Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Live now in utter delight, O Jerusalem, living in complete happiness and satisfaction; for God has removed all your lawless deeds and of necessity has rescued you from the power of the foe, to whom you were subjected in paying the penalty of punishment. The Lord will now be in your midst, showing his kingship by his care for you, so that trouble will no longer be able to approach you.

Thus wrote Theodore of Mopsuestia in his early fifth century commentary on the passage from Zephaniah we heard a few minutes ago. I’ve been interested in this early biblical scholar for many years, perhaps because we in seminary we habitually referred to him by a sobriquet which he certainly would have rejected–Teddy the Mop. In all seriousness, Theodore of Mopsuestia is one of those figures from the patristic era, like Origen of Alexandria, whom it is difficult to classify as either clearly Orthodox (like, say, Augustine or Gregory the Great) or clearly heretical (like Arius and Nestorius and the rest). So, relying on old Teddy the Mop for insight into our Old Testament lesson feels a bit transgressive.

That said, I couldn’t help myself, because of one word in that brief passage with which I began this sermon–necessity. Theodore writes that it was of necessity that God rescue his people from the power of their foe. The Greek word here is αναγκη, which implies what in philosophy we call logical entailment. Simply put, he is not writing here about God’s people (whether they be Jews or Christians) being in need, but rather that God’s very nature means that he needed to help them. This seems at first blush to imply something we may think is theologically out of bounds–namely, that God is subject to a power beyond himself (in this case, the very concept of logical consistency), that his hand is somehow forced. This brings up all sorts of concerns, from Plato’s famous “Euthyphro Dilemma”–is something good because the gods demand it or do the gods demand it because it’s good–to more popular paradoxes–could God create a rock so big that even he couldn’t lift it? We might be tempted to say that Theodore of Mopsuestia was a step away from heresy already, so just ignore it, but I think that would be too easy. We have here a potentially important insight into God’s saving activity, so let’s tarry just a moment, pondering the mystery.

What I think the Platonic view of divinity and even the pop-philosophy “God with a big rock” view miss is that they begin with an assumption that God is fundamentally a philosophical concept rather than a person. This is not to say that there is no place in Christian theology for understanding God in these terms. The classical “attributes of God” (omnipotence, immutability, simplicity, and so forth) can be helpful guard-rails, keeping us from creating a god in our own image, which would be precisely the sort of idolatry against which Zephaniah himself contended. Even so, if that’s all we have, then God is merely “the ground of being” or “the ultimate concern.” That is to say that God is essentially a metaphysical concept. Now, perhaps you are capable of having a relationship with a concept, but I’m not. I can only have relationships with people.

The view everywhere and at all times held by both Christians and Jews is that God is, indeed, a person. And what is a person if not a moral agent, one with a will more or less in congruence with “the Good”? What distinguishes the agency of God from that of mortals (from ours) is that it and “the Good” are coterminous. In other words, God cannot but act in perfect righteousness and justice and mercy and love.

But is this placing a limit on God? I would contend that it is not. Rather it is simply the recognition that we can know some things about God’s personality–his personhood–because he has told us about himself. Don’t let any of my college professors know I said this, but revelation is prior to philosophical commitments, and the latter must be held more loosely than the former. Put another way, and at the risk of being charged with anti-intellectualism, Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Gottfried Leibniz and all the rest are great as far as they go, but all their insights must be judged against a Sunday School song–“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

So, to return at last to the Prophet Zephaniah and to Teddy the Mop: what we know, what we can found our hope upon, is that salvation and eternal life, the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to be a light to the nations, the justification of God’s ancient, chosen people and all we who have been grafted on like a wild olive shoot is a certainty. It is God’s very nature both to keep his promises and to provide even more. He cannot do otherwise. He cannot, we might say, make a rock so big that he can’t lift it and this, it turns out, is a feature rather than a bug of the logic of his metaphysical subsistence. His property is always to have mercy.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I think it’s easy for us not to appreciate how radical Luke’s depiction of John the Baptist is, how counterintuitive a prophet this seemingly crazy man in the desert would have been.

