Luke 1:68-79
“Mercy and Light”
November 21, 2010 - Christ the King

         The call comes at 2 a.m. and you’re awake. You’ve been sitting in your living room for the last two hours watching out the big front window for headlights to come winking up your street. Your 17 year old son was supposed to be home at midnight. Now you pick up the phone to hear his voice.

         Then you slip on your shoes, grab your coat, and walk out into the dark to slide into the other car. Your son has yours. A few minutes later you’re downtown in an unfamiliar building, talking to a weary, overworked police officer about a subject you’ve never had occasion to consider: bail. Another hour and a bunch of paperwork later, you see your boy emerge disheveled and red-eyed from behind a steel door. You take him by the elbow, lead him to the car, and drive home in silence.

         You don’t know what you will say in the morning. You have no idea what consequences you will impose for your son’s behavior. But through it all, not for one second, did you consider leaving him by himself, alone in a jail cell. Your parent’s heart is full of anger, disappointment and dismay, but for the son born of your own flesh there is also a huge measure of mercy.

         At the birth of his own son, Zechariah sang the words we just read together, “Let us praise the Lord, the God of Israel! He has come to the help of his people and has set them free.” For a Jew living in first century Palestine, those words had deep political implications. They were people with a long history of living in captivity and in servitude to other nations. The began as slaves and ended up as the subjects of the Babylonians, the Persians and the Greeks. Now after a few short decades of freedom, they were again under a foreign thumb, this time the Romans.

         So Zechariah’s song about a mighty Savior, about being saved from enemies, “from the power of all those who hate us,” would have plucked powerful chords of feeling from his people’s hearts.

         I pictured the bail-out of your boy as the first time such a thing had happened, but God had been bailing-out Israel for millennia. Verse 72 refers to a promise, a covenant of mercy that went back more than two thousand years to Abraham. Like a parent who makes a commitment ahead of time to come and mercifully pick-up a child who gets into trouble, God promised Abraham that He would rescue them from their enemies. He had been keeping that promise politically for centuries.

         If a few weeks or months after your son’s sojourn in jail, you got another late night call like the first, you might hurry less, drive a little slower to the police station, even consider leaving him there for the night. Phrases like “tough love” would run in your head. And if there was a third, a fourth and more calls like that, your mercy might run out. You might quit posting bail, quit setting him free.

         It’s not that you wouldn’t want your son to be free. It’s that you don’t know how to set him free from his real enemy, from whatever is inside him that keeps landing him in a dingy cell in the dark of night. You are at a loss to help him fight the real foe lying somewhere within himself.

         That’s how it was with Israel. God kept bailing His people out of captivity to their political enemies until it became absolutely clear that the real foe was not aggressive, oppressive tyrants from other countries, but their own internal failure and sin.

         You and I don’t know how to bail a child or even our own selves out of the bad habits, stupid mistakes and recurring sins that hold us captive. We can’t post a bond big enough to free a heart, free a life that keeps losing itself to internal enemies. It doesn’t matter if it’s for our own selves, for someone we love, or for a neighbor or co-worker, we can’t fight the real foe of self-destructive sin. But God can.

         Zechariah’s prophetic canticle shows that the whole history of Israel led to this moment when God prepared to rescue His people in a new and more powerful way. He would rescue them from their greatest enemies, set them free, not from political powers, but from spiritual powers. As verse 74 says, He would “allow us to serve him with out fear, so that we might be holy and righteous before him all the days of our life.” God was about to reveal His greatest and most tender mercy.

         The baby boy resting in Zechariah’s arms as he sang these words was the man we know as John the Baptist. Verse 76 says it all about this boy’s life, “You, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High God. You will go before the Lord.” John was the precursor, the forerunner, the prophet that came ahead of Jesus. And the message was that God’s people were about to be set free one more time, not with a temporary political liberty from their enemies, but with a life-long and eternal freedom from bondage to sin.

         John’s mission, John’s message was “to tell his people that they will be saved by having their sins forgiven.” There would be no more temporary bail from the hands of evil kings and emperors, no more brief periods of political liberty in which only to sink ever deeper into spiritual captivity. Instead, God would break through all the dark centuries of sin with the grace and light of lasting and eternal forgiveness.

         That’s what we see breaking into our world in our Gospel lesson this morning. In dark hours Jesus Himself was a political prisoner condemned to death on the Cross. But as He hung there, a habitual sinner who hung beside Him, a thief who stole often enough to earn capital punishment, was offered the mercy of forgiveness and the light of paradise.

         So Zechariah sings, “Our God is merciful and tender. He will cause the bright dawn of salvation to rise on us and to shine from heaven.” That’s what Jesus did for the thief on a dark Friday afternoon. That’s what Jesus does for you and me as we find ourselves jailed within our own souls by our worst enemies, the sins we can’t control, but which control and imprison us.

         The last couple weeks have been typical fall in Oregon—rainy, cold, dark. It gets even the best of us down. Yet for the last few days, there’s been a merciful respite to the dim grayness of our weather. Bright, sunny dawns have broken through the clouds for an hour or two or three. In the version of Zechariah’s song that is part of morning prayer in the liturgical churches and part of my own morning prayer, we hear the words, “the dawn from on high shall break upon us.” That dawn is Jesus Christ and the merciful forgiveness He offers every sinner, that He offers you and me.

         Bright as it is, Jesus’ mercy is no cheap and easy spiritual bail-out. He is merciful and forgiving as verse 74 says, to “allow us to serve him without fear,” and as our reading from Colossians 1 verse 13 says, “he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.” Back to our text, verse 79 finishes by saying that merciful dawn of Jesus shines “on all those who live in the dark shadow of death to guide our steps into the path of peace.”

         The mercy of Jesus Christ sets us free to start down a new path, to live in His light, to become new people. He shows us mercy in order to make us into people of mercy and peace. Like some of the bright yellow and red-leaved trees we’ve seen this autumn, Jesus means the light of His mercy to shine through us in this world, making the beauty of His merciful light more visible.

         As we come to the close of another church year, we celebrate Christ as our King. Reading this canticle we’ve focused on our King’s mercy. He becomes our ruler by forgiving us. We are ruled by the King of Mercy so we might become people of mercy.

         Trying to find a story about a king having mercy I came across a German legend about a duke who insulted King Conrad III. Conrad’s royal army surrounded the duke’s castle and cut off all their supplies. Sooner or later when food and water ran out they would have to surrender.

         In the midst of the siege, the women of the castle begged for the king’s mercy, asking that they and their children go free, with only whatever valuables they could carry on their backs in order to provide for themselves. The king granted their request.

         The next morning the castle gates swung open and the women emerged with the children following. But instead of bags of money or jewels on their backs, each wife staggered along under the weight of her husband. Unmarried women carried a brother or a father. His soldiers were outraged and demanded permission to execute the impudent women and their men. But King Conrad laughed, kept his word of mercy and let them all go free.

         We’re going to show mercy to a bunch of people and let them come out of the cold here in our sanctuary this week. You will leave here and have the opportunity to show forgiveness and mercy to someone at home or at work or at school.

         Doesn’t our merciful King laugh with joy to see us receive His mercy and come to Him carrying someone else on our backs to receive that same mercy? Isn’t He guiding us into that path of peace wherein we show His mercy to those around us? May the light of King Jesus rise on you, show you mercy and forgive your sins, and lead you to those whom you can mercifully carry into His freedom and light and grace.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj