Christmas, Judgment, and Coming Home

"Christmas, Judgment and Coming Home"

Zephaniah 3:14-20 (from THE MESSAGE)
December 13, 2009

14-15So sing, Daughter Zion!
Raise the rafters, Israel!
Daughter Jerusalem,
be happy! celebrate!
God has reversed his judgments against you
and sent your enemies off chasing their tails.
From now on, God is Israel's king,
in charge at the center.
There's nothing to fear from evil
ever again!
16-17Jerusalem will be told:
"Don't be afraid.
Dear Zion,
don't despair.
Your God is present among you,
a strong Warrior there to save you.
Happy to have you back, he'll calm you with his love
and delight you with his songs.
18-20"The accumulated sorrows of your exile
will dissipate.
I, your God, will get rid of them for you.
You've carried those burdens long enough.
At the same time, I'll get rid of all those
who've made your life miserable.
I'll heal the maimed;
I'll bring home the homeless.
In the very countries where they were hated
they will be venerated.
On Judgment Day
I'll bring you back home—a great family gathering!
You'll be famous and honored
all over the world.
You'll see it with your own eyes—
all those painful partings turned into reunions!"
God's Promise.

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, and it has quickly come upon us—it is now less
than two weeks until Christmas Day, and I’m still stunned by how quickly Advent has
arrived, and how quickly this whole year has gone. I don’t know about you, but when I
was younger, when I was in my twenties, only some two or three years ago (!),
everything actually seemed slower, it seemed as if the days and years just eked along,
and nothing every came quickly—going through college, going through seminary,
getting through the ordination process, everything seemed to take forever, as if life was
in slow motion. Nowadays, it’s the opposite—everything seems to be on fast forward,
and I find myself wanting to push the slow-motion button on life, to slow it down because
it seems as if the years are going by way too quickly. I suspect the reason why
everything seemed so fast when I was younger was because I was so anxious to get
things, to get things over with, but now…I’m not so anxious, not so willing to hurry up
everything.

Of course, Advent is that time of hurrying up and waiting, waiting for what we know will
arrive in less than two weeks, Christmas Day, and it’s the church’s reminder to us that
our Savior looks like us, breathes like us, is born like us, and has parents like us. We
know the story, we know what happens on Christmas Day, but we are told to wait, to
wait for the day when what we know is coming will actually arrive. Douglas gets onto me
about not wanting to wait for Christmas Day to actually open presents that we both
know about—actually, we have an unwrapped Nintendo Wii under the Christmas tree,
and I am like, let’s just open it up now, and enjoy it now, but, for some unknown reason
(sigh), he feels we need to wait until Christmas Day until we open it—yeah, I get it, sort
of, like I sort of get Advent, but I guess I still haven’t quite been cured of wanting to
hurry it up, to get going, get on the road now, play the Wii now, be at the airport at least
two hours ahead of time, etc. Maybe that is why Advent exists—to remind people like
me that the waiting, the anticipation, is as much a part of the spiritual journey as
actually getting what you are waiting for, like waiting to play your Wii is as much a part
of the gift giving as actually being able to play it.

And that waiting, that anticipation, the hope found in knowing what is coming on
Christmas Day, is part of this passage before us today, this text from the prophet
Zephaniah. This man Zephaniah is not all that well known, and the details around his
life are a mystery, as they are for most of the prophets, but he seems to have been
active in the 7th century BCE, doing his thing, decrying the corrupt ways of the kings
and the priests and the temples, all of which lacked integrity, all of which seemed to
have been set up to favor the rich and powerful, the insiders, the people that had
forgotten about the powerless, the nobodies, the poor. Most of the three chapters are
simple judgment oracles, that is, they are messages of judgment against the powerful
and the prideful, for what they have done, and what they have left undone. The people
have been waiting, waiting for the day when God will set things right, when judgment will
finally be meted out, and someone, someone like the Lord of hosts, will vindicate them,
will take up their cause, will say to them, enough is enough, for I am with you, and my
anger with you is now over, and I will now take up the cause of those that no one,
especially the rich and powerful, stands up for. The waiting is over and whatever
lessons that were meant to be learned in the waiting period have been learned, and all
will be made right, especially for those who are poor and powerless, for those whom no
one gives a damn about.

