I count it one of my life’s great gifts that I went to the same small, liberal arts college as my younger brother. For most of our lives up until our college years, I was painfully quiet and shy, and he was, well, painfully loud and gregarious. He was on campus for less than two weeks before someone greeted me in my junior-level psychology class with “you won’t believe what your brother did!” But in our two years of college overlap of becoming adults and being out of our parents’ home, I grew less shy and while he didn’t become less gregarious, I became less embarrassed by it. One of my favorite parts of being on campus with my brother was that the student center had a tennis table and for one semester, we would meet at a certain time each week and play ping pong. And in the Kello family, we are fiercely competitive at playing games, and when it comes to ping pong, the fun was not destroying the other sibling in points, but when we were able to get a good volley of the ball going. It is the back and forth, that ping pong, that let the rhythm of the game be the foundation for our weekly time together.
I think about those ping pong games often, but I thought of them specifically this week for an odd reason: the song of Zechariah that we hear in our texts. I thought about those ping pong games with my brother as I was praying through Luke’s account of Zechariah’s song which we hear today because in Luke, every notable event has a pair, each ping has a pong, let’s say. First the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, and then to Zechariah, then Mary sings her Magnificat, then the song we hear from Zechariah, like we do today. Ping, pong.
Zechariah sings about the coming Christ child and God’s blessing over the people, and the role in which his own son, who will be called John, coming out of the wilderness. He sings of how John will prepare the way of the Lord, to give people knowledge of Christ’s salvation, and to call people to repentance.
The Song of Zechariah is one of my favorite canticles, and I particularly love concluding line on his prayer, “In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” What a prayer to pray over your coming child that you and your wife have longed for years and years. Here Zechariah prays that John might help prepare the way of the Lord, to give people knowledge of Christ salvation, and to call them into repentance—it’s a prayerful proclamation that your child not have an easy life but have a life that invites others into God’s compassion. That John might invite others to repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near!
I don’t know about you, I used to carry such baggage around the word repentance. It was a word that implied not only mistakes, shame, or guilt, but also malice. There is some part of the word, even when I hear it today that hits my ear as just the wrong angle and I bristle a tiny bit, but then I remember Zechariah’s prayer.
I remember that Zechariah prayed that his son would give God’s people knowledge of God’s salvation by the forgiveness of their sins, and I remember that to sin is to miss the mark, something we all do. And I remember that after Zechariah was struck mute by the wild prophecy from the angel Gabriel that he and Elizabeth would bear a son at their advanced ages that some of his first words that he was able to speak was a song of prayer that God’s tender compassion would shine like the dawn on those upon who are consumed by the shadow and darkness of death. And then I remember that all this is a prayer for God’s people to be guided into the way of peace, which reminds me that repentance isn’t a threat, but is guidance along the way.
Maybe it feels a little odd to be talking repentance and change and the darkness of the shadow of death when Christmas feels imminent. Or maybe as wars rage on and governments are on the brink of collapse around the world, it can feel impossible for us to orient ourselves to the work of repentance and change for things that by comparison feel foolishly small. Or maybe thinking about repentance on this second Sunday in Advent feels difficult or annoying because the idea of continually being responsible for change is exhausting in the face of a world that mocks those who admit that they have gone down the wrong path and decide to change course.
At its ultimate best, a call to repentance is a compassionate invitation toward a life of peace. Not peace that is absent of conflict, or peace that is so overarching and geo-political in its connotation that it feels heartbreakingly unrealistic, but the peace that Zechariah talks of in his song. The peace that our feet will be guided to in repentance and through God’s compassion like the break of dawn; this peace is one of active choices and changed courses, and choosing to orient ourselves continually toward the unrelenting hope of Christ through repentance. I can’t tell you what this peace will look like for you, but I know for me it’s often a sense of relief and ease and freedom from the burden of the shadows that want to hold us rather than letting the dawn break.
Zechariah’s prophetic, prayerful song is not just a song for John, it is for us. It is for us, but it is not just for us to hear and admire, but I ask that you also let it unsettle the ground on which you stand, too. Let Zechariah’s prophetic prayer over his son be a prophetic prayer over your Advent days: John is coming to prepare the way of the Lord, are you prepared to receive God’s tender compassion that will break like the dawn, are ready to step away from the shadow of darkness and death of sin into the way of peace? This is my Advent prayer, for you, for myself, and for our whole congregation, that we will let our feet be so guided as Zechariah prayed, that we will heed the compassionate invitation of repentance to a life of peace so that we can greet with joy the coming of the birth of our Savior. This is my Advent prayer, that our free may be so guided into the way of peace. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer. Amen.
A sermon delivered to the people of Christ Episcopal Church on December 8, 2024 in Bowling Green, KY for Advent 2C on Luke 1:68-79.
Becca Kello 