Zechariah’s Angel

Scripture Texts: Luke 1:5-25

Our Advent sermon series this year is the angels of Christmas who stand in the presence of God and reveal God to us.  I want us to see when eternity breaks into our world.

It is a strange and sad phenomena that surveys of Americans show more of them believe in angels than they do in God or Jesus or the Bible.  But angels come from the presence of God to point us to God and Jesus.

It is like when you point at something for a young child to look at and all they do is stare at your finger.  They are missing the point by looking at the pointer.  Angels are just couriers, carriers, deliverers, messengers and it’s their message is that’s important, their message is earth shattering, history changing, life altering.

Luke 1:5-25

The Gospels of Mark and John begin with the ministry of Jesus.  The Apostle Matthew begins his Gospel with the birth of Jesus.  Luke does neither.  Luke backs his story up to begin where Malachi ended.  He starts at the end of the four hundred years of silence after Malachi.  Luke starts when the voice of the Lord was heard again by the people of Israel.

You could say the NT starts in the OT.  All the characters of the Christmas story were in the OT when this all started.  Zechariah and Elizabeth, Joseph and Mary, Simeon and Anna, they were all OT believers, clinging to the promises and prophecies of Yahweh to the children of Abraham.

We need to feel the tension, the expectation, the drama, the weariness of waiting four hundred years for God to speak.  The significance of this first story in Luke’s Gospel is hard for us to fathom without feeling the weight of four-hundred years of silence.

The promises in Genesis 3 and 22 were about to be fulfilled.  The seed of woman, the seed of God is coming, the one to sit on the throne of David, the lion of Judah, the prophetic weeks announced in Daniel 9, the consolation of Israel.  Everything was about to come together.  400 years of silence is interrupted by an angel of the Lord.

Luke starts the story, in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, focused on an obscure priest, from the hill country of Judah, and his barren wife.

This is God’s way again and again.  In a world full of rich and famous, high and mighty, proud and powerful, God chooses what is weak and foolish, what is of little consequence and significance.

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