Pastor Peter Metzger
Reformation
Zechariah 4:1-7
11-03-13
First Lutheran Church
Lake Geneva, WI
Then the angel who was speaking with me returned and roused me, as a man who is awakened from his sleep. He said to me, “What do you see?” And I said, “I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold with its bowl on the top of it, and its seven lamps on it with seven spouts belonging to each of the lamps which are on the top of it; also two olive trees by it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left side.” Then I said to the angel who was speaking with me saying, “What are these, my lord?” So the angel who was speaking with me answered and said to me, “Do you not know what these are?” And I said, “No, my lord.” Then he said to me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel saying, ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord of hosts. ‘What are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain; and he will bring forth the top stone with shouts of “Grace, grace to it!”’”
He’ll Leave the Light on for You
Maybe you’ve seen the commercial. It’s for a hotel and the tagline for the commercial is, “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Having just recently come off another trick-or-treating season, most of us understand what it means when the front porch light is on. It’s kind of like a beacon welcoming people to your home. If you’re expecting company late at night, you put the front porch light on to show them the way. Leaving the light on for someone is a common way of saying, “I want you to be here.” And that’s why companies like Motel 6 use it as their slogan, to show you that they are welcoming and inviting and glad to have you stay with them.
The vision that the angel showed Zechariah in our first lesson has a very similar message for God’s people. When Zechariah sees that golden lampstand with the basin and the olive trees around it he’s hearing God’s clear message, “I’ll leave the light on for you.” This was an incredibly welcome message for Zechariah to hear.
You see, Zechariah lived about 500 years before Jesus did, and at that point in history he was part of the nation of Israel that had been taken captive and had been exiled hundreds of miles away from home in the land of Babylon. They were prisoners of war. They weren’t able to govern themselves anymore. They couldn’t go where they wanted to whenever they wanted to, to do whatever they wanted to do, because they were subject to the Babylonians, and had to listen to them. They no longer had an army or a king to stand up for them. The memories of their former glory were beginning to fade, and their hearts broke whenever they thought of the devastation of their former nation and most significantly the destruction of the Temple that Solomon had built in all its splendor. The land that God had promised to their forefathers had been taken away from them, and they felt lost and alone.
Yet, when we read this revelation from the book of Zechariah, we see that it’s the fifth vision that predicts a restoration for these same Jews. It predicts that they will go home and will rebuild their nation and their temple and will have a peace that they had not known for years. Zechariah got all that from visions like this one. So, I’ll ask you the same question that the angel asked Zechariah, “What do you see?”
The vision before Zechariah shows us a couple fairly common items. The first and probably most prominent feature is lampstand. Above it is a basin for the oil that fuels the lamps, and on either side of the basin are two olive trees that supply the oil for the basin, which in turn delivers the oil to the lamps through the pipes.
Now we could sit here and quibble about exactly what each feature symbolizes. Elsewhere in Scripture lampstands are used to signify churches; that’s what we see in the book of Revelation. In the Psalms we read that “Your Word is a lamp to my feet, and a light for my path.” We know that olive oil is used to fuel lamps, but that it’s also used to anoint people, like kings and priests, to show that they are specially chosen by God. But to be honest with you, when the Bible – when God – doesn’t identify each of the items in a vision or a parable, then we don’t occupy ourselves with speculation, instead we consider the bigger message of the entire vision as a whole.
So, again, I’ll ask you the question that the angel asked Zechariah, “Do you know what it means?” Zechariah didn’t. But, you know what, that’s ok! It’s ok not to have the answers. It’s ok to rely on God for the explanation. If we wait long enough, like Zechariah, we’ll get it. The angel himself explains this picture to mean that it’s “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.”
Consider what this means to a man who’s being told that he and his fellow Israelites will be restored to their homes and will rebuild their country. There’s no cause to boast in themselves. They’re prisoners of war! They will not be responsible for this restoration. Instead, God is calling Zechariah’s attention to the fact that they couldn’t have done any of this on their own. They were weak and disorganized. They didn’t have might or power. Instead their restoration would come as a result of God’s power.
Take a look again at the lampstand. Does it require human hands to keep it lit? No. It’s a self-sustaining system from start to finish. It doesn’t require a candle lighter to come forward every Sunday to relight it. It doesn’t require someone to come on Tuesday morning and refill the oil. God has established it so that it will last forever on its own power. The message of this lampstand is the perseverance of God’s church on earth. The church will survive because God continually supplies his life-saving, light-giving gospel.
