William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar
Redemption is Near
2 December 2018; 8 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland, Oregon
The
Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Advent 1 C
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
I
once had a friend, who, when faced with a horrible disaster and nightmarish
death in the family, told me, “How can I have faith in God? God did not deliver on any of those promises
of protecting us and caring for us. We
tried to follow God’s will, and all we got was this. No more faith, no more hope. Please, don’t talk to me about God.”
It
is hard when you face the unimaginable, when the God you trust seems to abandon
you. Loss of faith can come suddenly,
like for my friend, or gradually, over years of being worn down by seeing one’s
hopes wither and one’s heart broken.
Sometimes,
hope and faith gradually return; They did
for my friend. Sometimes, we remain
emotionally dead. This is the way God
made us: flight or fight in danger and
trauma, hunkering down to duck from further missiles of fate.
Yet
in all this, God entices us, and invites us into a loving, trusting
relationship.
How
do we respond to disappointment, to a sense of being betrayed by God?
In
587 BCE, a great catastrophe befell the people of the tiny kingdom of
Judah. The great empire Babylon, after a decade of dealing patiently, in
their lights, with the fanatic and ultra-nationalistic people of Judah, came
down hard. After killing all insurgent combatants and activists, they deported
the entire ruling class of the nation to
secure and safe provinces in Mesopotamia far from where they could stir up
opposition, and where they were expected to blend in, accommodate, intermarry,
and disappear. The Babylonians deposed and blinded the puppet king they had put
on the throne of Judah only ten years before, a minor prince of the House of
David whose name, Zedekiah, meant “Yahweh is Zedek,” that is, “righteous,
upright, the one who makes things as they ought to be.” They burned Jerusalem, and leveled to its
foundation the Temple of the Jews’ God. The House of David no longer
ruled. The nation no longer existed. It
had gone the way of the Northern Kingdom, Israel, destroyed by the Assyrians a
century and a half before.
This
was a disaster of overwhelming and unfathomable proportions. The people had
believed that Yahweh had promised to protect and keep them from harm. He
had promised, they thought, to preserve the line of the kings descended from
David. Now all that was gone.
The
prophet Jeremiah had warned of catastrophe for years. But as it broke over his people’s heads, he reassured
them that hope remained. Playing on the
various meanings of the word Zedek in the name of the last Davidic king, in
chapter 23 Jeremiah prophesies, “The days are surely coming, says Yahweh, when
I shall raise up a true (ZDK) Branch for David, and he shall reign as king and
deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness (ZDK) in the land. In his days Judah shall be delivered and
Israel shall dwell secure. And this is
the name by which he shall be called, Yawheh-zedekenu, ‘Yahweh is our Vindicator
(ZDK).’” This king won’t be overthrown like Zedekiah,
“Yahweh is Upright.” When Yahweh’s
trustworthiness is our own, he says, righteousness and vindication will come to
us. Dour Jeremiah says here that Yahweh’s promise to the House of David will someday
come true, and even long-lost Israel will be restored along with Judah. Yahweh may be upright, as the name Zedekiah
declared, but as the fate of this king showed, in crisis this may not seem to
matter. But Yahweh will, at long last,
vindicate us, as the name of the ideal king of the future declares: Yahweh-Zedekenu.
Many
of the prophecies we read during Advent about a coming ideal king of the future
are reactions to this catastrophe: the hope was that the Jews would return to
Palestine and bring with them a new Davidic hero to restore their former
glories. But even as the mass of exiles
did return some fifty years later, it was clear that the Davidic crown was gone: No kings in the offing, just scribes and
priests like Ezra and Nehemiah. This was
yet another defeat of hope and trust. It was at this time that a later prophet,
writing under Jeremiah’s name and in his tradition, repeated the earlier oracle
about the future Righteous Branch, thus affirming hope against hope once
more. It is today’s Hebrew Scripture
lesson.
Note
how this version changes and adapts the earlier one. The prophet starts by adding the words, “The
days are surely coming, says Yahweh, when I will fulfill the promise I made to
the House of Israel and the House of Judah.” Then, “In those days and at that
time, I will cause a Righteous Branch to spring up for David: and he shall
execute justice and righteousness in the land.”
He thus puts hope again into the future, and says we mustn’t lose faith
because our hopes for the moment are disappointed. He adds, “In those days, Judah will be saved
and Jerusalem will live in safety.” And then rather than giving the name of the
upcoming king as Jeremiah had done, this later prophet says, “and this is the
name by which it [Jerusalem] shall be called, ‘Yahweh is our Righteousness.’”
(33:114-16). Maybe hope can be fulfilled even without the Davidic King.
Today is the First Sunday of the
Christian Year, First Advent. Today’s
Collect from the Prayer Book is a summing prayer for all of Advent, to be said
each day in daily prayers throughout the season. It is based on the closing section of Romans. Paul counsels us to be good, to amend our
lives: “The hour has come for you to wake up from your sleep, because our
salvation is nearer now than when we first came to faith. The night is nearly
over; day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on
the armor of light” (Romans 13:8-9).
This idea—that salvation is nearer
today than it was yesterday, and the we need to wake up and put on God in
preparation—is present in all of today’s readings.
The Gospel is part of Luke’s version
of the little Apocalypse found in Mark 14 and Matthew 25. Jesus here says that scary things will
precede the final salvation: “People will faint from fear and foreboding.” Hopes
will be dashed and hearts broken. But,
he says, “when these things begin to happen, stand up and raise your heads,
because your redemption is drawing near.”
He adds, in the words of Eugene Petersen’s The Message that seem particularly a propos for us in Advent
preparing for Christmas: “But be on your
guard. Don’t let the sharp edge of your expectation get dulled by parties and
drinking and shopping. Otherwise, that Day is going to take you by complete
surprise….”
Human beings have been dealing with
horror and dashed hopes from the beginning.
The prophets teach us to hope on, regardless. The promises to David fail; Jeremiah says
they will still be fulfilled. This hope
fails, and Jeremiah’s student says it still will be fulfilled. Prophecy inspires hope, and hope inspires
further prophecy. Help is on its
way. All will be well in the end, and if
they are not well, it is not yet the end.
Christians, after the death and
resurrection of Jesus, realized that this promised ideal king of the future,
this Messiah, was in fact the Galilean rabbi they had followed. They saw in Jesus the embodiment of all hope,
the fulfillment of all the promises. So
when Paul says we should put on Christ as an armor of light, he means the best
preparation for the suffering in store, as well as the joy at the end, is thinking
about Jesus, following Jesus, trying to show the love of Jesus, praying to
Jesus and in Jesus’ name. All this puts
us in a place where God can give us what we need, can protect us like armor,
can light for us the darkness all about.
He does not mean that Jesus is some kind of talisman or amulet that
magically turns aside tribulation or sorrow.
God is not a magician or some kind of wacky great uncle to grant us our
wishes. Rather, opening our hearts and
our minds to Jesus makes sense of what appears to be our meaningless
suffering. And there is no suffering
where God cannot help us in some way. Jesus
suffered injustice, abuse, and terrible, painful death. But God raised him from the dead in
glory. If we share in human suffering
with Jesus on our lips and in our hearts, we share in Jesus’ pains, and this
means we will share in his joyful glory.
Prayer, reading scripture, thinking
on Jesus, and loving service are what we can do to prepare for the trials and
pain of life, as well as for life’s joyful culmination. It is putting on the armor of light that the
Advent Collect talks about. And what gives it all sense is this: our
redemption is near, and help is on the way.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment