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Dec.
14, 2003 (Jimmie Johnson)
Zephaniah
3:14-20
Sing aloud, O daughter
Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O
daughter Jerusalem! The LORD has taken away the judgments against
you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the LORD,
is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. On that day it
shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your
hands grow weak. The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior
who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will
renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival. I will remove disaster from you, so that
you will not bear reproach for it. I will deal with all your oppressors
at that time. And I will save the lame and father the outcast, and
I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.
At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you;
for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of
the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes, says the
LORD.
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Luke 3:7-18
John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, "You
brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves,
'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from
these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is
lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not
bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." And
the crowds asked him, "What then should we do?" In reply
he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone
who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." Even
tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, "Teacher,
what should we do?" He said to them, "Collect no more
than the amount prescribed for you." Soldiers also asked him,
"And we, what should we do?" He said to them, "Do
no extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and
be satisfied with your wages." As the people were filled with
expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning
John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them
by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful
than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing
fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather
the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable
fire." So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the
good news to the people.
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The chief characteristic
of repentance is not guilt, but rather it is hope. Yes, we have
let the fundamentalists and the followers of spectacular Christianity
hijack a great word: “repentance.” We have let them
make us think repentance has to do with something like God “checking
his list, checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty
or nice.” Well, you get the idea. We have let non-thinking
believers convince us that repentance has to do with being bad and
self-loathing. Please! Repentance is not about our badness; it is
about the discovery of God’s goodness. Repentance is the process
of turning from hopelessness to joyfulness. Repentance is betting
the farm on the news that God is stunningly loving.
I know some biblical voices can be heard in certain texts, painting
Christianity as being driven by shame and anxiety. The believing
crowd has always had folks, some involved in the editorial process
of giving us the Scriptures in the current form, who think the good
news is too good and who need to clean God up a little and set God’s
standards a little higher. But that’s not the voice that carries
the day in Scripture, nor is that the main voice heard in the beliefs
of the church.
Above everything else, Christianity is about hope. It is not a shame-shaped
religion. It is a hope-shaped religion. And hope is what makes joy
more important than happiness. If there is one skill that adults
need to learn, it is to die well, and if there is one discipline
that parents need to make sure their children master, it is the
wisdom that knows the difference between happiness and joy. It is
our God-concept that will make us or break us when it comes to our
faith being shame shaped or hope shaped. If our faith in God is
shame based, the outcome is fear. However, if our faith in God is
hope based, then the outcome is joy.
Since traditionally the third Sunday of Advent is called Joy Sunday
and the prophet Zephaniah instructs God’s people to burst
into song and not be fear shaped and the reading from Luke tells
of John the Baptizer calling for God’s people to bear fruit
worthy of “repentance,” let’s look at the way
our concept of God creates either hope resulting in joy or shame
resulting in fear.
First, there are two inadequate beliefs that simply cannot lead
to hope and joy. The first is a kind of minimalist view of God which
sees God as not much more than the mind behind the cosmic order.
For this reason agnosticism as a faith stance holds no imaginative
creativity for me. The other inadequate belief for me is a kind
of minimalist view of Christ which sees Jesus as no more than an
inspiring teacher, pointing humanity to new possibilities for self-realization,
and his message simply living on in the minds of his followers much
like a great line from Shakespeare. Neither of these beliefs can
bear the weight of hope.
To sustain hope, we have to be able to speak of a God who is capable
and active and not simply a God who is holding creation in being
as if God were some form of holy Elmer’s Glue. Rather, we
have to be able to speak of a God who interacts with our world and
our history, a God who can give life to the dead and who calls into
existence the things that do not exist. (Rom. 4:17). We have to
be able to speak of a God who cares not only for the whole of creation
but of a God intoxicated by a loving concern for us as individuals
so that God’s power is improvisationally brought into play
for our everlasting good. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
is just such a God. The God of Christmas is such a God. It is belief
in this kind of God that results in hope-shaped faith with its joy.
Martin Luther supposedly said that if he knew the world would end
tomorrow, he would plant an apple tree today. This is hope-shaped
faith. Martin Luther believed above all else that God is a God of
love; therefore, his view of the end is shaped by his prior view
of God. Hope-shaped faith believes nothing of good will ever be
lost in the Lord. So, if the end of the world is coming tomorrow,
planting an apple tree is a good thing to do today since the goodness
of the act of planting a tree will not be lost.
John’s words about sharing clothing and helping the poor by
not using your power to oppress or extort is so spiritually helpful.
Look, while the Bible is filled with competing voices, they all
agree about one point. God always says helping the poor is the fruit
worthy of repentance. I promise you if you want to discover God
in your life, simply start giving money and time to helping the
poor. The good things you do for others count. Our striving for
the attainment of good within the course of present history is never
wasted but will bear everlasting peace.
Look, this is the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness
is about lining your own pockets; joy is about making sure others
have pockets. There are other differences as well. Happiness is
found or lost in the visible world and simply cannot exist in the
presence of suffering or deprivation. Scalding tears instantly evaporate
happiness. It cannot last. Happiness is human rather than holy.
But joy, being the gift of faith, can be found as a reliable companion
even in such moments of heartbreak and counter-witness. Joy reveals
itself not in places and lives or occasions we would expect but
exactly in the places and lives and moments where common religious
sentiment and superstition tell us that joy cannot be found--in
the lives of sinners, in the midst of death, and in the ordinary
passing of hours in a common life like yours and mine.
Joy comes whether we are deserving or not, and this is the chief
difference between happiness and joy. Happiness comes according
to our plans and efforts, according to our calendars and schedules,
according to our abilities, resources and schemes, but joy always
comes as a surprise because it comes from God’s Spirit. And
this is the only reason buildings like this one are built and maintained.
A church in the sense of a building is walls and a roof erected
on the proposition that these promises of Zephaniah, which speak
of the end of exile and singing breaking out in the midst of tears,
and John’s testimony about the coming One are all somehow
wildly and wonderfully true.
Look, there is no way in all honesty of belief that we can prove
with certainty the validity of what our gathering is about, and
the truth is that much of what we see and do to one another contradicts
the existence of Jesus as the way, truth, and life. Yet, at the
same time we cannot deny that in some strange way at this very moment,
even with no sure maps except the life of Jesus and his voice calling,
we feel the pull of this joy like a strange gravity field. When
our personal world is stripped of all our pretending, when happiness
ends and we can no longer hide from ourselves and from those we
love, precisely there when all seems lost, joy can be found at the
very place happiness flees.
Why is that? God! And the whole point of this sermon and every one
of my sermons is not just any old god but the God who reveals Godself
in the least likely—in the baby playing in the straw who becomes
the man of sorrow in order to overcome all that would defeat love.
Don’t you want to join me and others in turning around toward
this love? Repentance is not about your needing to feel guilty.
Repentance is about your personal invitation to wager on the ultimate
validity of joy.
Look, Advent-Christmas faith is trust in the goodness of the world.
We don’t hide from the fact that in our experience are many
indications that the world is a meaningless chamber of horrors and
that all human hopes end in an abyss of nothingness. But there are
also signals of another destiny, a destiny which invites hope in
the wonders of the universe and in the magnificent possibilities
we see every now and then among human beings.
So, “repentance” means to turn and wager, to roll the
dice, that God is like Jesus lived and said, and, therefore, we
bet on the goodness of the universe, and we bet annihilation is
not the ultimate fate of everything we hold dear in life, not if
the future coming toward us is Christ shaped. Let’s bet the
farm on it.
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