First Saturday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
On Good Silencing
by Jacqui Mignault
Take a moment and read Luke 1:68-79.
There once was a man, trained in the scriptures and a tradition, who could not bear children with his wife. One day they received a word from God that they indeed will have a child. What’s more, this child will DO something. This child would somehow be a catalyst for change in their world. And their world needed a catalyst.
For this man and his wife, they did not need any more abstract and vague promises – they needed real change. For themselves and their people. They lived in a world under the heel of power and violence that diminished them. The people in their community who knew what to do and how to do it – what God wanted – were many and loud and divided.
This man didn’t know how this child would even help, nor how it could even happen. He was old and so was his wife. This kind of promise flew in the face of how he knew the world to work and even perhaps what he thought his world needed.
This man, so versed in the ways of God, in the practices, the theology, the power of a temple and a city, this man “on the right side of belief” and “in the know” admitted he did not know.
And he was struck silent.
His wife indeed became pregnant, but he could not speak. Now this story can be told, as these stories easily are, as a cautionary tale. Don’t express any doubt or God will hurt you, take something from you, show you who’s in charge. At best, this is an immature half-truth. It is not the deep truth of silence here.
The truth of the story is that silence is what follows a realization of not-knowing and silence is what makes space for something new to be said. Silence – our own silence - is the only condition from which we truly hear. God needs us to stop talking.
The truth is that silence is the only thing that can bring about the kind of change that transforms us. We are being called to wait for a new word to be spoken.
We wait.
We wait.
It’s too quiet.
We wait.
The man was silent. He stopped his talking, his convincing, his telling anyone of what he knew and was certain of, of where to go and how to get there. And the child grew, quite apart from a father’s efforts.
The man’s silence fed and nurtured this new life. He needed to be quiet, to not express an opinion. The silence of the man was a clearing event. A cleansing one.
One can only imagine what newness he heard when he stopped talking. We know he heard one thing for sure, “His name is John.” A revelation not spoken but written, quietly, to everyone’s surprise. A revelation that indeed something was going on inside him, but what exactly, could not be told.
What did this man begin to imagine in his silence? What did he see in his peripheral vision? What did he learn from the women around him, the growing expectancy of women who say yes to life?
It’s been said we are living in apocalyptic times. Not the end of the world times but times that are revealing the truth of us. That we, along with generations before us, have started to think that power, wealth, violence and grievance could get us what we needed. That we have let a bland discipleship happen that settled for affluence over solidarity with the poor. discipleship that settled for being right over being loving and that the way of Jesus became synonymous with hating the world, putting up deep barriers between us and the neighbours, us and strangers, us and enemies.
This last year has been a quiet one for me. Where once I prepared sermon after sermon, social media posts, hundreds of blog entries, wrote bible studies, led groups – I am now quiet. I am working – I am still a university chaplain and am training to be a Spiritual Health Practitioner and my practicum is with families in hospice right now – but I am compelled to be quiet.
I don’t know how God’s peace comes. I mean, I do…. There’s something to do with small, ordinary groups of surrendered humans being honest, being faithful to one another, being generous and trusting that the way of Jesus is indeed the way to life.
I’m so tired of trying to convince and sway. I am tired of all the words. All the language, all the Christians yelling to persuade one another. God, the Christians are so noisy.
But this year, in the wake of another revealing election and an arrogant cruelty in the Christian community of my city, I have noticed a quieting, a silencing. In me and some other leaders that I trust.
We are being called to stop talking. Not to stop hoping or doing good in our communities. But there’s a quieting, a cessation of the noise we produce that God needs us to hold. For a while anyway. Until we can begin to hear what the word is actually saying. The word that is deep in the dark, deep in the womb, deep in the voices of unnoticed women.
The man in the story, when he began to talk again, didn’t reveal a grand plan. The only words he had after 9 months of silence were about God’s character and his active presence in the world.
They were words like
“tender mercy” and
“without fear” and
“knowledge of salvation and forgiveness” and
“paths of peace.”
This man after his silence wasn’t given the full story or any sort of action plan. He was only given the nature of a good and active God and his own part in it. Here is this one child to love, to raise for the good of the world.
In this season of noise, the word is being spoken. It always is. Could our invitation be to stop talking so we can hear it anew? It is truer than we hoped, lovelier than we imagined. It is mercy, peace and God-Is-Not-Finished-With-Us.
Thanks be to God.
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