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”

This is an incredibly subversive way to begin the Christmas story. Perhaps if we translate this into contemporary terms, the point will be clearer… In the fourth year of Joe Biden’s presidency, when Mike DeWine was governor of Ohio, and Anne Jolly was Bishop of Ohio and John Drymon was Rector of Trinity, Findlay, the word of God came to a seemingly mentally deranged nobody out in a corn field in Putnam County.

You see, with John the Baptist, God’s message was not coming through the expected channels, through the institutions set up to be the agents of God (in the case of the high priests) or through those in positions of temporal power, such as the Emperor or the Governor. Rather, the message of God, the call to repentance, was coming from this strange figure, this apparent madman, John, to whom few of us, if we were honest with ourselves, would have probably listened.

Now, John the Baptist was subversive in a manner wholly different from the cultural subversion which we’ve come to see in our day and age. Whether we’re talking about radical religious traditionalists or militant atheists, about far right or far left political movements, about this team or that, the spirit of our age seems obsessed with labels dependent on a combination of personal autonomy above all else and a simplistic moral dichotomy between the goodies and the baddies, in which the former is anybody who agrees with me about everything and the latter are those who disagree with me about anything.

John the Baptist was not the personification of some Ancient Judean zeitgeist. He was not countercultural in a way to which our contemporary sensibilities would apply. He was not even anti-establishment in the same way that either the anti-Roman zealots or the pro-Roman collaborators of his own day were. He was much weirder even than that.

In Matthew’s account we read “the same John had his raiment of camels hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.” This was almost as strange a way to dress and eat in those days as it would be now. What’s more, John didn’t go to the temple or to one of the gates of Jerusalem to preach his message where it might be heard by those with some political or economic power. He remained in the desert.

This would have been reckoned very strange by the people of the first century, even the counter-cultural people of the time, who would have been used to self-proclaimed prophets. John was not like them, but those with any sense of history would have recognized that he fit the bill, as it were, a great deal more closely than these other so-called prophets.

It had been more than four-hundred years since a legitimate, canonical prophet had preached in Judea, but if one were to look back at those Old Testament prophets, one would notice the similarities between them and John. John’s message was not self-promoting, as were the sermons of first-century pseudo-prophets, who claimed a messianic identity for themselves. Rather, John, like the legitimate prophets of the Old Testament, pointed away from himself and always to another, namely Jesus, as the longed-for Messiah. Like so many of the Old Testament prophets, chiefly Amos, John arose from obscurity to take on the prophetic vocation. And his message, like those prophets of old was not “feel good.” His was a message of repentance and of apocalyptic expectation–preparation for the day of the Lord. This reminds one of the legitimate Old Testament prophets, particularly Elijah, the prophet with whom John was most readily identified.

We’ll hear more about John the Baptist next week, so I’ll leave it at that for now. But what can we learn from the little introduction to John which is this week’s Gospel? It seems to me that the most important lesson we get is that the Word of God comes to us from sources we might least expect. Certainly, we should be attentive to the normal modes in which we’ve come to experience that Word. We should be attentive to the Scriptures and to the teachings of Church Fathers and Councils and even (to a lesser extent) to trusted religious leaders in our own day. But sometimes, and maybe more than just sometimes if we’re paying attention, the grace and love of God is made even more apparent, presents itself even more tangibly, in unexpected ways from the people we least expect.

Of course, this must always be judged in the context of the deposit of faith–weighed against first Scripture, then Church tradition, and then our rational capacity as beings made in the image of God. We mustn’t fall prey to charlatans, to wolves in sheep’s clothing, or to use a Japanese idiom I just learned this week which makes more sense to me personally (since I deal with neither sheep nor wolves) a “neko o kaburu”, one whose put a cat on one’s head. Now that is a winsome image of one to whom I might be inappropriately drawn to trust and follow. So perhaps the corollary to applying scripture, tradition, and reason (in that order) is to beware the message which we want to hear when there is a harder lesson we need to hear.

