Bart Garrett:

For reading Devona. And welcome to everyone. If I haven’t met you yet, I’m Bart Garrett, the lead pastor here, and I look forward to meeting you. And if you’re tuning in online, a special welcome to you as well. And we all, I think, love a good plot twist. And this is that time of year that we yearn to dive eggnog deep into our favorite Christmas movies and stories. And the best ones have plot twists, don’t they? Remember that one Hallmark movie where there’s the career woman and she’s living in the city with her banker boyfriend, and then she goes to her hometown and she meets this grizzled man who’s out chopping wood, and they have this romantic repartee plot twist. They fall in love and get married. Right. But there are other ones, like the three that we saw in that title sequence. And one of my favorite ones is when the Grinch realizes that Christmas isn’t something you buy in a store. Perhaps it means just a little bit more. That’s right. And we have our own personal plot twist in life. Big ones, small ones, happy ones, sad ones. For better, for worse. Twists that seem good. The promotion that you didn’t see coming, an acceptance letter you got in the mail. A surprise visit from a family member. Twists that seem bad. A surprise visit from a family member, someone else gets the job. You heard about the party after it happened. And I say seems good and seems bad because some good circumstances may conspire to bring you down and some bad circumstances may forge deep character, which is often the case. And if Christians believe the story of Christ is God’s true story for the whole world. Do I need another microphone? Here we go. Better plot twist. Yes. Are we good? I can keep using this one. Okay. If Christians believe the story of Christ is God’s true story for the whole world, that a beautiful world has broken but is being restored. And if that world is being redeemed every second of every day by Jesus, then ultimately our bad things in every plot twist will turn out for good. Our good things can never be taken away. And our best things are yet to come. And Advent is the season leading up to Christmas that invites us to press deeper into that story. And Advent has its own plot twist as well. It goes like this. We, you and me, begin the Christian year not with our own frenetic effort and energy. So think Black Friday, think Thursday, where we thank God and we’re grateful for all that we have, and we’re content. So Friday, we turn around and buy everything that we can think frenetic frenzy in front of the target, the blitzkrieg that happened on Friday. Think instead of Advent not as working frenzy, but as waiting. Not even with the merriment of Christmas yet, or the triumph of Easter yet. Not even with the good work of the mission of the church yet. Instead, we begin plot twist in a place of longing, of waiting for the King to return. That’s what Advent means in Latin, adventus, the coming of the King. We observe it, as Devona said, in the first coming of King Jesus, as a fragile little bitty baby. And we await his second coming, when Christ will return in glory to put the world to rights. Or as Samwise Gamgee says, to make all sad things come untrue. And maybe you came this morning with a friend or a family member. Maybe you’re a newbie to faith or you’re exploring faith. You’re curious, you’re skeptical. You’re maybe even cynical. You’re unconvinced. Maybe you’re okay with the carols and the candles and the cocoa and the cookies and the candy canes and the cards and the chimneys and the chestnuts and every other Christmas thing that starts with C. But the Christ, this story. I mean, you’re asking me to believe something today based on ancient manuscripts that were compiled 2000 years ago. Weren’t they just making this stuff up? Don’t our cute little ancestors not know any better? But this is not actually a plot twist of a Bible story. It’s the plot twist of a historical event. Event, because we have a foundation for faith that is far more substantial than the Bible tells me. So, in fact, Christian faith rises and falls on the identity of one single individual. Jesus of Nazareth. So is Christianity worth taking seriously today? Well, if Matthew or Mark or Luke or John, who wrote these four accounts that we call the Gospels at the beginning of the Greek scriptures, and if one of those accounts is reliable as a set of actual events, if what they say about Jesus of Nazareth is true, then we must press in. It would change everything. Our faith would be built on an event. The resurrection. And what immediately follows is not a new religion. After all, this was a Jewish boy, the son of a Jewish carpenter. The story was written down, documented by adherents to that Jewish faith. And this movement that it sprung was premised upon the historical event of the resurrection. So the story of Jesus is not a Bible story. It’s actually why there is a Bible. If there had been no resurrection, then there would have been no church and there would have been no one in this early band of followers who would have written this story down. But even if one of these accounts is true, then we should lean in, we should explore, we should consider, we should examine what is the plot twist of history. So if we could back up from the story that Devona read for just a second. We didn’t read the first four verses in the book of Luke. And the book, remember, is a scroll, and the first few verses are the preamble, because you can actually read what the scroll is all about before you unfurl it. And this is what you would read.