Flipping through the pages of Scripture and of History we see that this truth stands the test of time. 500 years after Zechariah’s vision Luke writes his gospel account of Jesus’ life and records the words of Jesus that we read in our gospel lesson.
There Jesus told the parable of the tenants, in which the tenants who were entrusted with the care of their master’s vineyard grew selfish and held the proceeds of the harvest hostage, intending to keep it for themselves. They even went so far as to kill to the son of their master to keep it.
At the end of that lesson we read that the Jews understood that Jesus was identifying them with the wicked tenants. And so the message that Jesus was proclaiming then was that he would take the governance of his church out of the hands of the self-righteous Pharisees and give it over to the true believers. In other words, even though the Pharisees and teachers of the law were holding the church hostage by their made up laws and self-righteous ways, God would preserve his church by giving it to other people.
1500 years after Jesus spoke this parable we see the care of the church changing hands once again. A lowly monk, whose own conscience was unduly burdened by years of heavy oppression by his church’s traditions, was woken like a man from his sleep, just like Zechariah, and by the grace of God he was made aware of the great offenses and mismanagement of the church at large in his day.
When Luther spoke of the way that the Catholic Church operated at that time he called it the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. He borrowed the very imagery of the story of the Israelites at the time of Zechariah. He resented the fact that the Pope was holding the common person hostage, and was trying to play the role of Jesus, the one who offers and gives the forgiveness of sins. A prime example of this was the selling of indulgences at that time. Luther asked, if the church and the Pope have the ability to forgive sins, how can you possibly claim to be Christian when you withhold that forgiveness until you get paid for it?
In Luther’s time too, the saying holds true, God will keep the light on for us.
Now, the point of all of these examples is not to show how we human beings keep bungling the Bible repeatedly throughout the course of history, but to show that no matter what we do, God keeps his Word pure. The point of all of this is the same point as the vision of Zechariah. It’s a message of comfort - The church will survive because God continually supplies his life-saving, light-giving gospel. The same holds true today.
Could I say that our church today is like the church of Luther’s time, that it’s being held hostage and that forgiveness is being withheld from people for selfish gain? Maybe, but probably not to the same degree. Could I say that our church today is like the church of Jesus’ time, in which people rely on their own persistent obedience for their salvation? Maybe, but again, probably not to the same degree.
We may not be a church in captivity, but we are a church under attack and Christianity around the world faces the sad fact of corruption from within. All we have to consider are the popular trends in global society. The prevalence of homosexuality, for instance, though clearly condemned in the Bible, it is vehemently defended in the world. And so, from the outside you see Christians being labeled as unloving, radical, and close-minded; from the inside you see compromise and you see the Word of God being tossed aside in preference for popular opinion.
I could go on to talk about the repression of gospel proclamation in public. I could talk about the sweeping compromises in Christian circles that value unity more than purity and harmony more than truth. But God’s message for us remains the same: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.
Zechariah was one little preacher who was a prisoner of war. Luther was a humble monk standing in opposition to the universal church and the ruler of the “civilized” world. Their might and power did not win the day. Their human authority and tenacity did not preserve the church; God did, by his Spirit.
There is nothing that man can do to insure the survival of the church. God has that under control, as history would testify. Not because he’s filled the church with heroes of faith. Not because we have traditions that have stood the test of time. But because he unceasingly shines the light of the gospel through the power of his Spirit.
Through his Word he points us to the cornerstone of our faith, the rock on which we place our trust – Jesus Christ.Zechariah pointed to that rock when he described the restoration of the temple by drawing attention to the cornerstone being brought out to shouts of praise.The cornerstone of our faith rode into Jerusalem to shouts of praise too. He arrived, not with might or power, but in humility and riding on a donkey, and by the end of the week he was dead. But that doesn’t mean he was defeated. Three days later he rose from his grave and in so doing proved that he conquered death, and all of our sins that put him there, and the power of the devil that tried to keep him there. Victory is ours through our Lord Jesus Christ.
That message of victory is the same today as it was yesterday, and 500 years ago at the time of Luther, and 2000 years ago at the time of Christ, and 2500 years ago at the time of Zechariah. The church will survive because God continually supplies his life-saving, light-giving gospel. Now, by God’s grace and by his Spirit, that message of victory will continue to resound until the end of time. In him we find refuge. On him we build. Through him we have victory. And with him we will live, today and always. Amen.