Be Not Afraid (Part 1)

Be Not Afraid

Luke 1:5-25

Here is a popular notion that I don’t buy: “Life is fair and God is in charge of making sure it stays that way.”  The underlying conviction is that people get what they deserve.  If you do good things, good things will happen to you.  If you do bad things, you will be punished.  God keeps the score.  It’s not that God wants to punish you…but God will…to teach you a lesson, to get you to be better, to get you to change your ways.  It’s not that God wants to punish you.  It’s more like God is that reluctant parent who looks at you and whispers, “Now, look what you’ve made me do…”

For centuries, the role of the chuch was to try to keep people “on the straight and narrow” and to keep God from having to punish anyone.  If you felt you were suffering through something that you didn’t deserve, the religious authorities would point out your flaws until you thought, “Well maybe I did deserve this after all.” If you thought you were doing just fine and had no complaints, those authorities would point out your flaws until you repented, just in time, presumably, to avoid God’s wrath.  One of my Protestant American ancestors said that we are all “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” For centuries, the church said to people, “You know, sooner or later, God’s going to get you…unless you repent!” Ultimately, the message was, “You will get what you deserve.”

In popular contemporary Christianity, the focus has turned to the reward side of this fairness question.  According to these folks, God isn’t out to get you.  Rather, God is just dying to reward you.  If you can just be good and do some good, God’s blessings are going to rain down on your life.  And, as an added bonus, you can look at the people around you and measure how much God loves them.  All you have to do is “count their blessings.”  If someone is materially successful or has a great job or their life is tragedy free, they must be a faithful person.  This is how we end up with a group of pastors who have expensive suits and luxurious homes and private jets:  they are the most faithful people so they must be the most blessed, right?

Here’s the thing:  life is not fair and God is not in the reward and punishment business.  Some of the most faithful people that I have known have suffered graciously through terrible things.  Some of the least faithful people that I have known have prospered, wildly.  Of course, people who stick to the “rewards and punishments God” will hear this and start talking about “God’s own time.”  In their view,  sometimes the punishments and the rewards are just delayed, sometimes even delayed into the after life.  So, faithful people who are suffering are told that they will get their reward in heaven and faithless, successful people are told, “You just wait!”  (And if we all don’t like the faithless, successful person, we spend extra time developing our vision of exactly what hell will be like for them.)

The bottom line for me is that I don’t think that Jesus came to show us how we can get what we want, in this life or any other life.  I don’t think he came to teach us how we can guarantee that we will never suffer.  I think he came to show us that a person can be a loving person, regardless of whether we are suffering or not, regardless of whether we think life, in its current iteration, is fair or not.  No matter what is happening, we have the chance to choose to be a loving person who is determined to find the next loving thing to do.  That’s our job.  That’s Christ’s way.  I know…it doesn’t fill the pews nearly as well as making people afraid or promising them that God will make them rich.  Still, though…it’s the God’s truth.

In the ancient world, people were sure that you could point to married couples who didn’t have children and say, with confidence, that they had been cursed by God.  In fact, they must have done something terribly offensive to God for God to deny them the joy of having a child of their own.  There wasn’t really any scientific understanding of infertility.  So, since, whatever happened was God’s will, and life is fair, the childless couple should ask themselves, “What did we do to offend God and how can we get back on God’s good side?  (Again, I’m not talking about what I think or believe.  I’m talking about what folks thought and believed in the ancient world.)

The person who ended up being considered the “father of faith,” Abraham, ironically, spent a great deal of his life being unable to “father” a child.  This was a burden that he and his wife Sarah shared together.  This is a figure who is central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  (You’d think we might be kinder to childless couples, right?). One day, though, Abraham and Sarah are told that they are going to have a child.  Abraham questions this.  Sarah just starts laughing uncontrollably. Their life without a child wasn’t evidence of their faithlessness. Rather, the way they coped with not having a child was evidence of their faith.  Abraham and Sarah loved each other through thick and thin.  God loved them, too.  Then, one day, something happened that was beyond their wildest dreams.

