The Song of Zechariah, Canticle 16, found on page 92 of the Book of Common Prayer or alternatively Luke 1:68-79
You, my child, shall be called prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins. Zechariah sings these words at the naming ceremony of his son, breaking a silence that has lasted approximately nine months and eight days. Elizabeth has given birth to a son, a miracle for a couple who had reached old age without conceiving. She names him John, and the others at the ceremony raise a ruckus because John is not her husband’s name. In naming conventions of the time, the father chose the name, and usually firstborn sons were named after their fathers. They try to get Elizabeth to change her mind, they try to get Zechariah to intervene, but he just scratches out on a tablet the words “His name is John.” Yohannan, God is Gracious. And with that, Zechariah bursts into song.
The song of Zechariah is a father’s response to the gracious gift of a son from God, but the first lines of his song are not about his son at all. The first line blesses the Lord, celebrating the freedom that comes from God’s presence. The second line is about Jesus, whose miraculous birth is still to come. He has raised up for us a mighty savior, born of the house of his servant David. Neither Zechariah or his son are of the house of David, and the angel did not claim that John would be anyone’s mighty savior. Whether Zechariah realizes it or not, he is joining in the prophetic witness of Mary’s Magnificat and foreshadowing the fiery preaching of John. His song heralds the coming of the Lord, and only when he has done so does he turn to his own child’s calling.
You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way. Zechariah holds his newborn son, only 8 days old, and proclaims that he will be a prophet of the Lord. As a priest, Zechariah knows more than most what usually becomes of prophets. To be a prophet is not glamorous, or easy, or safe. Prophets often end up in prison, or on the run, or dead. In his short life, John will experience all three. But still, Zechariah invokes the tender compassion of God, the light that shines in the darkness and illuminates the path of peace. Knowing that the world can be cruel, knowing that John’s path will be a wilderness one, knowing that this tiny infant will be alone in the world from a young age, Zechariah praises God for a future he himself will not live to see.
Elizabeth, likewise, praises God for the gifts of the new generation. A couple of Sundays from now, we will remember Elizabeth’s response to a visit from her cousin Mary, whose voice causes John to leap in Elizabeth’s womb. She will recognize Mary as the mother of her Lord, the fruit of her womb a fulfillment of the promises of God. Like her husband, Elizabeth has lived a long life, and she is not likely to see her son grow to adulthood. But still she celebrates, blessing God.
Elizabeth’s name means God keeps promises. Zechariah’s name means God remembers. Trusting in God requires remembrance, a constant remembering and reiterating the blessings and miracles of the past, a collective memory of God’s faithfulness passed down from generation to generation. Elizabeth and Zechariah, elders and righteous people of God, mature in their faith, know that what God has promised will come to pass because the wisdom of experience and history has shown God to be faithful. Before we ever meet Mary, before Jesus is even mentioned, Luke introduces us to the mother and father of John. God keeps promises, God remembers, God is gracious. John will spend his ministry talking about the future, about the Advent, the coming of the Messiah, the approaching kingdom of heaven. But he is first raised by people who built their hope on a remembered past. John will be the voice crying out in the wilderness, a prophet of the Most High, because he comes from a long line of people who found God in the wilderness. John’s birth marks the beginning of a new generation, the generation that will know and either follow or reject the Christ. It is no accident that he is born to a couple whose generation was coming to an end.
In liturgical time, Advent is about waiting, preparing, looking forward toward the first and second comings of Christ. But in our lived reality, the parallel timeline of the secular world, this is also a time of looking backward, of remembering the past. We pull out old ornaments and decorations that hung on the trees of our parents and grand parents. We listen to the songs that played on the radio when we were children. We spend time and money and energy recreating the nostalgic feeling in our memories, of a simpler time when the candles and the stars shone brighter and the darkness was more magical than scary. There is a danger of succumbing to the temptation to grasp for nostalgia at the expense of actual memory, but the traditions of the church can actually help us here.
Remembering is what we do, who we are, why we come here week after week. The wisdom of our elders, our ancestors, our collective memory lives in the pages of our Bibles and the verses in our hymnals and the prayers in our prayerbooks. That wisdom also lives in us, in one another. We have known Elizabeths and Zechariahs of our own, and we are becoming the elders and memory-holders for a new generation. We have our own stories of promises that God has kept in our lives, moments when we know God remembered us, times that God has been gracious. We must not keep them to ourselves. If Zechariah and Elizabeth had not shouted out their blessings, we would not have them now to remind us of our own.
We do not know what the future holds. Some parts of the past might be better left behind. But right here, right now, we have the blessing to be holding a future that will outlive us with the collective wisdom and memory of the communion of saints behind us, holding us up. We have the opportunity to sing it out, to write it down, to tell the stories of God’s faithfulness so that the next generation will know that the promises of faith will never be broken, because they never have before. As we make new memories this season, let us also remember. This is how we prepare the way of the Lord.
Mother A Writes 