Let me tell you the back story to the wonderful piece of poetry we have just read. It is a story that speaks to us – to the despair and pain in our personal circumstances and the terrible mess we see around us in our nation and in the nations of the world. The speaker was an old man called Zechariah, and the child (v. 76) was his eight-day-old son, John. Zechariah and his wife Elisabeth had tried for years to have a child, and had eventually given up. Elisabeth's biological clock had passed the stage when she could expect to become pregnant, years before. And then, Zechariah had an encounter with an angel in the temple and was told he was going to become a father, in his old age – and the child would have a special job to do preparing for Messiah to come and sort out the mess that the nation was in. Zechariah had hoped, and been crushed, so often that he didn't believe what the angel said – so was struck dumb, and could only watch as Elisabeth went through her pregnancy. It was at the baby's circumcision that Zechariah recovered his speech – and out came this wonderful poem.
Zechariah knew, as he held this wee scrap of humanity in his arms, that God had not only visited him and Elisabeth and rescued them from the loneliness, shame, and insecurity of childlessness – but God had visited and redeemed his people from all the mess they were in. Now, it hadn’t happened yet. But enough had happened to assure Zechariah that the job was as good as done... redemption was definitely on its way and nothing could stop it.
Messiah wasn't even born yet – but Zechariah knew all about Mary’s pregnancy too, and was able to say “The Lord has raised up a horn of salvation - a mighty saviour for us in the house of his servant David – and has shown his mercy” (mercy is chesedh – God's covenant-keeping love).
And Zechariah could see that John's task was to get people ready for Messiah by having their sins forgiven. He could see that Messiah's Kingdom was not just about politics but began with the mess inside. And he just hints at the insight that Messiah's kingdom was going to be for all the nations who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
What an amazing thing, that this wee, old, disappointed and slightly cynical man, from a back water village, in small, occupied country could receive and articulate this hope!
Hope is the big issue as we look towards this Christmas. I know some of us have been through difficult and disappointing things in the past year: bereavement, illness, financial challenges. And in our world, we see militant Islam and militant secularism squaring up to each other. There have been attacks in France, Kenya, Uganda, Lebanon. We see our country signing up to drop bombs on Syria. We all get busy “doing Christmas” while food-banks do a roaring trade – and it's not all benefit scroungers. A young army Lieutenant suffering from PTSD after action in Afghanistan, walked barefoot into a food-bank in Hillingdon. A young couple had no heating, no money, and no food, when they were hit with a delay in benefits combined with Dad being off work with 'flu and getting no sick pay. A 21 year old student who has been in care so has no parents to fall back on, lost both her part time jobs; she's not got kids, so was not entitled to any benefits. It makes me feel a sense of despair. This is Britain, 2015 years AD. Anno Domini – in the year of our Lord. What happened to this Kingdom?
And about 55 year AD, Paul writes to Christians in the heart of the Roman Empire, in Rome itself. Paul like Zechariah was a Jew, and like Zechariah his life had been turned around by a supernatural experience. Paul had met with Jesus – which turned upside down, his assumption that Jesus was dead. Paul's life-work from then on, was telling people about Jesus. The same words that Zechariah uses – salvation, redemption – Paul also uses. Messiah has come. Messiah has brought the Kingdom. Messiah has died to put us right with God – to bring us into the Kingdom. But after Jesus, there was still disappointment, suffering, oppression. There was still a Roman Empire. Paul didn't always have it easy. The people he wrote to in Rome, didn't have it easy either: some as Jews struggled to fit into the pagan Roman culture. And Rome was still the capital of an oppressive empire – and a city of inequalities, with the poorest living, or more accurately sleeping, in crowded tenements, and going out to street stalls to buy fast food. Many tenements were shared by a number of families and had no space for luxuries like cooking. So what has happened to this Kingdom?
Paul says “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us...” there is more to come. Paul's vision is bigger than Zechariah's. He expects the Kingdom to impact the nations and the whole created order. He talks about the whole of creation being messed up. It is, he says,
“subject to fulility” - a universe not functioning as God created it to do. And I think of Wilfred Owen's war poem “Futility” which ends
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?
- In “bondage to decay” – and decay could mean destruction, shipwreck, ruin,
- groaning in shared agony right up too the present time.
But Paul also talks about creation as “Waiting, craning its neck forward to see....” to see what? To see the same thing we are waiting and groaning to see. Paul says creation is waiting for the sons of God to be revealed – to be unveiled in all their glory. He says we groan for the final completion of our adoption and our redemption.
These things are already done for us in Christ – we are the sons of god, we are adopted in his family, we are redeemed which means rescued through he paying of a ransom. Paul says
- There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. (v. 1)
- The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free (v. 2)
- All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. (v. 14)
Paul says we have the “First fruits of the Spirit” (v 23). That's an idea from Jewish and Greek religion: the idea that the first fruits of the harvest belonged to God – and certainly for a Jew to bring the first-fruits to the Lord meant that the rest of the harvest belonged to the Lord too. So, the first fruits of the Spirit – the Holy Spirit's present activity in our lives, means that the rest of the harvest is coming.
- The Spirit sets us free. When he comes, he puts his authority and constraint, God's rule, God's Kingdom, within us, setting us free from the other law of sin and death. That doesn’t make us perfect but it means that change is a possibility for us and legalism is not the pathway to that change.
- The Spirit assures us we are God's Sons. He enables us to call out to God “Abba (Daddy) Father”. Pete Greig, in “God on Mute” describes seeing a wee Arab boy with his Dad at a swing park in Israel. The wee boy fell off the swing, gasped for breath for a second or two, and then wailed “Abba!” The Spirit enables us to call God “Father” with that level of intimate affection and trust.
- The Spirit helps us pray – when we don't know how best to pray the Spirit prays though us in groans too deep for words.
There's plenty in our world and in our own lives that could make us despair. We don't yet see the triumph of the Kingdom – the justice, the peace, the wholeness the freedom from bondage to decay. It's the fact that we don’t see it, that makes it a hope. But God's word says it will happen. We live hopefully, and patiently; and prayerfully, knowing that in all things God is at work for good; we know he has his plan, and we know we are part of it.
The activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives, is the foretaste for the whole of creation, of the coming Kingdom. So we welcome the Holy Spirit, the transforming, encouraging, praying, empowering Spirit, in our lives. We allow him to work through us, so that all of creation can begin to get a glimpse of who God's sons are, what God's rule is like. We co-operate with the Spirit so that the whole of creation can taste, in us, something of the freedom of the coming Kingdom.
© Gilmour Lilly December 1016
