SERMON

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2002

CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER

If you came to church today looking for comfort and assurance, I should imagine that the first reading left you feeling cheated.  The prophet Zephaniah lived in the seventh century BCE and was descended from an earlier king of Judah, the southern kingdom of divided Israel.  “Zephaniah’s sensitive moral and religious spirit was overwhelmed by the impending doom that awaited the disobedient; in such a spiritual atmosphere destruction was sure.” (Harper’s Bible Dictionary)  There is essentially no good news in Zephaniah.  His prophecy finds parallels throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and is also echoed in the apocalyptic writing of the New Testament.  Look up Mark 13 to see what I mean.   

The wrath, judgment, and punishment with which God threatens his people must be heard and examined in our time.  Much as we prefer to hear of miracles and shepherds, justice achieved, and hope renewed, as Christians we have inherited the entire Bible.  The frightening passages are as real as the more comfortable ones.  We love the Gospel of Easter but would rather not spend too much time on Good Friday.  Human nature likes its good news rather than the possibility of bad.   

I have been reading recently about the Great Awakening in the United States, that religious watershed in the mid-eighteenth century, when as the result of numerous currents in society and philosophy, Protestantism experienced a huge revival.  The zeal of the early colonists had cooled; lethargy seemed to have won the spiritual day.  Out in Northampton and in nearby surrounding communities a change began.  Jonathan Edwards, a famous, but hardly the sole, preacher at the heart of the movement, saw the work of the Holy Spirit in people’s return to their religion.  A significant element of the preaching and atmosphere of the revival was its emphasis on the wrath of God and the real possibility of divine punishment.  A landmark sermon from Edwards was entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”.  While the cooling waters of repentance and transformation might quench the heat of hellfire and brimstone, the threat was real, and the people believed.  In our time such preachments do not draw a crowd, and we tend to avoid the “day of the Lord” passages. 

Whether we like it or not, the ancient concept of God’s judgment persists to our time.  As we approach the annual season of Advent, the four weeks before the joys of Christmas, we are reminded again and again that God is both judge and savior. Taking the collect for this Sunday as a point of departure, I am aware that ALL scripture has been written for our learning.  We cannot select only the easy or mild passages.  We have the whole package.  The authentic Bible includes everything.  I suppose we can think of the Bible as a collection of writings, like a collection of people at a party.  While we may prefer some of the people to others, we have to see them all.  Much as I might prefer a conversation with the 23^rd Psalm, I am obliged to spend time with Zephaniah.   

A prophet’s vocation was not merely that of predictor of future events, even if a segment of prophetic utterance would offer a view a view of either a disastrous or restored future.  His main task, to tell forth the word of God as divinely and mystically given to him, placed the prophet in a dangerous position.  He is called by God to indict an entire nation or a segment of the population through evaluating their behavior: often their religious hypocrisy or their blatant social injustice.  The tone of prophetic language is both dramatic and confrontational, no holds barred words and images.  Generally, in the historical writings, if the people indicted actually changed their ways, they were spared.  Those who scoffed at the prophetic utterances were vanquished, sent into exile, or just plain disappeared from view.  Zephaniah stands as an excellent example of the disturber of the status quo. 

Zephaniah’s prophecy or oracle takes aim at the religious syncretism of the people of Judah, meaning the practice of two or more religions at once.  These people lived under the Law, the Torah, and they were specifically prohibited from worshiping any other gods.  But like earlier generations, they turned to the fertility gods, such as Baal, plus other assorted deities decidedly unwelcome in the hegemony of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Jerusalem had become in Zephaniah’s time complacent and inattentive to the rule of God.  As a people in covenant with God, they had strayed far from the serious obedience and devotion demanded of them as partners with God in a timeless agreement.  And as always, there were those whose patent indifference to the spiritual side of life displeased the prophets. 

The wrath of God carries destruction and suffering to everyone.  Just to look at the language of Zephaniah, some from today’s reading:  “I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth, says the Lord.  I will sweep away humans and animals; I will sweep away the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.  I will make the wicked stumble.  I will cut of humanity from the face of the earth. . . . the day of the Lord is at hand.  The Lord has prepared a sacrifice. . . . The great day of the Lord is near, near and hastening fast. . . . the day of the Lord will be a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements.”  Note that these events are to happen on earth in real time, and are not restricted to some far off hell.  They are imminent.    

The anticipation of the kingdom of God, that time when we shall know peace and harmony over all the earth has been long in the hopes and predictions of religious and political leaders.  The Cross has, we believe, paid the price of such harmony, yet we still wait for the kingdom to come.  Something in the nature of humanity resists the unity that would bring us all together.  We resist compromise and sacrifice.  We humans are lethargic in our spirituality and seemingly always have been.  Awakenings and revivals of our flagging spirit come and go.  We seem to be in a good place, then we fall away, too reliant on our selves for salvation, too proud; we lose hope. 

So is all lost?  Are we doomed to suffer the wrath of God?  Clearly good news must be found to balance the bad, and of course there is.  In Biblical terms, God does repent of God’s anger.  We as well can repent of our syncretism and human shortcomings.  We can transform our lives – change from lethargy to enthusiasm, from lazy spirituality to vigorous faith.  Yet again and again we, like the population of ancient Jerusalem, need to be reminded in strong language that we are heading in the wrong direction.  Our journey must lead to God’s grace and love, not away from it.  The off-putting words of the prophets (and of Jesus as well) serve as warning lights flashing before our eyes, calling us back, beckoning us away from the seductive sins, and returning us home to the humanity we were given by our loving Creator.  God’s good news for us is Jesus Christ, the means of grace, and the hope of glory.   

The lectionary readings of pre-Advent and Advent, like those of Lent, are for our learning, as Thomas Cranmer’s four hundred year old collect prays, “Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.”  AMEN. 

                                                                                    The Rev. Richard H. Downes

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