Nativity of St John the Baptist

June 24, 2001

Christ Church, South Yarra, VIC

Reading: Luke 1:57-66, 80

It was a birth
like any other,
and like any other birth
it was unique.
A helpless looking creature,
skin translucent
to the life beating so strongly beneath it,
deep eyes
surveying the new world.
A mixture
of fragility
and strength, this firstborn child,
born of joy
but of sorrow too.

They had long given up
expecting a child,
as month after month went by with no sign of a pregnancy.
"Poor Elizabeth,"
she heard them whisper,
when they thought she wasn't listening.
"Barren, she is."
And their eyes looked
bright with suspicion,
as their minds played with all the possibilities
of what she might have done
to deserve this calamitous fate.
No child.

So when Zechariah
went into the sanctuary
that day, drawn by lot
to offer incense,
the promise of a baby
was the last thing
he expected to hear.
People were praying outside,
and he with them,
prayers well worn with familiarity
and repetition,
as they had prayed
for hundreds of years,
and for hundreds of years

their prayers
had been met
with the silence of God.

We
as a culture
don't do well with silence.
We live in a world
that is saturated with sound.
Just sit a minute, and listen,
and you will hear the blare of a siren,
the squawk of a magpie,
the buzz of a plane
and the staticky snatches
of TV and radio. Talk is like a virus
replicating among us,
and the hum of traffic
is as pervasive
as the air we breathe.
Silence usually means
something has gone wrong,
and on those odd occasions when the world falls
suddenly,
momentarily
silent
we rush to fill in
that dangerous space
with words.

God was silent,
and the prayers of the people
did well
to fill in that dangerous space.
Which was how it should be.
They knew too well
the stories of their forebears,
stories of a God
who brought promise
but also judgement,
healing
but also destruction.
That God
turned worlds upside down
and all in all, I imagine,
a silent, even impotent, God
was a whole lot safer.
They had a contract:
pay their dues
with ritual and rules,
and God would leave them
in peace.

Zechariah
stood in the sanctuary
surrounded by the prayers of the people
and centuries full
of the silence of God.
And then the silence
was broken.

An angel spoke:
"Do not be afraid. Your prayers have been answered. Your wife
Elizabeth
will bear you a son."

Is it any wonder
that Zechariah
found this hard
to believe?
He and Elizabeth
had pleaded with God,
pleaded long and hard,
and all the only answer to their pleas
had been a long
silence,
month after month of bloody reproach.
And now
he was an old man,
old, and Elizabeth well on in years too,
and a child
was beyond
possibility.
After the long silence
of a barren womb,
an angel's speech
was hard to comprehend.

"You will have a son,"
the angel said,
he will be great in the sight of the Lord.
You must bring him up
as a prophet,
chosen by God,
protected from the things
which would lead him astray.
And because you did not believe
you will be silent
until what I say
comes to pass."

And Zechariah was silent,
unable to speak,
his body his only language
for nine long months.

And then
the baby
was born.
Fragile
yet full of life,
an unexpected blessedness
to his aging parents,
binding their lives
in new love and joy.

It's not a birth
we usually pay much attention to.
The fanfares
are reserved
for his younger cousin,
the infant Jesus
in a stable stall
watched over by stars and angels.
This baby
is better remembered
as a voice in the wilderness,
a head
on a plate.
In death,
in life,
even in birth,
this child
was a foreshadowing,
of things to come.

He was born, and his family celebrated.
Neighbours came
to see him,
to support his tired mother
and still silent father.
It came time
to give him a name
and in the way of friends
they offered suggestions,
perhaps hoping that the silence of the father
could be counterbalanced
by the speech of a son
bearing the same name.

"No," said his mother, "His name is John."
And still they argued,
until old Zechariah,
still hearing the angel's words
echoing round
in his head,
labouriously wrote,
"His name
is John."

"His name is John"
is what Zechariah wrote,
and those words
signalled his acquiescence
to all the angel had told him,
nine long months
before.
Nine long months
of pondering, nine long months
of silence.

When an angel appeared to Mary
in what we call today
the annunciation,
it seems that she did not hesitate;
her "yes"
to the message he brought
was instantaneous
and confident.

But for Zechariah
it was a whole lot
more difficult.
For nine long months
he struggled
with this message,
for nine long months
he wondered
how he would fit in
with the unexpected
plan of God.
Of course, he could see the child growing
in his pregnant wife's body - it was too late to stop that -
but the rest of the angel's message...
this son
expected to follow in his footsteps
would instead
be a prophet,
this son
would require
special care.

Zechariah's yes
was no less certain than Mary's,
but it was a yes
born of struggle,
born of pain.

We tend to think
of those nine long months
of silence
as being a punishment,
the penalty
for a doubting response.
But I wonder,
I wonder
whether by God's grace
they were not
a blessing.
Because that silence
made room
for Zechariah's doubt,
that silence
made room for the struggle
and the pain,
and finally the full hearted acceptance
of what God had in store for him.
Just as Jesus
went out into the wilderness
for forty days
before he began
his formal ministry,
so too Zechariah
lived in an internal wilderness
long enough
to prepare
for the role he had been given.
That God-imposed silence
meant that there could be
no premature conclusions,
no gabbled speech
simply filling the void.
That God-imposed silence
left the dangerous space
open,
left it open
for God's word
to grow
and flourish within Zechariah
until the time
when it, along with his baby
reached full term.

We live
in a world

which all too often
does not value silence,
does not value waiting.
We want things now - in fact
we have been taught
that have a right
to expect them
right now.
Where once a letter
might take months to reach us,
email and fax
bring us mail in an instant,
and I begin to get worried
if my messages are not answered
within 24 hours. We want things now
we want to fill the silence
to make things happen
to move on quickly.
The pressure is on,
if we don't do it now
we might miss out
for ever,
a minute passed
is a dollar not earned.

But there are times
when the quick fix
is not enough,
when rushing to judgement
might close down
the work of God
within us.

Some things take time; some things take silence,
discerning
where God is at work,
listening
for God's call,
preparing
for action.

There are many times
when the church has thought
it heard the call of God.
Sometimes
it took time to deliberate, to reflect,
sometimes
it rushed to action.
Sometimes
it made the right decisions,
sometimes, history has shown us,
it went wrong.

The same is true
in our individual lives.
We live in uncertainty,
but the way to security
the way to faith,
is not precipitous
decisions,
but the waiting on
and with
God,
a shared silence
out of which
comes life.

And so
when we think we might have heard
the whisper
of God,
rather than dismissing it
as a flight of fancy
or rushing in,
anxious for some sign, any sign,
we let it sit,
allowing it to incubate,
to come to full term
and be born
healthy and full of life.

God does not always
act quickly.
There is not always
a simple
clearly defined
path ahead of us.
Sometimes
we need to wait,
sitting in silence, struggling with the possibilities,
until we come to a place
where we can hear
and acquiesce
to the call
of God.

In Zechariah's
experience,
the silence
of God,
and his own silence
ended up as a gift,
the very grace of God,
and from it came new life
and words of praise.

As we wait
surrounded
by our own struggles,
our own doubt,
as we hold these things
before us
in the space cleared
by silence,
the Holy Spirit broods over us,
and we share the loving presence
of the God
who spoke all creation into being
out of silence.

Raewynne J. Whiteley
24 June 2001