Roll the clock forward… I’d like to introduce you to another childless couple:  Zachariah and Elizabeth.  Luke tells us that these are really faithful people.  They have lived honorably, keeping the commandments, and having clear consciences when it came to God.  This couple is beyond reproach.  However, they have had to learn to live without the one thing they always wished for:  a child of their own. Now, they’re old.  They’ve let that dream go. As with Isaace and Sarah, we should, pause honor Zachariah and Elizabeth for doing the hard work of accepting what was so hard to accept.  Sooner or later, we’re all challenged to accept what’s missing in our lives.

Zachariah is at “the office” just doing his job.  Well, let’s clarify that statement.  He’s at the temple and his job is to be a priest—not a fancy priest, just one of many. (Imagine how many people had judged him as a childless man in that place—the place where everyone came to learn how to judge one another!). It turnes out that it is Zacharaiah’s lucky day—a day when everyone would have thought he was blessed.  It was his turn to go into the holiest of holy places in the temple.  You only got to do this once in your life.  You entered the space, lit some incense, and said some ritual prayers.  This was the temple’s way of rewarding the average priest for a job well done.

It turns out that being blessed to go into this sacred space was kind of a mixed blessing.  (Again, if you’ve lived long enough, you probably know that an awful lot of life’s blessings turn out to be mixed blessings, right?). Zacharaiah has the experience that almost every pastor whom I’ve known has at some point.  We think we’re just leading worship and to our utter surprise, we are confronted with the presence of God.  Something holy actually happens! 

One of my favorite examples of this happened years ago with Sandy Ragsdale.  We were in the midst of a Maundy Thursday service (I think..) Folks were coming forward to share a somber communion as we remembered Jesus’ last night with the disciples.  Sandy worked her way up in the line.  When she got to me, she leaned in close and said, “I want to dance.”  On a less tuned in night I might have said, “Well…that’s not in the bulletin, Sandy.  That’s not what I planned.”  Instead, I said, “You should dance then.”  She did…and it was such a powerful moment.  Sometimes, all the prayers and planning and rituals just create the space for God to show up and say, “Surprise!”

Zachariah is doing his job when an angel, a messenger from God, shows up, leaving him slack jawed:  “Who would have thought something mysterious and powerful would happen in a designated holy place?”  Luke tells us that Zechariah is paralyzed with fear.  The angel immediately tells him, “Do not be afraid” which could be the refrain of the Gospel of Luke.  The first response for most folks in the face of mystery and power is to start shaking like a leaf.

The only thing crazier than something unexpected happening at the temple, where everything is plannned, is what the angel has to say: “We’ve heard you’re prayers.  I’m here to tell you that you and Elizabeth are going to have a baby. And, that son of yours is going to be an amazing guy—the one who prepares the way for the Messiah.'  That’s when Zachariah does what any self-respecting person of faith does when confronted with the unimaginable: he dismisses it out of hand:  “Do you expect me to believe this? I’m an old man and my wife is an old woman.”

This is the crux of this text.  What so many of us crave is control.  We want the present to make sense.  We want to know what to expect going forward.  We want to feel like things will be fair and everything will work out.  In other words, we would love to be in charge rather than operate on faith and trust.  What we can trust is that God is with us, whatever our judgment might be about the current state of affairs in our life.  What we need to do is accept what’s happening—not endorse it necessarily, but not waste our energy on arguing with what is real.  What we should be searching for is not the answer to the question, “What did I do to deserve this,” but “Given that this is happening, what’s the next faithful thing to do?”  How am I being called to respond?

The angel answers this question for Zachariah:  “What you’re going to do is stay silent. You’re going to listen, until the day your son is born.”  What an interesting strategy that would be, right, when things don’t make sense to us— because they are wildly unexpected— maybe the thing to do is to listen? Maybe we need to take a moment—or, in Zachariah’s case—a few months—to let things settle in.  That is a potentially life changing thought…

Interestingly, no one needed to tell Elizabeth, Zachariah’s wife, to not be afraid.  She takes the news of the pregnancy in and immediately accepts it.  Women in the ancient world had no control over anything and very little reason to expect anything to be fair.  The gift of that otherwise dismal lot in life was that a woman wasn’t going to waste a lot of energy over whether or not she got her way. Elizabether didn’t argue with the angel for a secon. She just took the news in and accepted it.  She got busy getting ready to have a baby.  This makes Elizabeth the first of our boldly faithful women.