Afraid of hope

Tomorrow begins the second week of Advent, the season when we wait, peering into the darkness for the quiet, secretive entrance of the light. During the midweek Advent service on Wednesday, the Gospel reading was Luke 1:5-20, about Zechariah’s encounter with Gabriel while he was offering incense in the Temple. Instead of a sermon, we took time to reflect on the story with the help of some questions in the bulletin.

The first question was “What do you think Zechariah was afraid of?” The congregation’s discussion afterwards focused on Zechariah’s very understandable terror when Gabriel first appeared (if it were me, I would have been afraid I had been caught inadvertently offering the incense wrong or something), but my mind immediately went to the next part of the story.

It seemed to me that fear was also the reason that Zechariah doubted the angel--fear of getting his hopes up. Because he and Elizabeth had experienced decades of disappointment already--hoping for a baby, then being crushed. Over and over, with every randomly nauseous morning or late cycle, until they just couldn’t take it one more time. And now that they were old, perhaps it was almost a relief to have put it behind them and know for sure that that particular door had really and truly been locked and sealed shut, and they never had to think about it again. And then God took him by the hand and led him back to that bricked-over door and said, "No really, I'm going to open it." No wonder he didn't welcome the promise. To be disappointed one more time would have destroyed him.

That’s Advent, though. Sitting here in the dark, where we’ve been squinting into the blackness so long, imagining that we see the first glow of dawn when it’s really only in our own eyes, that we can no longer believe that light will actually ever come. Zechariah and Elizabeth were living under an oppressive foreign government, waiting for God to fulfill the promise to free them and restore the true king to the throne, but all they had was a puppet king. Just when we start to hope that maybe love and community and honest efforts to listen to our neighbors really might be more powerful than fear and violence and willful ignorance, we’re crushed to discover that disgust and ignorance are winning out again. We were promised that Jesus would return and bring in the kingdom of God and restore everything that has been broken or lost, but it’s been a couple millennia now.

The darkness is so heavy it can leave you speechless sometimes, because you can’t bring yourself to repeat those promises of hope that have been made to look like lies so many times before. I sometimes think that the silence imposed on Zechariah was a gift, because he couldn’t try to argue about it or make up justifications or excuses. He just had to sit there in the dark and listen.