Routine Religion
Luke 1:1-25

For most of my life I’ve been lucky, in that I’ve never had to commute too far to work. The longest commute I ever had was to Brantford in the early 80s, when I was attending the Branford campus of Mohawk College. Five days a week I would drive highway 53 out to Brantford. (This was before they extended the 403.) I’m not much of a morning person and more than once I arrived at the campus with absolutely no recollection of how I got there. I would just be on auto pilot, totally routine, unaware of what was going on around me.

I wonder if it was just routine for Zechariah… After all, religion is what he did.

There’s an ad on the radio for Hotels.ca. “Hotels are what we do. Plumbers do plumbing. Lawyers do… lawyering. We do hotels. It’s what we do.”

An ordinary priest

Zechariah was a priest. Priests do religion. It’s what they do.

It’s what Zechariah did. He was a descendant of Aaron, who was the brother of Moses and the first high priest. Zechariah had trained to be a priest since he was a boy and had been doing it all his life. He knew all the rules for the operation of the temple. He knew which sacrifice to give in which situation. He knew the blessings to speak over different events. He might have been one of the priests who sang or played instruments in the temple for the worship service. He also had administrative duties; inspecting and repairing the temple, collecting tithes, checking on infectious diseases and monitoring people’s contact with dead bodies.

It was a busy life as a priest, even if a lot of it was just routine. But Zechariah worked hard at doing things right. It says that he and his wife, Elizabeth, were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly. He did it right. He even had the right kind of wife. It says that Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. That means that she too came from a priestly family. Her father and brothers were priests. She understood what it meant to keep house for a priest, the special rules of purity that had to be kept so her husband would keep his job.

The right family, the right life, the right wife - but still they were childless. It was so unfair. Verse 7 says, But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren; and they were both well along in years. You do everything right, but still things don’t turn out the way you hope. It was so unfair. Not least because the assumption amongst their peers would have been that, although they looked good on the outside, they were doing something wrong and so God had (as they say in the Old Testament) “closed Elizabeth’s womb.”

But still Zechariah fulfilled his duties as a priest, as a member of the division of Abijah. There were so many priests that they took turns to serve in the temple services. Each division got to serve for one week, twice a year. So the rest of the year he was doing all the other legal and administrative stuff, but this week he was doing temple service; making sacrifices and that kind of thing.

That was a bit out of the ordinary, but he had been a priest for years and so he had done all of this before. It was still just routine.

An extraordinary day

Then something unusual happened. This normal, routine day turned into an extraordinary one. Verse 9 says, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense.

They had so many priests that they cast lots to see who would go into the Holy Place and burn incense. If your number came up it was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, because you could only do this once, and then you number was retired. Some priests served their whole lives and never got a chance to enter the Holy Place and burn incense, and here was Zechariah, the childless one, the one that the other priests had doubts about because God hadn’t blessed him with children, here was Zechariah being chosen to go in and burn incense.

The incense that burned in the temple was symbolic of the prayers of God’s people, and it had to be kept burning 24/7. So it was replenished every morning and evening. That was what Zechariah had to do. Take some coals from the main altar, along with some incense. Go into the Holy Place, the inner room of the temple, put the coals on the small incense altar that was in there, and add the incense on top so it burned for another 12 hours.

It was hardly rocket science, but it wasn’t exactly routine either. He had trained and waited all his life just to do this simple task, and now he gets one shot at it. Then it’s over.

He goes into the Holy Place. It’s dark in there. The only light comes from a seven branched lamp stand on his left with oil lamps on it. On his right is a table with flat bread on it. That bread will be replaced on the Sabbath. But that’s someone else’s job. Zechariah’s focus is on the altar of incense at the far end of the Holy Place, right in front of the curtain that blocks off access to the Holy of Holies. This is as close as anybody, other than the high priest, will ever get to the Holy of Holies, the place where God’s presence dwells. And the high priest only gets to go in once a year, on the Day of Atonement.

An extraordinary visitor

Zechariah is as close as he’ll ever get to the presence of God. He wants to get this right. Every hair on his body is probably standing on end.

Then, as if all this tension isn’t enough, it moves up another notch. There’s somebody else there in the Holy Place with him! “What’s he doing here? This is my shift!” Then he realizes that the person standing beside the altar of incense isn’t human.

Verse 11 says, Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense.

Angels are scary things!

You might not think that, but that’s probably because you’re used to seeing the cute romantic pictures of people with wings, or watching “Touched By An Angel,” or the ads for Philadelphia cream cheese. But if you look in the Bible, every time an angel appears, people are afraid. So much so that almost always the first thing an angel says is, “Don’t be afraid!”

And, true to form, this angel’s first words to Zechariah are “Do not be afraid.” And it’s just as well, because it says that when Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear.

