lack and God’s abundance; our need and God’s provision; our sin and God’s grace.  God wants to forgive people their sins.  He is ready to forgive everyone their many, many, ugly, ugly sins; even yours; even mine.  Even today, too many are not ready to confess them.  They won’t.  They can’t.  What would it do to their precious self-image, that bedazzling self-truth the world has helped them build over years?

Yet “the tender mercy of our God” abides, “by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven” (1:78).  The Son, here s-u-n, will “come to us from heaven,” as surely as John has come, as surely as night precedes the day, as surely as every beginning leads to its God-appointed end.  The rising Son “will come to us from heaven”—God sends the light, gives the light.  The light rises.  Without even knowing or understanding all that he is singing by the Spirit, Zechariah has foretold the resurrection.  The old life over, done.  The new life beginning.  Jesus is always new life for us, not the dream of new life but the truth and reality of new life, guaranteed by God’s Word, written in the blood of the Son.  Blood—that most vivid sign of the covenant mercy of God.  That mercy by which we do not receive what we deserve, do not get what we have merited.  The mercy of God looks like the blood of Christ.

God sends the light and gives the blood, sends the life and gives the faith, “to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace” (1:79).  Oh, in this season, the shadows lengthen, and light becomes brief, even in sunny Texas.  So many living in darkness, longing for news of the light.  So many living in the shadow of death—crime, COVID, cancer!  Darkness and death can steal all and any calm.  I tell you, beloved, there is a peace that cannot be taken away.  If you will, God will guide you onto the path of that peace, and give you that peace, keep you in that peace.  In that peace the darkness loses its terror and becomes what God means for it to be: a backdrop for the glories of His wonders, all the beauties of His light, beneath which all our tangled strings of Christmas lights fade.  Shine Jesus, shine!

To the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, be honor and eternal dominion.

               [1] Jerusalem Bible.