The Light of The World Week 2: "The Light & The Mission"
Of all of the beautiful Advent stories in the Bible, my absolute favorite has to be the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth , the parents of John the Baptist . In Luke's gospel we get introduced to this lovely old couple, who--we are informed--are faithful, God-fearing and childless. That last bit of information is sort of placed there in the Scripture as a glimpse into the secret pain of these two lovely people, which, by now in their life together, they had undoubtedly learned to accept. Knowing what we know about 1st Century Jewish culture, a childless couple would have felt the weight of societal and religious pressure to have children, and perhaps may have even heard the whispered word, "Cursed!" uttered by their neighbors. But that pain, the kind of pain that we've been talking about, probably faded to a dull ache by the time we are introduced to Zechariah and Elizabeth for the first time. Zechariah was a priest---one of 18,000 of them...