And yet, in every generation, there are those that argue that prophets had it all wrong,
that if we side on those who are considered the losers in this world, we’ve actually got it
all mixed up, because, let’s face it, they say to us, the rich get richer, and the poor, the
poor just get poorer, and it’s an obvious truth that God prefers, not the poor and
marginalized, but the ones who’ve already got there, the rich and the powerful, people
like us—yes, us, because, compared to everyone else in this world, we are the rich and
powerful, at least materially we are rich. You see this idea in the prosperity Gospel
often espoused in churches, sometimes even in churches that mostly work with
upwardly mobile middle class, and you see it in the theology and ideology of informal
organizations like The Family, a informal network of political and wealthy men in this
country and throughout the world who believe that Jesus came not to side with poor of
this world, but stand with the rich and powerful, to show them how to use that power to
increase their wealth, their prestige, and then, at best, we, the nobodies of this world
would benefit from their power and riches—trickle down wealth and all that. The
investigative reporter Jeff Sharlet (The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism At The
Heart of American Power, 2008) has recently written about this group of Christians—
actually, they don’t call themselves Christians, because they feel that is a name for
those of us who form the bulk, the “ignorant” mass of Christianity, and they don’t want
to be associated with us—ironically most of them don’t actually go to church. In fact,
some of these people really are powerful—they are Senators and Representatives, and
they follow a man named Doug Coe who believes that Jesus didn’t come to come to be
good news to the maimed and the homeless, but actually came to be good news to the
most powerful, the most wealthy, the most blessed, so they say. Sure, they say, Jesus
said all those things about the poor, but that was mostly a cover for his real goal, which
was strengthen those in power, so that they could rule us rubes and extol the virtues of
unrestrained and unregulated capitalism. Jeff Sharlet does an amazing job in
documenting this religious group, whose power center is in Washington, and who host
the National Prayer Breakfast every year, and who have recently been tied to a
draconian bill in the country of Uganda, where the death penalty is being proposed for
homosexuals, and imprisonment for all those who do not turn in their homosexual
neighbors or who advocate for the rights of gay and lesbian Ugandans (http://www.npr.
org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=120746516 and http://www.npr.
org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106115324&ps=rs). It is an amazing perversion
of Christianity and Judaism, this idea that Jesus was simply doing a public relations spin
for the poor, speaking up for them publicly, but secretly being on the side of the rich
and powerful. The Family believe that only those in the inner circle know and
understand the real truth behind his teaching, and this secrecy, this idea that only the
inner core know the truth is why it is simply nothing more than another form of
Gnosticism, a belief that only those in the inner circle are privy to the “truth,” a belief
that the early church fought tooth and nail against, against this elitist understanding of
Jesus’ message.

But this is nothing new, and is something surely the prophet Zephaniah fought in his
day, this idea that it was obvious that God favored the rich and powerful, because, well,
they were rich and powerful, and surely God favors those whom so much seems to
have been given. And yet Zephaniah, like all the prophets, he absolutely rip apart this
belief, this ideology, and instead offer us a picture of a God who is as outraged by the
injustice in this world as we are, as most of us are, in this world. In Zephaniah, we are
told that there will be a day of the Lord, a judgment day, when God will set things right,
when God work out the kinks in the system, when God will bring home the maimed and
the homeless, the nobodies of this world. I admit that I have a lot of negative
perceptions around this whole idea of a judgment day, perhaps because of some those
early years I spent in conservative Christian settings. I’ve tended to be suspicious of
the idea, mostly because it seems that people are usually very sure that someone else
is going to get what’s coming to them, but never, never themselves, or worse, they live
in fear of that last day, they live in constant fear of God’s judgment on them. It seems
like a tool to control people, to terrorize them into doing what you want, to getting them
to follow your understanding of God’s rules, which often were nothing more than their
own personal prejudices deified.

