Behold: Hope

Zephaniah 3:14-20

Luke 3:7-18

Advent 3 Year C

December 16, 2012

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

and Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

* Note:  This sermon was preached on the Sunday following the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, CT.  

            Earnest Hemingway wrote at the end of A Farewell to Arms, “the world breaks everyone.”

            The world breaks everyone.

            I love Hemingway, but at times he can seem to be a bit of a prophet of doom perhaps overstating the case just a bit.

            Still, those words do, from time to time, ring painfully true.  The world can be a cruel and even despairing place. 

            I imagine that this is especially true for a woman who woke up today still trying to come to grips with the reality that her grandson killed her daughter, took the lives of 20 grade school children and six educators before taking his own life.  If a life has a breaking point, that would certainly fit the bill.

            As I struggled to find the words to preach this morning, I found myself being drawn to one question.  Was I her pastor, what would I say this morning?  What could I say?  What word is there that might help let in even the smallest sliver of light into what must be a nearly overwhelming dark night of the soul?

            In truth, any words this morning are going to come with some measure of danger.  Few issues are as divisive and passionate in our culture than gun control and gun violence. 

            My theology professor in seminary is fond of saying that there is no theology without risk.  This morning I propose to take a risk with you and attempt to make some theological sense of this moment in the wake of the events not only in Connecticut but in every part of the world where the children of God are smothered and broken by the weight of a culture of violence, hate and despair. 

            Let me say here that this is not a gun sermon.  That is not because I am opposed to preaching about gun violence or the gun culture.  You know I am not.  As you have heard me say before, I truly believe that the church has an obligation to speak without ceasing against a culture that values the right to own a gun over a child’s right to be safe from one.  I believe that with all my heart and my soul and I do count it as a conviction of my faith. 

But that is not the word that a mourning grandmother and mother needs to hear.  And I am not sure it is the only word to say today.  So this is not a sermon railing against guns, it is instead a sermon seeking to say a word in favor of hope.

Hope is an increasingly rare commodity in our culture.  We have, as a culture, nearly accepted Hemingway’s despair as the defining last word of our life together.

The world breaks everyone. 

That, much of the world says, is the final word.

The prophet Zephaniah has a somewhat different word to speak to us this morning.  Now to truly understand the weight of what the prophet says, it is important to understand his context.  Zephaniah is an advisor to Josiah, the king in Jerusalem.  With each passing day, the world both within the city and without is trying to break the children of God.  Religious and civil unrest in the city is compounded by widespread political chaos across Asia Minor.  It is still a few decades before Jerusalem would fall to the Babylonians, but the pressure is already building. 

If there was ever a cultural moment for a prophecy of doom, this is it.  But Zephaniah is no prophet of doom.   In fact, among the prophets, he is one of the most hopeful.  In the midst of the pressure of the world, that pressure seeking to break everyone, he writes, “Rejoice, Daughter Zion!...The LORD, the king of Israel, is in your midst; he has turned away your enemy.”  God, he says, is right there in the midst of the brokenness; right there at the heart of the community’s common life.

Paired with the prophet’s words this morning is the continuation of the story of John the Baptist.  John’s was not a world wholly unlike Zephaniah’s. 

By John’s time Jerusalem was living under the burden of Roman rule.  They might not have been exiled from the land, but this place with these occupiers did not feel like home.  An earthquake had shaken the city just years before, its evidence and aftermath still all around them.  The circumstance of the world was continuing to exert pressure on the people; pressure that could all too easily lead to brokenness and despair.

Standing down at the river preparing to baptize the crowds that had gathered, John answers their questions about what they can do to help prepare the way of the Lord.  “If you have two shirts, give one away,” he says. “Do your work, but be fair.”  “Don’t cheat or harass anyone.”  In other words, just go about your lives, but do it with compassion, fairness and honesty.  That is how you prepare the way of the Lord. 

God is coming right into the middle of everyday life. 

In both Zephaniah’s and John’s words, a common promise is made; God with us. 

God with us.

That is the promise of the scriptures and that is the promise of this Advent season; that God, unwilling to cast aside God’s creation, dwells in our midst.

Ours is God with us.

Hearing what some people who purport to speak for the whole of the Christian world have to say in the wake of the shootings in Connecticut and those at a mall in Oregon or a movie theatre in Colorado, I find myself wondering if they ever read the texts for this morning.

Preacher after preacher, pundit after pundit have made the careless and dubious claim that what happened Friday was the result of prayer being taken out of schools; that the reason for so much gun violence in this country is because we have somehow banned God from our lives; that God is using this tragedy to teach us a lesson. 

They say that God has abandoned us.

They claim that if the world breaks us, we have no one to blame but ourselves and God is not going to lift a finger or cry a tear.

Not to put too fine a theological point on it, but that sort of theology is a load of buffalo bagels!

These false prophets, these preachers of a theology of abandonment do nothing but contribute to the myth of meaningless and hopelessness that says, “the world breaks everyone.”  They perpetuate the illusion that the God who stayed Abraham’s hand; the God who created us from the dust of the earth; the God who comes as the Prince of Peace is a god of blood-lust and vengeance rather than a god of self-sacrifice and hope.

The God we know from our readings this morning; the God we celebrate this Advent season; the God witnessed to from “In the beginning” in Genesis to “Amen” in Revelation is not a God who withdraws from us forever because of our misdeeds but the God who draws ever nearer to us in spite of them.

This one truth that God draws ever nearer to us is the foundation for our hope.  If there is a consequence of our drawing away from God, it is not the loss of God’s love and care but the loss of hope found, as the hymn says, nearer to the heart of God.

Ours may not be a nation under siege like Zephaniah’s or a nation under dictatorial rule like John’s, but ours is a nation and a world in deep need of a message of hope.  We need that word today in our world.  We need to hear HOPE shouted from every point and place on earth. 

We need that message.

But who will deliver it?  Who will be the prophet of the hope of God today?  Who will be our Zephaniah or our John proclaiming the day of the Lord and calling on the world to make clear the way of the Prince of Peace?

Who delivers the word of hope today?  We do.  Or at least we should.

When we share in the meal at this table, we say in the prayer, “as this bread is Christ’s body for us, send us out to be the body of Christ in the world.”

The church is the body of Christ in the world and just as Christ would not be silent in the face of a world gone mad, the body of Christ must not be silent.

It is we who are called to proclaim the hope and the love of God against the despair of the world and even against the false teachers from within the church who would proclaim that God has abandoned God’s children. 

This is the season of Emmanuel, God with us, and we must proclaim him and the hope that though the world may try to break us, we are forever made whole in Christ Jesus who lived for us, died for us, rose again in glory for us and reigns today for us.

We may never know what led that young man to commit such unspeakable acts.  We may never know what within him gave way to such despair and anger.  What we can know and do know is that despair and anger do not get the last word.  The last word belongs to God and God with us has spoken loudly, clearly and finally.

Hope.

In the midst of the crushing reality of the world, hope finds a home.

Hope is the final word of God even in this world that tries to break us.

As we continue our journey through this season of preparation, it is my prayer that we will all keep our hearts and our spirits fixed on the expectation of God’s promised tomorrows even as we cope with the realities of our yesterdays. 

May expectation of great joy fill each of our hearts and our entire world with the hope of Jesus Christ.

Come, Lord Jesus.  Amen.