“What kind of music do you like?”
That is simultaneously one of the easiest and hardest questions for me to answer. It’s hard because my musical tastes span all kinds of genres. I like rock music and folk music, bluegrass and classical music, opera and rap, blues and heavy metal, punk and jazz. As an experiment, I put my “Songs You Like” playlist on Spotify on shuffle mode while I was writing this sermon and wrote down the first six songs that came up.
They were “Fly As Me” by Silk Sonic, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by 
Metallica, “’Round Midnight” by Miles Davis, “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar, “Love Will Come to You” by the Indigo Girls, and “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” by Mere Haggard. When I’m driving with other people in my car, I can’t just shuffle that playlist, because if I do, for every song that is someone’s jam, it’s something that another person hates and yet another one has never heard of and wishes that it had stayed that way. I literally have one called “Everyone Likes This Playlist” that I use most often on those occasions, because it’s mostly Motown with a sprinkling of the most popular songs of the 70s and 80s.
But what kind of music I like is also a very easy question, because what I really like is music with soul. Now I will grant that “soul” is a somewhat subjective thing, and there is an element of “I know it when I hear it,” to that. But I think what I really mean is music that embodies the depth and complexity of what it means to be human in some way, and particularly music that dives unreservedly into the depths of human emotion, whether that is joy, pain, hope, despair, anger, or love.
Some are obvious. Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Beyoncé all indisputably have soul. But so does Bach; so does Mozart; so do Hank Williams and Joni Mitchell and Benny Goodman and Radiohead and Dolly Parton. The soaring arias of love and pain in Puccini’s operas? They have soul. The prophetic anger of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine against the injustices in our society? That has soul. Julien Baker’s searingly introspective indie-rock vocals, lyrics, and guitar-playing have soul. Bruce Springsteen’s classic story-songs of longing and hope and weariness have soul.
It’s the music that speaks your deepest truths, and especially the hard or complicated ones, to you and for you, in ways that you wish you could but didn’t have the words or the insight, that’s the music that has soul. There’s a song that opened up a whole genre for me in terms of music appreciation about twenty years ago. It’s called “Life Worth Livin’” by a band called Uncle Tupelo, which introduced me to the alternative country music movement of the late 80s and early 90s. Alternative country mirrored the alternative rock movement in providing an “alternative” to the mainstream genre, rejecting its stylized appearances and musical and lyrical cliches in favor of gritty production and authentic emotion.
The song opens with an irresistible call if you’re into this sort of thing: “this song is sung for anyone that’s listening / this song is for the broken-spirited man / this song is for anyone left standing / after the strain of a slow sad end.” It is hard to get clearer than that in terms of raw emotion, of bone-aching weariness. And then the chorus comes: “Well, we’ve all had our ups and downs / it’s been mostly down around here / now this whole dang mess should be becoming quite clear / Looks like we’re all looking for / a life worth livin’ / that’s why we drink ourselves to sleep / we’re all looking for / a life worth livin’ / that’s why we pray for our souls to keep.”
There are few songs I know that capture the authentic weariness of life more clearly and concisely than that: a desperate longing for a life worth living; an unflinching admission of how down life can be while we are looking for that life; a clinging to threads of hope for our soul, and the temptation to numb our pain and despair so at least we don’t have to endure the full strength of the weariness.
“This song is for the broken-spirited man / This song is for anyone left standing / after the strain of a slow sad end.” This song is for Zechariah, the main character in this passage from Luke that we heard read today. It can be easy to miss that, because Luke begins by telling us how righteous and blameless both Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth were, living faithfully according to God’s will and commandments as the decades of their life pass. “But” Luke says, giving our first clue that all is not as it seems, “but, they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.”
The implication, of course, is that they wished for children; not everyone does, but otherwise there would be no point in this detail. Now, think for a moment how poorly our culture deals with the realities of infertility and miscarriage today. People, and especially women, experience enormous amounts of grief and shame, both because of how they themselves feel and how they are treated by others. People say thoughtless and even offensive things to them, often failing to understand the depths of weariness and grief that these challenges inevitably impose, or responding to them with platitudes or even judgments, including wildly false assertions about God’s will.