So, keep watch. Open your eyes. Look for those signs of God’s message, which both calls us to repentance and promises the sort of Grace which is not, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, “cheap.” We hear over and over again, and especially in Advent, to be watchful. Baruch tells us “look toward the East”; the Prophet Isaiah is quoted in today’s Gospel as saying “all flesh shall see the salvation of God”; we hear in an ancient Latin hymn this morning “Lo [look, behold] the Lamb, so long expected, comes with pardon down from heaven.” Let us be watchful, though, not only for Christ at his return, but for the risen Christ in our midst, right now, being made present in ways and through people we do not expect. Pray that God may give you the eyes to see his messengers for what they are, and ask Him to give you faith in the message they preach, and that John the Baptist preached, and that each of us should be preaching: namely that great message of hope in our Lord’s return, for

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

These are not particularly cheerful words during a season in which the culture-at-large tells us that it’s time to start celebrating Christmas. I’d guess that most of you here have been more-or-less successfully catechized to know that there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, a distinction which the church continues to maintain despite the fact that it seems that Christmas in the secular culture seems to keep expanding to envelope about the last quarter of every year.

I must admit that I used to be rather rigid about keeping this distinction in my own personal practice, but I’ve loosened up significantly I have already watched three Christmas movies this year, before Advent even began–The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (which I mentioned in a sermon several weeks ago), the so bad it’s good Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Jingle All the Way, and the surprisingly actually pretty good Will Ferrell movie Elf. Not only have I grown more lax, but I’ve grown more sentimental, obviously. There’s nothing wrong with this, I’ve come to learn, but it does make observing Advent as a distinct season a bit trickier for me. It’s still worth acknowledging, though, that we’ve not made it to Christmas yet, and there’s some spiritual work to do over the next several weeks, even if it’s okay to cheat a bit.

All this is well-trod ground for us, but I think that sometimes we say there is a difference between Advent and Christmas, but we don’t quite acknowledge what precisely the distinction is, or, more to the point, what Advent is really all about. We sometimes say that it is to prepare us spiritually for Christmas, a sort of fast before the feast in the same way that Lent prepares us for Easter. This is true to a certain extent. Advent is a season of penitential expectation, which we reflect in the way in which our liturgy changes and becomes more penitential and traditional. But there is a whole other theme in Advent which we sometimes shy away from: namely the second coming of Christ.

It should be no surprise that we tend to forget this part of the story, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless. As I’ve said before, we in the Christian mainstream have basically ceded this topic to fundamentalists, and that’s too bad, because there is a great deal of hope to be found in scripture’s account of the second advent of Christ. It’s not just weird, scary stuff.

Remember that seemingly scary passage from the Gospel reading with which I opened the sermon: the nations are in perplexity, people are fainting with fear, the seas roar, and the heavens shake? Here’s what comes next.

And then they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

We get caught up in the nasty bits and we forget that the Gospel is Good News. We forget that it’s not about God inflicting turmoil on the world, but about God coming to us in the midst of turmoil and, through Jesus Christ, setting all things right.

What our Lord is on about in this morning’s Gospel is that when things seem to be absolutely as horrible as they can possibly be, God is there ready to step in and establish justice and peace, to bring about the Kingdom of God. Our Old Testament lesson from Jeremiah is about the same thing. Prior to the lesson we heard, Jeremiah speaks of the desolation of Israel and Judah, but it ends up in what we heard this morning- the fulfillment of the promise and justice and righteousness abounding in the land.

We do pray for this every week for heaven’s sake: thy kingdom come. We pray for it because it’s a good thing. Please permit me to take a liberty and just suggest that there are some things not worth worrying about (if I explained why in detail it would take longer than anybody here wants to listen to a sermon, and I have covered it in detail in other sermons): Don’t worry about some people getting raptured up and others left behind. Some very poor biblical scholars basically invented that idea. Don’t worry about the wrath of God coming down to give you your just deserts for minor infractions. This religion we’re a part of is about grace, not judgment. Don’t worry too much about the whole world going to hell in a handbasket. I don’t mean to say “don’t worry at all” or “don’t work to make it better.” That is certainly our call. Even so, scripture promises that just when things seem most bleak, God is near at hand. God will, at the end of days, come and make all things new.

So, that’s really the upshot, here. Don’t freak out. God is on our side. God will keep us safe. God will establish a kingdom without end. Watch for it and pray for it.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.