Zephaniah
3:14-20
Advent
3
December
16, 2012
William G. Carter
Rejoice, Daughter Zion! Shout, Israel! Rejoice and exult with all
your heart, Daughter Jerusalem.
The LORD has removed your judgment; he has turned away your enemy.
The LORD, the king of Israel, is in your midst; you will no longer
fear evil.
On that day, it will be said to Jerusalem: Don’t fear, Zion. Don’t
let your hands fall.
The LORD your God is in your midst— a warrior bringing victory.
He will create calm with his love; he will rejoice over you with
singing.
I will remove from you those worried about the appointed feasts. They
have been a burden for her, a reproach.
Watch what I am about to do to all your oppressors at that time.
I will deliver the lame; I will gather the outcast.
I will change their shame into praise and fame throughout the
earth.
At that time, I will bring all of you back, at the time when I
gather you.
I will give you fame and praise among all the neighboring peoples
when I restore your possessions and you can see them—says the
LORD.
Today I want to talk about hope. Hope. Hope is a human word. It is
in our DNA. It runs through our bloodstreams. Whoever we are, wherever we find
ourselves, there is the possibility of hope. That’s what I want to talk about
today.
Hope is an Advent word. The four Sundays before Christmas invite
us to be full of hope. Advent slows down our speedy impulses when everybody is
in a hurry. We wait for Christ to be born within us, to become more like him,
to love as he loves, to live in union with God as he lives. The church knows this
takes a while. We don’t become like Christ without effort and the passing of
time. So we have the days of Advent to wait it out and work it out. And the
promise of Advent is that, when Christ comes, we shall join in the Christmas
carol that says, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”
We hope for Christ to come right here. We hope for him to come where he is
needed most.
But hope is a misunderstood word. Hope is often confused
with “wish.” We have lived the age-old scenario: “Blow out the birthday
candles, close your eyes, and make a wish.” The problem comes in closing the
eyes. A wish always closes its eyes. A wish imagines something that cannot
happen. But hope is different. Hope keeps its eyes wide-open, sees how things
really are, imagines what things could be, and works for that.
We heard some people “hope for peace.” Truth be told, they
aren’t hoping for peace so much as they are wishing for peace. They are blowing
out birthday candles and expecting magic. Because, you see, a wish is always a
wish for magic. But if we hope for peace, it wires us differently. And
that’s what I want to talk about, as a way of addressing our national crisis,
as a way to get through our days and nights.
Our guide for this Zephaniah, one of
the Bible’s nearly forgotten writers. How many of you knew there was a book
named Zephaniah? We don’t hear from Zephaniah very much because he wrote one of
the grumpiest books in the Bible.
We call him a “minor prophet” and do not
know much about him. According to the very first verse, which was added later,
Zephaniah spoke up for God during a time of national housecleaning. Israel had
a decent king for once, a king by the name of Josiah, who was leading a
national “Back to the Bible” reform. The king’s Bible at the time was the book
of Deuteronomy. By returning to Deuteronomy, the people were returning to God.
There was a brief national emphasis on getting rid of the counterfeit gods – you
know, the small “g” gods that everybody tends to worship.
It’s all too easy for anybody to fall
into that kind of idolatry. The God of Israel is frequently very quiet, and The
Creator of the Universe is sufficiently enormous to remain out of sight. And in
that supposed vacuum, other pretenders fill the gap. Or we turn to small little
things or small little people from whom we expect great things. Josiah
rediscovered the biblical book of Deuteronomy, a book about keeping God first,
a book about loving God first before everything else.
On the surface, the prophet Zephaniah
did his preaching during that time of reform. The first verse of the book was
added later to date his work at that time.
But apparently, a lot of people weren’t
getting the memo. Because what Zephaniah actually says is that God is coming
with fiery nostrils to snort and rage against the people. The very first thing
God says is, “I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth!”
And who can blame the Holy One of Israel? God’s own people are worshiping their
own pleasure, in the name of Baal, the pleasure god (1:4). They are weighing all
their silver coins (1:11) and bowing down before the fake gods of money and
affluence, and Zephaniah says, “Neither their silver nor gold will be able to
save them” (1:18).
God says, “I have called them to live by
justice, but they have ignored me” (3:2). The people live by the status quo as
violence breaks out around them. They put up walls and think vainly that this
will keep them safe. And to make matters worse, the so-called holy leaders take
the Bible and use it as “a weapon to maim and kill souls” (3:4, The Message).
To sum up, it was a dark time in the
national life. If there was any reform, it was not taking root. When you start
reading the prophet Zephaniah, it is like, “Whoa! The Day of the Lord is right
here. This murderous, indifferent people are going to be flushed down the
sewer.” It looks like gloom, doom, destruction and despair are riding closer on
the horses of the Apocalypse. God is sending judgment on the people – and in a
way, it was largely self-inflicted.