The first century was certainly no better in responding to people experiencing infertility than the twenty-first century, and in some ways was quite a bit worse. So if Zechariah and Elizabeth have been struggling with infertility for years, even decades, there is no possible way they are not deeply, profoundly, weary from that experience; no way that they have not experienced brokenness of spirit as they are finally left standing after the strain of a slow sad end.
Given all that, it is not surprising that Zechariah responds even to the direct manifestation and message of an angel of the Lord with hesitancy. Gabriel tells him, “Your prayer has been heard,” and then confirms what that prayer was, the prayer for a child that Zechariah has whispered countless times from the depths of his soul throughout the years as he still clung to a few threads of hope: “your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son.” And upon hearing that his prayer has finally, finally been answered with a yes… he is afraid to believe it. Now, it’s tempting to label his hesitancy as doubt, because we’ve been conditioned to do that with anyone who doesn’t immediately obey when God, Jesus, or an angel tells them to do something.
But I don’t think that’s quite fair. It’s weariness far more than doubt that makes Zechariah hesitate: when Zechariah says, “How will I know that this will happen? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years,” what he’s really saying is, I am a broken-spirited man, still somehow standing after what I thought had to be the strain of a slow sad end. I need some clarity, some certainty, before I risk investing in hope again. Reducing that painful reality that I suspect many of us here have experienced at some point in our lives to mere doubt is misleading and unfair. Embracing that kind of hope, against all reason and all experience, requires casting off the kind of weariness of soul that can crush a person, break their spirit.
The question is, when should we risk trading in that kind of weariness for new hope? Because while a life of weariness can be very understandable, it’s also not the life worth livin’ that the song reminds us that we are still, on some level, longing and looking for. And let’s be clear here: it is not having children that makes a life worth living; that not only misses the point but is an outright falsehood. It is a life rooted in hope that is a life worth living: a hope that life is not inherently a life of weariness and loss and grief and despair, but that all those things can be real and acknowledged and contained within a larger life worth living: a life that is inherently one of love and joy, of meaning and community, of purpose and yes, of hope.
The problem with weariness is that it can convince us that it is the sum total of our reality, present and future; it can allow us to recognize the slow sad end and think the song is over, while missing the softly rising notes of a slow, joyful beginning that is also possible for us. That’s the problem that Zechariah falls into here: he is unwilling, maybe even unable in his state, to let go of his weariness and risk hope and therefore disappointment once more. Which, again, is understandable, but a life mired in weariness, without hope, is not the life that God intends for us.
Which is why I think Gabriel imposes silence on Zechariah. It is usually interpreted as a punishment for Zechariah’s lack of faith in immediately believing Gabriel. But what if it’s not? What if it’s a gift, a blessing, instead? In many religious traditions, silence is a spiritual discipline designed to help us stop filling the silence with our own words and thoughts and focus our attention on what God is already up to in the world. Since Zechariah struggled to hope in Gabriel’s words, Gabriel is helping him to focus on signs of hope as Elizabeth does, in fact, become pregnant against all odds and give birth to a son whom Zechariah will name, still silent, by writing on a tablet, “His name is John,” just as the angel instructed him to do.
And then he regains the ability to speak, and his first words are songs of praise and prophecy that John will grow up to prepare the way of the Lord. The voice of weariness has been replaced by one of joy and hope, because Zechariah spent his months of silence not talking himself and others out of hope but seeing and hearing the signs of hope in his wife’s pregnancy, in the even more startling pregnancy of Elizabeth’s relative, a girl named Mary whom both Elizabeth and her unborn child recognize when she visits as the mother of the promised Lord.
You could argue that Advent, in many ways, is the most soulful of seasons in the Christian year. Advent is the season that not only allows but encourages us to acknowledge the raw realities of our weariness with the way this world is in so many ways. But in the very act of acknowledging that weariness, it also gives us the strength and opportunity to claim the hope that claims us: that the world as it is, and therefore our lives as they are, are not what God created them to be, intended them to be, nor will God leave them the way they are. No, God is even now breaking into the world in and through Jesus Christ to make things right.
So on this first Sunday of Advent, in song and in silence, at Christ’s table and in the world as we leave that table, let us commit ourselves anew to a life worth living: a life of hope and love and joy and peace that Christ offers us: a life that sings with soul, a life that is unafraid to sing the full verses of suffering and weariness, but which always returns to the chorus of hope, and love, and joy, and peace.