Advent Devotion: Luke 1:5–17

Luke 1: 5-17, by Robert Updegrove

What a time of angel messages!  Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and Zechariah all received personal visits from angels.  How wonderful it must have been to have heard messages from heaven.  How many of us wish to hear an angel today? 

What is God saying to us today?  I notice that in most of the above cases, the person was not expecting a divine message, rather the message came to them as a surprise.  But in each case, the hearer listened and obeyed in faith, even though the message may have been difficult for them to believe.  God showed trust to them, and in turn, they trusted God.  Like them, our challenge is to hear, understand, and act. 

But how does God speak to us today?  

A lady recently said to me, “Don’t you think this Covid epidemic is a sign from God?  She implied that God is not pleased with humanity.  I thought about that and noted that there is surely much about us that would displease God: people killing or intimidating others in his name; our enormous depletion of the earth’s resources and acts of pollution; our habits that result in reducing the number of species of life with whom we share this world; our intolerance of others; and the practice of more and more people of not including God in their lives.  On the other hand, I realized that pandemics have been a periodic feature of our history.  

As we endure the passing weeks and months of the epidemic, we feel a kind of oppression, just as the Israelites of Zechariah’s time felt the political and cultural oppression of the Roman Empire.  We are not sure when it will end.  We must have faith in both the advice of our health experts as well as God’s ultimate interest in our lives.  Like Zechariah and Elizabeth, we must always try to lead lives pleasing to God.  

We find in this passage of Luke that God had a gift for the childless couple, now in their old age.  As we find ourselves in old age, we often fear that most of the pleasures of life are behind us and there is little happiness now or ahead.  Robert Browning, in his poem, “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” as well as our text from Luke, say otherwise: 

                             Grow old along with me!

                              The best is yet to be,

                              The last of life, for which the first was made:

                              Our times are in his hand

                              Who saith, “A whole I planned,

                              Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”