Luke 1:1–4 (NIV)

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Notice the first word is many. So how many is many? 2, 4, 9? That’s actually not many. I wonder how many would undertake to draw up an account of your life or of my life. Probably not many. You know what? Not many even took up to draw up an account of the most famous people in the first century. In fact, Herod the Great, who was quite famous, which we’ll get to in a second, only had one biographer, Josephus. How many accounts of peasant farmers or Galilean day laborers? Zero. Or I should say one. So why would so many tell this story? The answer is simple. Something extraordinary happens. Somebody had to tell the story. And Luke writes that it happened among us, that this was in their lifetime. Luke knew the men and the women who were the eyewitnesses to Jesus. In fact, he had a conversation with James, Jesus’ half brother, and with all the other disciples as he carefully investigated. This is actually not a once upon a time story. Luke is not even writing a Bible story. He didn’t even know if his document would survive past the first century. Yet it became part of the Bible because in his account he included the true story of a resurrected Jesus. So there are a lot of big questions to take to faith. I can probably give you more than you already have. I could offer you the classic theodicy question, how could there be a good God in a world of so much evil and suffering? But please don’t start with those questions. Start with this. Are these accounts true? Because Luke says, the reason I wrote this down is because I want you to know the certainty of the things you have been taught. Don’t embrace the impression that Christianity is all about having faith in faith. Faith is actually anchored to an event and ultimately to a person. So that’s our big idea. If you’ll explore it with us. This Advent season, we’re going to be talking about these Christmas plot twists. And the plot twist of Christmas is that it is a story of hope, not despair, that all is not lost. We’ll be talking about this Advent plot twist, which is this story again, of waiting first, not working in a if you’re somebody, then prove it culture. We need a God who loves us first, who finds us first. And we look at this plot twist of history, which is a story not of death, but of life, that Jesus would dismantle death from the inside out. And then we see the characters in the story as we walk through Luke, chapter one and chapter two over these next few weeks and today with Zechariah and Elizabeth, who I’m going to call Zeke and Liz, just to keep it short if I can. And we see a couple plot twists in their life that I want to unpack in the story for a moment. The first one is faithfulness, not abandonment. And the second one is faith, not fear. So let’s look at both of these for just a moment. First, faithfulness, not abandonment. Maybe there are some of you in this room today and you believe that God’s there, but maybe God just doesn’t care about you anymore. Or you think God’s there, or you thought God was there, but you’re just not so sure anymore. Or you used to think that God was there, but something happened and now you feel abandoned. Maybe this is when suffering just doesn’t seem to stop, albeit through chronic illness or infertility or anxiety or depression that always loom, or a marriage that just won’t heal, or a loved one in your family who’s dying. And the question is, if God had not abandoned me, wouldn’t God be doing something by now? Or maybe it’s when your prayers just don’t seem to be answered, the job isn’t offered or the relationship doesn’t materialize, or retirement seems so far out of reach. And the question is, if God hadn’t abandoned me, wouldn’t God be listening to me right now? Or maybe it’s when others seem to flourish while you feel like you’re languishing. A friend gets engaged or a coworker gets promoted, or everyone else just seems to be healthy and stable and happy. And the question is, if God hadn’t abandoned me, then why does it seem like God just skipped over my life? Or maybe it’s when the world’s brokenness just seems overwhelming. All of the wars and the injustice and the mass shootings and the chronic political polarization, we look at the news and we say, well, if God hasn’t abandoned us, why does the world seem to be burning down? And see, we assume God abandons us when God’s plans stop aligning with our expectations, we assume God abandons us when God’s plans stop aligning with our expectations, albeit through suffering or loneliness or tragedy or trauma or just simply the ordinary grind of life. But could we assume if God is God and I’m not God and you’re not God, could we assume that if God is God, while we only have POV, God has V. While we only have point of view, God has view. That’s actually what’s happening right here in verse 5 as our story begun this morning in the time of Herod, King of Judea. And this is point of view. It’s brutal point of view because to be on the ground as a Galilean peasant during Herod’s reign. Herod was not simply a harsh ruler. He was paranoid, he was violent, he was increasingly erratic. He executed his wife, he executed three of his sons. The famous quote back then was that it was better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son. And that’s because he kept kosher in public, but he killed his family in private. This is a bad man. He was a puppet king who only enriched Rome and his own family. So people were living under the dual weight of this paranoid king and Rome’s occupying empire. And if you were there, you would have felt abandoned. You would have felt fear of arbitrary violence and exhaustion from taxes and grief at the desecration of your holy spaces and the loss of your ancestral lands. And this is why the announcement in the Gospels of a different kind of king felt so electric and so dangerous. Because a Galilean peasant would have thought, our God sees us, doesn’t he? These oppressors cannot rule forever. The Messiah will come. That’s the advent to restore justice. And the feelings of abandonment, even in those pleasures were real. But this fragile hope prevailed. There was weariness, as you would have been working from dawn to dusk, and inescapable pressure of taxes and debt and year to year harvest anxiety and anger at the elites and at Herod and at Rome. Yet there was this longing for relief for justice, for Messiah, for God’s faithfulness to his people. Well, enter Zechariah and Elizabeth. Zeke is a priest from the division of Abijah. Elizabeth is the descendant of Aaron, who was the first high priest. So they had this blessed lineage. They lived, as Luke wrote, blamelessly, which doesn’t mean they didn’t do anything wrong, but it meant they were this devoted couple who loved God and loved their neighbors, and yet they couldn’t have kids, which was, in that day a death sentence. And in the cultural context of ancient Israel, infertility was seen as proof of God’s abandonment. And it was also a source of social shame, not even to mention personal grief. And Elizabeth is advanced in years, which is a kind way of suggesting she’s too old to have kids. And any hearer of this story would have been reminded of all of those older stories of Abraham and Sarah having a child at their age, and Rachel and Jacob having two sons after years of childlessness. And God’s faithfulness to Hannah after she was shunned in giving her Samuel. And this story, Luke hints, is not a strange new thing, but it takes place within this longstanding history of God’s faithfulness. The child to be born, who will be called John, will play this key role in God’s fulfillment of his promises. So the circumstances, the situations, the timeframes, all were pointing to abandonment. Yet God says, I will be faithful. Well, how does God do it? Well, often God’s work unfolds in these unexpected ways. So the setting of the scene here, this encounter, Zeke is performing his priestly service in the temple. And this is specifically inside the sanctuary. It’s in the holy place, right next to the Holy of Holies. Holy of Holies was that little 15 by 15 foot cube that only the high priest could go in one time a year. The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Zechariah is right outside of it, offering the prayers of the people. And this angel Gabriel appears. And I’m going to spend an entire week of this story from Gabriel’s perspective. So we’ll talk all about angels in a couple weeks. So come back. But suffice it to say here, Gabriel says in verse 13, your prayers have been heard. And again, we assume God abandons us when God’s plans stop aligning with our expectations. Yet human history is full of fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters who in faith keep praying and pleading and hoping for God to act. And with all of the plot twists and all of the turns of human history, the signal and the noise is that God never abandons us, but remains faithful. And in that faithfulness, if you think about it, there are really three ways for God to answer a prayer. Right, yes, no, or not yet. And as viewed through the eyes of faith, again, not faith in faith, but faith anchored to an event and ultimately faith in a person through the eyes of faith. Our belief, our trust is this. God doesn’t abandon us, but always is faithful. So when we pray, as Zechariah did, and God says yes, what is left for us to say is thank you God. And when God says no, what is left for us to do is to think, well, maybe God, you must see me better than I can see myself. You must know me better than I can know myself. You must love me better than I can love myself. And if God says not yet, what’s left for us to say is maybe there’s more space for me to grow in my capacity to more fully comprehend your faithfulness to me. This is a plot twist of faithfulness over abandonment. What about the last one? This plot twist of faith not fear. Now, faith not fear. This is not something to needlepoint on a pillow or place on a refrigerator magnet or slap on a bumper because Zechariah is actually not a great hero of faith. Luke tells the truth in the story. His first reaction to the news is he’s clutching at straws. He’s saying, show me something, I need a sign. This is Gabriel, the high angel, and he’s saying, show me something I don’t believe. You see, God regularly works through ordinary people, people that are doing what they normally do with a mixture of fear and half baked faith, doing their best to understand what God might be up to in their life. In fact, Zechariah standing before the angel Gabriel, the emissary of God, who’s already shown up in Daniel’s times to explain visions and to explore divine plans, he’s a lot less like Clarence Oddbody and a lot more like Gandalf the white. In verse 11 we pick it up.

Luke 1:11–20 (NIV)

¹¹ Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. ¹² When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. ¹³ But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. ¹⁴ He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, ¹⁵ for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. ¹⁶ He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. ¹⁷ And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” ¹⁸ Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.” ¹⁹ The angel answered, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. ²⁰ And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their appointed time.”

He will be a joy and delight to you and many will rejoice because of his birth. For he will be great, great in the sight of the Lord. And he goes on to say that he’s going to bring the people of God back from their sins, which is to say what the Jewish people in Roman occupation needed to realize is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write, that the line between good and evil isn’t out there somewhere, but it cuts right in the middle of the human heart that we’ve turned away from God and John is bringing the people back by showing them the Messiah. And yet Zechariah is still afraid. He’s saying, show me or I won’t believe. So Gabriel makes him mute for nine months. He can’t talk, which I think is actually much more a provision for Zechariah than it is a punishment. And that’s based on the brief interaction we have here, because I imagine him continuing the conversation with Gabriel if he was allowed to, and he’d be saying, I don’t believe you. And suppose I do believe you. Why will my boy be the messenger and not the Messiah? Why will my boy play on JV and not Varsity? So much more I would love to say here, but our time is up. So suffice it to say Zechariah with this concoction of fear, his doubt, his skepticism, his demand for a sign. Elizabeth, who will go on to receive this in faith, which we’ll talk about in a couple weeks, she’s sharing the news with her cousin Mary. For both of them, it was not a light switch that flicked on and off. It was more like a dimmer switch that slowly, subtly pushed away the darkness of fear and turned up the light of faith. Zechariah, in his being, made mute for nine months. Elizabeth experiencing nine months of this baby growing up in her womb. Both of them are contemplating more and more, a little bit each day, the faithfulness of God through the eyes of faith. And that’s our invitation, too. That’s the invitation of Advent, of expectant waiting, of asking what God might be up to in my life? What plot twist might God have for me this season? And if God sees you better than you can see yourself and knows you better than you can know yourself and loves you more than you can love yourself, then can you trust this God with all of the plot twists that ultimately, in all of them, will have the bad things turn out for the good, and the good things never be taken away, and the best things be things that are yet to come. As we come to the table, that’s my Advent prayer for each of us, in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit, we pray Amen.