But what if judgment day, or the day of the Lord, as it is named in the Jewish Scriptures,
what if that day is not a day of punishment, but a day in which all that was separated
comes back together again, a day in which we can see ourselves fully for who we are,
the good and the bad, when we can be truthful with ourselves about the shadow and
light within ourselves, both of which we often ignore in ourselves, or overemphasize one
over the other? What if judgment day was seeing it all, and then seeing fully how
accepted really were in God’s eyes, finally fully accepted by the God who has always
known us as we are, and has finally revealed to us what God sees in us? You know, I
think the reality is that on that Day of days, what we will see are parts of ourselves that
are more dark than we could have ever imagined, and yet we will also see in ourselves
spaces and places that are more beautiful than we could have ever believed.
Judgment Day, the day of the Lord, is all about revelation, it’s all about seeing
ourselves for who we really are, and seeing that we were probably never the saint we
thought we were, but neither were we the demon we sometimes believed our self to be.
And on that day, on that day, those two sides of ourselves will be brought together, and
the broken pieces of ourselves will be reunited.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Zephaniah imagines the Day of Judgment as being a
day of homecoming, a day that brings together, a day of reunion, with others, and with
the warring pieces of our hearts and souls, a day of forgiveness and accountability. It
is almost as if judgment day is a day of reconciliation, if the prophet here is to believed,
a day when parts of the world, and parts of our souls finally become one again, after
spending so much time being at war with one another. What is wrong in this world will
finally be made right, and what is wrong within us, will finally be made right—and,
conversely, what is good about us will also be recognized, as the prophet indicates
here in our text. The maimed and homeless, which were some of the worse things you
could be in ancient cultures, a less than physically perfect person, that person that was
forbidden to become a priest in the temple, because only perfection was seen as
worthy of serving God in the temple, but on that day, on that day of the Lord, all those
excluded ones, the ones with no home, literally or emotionally or spiritually, they finally
get to come home, and all those less than perfect ones—which really is all of us, right--
we we all finally get to go home as well. And home, home in this light is not a place, but
a state of being, where our hearts are finally fully at peace, and the pieces, the
fragments of our selves, are finally reunited, brought back together.

And yet, it’s a hard thing, this bring together, because we resist it, we’re not sure we
want it, and we fear that day, that day of the Lord, because, frankly, we’re not sure we
want to actually be put back together—after all, the devil we know is better than the
devil we don’t know. This reality came to me when I was in Chicago a few weeks ago,
browsing a used bookstore for books on religion—imagine that! This gentleman and I
were scrunched together looking at books in a corner of the bookstore, when another
man arrived in the religion section, asking for our help in that section. The other
gentlemen pointed out the neatly labeled sections on Christian theology, and then the
other sections on other religions, to which the newcomer then loudly proclaimed that all
that stuff was OK, but he and I and the rest of the universe had to believe in Jesus or
we were doomed for Sheol, a term you see being used in the psalms, and most
classically means the place of the dead, not hell, which is what this guy thought it
meant. The other gentleman said something to the effect, in a low voice that he was
already a Christian, but he quickly abandoned our little section of the bookstore,
shaking his head murmuring to himself as he quickly escaped to another part of the
store. Now, I was still there, quietly minding my own business in the Christian theology
section, but I have to admit that when he said all that stuff, being the contrarian I can
sometimes be, I was tempted to slide myself over to other religions section, especially
the pagan section, just to raise his eyebrows a bit, and make my own subtle objection
to his understanding of the Gospel. And, admittedly of course, it also allowed me to
feel a big smug and self-righteous about my own Christianity, which is a lot less narrow
than his, a bit more open than this stranger’s understanding of the Gospel, and maybe
I felt a bit superior to him, a bit like a member of The Family, part of the inner circle that
gets it, you know. Sure, I think what I believe about who God includes in this world is
right, is light, is true, but surely my smugness and self-righteousness about those
beliefs, is the shadow, the darkness within me. What judgment day means for me in
that moment, and for all of us on that great day, is that those sides that constantly
dance with each other, the light and dark within us, that struggle within each of us, they
will finally be reconciled, will be brought together, and only what is the best of us will
remain, smoothed away, as Zephaniah says, by the calming love of God.

In Advent, in Christmas, of course, we get a taste of Judgment Day, ironically enough,
because instead of getting an image of God that destroys us, and whose judgment is
something to be feared, we get an image of what judgment really looks like and who will
be dispensing this judgment. If you want to see who your judge will be on that day, I
invite you to come to the manger and look inside, and see who God has become for
us—and I know some of you may be a bit skeptical about this whole incarnation thing,
this whole God becoming us thing—I get that, though I have often argued that it is
probably the only reason I believe in the existence of God—but even if you are
skeptical about it all, it really does say something that in two of its Gospels the writers
went to a crib to get a first picture of who God is, and what God looks like. When
Christ is born amongst us, us ordinary human beings, full of the frailties of what it
means to be human—let’s face it, folks, there are few babies as truly vulnerable as
human babies—I think it really says something about the God we will face on that final
“getting up morning” to use an old African American description of that last day. On
another morning, thousands of years of ago, flesh and divinity are reconciled, are
made one, and so it will be with us later, on that last day, we will be made whole again,
and we will finally see ourselves wholly, completely, ourselves and our lives, and it will
be a good moment, a god moment, a reunion with others, and most importantly, it will
be a homecoming, finally, a coming together of all those fragmented, broken pieces of
ourselves that we and God have so lovingly held for so long in our hands. Amen and
amen.