Introduction: I understand that last week, you had a famous preacher come to your church. Toward the end of his sermon I was told that he mentioned something about a “preach off.” Well, I guess your pastor wanted no part of that because he left town and asked me to come and stand in his place today! My name is Zechariah. I am not a preacher; I am a priest. Given that I’m here, I’d like to share a bit of my story with you. It has to do with the amazing, even incomprehensible ways of God. “Your ways are not my ways,” said the Lord through Isaiah (55:9). What I learned long ago is that God does the planning, and he asks us this question: Are we prepared to notice, and join him in what he is doing? I unfortunately, was not.

 

I. A First Century Priest

            A. So, as I said, I am a priest. This was my occupation because I am a direct descendant of Aaron, who, you might remember, was the brother of Moses and the first priest of Israel. After Aaron, God set things up so that every descendant of his automatically entered the priesthood. To be sure, it was a special and honored calling. We blessed people on God’s behalf, we were interpreters of God’s word, and we oversaw the sacrificial system at the Temple. By the dawning of the first century, there were over 18,000 of us around and so we were divided into 24 divisions. Each division served at the Temple on a rotating basis for two, one week periods each year. During the great festival days, what you might call the “holiday rush,” all of us were needed.

 

            B. At the Temple, our daily routine called for the offering of incense before the morning, and after the evening, sacrifice. It represented in a symbolic way the lifting up of our prayers and sacrifices to God. The burning of incense took place at the altar of incense, located just outside the holy of holies. Only the high priest could enter the holy of holies, and then only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, so to be able to stand just outside of this place where the glory of God was thought to dwell was an incredible honor; it was as close as anyone but the high priest could get to the presence of God. But because there were so many of us, this opportunity to burn the incense was chosen by lot. It was the best way we knew of keeping our human will out of the decision and allowing God to choose. Though we had about one chance in a thousand of being selected, it happened to me. Needless to say, it became the experience of a lifetime, in several ways!

 

            C. Before going further, I should also tell you that I had a wife whose name was Elizabeth. She, too, was a descendant of Aaron, so our priestly heritage was as pure as it could get. However, Elizabeth was also barren; we had not been able to have children. Because of this, my poor wife suffered great disgrace because being childless meant that she could not fulfill her expected role in our society. Typically, barrenness was understood to be a punishment from God. However, I should humbly say, and Luke backs me up on this, we lived good and upright lives. You wouldn’t find our names in the local tabloids; no one could accuse us of wrongdoing. But if our barrenness could not be linked to any bad behavior on our part, we could not figure out why we had not been blessed in that way. I guess it took me a lifetime to learn that being good doesn’t mean that God automatically owes us something. His ways, his plans, are not ours.

 

II. In the Temple

            A. So there I was, an old bald guy, with an old (but still beautiful) barren wife, having been chosen to burn the daily incense in the temple. As I burned this incense inside the temple, I knew that outside the temple, many people were praying. They weren’t praying for me; they were praying for our nation. They were praying for our nation because those days, the days of King Herod, the Roman puppet ruler of our region, Judah, (that tyrant!) were dark days. The prosperity and peace that the Roman Empire was noted for was produced through conquest and plunder, and it was maintained through repressive taxation. Our expectation, the expectation of all God’s faithful people, was that one day, God would come. When he came, he would destroy our enemies, and put an end to the political and social oppression that we were having to endure.

 

            B. As these prayers for God to come and put the world to rights were being offered, well, I guess you could say that God came….right to me! He came in the presence of an angel, who stood right next to the altar. I don’t mind telling you that I was frightened out of my wits. You don’t stand in the presence of a holy and righteous God and live to tell about it! But the angel told me to relax, for he had a message to bring me. The message I was given was that my prayers, and the prayers of our nation, were going to be answered at the same time. Elizabeth and I would have a son, and this son would somehow be involved in preparing our people for the coming of the Lord.

