Those words of Malachi, the last prophet heard from in Israel for more than 400 years, must have somehow been echoing around in the priest’s head as he entered the Holy Place to offer incense. Maybe every priest that did so, every day thought of those words—who knows? That’s what they were praying for, after all. That’s what Israel was hoping for in its long Advent wait—that the Lord would show up again and restore Israel to its ancient glory.

Times were hard and discouraging when the aging priest Zechariah finally won the lottery and got his chance to enter the Holy Place to offer incense. The temple had been rebuilt for the third time. It was beautiful in its own right, but it was nothing compared to the temple Solomon had built back in the day when Israel was really something. Nations streamed into Jerusalem to see the marvelous building and pay homage to this small but prosperous people of an invisible God who had done great things for them. Alas, though, the Babylonians had destroyed that temple some 500 years earlier. The temple had been rebuilt in its place 70 years later, but that version couldn’t hold a candle to the glorious one of old.This time Israel was just a vassal state of the Persian Empire, with no freedom to rule itself. A few hundred years later the Greeks desecrated that temple. It had to be cleansed by the Maccabees. The miracle of the oil in the lamps gave us the Hanukkah holiday.

By the time of our story, the half-breed King Herod was ruling Palestine and had rebuilt the temple to bring glory to himself and to get support from the Jews. But the sense of God’s presence in the temple had long been lost. The Ark of the Covenant had disappeared from the Holy of Holies, possibly hidden by the priests when Nebuchadnezzar’s horde came calling. Maybe it had been destroyed. We’ll have to ask Indiana Jones, don’t you know?! Now the Holy of Holies was just an empty room, and Israel was left to wonder if their God would ever reappear in his sanctuary.

The Holy Place just outside the Holy of Holies, separated by a thick curtain, was still a room with promise. Each day a priest would enter to offer the prayers of the people and burn incense as a way of raising the attention of God to their prayers. It was a beautiful room with a 12-foot ceiling, about 36 feet long and 14 feet wide. This is where Zechariah entered that afternoon to offer incense.

It was Zechariah’s big moment. It would likely only fall to him once in his lifetime. He was of the priestly family of Abijah. Twenty-four priestly families rotated each year, serving at the temple for a week at a time. He must have wondered whether the lot would ever fall on him, because for all his years—maybe sixty or so—he had watched others gain the privilege. At long last the lot had fallen to him. God had given him his moment. He would enter after another had cleared out the ashes. He would burn the incense; then fall on his face to pray and not tarry long. Everything was going according to plan until Gabriel showed up.

This angel of the Lord, who had once appeared to Father Abraham to tell him that his prayers had been answered and his wife would conceive a son, showed up again with a similar word. Like Abraham’s Sarah of old, Zechariah’s wife, Elizabeth, was said to be barren. It might have been Zechariah’s low sperm count, but nobody back then thought the seed could have been the problem—fertility was all about the womb that like the earth received the seed. If no children came of it, the fault was with the womb-man, not the man. Elizabeth knew daily shame from her peers, because to be a woman in those days (and to a lesser degree today even) meant that you were meant to give birth if you were to prove yourself a woman of blessing.

It must have been humiliating and confusing for Zechariah and Elizabeth. Luke tells us that both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. And yet they seemed to have nothing to show for their faithfulness until this moment when they were both no doubt tired of praying and hoping, thinking their moment had passed and wondering where they had gone wrong and what God held against them. Zechariah had toiled faithfully as a priest, and yet he never got to the big duty of representing all of Israel in the Holy Place. How many times must have the lot fallen on someone else in his maybe forty years of missing out? And what about Elizabeth? How many times had some young woman of less spiritual virtue been found with child while she was left to a home without a cradle?

Many of us know this kind of frustration. Some of you, like Zechariah, have watched as your peers have become wildly successful. You are here in church week by week. You teach Sunday school. You try to do everything right. You work hard. And yet you feel stuck in your job, linger in debt, and wonder why God seems so unfair. Isn’t God supposed to reward the faithful and punish the unfaithful? It doesn’t make sense. You are waiting.

