Allowing Ourselves to be Amazed

Luke 1:57-66

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

December 15, 2024

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGM0WmiQL0o

Jim started seminary ahead of me. By his last year, I was hurrying to catch up. My final semester, I was taking a ridiculous course load and doing an internship as a hospital chaplain and working a part-time job selling housewares at Sears. By the middle of that semester, I was exhausted. Coming home from class or work, I immediately crashed on the couch. I didn’t turn in a single paper on time. I went to the campus clinic and was tested for anemia. When that test was normal, I began to think I was clinically depressed. I was not sad, but oh so very tired.

Finally, I took an at-home pregnancy test. It was positive, but I couldn’t believe it was right. I made an appointment with a friend’s obstetrician just to make sure. I was not expecting to be pregnant and had no idea how far along I might be. The doctor set up to listen for a baby’s heartbeat. As she put the gel on my abdomen, she carefully explained that the baby had to be a certain number of weeks old before we would hear a heartbeat. I knew that she was trying to reassure me, so I wouldn’t be concerned if we didn’t hear anything. But I lay on the table thinking, “There’s not going to be a heartbeat, because there’s no baby. I’m not pregnant.” But then, almost immediately, the sound came through loud and clear. It was amazing. The tears started rolling down my face. And this doctor, whom I had just met 10 minutes earlier, had no idea whether I was happy or sad about the pregnancy. But she said, “Do you have someone with you?” When I said that Jim was in the waiting room, she went to get him and then brought him in and started all over so that we could both hear baby Molly’s heart together. And it was just as amazing the second time.

I really wonder what it was like for Elizabeth to be pregnant for the first time so close to the end of her expected lifespan. How long was it, how many explanations did she rule out, before she truly believed she was pregnant? And how incredible, how amazing, was it to feel the baby’s first kick? Or his second, or third?

She stays at home with a silent husband for the first 6 months. Imagine how many things she thinks about ---

· whether Zechariah is ever going to speak again

· what their friends and neighbors are going to think

· how surreal, ridiculous and incredibly joyful it is to be preparing for a baby finally, now,

· when the baby grows up, what parent-teacher conferences are going to be like; the teachers are always going to assume she and Zech are the grandparents, not the parents

· if she will even survive – will this birth be her death?

Elizabeth does survive. Both she and baby John seem to thrive, in fact. On the eighth day of John’s life, friends and relatives gather, to celebrate and rejoice with the family. Between Zechariah’s inability to speak and Elizabeth’s isolation, the pregnancy was kept on the down-low, so now the excitement is running high.

The crowd expects the baby to be named after his father. So much that they argue with Elizabeth when she announces that his name is John. This is in obedience to what the angel Gabriel announced, although the crowd does not know that. They go to Zechariah expecting him to back them up, but Zechariah writes that his name is John. At that, the mood of the crowd shifts from dissention to amazement. Suddenly, Zechariah can speak again. After 9 months of silence, the first words he utters are praise to God. Amazement turns to awe. Luke writes “Fear came over all their neighbors and all these things were talked about through the entire hill country of Judea.” They wondered what the baby would grow up to be. They know that they have witnessed something important, but do not know exactly what it is or what its consequences will be. [1]

Awe can be an antidote to weariness. Especially for those of us who are jaded by too much consumerism and the capitalism of too many Christmases. Scientists say that the experience of awe is essential to our well-being. It slows our heart rate, deepens breathing, relieves digestion. It can also silence the negative self-critical voices in our heads, disrupting our preoccupation with self and opening us to wider experiences.[2]

If you are weary, I invite you to cultivate awe this week. Allow yourself to be amazed. Closely examine a pinecone. Notice your family members – how quirky or funny or helpful or inventive or reliable they are. Enjoy dish-soap bubbles while washing pots and pans or recognize the deep memories evoked by your favorite Christmas carol. Maybe some of your weariness will slip away in the presence of awe and gratitude.

A year ago, Jim and I were on a cruise with my Dad and brother to Greece and Turkey. By the time we got to Istanbul, Jim had Covid, so he was simply staying in the room sleeping and fighting his fever. The port excursion required too much walking for my Dad, so he also stayed on board. My brother, Roger, and I got on the bus together. We were going a lot of places that day, but the most important stop for me would be the Hagia Sophia. The Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian church. For a thousand years, it was the world’s largest cathedral and the seat of the Patriach of Constantinople, the Eastern church’s counterpart to the Vatican. Later it was converted to a mosque and then to a museum and most recently, back to being a mosque again.

