Sermon: In the hands of dreams come true

Zechariah 2:10-13; Luke 1:39-55; Psalms 113, 131

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” wrote the author of the letter to the Hebrews. A friend, invited to give a prestigious lecture series, began the first lecture by paraphrasing those words, “It is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of a dream come true.” 

Mary and Elizabeth did both – they fell into the hands of the living God and of their dreams come true. On this final Sunday of Advent, the bible readings narrow their focus onto the joyful emotions surrounding God’s promise to restore his people and the anticipated birth of two babies who will be instrumental in that redemption – John the Baptist and Jesus. Awe and fear are appropriate alongside the joy. 

I’m reminded of the conversation early on in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” when the four children have arrived in Narnia and met Mr and Mrs Beaver. The name Aslan, the Lion, comes up and the children do not know who he is. 

“If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr Beaver, “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” 

That’s not a bad way of describing what it is like to fall into the hands of the living God, God who is ultimate goodness but not to be domesticated by us, and therefore not always experienced as ‘safe’ in our terms. 

Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah were the epitome of faithful Jews. He was a devoted priest and they lived blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. But Luke adds the devastating sentence, “But they had no children because Elizabeth was barren and both were getting on in years.” We can imagine their emotions as each month there was no pregnancy, until Elizabeth was simply too old. The prevailing belief at the time was that God blessed the righteous with sons if you did not have children it must be because you were sinful. Elizabeth later refers to the shame that she lived with for years. It must have hurt them, terribly. But we are told they were righteous before God; their disappointment did not harden their hearts. 

Eventually God stepped in and we picked up the story when Elizabeth is six months pregnant. She has fallen into the hands of her dream come true. Zechariah is temporarily struck dumb, literally, because he doubted God’s ability to do this – a reminder that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God and doubt God’s power. Then Mary shows up on their doorstep with her own story of an unexpected, miraculous pregnancy. At this point the baby in Elizabeth’s womb jumps for joy and the two women start praising God, with Zechariah no doubt wishing he could join in too. 

Their joy was a mix of praise for private blessing and joy that God was acting to save his people and they – ordinary people that they were – were caught up in this salvation. They had fallen into the hands of the living God who had promised to bring salvation. Hence Mary’s song of praise, the Magnificat, which some two thousand years later we sing day by day in this Cathedral, with its words of promise fulfilled and God’s salvation coming with blessing to the poor and needy. 

Mary is unlikely to have made up the Magnificat on the spot; it is a hymn that the author of the birth narratives has put on her lips. Centuries earlier, Hannah had sung something similar when she bore a child after years of painful waiting. Probably Mary’s song was a well-known hymn that she could sing spontaneously – the “Praise my soul the king of heaven” of its day. It certainly draws from Psalm 113 which the choir sang earlier. 

So, there is great joy on this fourth Sunday in Advent as we share the joy of three ordinary people who have fallen into the hands of the living God and into the hands of their dreams come true. But there is also fearfulness or fearsomeness in this, a cost to them – in Mary’s case her pregnancy, outside of marriage, brought the penalty of death by stoning. In the words of T.S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’, it was going to cost them not less than everything. 

Eliot was writing of a condition of complete simplicity when all is well and everything is brought to completion. There are echoes of Psalm 131when the Psalmist describes herself – for this is surely a woman’s psalm – as being like a child who has been weaned from its mother. This is not a baby dependent on its mother for milk but a child who has been weaned and in simplicity is with its mother, kept secure and tranquil. 

The psalmist describes herself as not high-minded or proud, and not exercising herself in great matters that are too hard for her. Normally in the bible the phrase “great matters” refers to the great deeds of God, so this mother has not occupied herself with pondering God’s wonders and impossibilities. The psalm suggests it has been something of a struggle for her to calm her soul, and one of the two other places where the phrase “things too great and marvellous for me” occurs in the Old Testament involves Job at the end of his desperate struggles to understand where God was in when bad things happened to him. He ends up in the same situation as this trusting mother in Psalm 131; both of them struggle their way to submission to God, the mature place for a human to be. 

I suspect that throughout their lives Elizabeth and Zechariah had had to struggle to reach that place of mature submission and peace in God’s presence, like a weaned child who has learned to let go of having its needs met automatically and now can be simply  held safely by its mother. How else could they have remained faithful through such disappointment? But if they had remained faithful when they were childless, they had to begin again now that Elizabeth was pregnant. I can’t help wondering if the news of her pregnancy was unalloyed delight. They may have wanted a child desperately when they were younger, but now they were old and they had to adjust to having a baby in the house. They probably died while John was young and scholars tell us that the group of devout Jews known as the Essenes had an orphanage for the children of priests in the Judean wilderness which is where John came from when he started baptising. So maybe he grew up there. 

Have you managed to remain faithful through disappointment? How would you feel if God answered a prayer of your youth late in life? Speaking personally, I regret that I never had children, but life has moved on and I’m not sure I’d want an answer to that prayer of my youth now. If we have disappointments and regrets that are holding us back from trusting God’s goodness, now is the time to lay them to rest and, like the psalmist refrain, or calm and quieten, our soul and turn to God as a weaned child with its mother. 

I suspect Zechariah and Elizabeth discovered that “It is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God, into a dream come true.” That didn’t stop Elizabeth and Mary going further than the psalmist. Not content with not understanding things too hard for them, they gave voice to their wonder at the stunning things that God was doing, turning the world upside down, exalting the humble, scattering the proud and mighty. Having learned to trust, they then learned to sing in awe. 

On this last Sunday in Advent with the promises of God coming among us ringing in our ears, we hear of people caught up in God’s great and marvellous ways. We can sing and rejoice that God is coming to dwell in the midst of his people; we can share Elizabeth’s joy as her baby gives her a hearty kick at Mary’s arrival and share Zechariah’s speechless rejoicing which will later burst out in the canticle we know as the Benedictus; we can with Mary magnify the Lord and rejoice in our Saviour as God looks with favour on his people. They rejoice in God’s promises fulfilled, in years of prayer answered. 

Elizabeth, Mary and Zechariah are our examples of faithful prayer and trust who remind us that, when we yearn for God’s righteousness and salvation to come on earth, we are falling into the hands of the living God who is good but not always safe. This will cost us, like them, not less than everything. And one way it will cost us is that we too will find ourselves caught up in bringing God’s peace and justice to the world. 

There is still time to do something very practical about this before Christmas – to give extra time or money to charity, especially those relieving the needs of the suffering people in God’s world, to visit a housebound person with a gift, sing carols outside people’s door without asking for reward. In these ways we can proclaim with our lips and our lives that God is come among us bringing salvation and hope to all people.