And then there’s Elizabeth’s disappointment. How many times will you have to celebrate or pretend to celebrate the news of a pregnancy with someone else? How many times will you have to sit in the sanctuary and watch someone else’s baby dedicated or go to a shower and force yourself to smile? It doesn’t seem fair. You are waiting.

What we learn from this wondrous story is that God takes concern not just for the big picture of how to get salvation to the world and keep promises made long ago, but also to the smaller concerns that mean everything to an otherwise inconsequential couple that live with longing under the radar of history. In other words, whoever you are and whatever your deepest prayers, God knows how to answer them and to include you somehow in the great purposes of God’s kingdom.

But surprisingly, the good news Gabriel brings doesn’t have Zechariah jumping for joy right away, even though the angel tells him that he’s getting his own prayers answered as part of his priestly prayers being answered for Israel. He will have a son that will be a joy to him, Gabriel says, and the boy will at the same time prepare the people for the coming of the Lord. To this news Zechariah says, How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.

Before you get too indignant at Zechariah, think about how easy it might have been for him to figure that nothing would ever change. He had been faithfully going through the rituals of religious life for his entire adult life and had nothing to show for it. He must have figured this as simply true faith—to be obedient even when nothing special ever happens to you. God had spoken before to others, but why should God speak to him?

This temptation suckers ministers and Sunday school teachers just as easily. We study the scripture and declare what God has done for others in days of old. We pass on the faith tradition faithfully. But do we really think God might speak to us and answer our prayers in any ways that approach the stories of the Bible? It is so easy to get to thinking that the way things are is the way things will always be, even when you know that God can do a new thing now. You can get so familiar with Christ’s religion that you miss the living Christ himself.

My great-grandfather Wilfred Mason died on a dock. He was a sailor, as were his son and grandson. Which makes me, as I have told you before, the son of a son of a son of a sailor. (I’ve got the Jimmy Buffett song beat by one.) Anyway, sailors figure they might drown at sea by losing their footing, being thrown overboard in a bad storm, or going down when a vessel sinks. But my great-grandfather was probably walking back to the ship at the dock one night from the pub up the street after having one too many. He must have lost his balance and slipped between the pilings of the pier. They found him two weeks later, his hair and fingernails all grown out. He must have been unconscious for a good while before he died.

We serve a living Lord who still speaks. But are we awake enough, conscious enough, sober enough to hear and believe when the Lord shows up suddenly to bless us beyond our imagination? Or will we be so dumbstruck in our surprise that we ask how this can be?

One February morning in 2001 I was preaching on the prophet Isaiah. He was serving the Lord in the temple as Zechariah was 800 years later. The Lord called out, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And Isaiah answered, Here am I, Lord, send me. And in the choir that morning, David Ivie heard the voice of the Lord as if speaking directly to him. And something inside of him called out, Here am I, Lord, send me. Over the next few years we were able to encourage David and his wife, Laura, as David prepared himself for ministry. And a few weeks ago I had the privilege of preaching his ordination service at the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Worth. (Okay, so we lost him to the Presbyterians, but they figure it was predestined to turn out that way.)

What about you? Are you awake to the presence of the Lord?

I met a fascinating new friend the other day. David Elie is a Friend, as in the Society of Friends, as in Quakers. He was telling me about how his small group of Friends continues the old tradition of putting substance ahead of form. In their weekly meetings they sit in silence and listen for the Spirit of Christ to speak to them. David said that what the Friends practice is hearing more than listening. And when they hear the Lord, when they sense his presence, they are then prepared to welcome it and speak.

Zechariah should have known better. But maybe he was too busy speaking to hear, too busy going through the motions to have the experience of God. And as a result he was struck dumb from that moment. It might not be politically correct any more to use the word dumb, but it seems to fit in this case. Sometimes we have to be shut up, to become, as it were, dumb, in order to learn.

We learn that when John is born and Elizabeth announces his name in obedience to what the angel told Zechariah, the old priest is finally able to speak. At long last he regains his voice in order to declare the greatness of God. Which only goes to show that even when we miss our big moment, when we miss the mark, God is not remiss: God does not dismiss us entirely; God disciplines us but blesses us anyway. God is faithful and demands that we be so, too.