This is a place that I knew about from church history classes as the site of the schism between the Eastern and Western Church. It was a place that had captured my imagination a long time ago. As we rode the bus through Istanbul, it suddenly struck me that I was going to be there, at the Hagia Sophia. It seemed incredible. It was nothing I had ever planned or expected. It happened only because my Dad chose and financed this particular trip. And when I realized that, again, my response was tears. Because Jim was sick and I might have been also, I was wearing a face mask. The tears and the mask made me sniffle. Roger was already nervous that he might get Covid, so I had to explain to him that I wasn’t sick, I was just crying because I was so amazed that I was actually going to the Hagia Sophia. How could that be? Who was I to have that privilege?

Elizabeth was amazed by what was happening to her. When Mary arrived, she said, “who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” It is a wonderful part of this story that Elizabeth and Zechariah allowed themselves to be joyfully surprised, to be awe-struck at what God was doing in their lives. Remember that Zechariah’s first reaction was “We’re too old.” Their on-going response might have been fear – “now the neighbors will gossip more than ever” or “Elizabeth may die.” It might have been anger – “this is a lot to ask of us right now, God. Your timing is lousy.” Their response might have been weariness – “we already get up in the night for our own trips to the bathroom; we don’t have the energy for feeding and diaper changes. How are we going to keep up with him when he’s an active three-year-old?”

God is asking a lot of them. And they choose to respond, not with fear or anger or weariness, but with delight and awe.

Luke says that Elizabeth and Zechariah are “advanced in years”. I think that might be a reasonable description of Emmanuel at 190 years old. The boiler gave up the ghost last month. I think it was the third boiler that died in my time here. I could be wrong about that. I’ve kind of lost count. Last week, Tom was in the building three or four times a day, checking vital signs, ahem, I mean taking temperatures, at various locations, for fear the pipes might freeze. The building is old.

Our average age is mature. We have worn out a generation of grandparents who taught Sunday School decades longer than they expected to. Other church leaders keep looking over their shoulders for a younger generation to take the reins, but with few notable exceptions, that generation isn’t here. It seems fair to say that Emmanuel is “advanced in years.”

I hope you will stay and participate in the congregational meeting following worship today. Everyone here is welcome. As far as I know, Gabriel is not planning to put in an appearance. No promises though. The Building Team has some important news to share, but I don’t think that they are going to announce that Emmanuel is expecting. Not in those words anyway.

A few weeks ago, I described a new thing that God is doing in our time. I suggested the analogy of a cell phone church, in contrast to a landline church. I do want to explore that idea more with you. But today, because of this text, I’m using another analogy. Today, I’m wondering if we might actually begin to see ourselves as being called to give birth to what will grow up to be a new church, something we can’t really imagine. Could Emmanuel Baptist Church be pregnant? That really would be asking a lot of us at our advanced age, wouldn’t it?

A final memory of awe in my life. Maybe I was about 12. We were driving around the area where my father grew up. We went past the country church that he and his brothers and parents had attended. Behind it was a tree, a tree that towered over the church. It was even taller than the steeple. My Dad said that my grandmother had planted that tree when he was a child. And I grappled with how long ago that had been and all that might have happened since and marveled that the tree was still standing and I was there to see it. “To plant a tree is to believe in tomorrow” as someone has said.

Elizabeth and Zechariah bring John into the world, but they are old. They do not live to see his adult ministry. They never know that huge crowds go out to the wilderness to hear John preach and be baptized by him. They only trust, from the prophecy of Gabriel, that he will be part of the astonishing new thing that God is doing. God chose them, old and faithful and ordinary people for this wild and ridiculous and joyful task.

Emmanuel, we are faithful, ordinary people, also advanced in years. What if the call to gestation and pregnancy and new birth is also our call? How wild and ridiculous and joyful would that be for us? We may be fearful. We may be angry. We may be old and weary. But what if, what if, we could lean into awe? What if we say Hallelujah anyway, and just allow ourselves to be amazed?

[1] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 28.

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/well/live/awe-wonder-dacher-keltner.html