 

            C. Well, and I am ashamed to admit this, I didn’t believe it. Maybe it was because by now I had become somewhat of a cynic. Oh, on the outside I did all the right stuff. But God had been silent for so long that I had pretty much, deep down, given up hope, hope that God would ever bring about blessing in my life, or in the life of our people. I guess you could say that I had really stopped trying to be prepared for what God might do; I was just going through the motions. In response to my unbelief, the angel struck me dumb. While it was, on the one hand, a rebuke for my disbelief, it also served as a tremendous aid to my faith. It was a gift, really, to have to be silent.

 

III. The Gift of Silence

            A. In Psalm 46, the psalmist writes, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Have you ever taken God up on that offer? Make no mistake about it, taking time to be silent is not easy. Every part of our life, it seems, is filled with noise, filled with words. Silence seems, so, well, unproductive. So, when we come upon silence we try to fill it. Part of our desire to fill the silent spaces is that noise, be it words or music, can help us to stuff down what we’re afraid might come up. As one of your writers puts it, silence is like a can opener that opens up the contents of our heart. If we don’t spend time in silence, we’ll never hear what’s really going on inside of us, and we’ll never hear what God has in mind for us. If, as the prophet Jeremiah claims, God knows the plans he has for us (29:11), how will we ever be able to hear God’s plans if we don’t carve out some time to be silent? Silence, I learned, offers us a way of paying attention to the Spirit of God and the things he wants to bring to the surface of our souls.

 

            B. My own time of silence took me back to when I was a boy. We used to head south, to the Red Sea, with our olive wood boards, and spend entire days just catching the waves. It’s a funny thing about waves, though. Surfers don’t make waves; surfers just ride them. Oh, surfers can prepare. They can polish their boards, pay attention to the weather forecast, and paddle on out. But only God can make waves. The question is, when he makes them, are you prepared to ride them? God makes the plans, we are just called to recognize how he is working and to join him in whatever he’s doing. There’s a big difference between asking God to bless what we are doing, and seeking to do what God is blessing. Being silent is a wonderful way to prepare for, and to notice, what God is doing and blessing.

 

            C. My time of silence enabled me to reflect on how God often acts. He often acts in ways that are not our ways. Who would have imagined that God would have begun the process of restoring the human race through another old, childless couple, namely, Abraham and Sarah? Who, actually, would’ve planned the exodus from Egypt? Hollywood certainly liked the idea, but it wasn’t theirs. No one would’ve conceived a plan that involved God coming to his people through the conception by a teenage girl of the Son of God. Who, in this world, didn’t think it foolish that this same Jesus would conquer death and establish God’s kingdom by allowing himself to be nailed to a cross? And the church was not created by a bunch of disciples who had gone away on a strategic planning retreat; that took place through the unimaginable power of God’s Spirit, unleashed at Pentecost. Yes, God acts in surprising ways, in ways that are beyond human expectations and human ability to bring about. His job is to plan; our job is to prepare to join him in those plans. Being silent to ponder, to reflect, to listen, well, there’s no substitute for it if we want to be prepared.

 

Do you know when my silence finally ended? It was when I was ready to name my child, not after me, which would’ve been the custom. It was when I named him “John,” which means, “grace of God.” The gift of silence had finally enabled me to notice, and to desire to participate in, God’s amazing grace.

 

Conclusion:

Where can you use a little silence in your life? Let me offer two observations. First, let me observe, as I look around, that in recent years the church in North America has had some of the best minds creating the best churches that people can plan and build. But despite all of that planning, it seems that the church in this generation is desperate for God to show up. You’ve gone as far as you can go on human effort, and you know that you still have a long way to go. You need to know God’s plans for you, you need to know what God wants to do. Maybe a little silence would be helpful

 

Second, on a personal note, maybe you are just having trouble getting into the spirit of Christmas this year. Either you’re too stressed with events in your own life, or too depressed from events in our troubled world. How about giving yourself the gift of silence? How about finding a space and taking ten to fifteen minutes a day to make a place for God to bring to the surface of your soul whatever God wants and needs to reveal to you? Let me just say that the benefits of this will not necessarily be in your experience of silence, but in the fruit it will bear.

 

There’s a reason, I think, that that holy night so long ago was a silent one. The only way to really hear holiness is to be silent; otherwise, you’ll miss it.