Where Christmas Starts

The angel said to Zechariah, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their appointed time.”

Luke 1:19-20

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In college, I was a part of a campus ministry that took yearly trips to Mexico. On these trips, several college students would help build churches, do demolition work, clear fields of brush, and even dig holes for a septic tank or two. Learning the language was not a high priority.

However, some of us thought it would be fun to try order our food in Spanish and see what happened. I hadn’t even taken Spanish in high school, but I knew a few words and had listened to a lot of conversations since we arrived, so I felt confident enough that I could order my food.

I knew I wanted chicken. Pollo. So off I went. The waiter came, and I declared my order with the unearned confidence of a 21-year-old. Yo soy el hermosa pollo. Which I thought meant, “I want the delicious chicken.”

The waiter looked me up and down. Then he laughed and said, “Si.”

Turns out what I had actually said was, “I am the beautiful chicken.” Big difference. After that, I pretty much just pointed at things the rest of the trip.

All that to say, I can sympathize with Zechariah a little bit as to how it feels to have your voice taken away. But that was the price I had to pay for not learning the language of this new place, this new reality, this new world I had entered from the world I knew before.

Life can do that to you. You can feel like you have the lay of the land, that you can accurately and easily describe your reality, and then suddenly you cross a border. A border into a new reality, where people are speaking a totally different language.

We’ve all experienced this in 2020. How many of us used words like “social distancing,” “droplets,” “contact tracing,” or “zoom” regularly before this year? It’s like we crossed some invisible boundary and have had to acquire language to help us through it.

And that’s where Christmas starts. Or at least it should.

The fact is that we like to run to Christmas as fast as we can. Signs of the season start popping up in stores sooner and sooner each year. But the Christmas story doesn’t start with Mary and Joseph. It starts with Zechariah and Elizabeth. And maybe more to the point, it starts with 400 years of silence. Of nothing. Of waiting.

400 years. For some context, the entire history of the United States is only 244 years.

The words spoken to Zechariah about his son-to-be, John the Baptist, are the words that break this deep, dark wondering about where God is, what God is up to, and what God will do next.

And these words, of all things, are a promise that Elizabeth, old and barren, will have this son. Even for the priest, this is hard to believe. Though it’s what he wanted for so many years.

The story tells us quickly that Elizabeth and Zechariah are a few things: old, waiting for this prayer to be answered, righteous, and blameless. We also know that then, and even now, barrenness was considered a curse. Whispers follow the people who carry such a burden. Assumptions are made. Questions are posed.

That’s why Luke wants us to know that Zechariah and Elizabeth are righteous and blameless. They were faithful people. Day in, day out, washing the dishes, going to church, loving each other, helping their neighbors’ people.

The first lesson of Christmas then is to keep showing up even when your miracle hasn’t. To do this in the midst of pain is what greatness looks like. And it’s probably the reason God chose these two to be the parents of the man Jesus said was the greatest human being ever to live (Matt. 11:11).

That means the first miracle of Christmas is not the star that guides the wise men or the angel that appears to the shepherds or the birth of Jesus or even the birth or announcement of John. It is instead the faithful, chiseled life of two very normal people hammered out of the hours, days, and months to be deep enough, secure enough, and wide enough to house a prophet.

John would not have been John otherwise. God knows that prophets can’t spring from shallow roots, from ease, from anything easy. But who could have imagined this? Who could have realized that all those years of faithfulness were making Elizabeth and Zechariah into the kind of people who could raise up the most important human who ever lived? The kind of people God could trust with such a task?

This was more than an answer to the prayer they prayed. This is winning the lottery when all you asked for was a small business loan.

This isn’t to say that God caused the pain and the isolation that comes with barrenness. No, God wouldn’t be God if God operated in such a way. But God does use everything. Everything. Nothing is wasted.

For Zechariah, it’s too much. He wants assurances. He needs to talk it out. But he doesn’t get the chance. Because the right response to Christmas is silence. That’s where it starts. That’s where it comes from. 400 years’ worth of it.

In that way, Christmas makes fools of us all. Zechariah comes out of the temple waving his arms and gesturing toward the sky in a first-century equivalent of charades. But after a while, he settles in. He starts to hear more. He starts to see more. Because to speak too quickly is to not realize we have yet to grasp the language of this new world. We, still, have much to learn.

The lessons are hard, and the irony is thick. A priest who can’t speak. A barren woman giving birth. A prophet whose entire job will be to point to another. This is a different world. One that takes some time to adjust to.

A place where no pain is wasted, where no injustice is overlooked.

That’s where Christmas starts. In that place, unable to speak. If we rush past this part, we miss it all. For here we hear. We hear the voices of those trampled down by this world. We hear those crying out for another reality. We hear the sound of those who have had their voice taken from them. We hear the sound of the revolution.

The sound of shame on the run.

And when the time is right, we place our order. One Christmas, please.