Then the angel tells Zechariah the news he thought he would never hear, “your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son…”

With instructions for John’s upbringing

The miracle baby was to be called John, which means “God is gracious.” And the angel goes on to give instructions about how he should be raised. The instructions may seem a little strange to us, but to Zechariah the priest, steeped in the Old Testament, they were full of meaning. Like the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 1 he would be set apart to do God’s work, “never to take wine or other fermented drink,” and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth. Like Elijah in Malachi 4 “he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

A routine response

This is heavy stuff. You might expect Zechariah to be overjoyed. You might expect him to be excited, to be jumping up and own with excitement, to be punching the air, or whatever people did in those days to show how excited they were.

But what does he say? What’s his response to this amazing message from a supernatural being? “Eh, could I have that in writing please? It’s not that I don’t believe you or anything but you how it is. Angels are always saying stuff. Why, just the other day, Mr. Brown down the road had an angel promise to fix his bad back, or maybe it was just the wine talking, he does drink a bit. Anyway, I need some proof it I’m going to go along with this.”

All these extraordinary things have happened. His number comes up to go into the Holy Place. While he’s in there he sees an angel; an angel that tells him not only that he will have a son but that his son will be the one who prepares the way for the saviour. And he asks for proof!

There is no proof for the promises of God, except for those who believe them and trust them. That’s the definition of faith, trusting God.

[It reminds me of a scene in an episode of Battlestar Gallactica. Sharon, who had been a sleeper agent for the enemy and had tried to kill the commander, is given a second chance to serve as an officer. Just before she heads off on a mission who’s success of failure depends on her she turns to the man that she had tried to kill and asks, “How do you know? How do you know you can trust me?” To which the commander replies, “I don’t. That’s what trust is.”]

Back at the beginning of the Old Testament, Abram didn’t have any guarantee that God would make his descendants as numerous as the sand on the sea shore. All he had was God’s promise, and he trusted him.

When Moses was called to lead the Israelites out of Egypt he asked for a sign to confirm his call. “¹² And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” There were a lot of steps of trust and obedience between the promise and its fulfillment. In fact, the only way to the fulfillment was for Moses to believe the promise first.

I spent the best part of 25 years in an organisation that was started by a man by the name of Loren Cunningham. As a young man he had a vision of ocean waves that turned into teams of young people taking the gospel all over the world. How did he know that the vision was from God? What proof did he have? None really, but he trusted God and believed that he had been called to do something special and today Youth With A Mission is the largest mission organisation in the world, with over 16,000 staff from 150 different nations, based in nearly 1200 locations in more than 170 countries around the world. They train nearly 15,000 students a year in residential courses around the world, and right now my daughter is one of them.

Bringing it closer to home; in early September 2003 Brian and I stood inside the glass doors of the foyer and looked at the kids streaming home from Sanford school and asked if there wasn’t some way we could connect with them. A few days later we got a phone call out of the blue from some Redeemer students asking if we would host a Kids Klub on Thursday afternoons. How did we know that was God’s answer to our prayer? We didn’t know, but we trusted that it was and the results have borne it out. This evening there will be a dinner for the families of the neighbourhood children we’re serving through our kids’ programmes.

That’s the way faith works. There’s nothing magical about it. You simply trust God and take him at his word. It’s the same process whether you’re making your first step of faith and believing God’s promise that Jesus’ death and resurrection on the cross is enough to wipe the slate clean and give you a whole new start on life, or if you’re trusting him to begin a new ministry or phase of your life.

Zechariah had all kinds of evidence that this was an authentic message from God. He was in the Holy Place in the temple. He was talking to an angel who told him his deepest prayer had been answered. But still he didn’t take God at his word.

If there’s one thing we can learn from Christmas it’s that God often breaks with routine religion. If we’re too tied to routine religion, if, like Zechariah, we prefer things to be predictable and verifiable, then we’re liable to miss what God is doing.

But God often does things that are unpredictable and unverifiable, like having a sixty year old woman give birth. At least they’re unverifiable until after the promise has been fulfilled, at which point there is no longer any need for faith except to admit that God was right.

Don’t talk back to an angel!

One lesson we can learn from this story is; Don’t talk back to an angel. 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 proper time.”

Basically the angel gives Zechariah his credentials, then robs him of the ability to tell anyone about what has happened to him. Not trusting God has real consequences. For Moses it meant that he couldn’t enter the Promised Land. For Zechariah it meant that he missed out on sharing the joy of telling all his friends the good news.

A faith filled response

There is an epilogue to this story. In verse 57 the baby is born and Zechariah has a second chance to express faith in what God is doing. This time he gets it right. (Read Luke 1:57-66)

Conclusion

As we run up to Christmas this year let’s remember just how unusual this whole story is. Over the next few weeks we’ll be returning again to this theme of how unpredictable and un-routine that first Christmas was. We’ll see God breaking into the lives of normal men and women and we’ll see how they respond.

When God comes and speaks to you, whether it’s in prayer, or as you read your Bible, or in a worship service, or just as you go about your day, will you be like Zechariah and ask for proof? Or will you take God at his word and believe that he has spoken to you and trust him to make his promises reality?