And then, just at that point, just when
the darkness is so heavy, we get the passage that we heard today. “Rejoice,
Daughter Zion! Rejoice, my little girl Jerusalem! The Lord removes your
judgment. The Strong King stands in the middle of all of you. You don’t have to
fear evil anymore.”
Let me say something, then, about how
the Bible talks, and specifically how the prophet Zephaniah speaks. Here is a
prophet who brings the honest word of God. There is no tinsel on his
description of how corrupt are the people, no glitter as we describes our broken
lives. As God speaks through the Bible’s prophets, God never softens any words
about how messed up the human family was, is, and always shall be. Because of
this divine honesty, the prophets, as God’s press agents, often took the brunt
of human response.
But just after God speaks, and the
moment of recognition comes when the people say, “Yep, that’s what we are,” God
will then often interrupt that dark moment by saying, “Rejoice, little girl.
The Warrior God will bring calm with his love. God will rejoice over you with
singing.” That’s called “the good news.” Hebrew scholars call this “the
salvation announcement.” This is the shout of God’s light in the thickest human
darkness. And it is intended to shape us differently, to remake us into
different people.
You know, a lot of people could say,
“Where was God on Friday, when shooter went into the Sandy Hook Elementary
School?” The assumption is that God should show up like a comic book super
hero, block all the bullets, defend all the innocent, and punch the crazy guy
to the moon. Remember the distinction that I made between “hope” and “wish”?
That would be a wish. You can shut your eyes and make that wish.
Perhaps other people ask other
questions. Here is one that I have heard: “Where was God in the gun store, when
overly dangerous weapons were sold?” Or here is another: “Where was God, when a
young man was so tormented that the reptile part of his brain struck down little
ones who had done nothing against him?”
Where was God? The answer is right there
in the words of the prophet Zephaniah: “The Lord your God is in your midst. God
will create calm with his love. God will rejoice over you with singing.”
So I want to talk about hope. On a day
of national grief, what are you hoping for? Twenty children in Connecticut have
been taken from us, six adults cut down, the shooter himself and his mother are
gone – what do we hope for? I could turn you loose to talk among yourselves,
but I’m not sure I could get you back. We are a divided people, especially when
it comes to guns. All of us agree that children must be kept safe. We will do
whatever we can to protect them. But we do not know how to do this.
One of the Bible’s words for hope is the
Hebrew word gavah. The root of it means “to twist,” as in when the
strands of a rope are twisted together. As someone has said, this is a word
that seems to fit our brand of hoping well. “The possibility that that good
thing happen and that bad thing will not happen, a hundred little strands of hope
that we twist together to make a cable
of hope strong enough to pull ourselves along through our lives with.”[1]
So we take everything that we hope for
our children and we twist it together. It can become strong enough that we can
pull ourselves along and get through the dark.
There is no question that this world is
a mess. Anybody have any doubts of that after the gunshots in Connecticut? I
suppose we can obsess about the killer, flash his face repeatedly on the news,
do an amateur psychological analysis, and become addicted to the
sensationalism. But this can become a sick distraction from the fact that whole
world is a mess. And this pushes us toward God. What we hope for is God – a good
God, a just God, the only God who, in Zephaniah’s words, can “change shame into
praise.”
I think of how Fred Rogers, the prophet
for children, once put it. He said, “At the heart of the universe is a loving
heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything
that we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of
our fellow human beings, that is our job.”
So then, hope is more than a vacant
wish. Hope is something we invest in. Hope is what we give ourselves to. And
when a senseless tragedy happens, we open our eyes to see – and then we decide
if it is going to define who we are. The prophet Zephaniah is well aware of
what deep trouble the human race repeatedly creates for itself. But as the
prophet listens to God, he hears God say, “Don’t be afraid.” Our world may be
in a mess – but people who listen to God refuse to live by fear. No, there is
another way forward.
Saint Augustine, the early bishop of the church, knew this. In one of his
most memorable quotes, he said, “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names
are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that
they do not remain the way they are.”[2]
Hope has to do
with what could be. It has to do with what we will do to invest ourselves in
changing what needs to be changed. One of the dreamers who taught us a great
deal about hope was the poet Langston Hughes. Here are some words that he
passed along:
I dream a world where man no other man will scorn,
I dream a world where man no other man will scorn,
Where love will
bless the earth and peace its path adorn.
I dream a world
where all will know sweet freedom’s way
Where greed no
longer saps the soul nor avarice blights the day.
A world I dream
where black and white, whatever race you be,
Will share the
bounties of the earth and every [one] is free.
Where wretchedness
will hang its head
And Joy, like a
pearl, attends the needs of all humankind
[“all mankind”]
Of such a world,
I dream, my world.
You, there is something
curious about that poem. It is never says who is speaking. I think it is God.
For God dreams that “love will bless the earth and peace its path adorn.” This is
God’s dream for God’s own world.
And when we hear
God’s dream - when we work for it - that is the very definition of hope.
© William G. Carter. All rights
reserved.
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