14 Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
15 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.
16 On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Do not fear, o Zion;
do not let your hands grow weak.
17 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
18 as on a day of festival.
I will remove disaster from you,
so that you will not bear reproach for it.
19 I will deal with all your oppressors at that time.
And I will save the lame and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise
and renown in all the earth.
20 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.
Zephaniah 3:14-20
The Days Are Surely Coming
Today we hear in the words of the prophet Zephaniah that God is going to bring the people home, and with much rejoicing. There is a Celtic prayer I love that ends like this: “May God bring you home rejoicing once again into our doors.” In this last week of Advent, as Christmas—and Christmas vacation—fast approaches, many of us are thinking of children off at college or relatives from out of state who will be coming home, hopefully rejoicing, once again into our doors. When it comes to actually rejoicing, as in with song, I confess I’m always a bit conflicted this time of year. I love the beautifully haunting chords “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” an Advent hymn singing the arrival of God in our midst. What I have trouble abiding are the sickly sweet carols and parum-pa-pum-pums which inundate us on the radio and in grocery stores. I have a hard time imagining a stable-scene birth as charming and cuddly as many of the radio songs describe.
But the prophet Zephaniah still exhorts us: “Sing, O Daughter Israel!” In fact, singing and rejoicing are all over the texts of this Advent season. Isaiah exhorts the people to sing out in praise at Yahweh’s glorious works. Paul commands the Phillipians to “rejoice in the Lord always.” Last week’s gospel reading from Luke showed old man Zechariah bursting forth in song after being mute for months, praising the faithfulness of God in giving a son to him and barren Elizabeth. From these readings, it’s no mystery why one of the themes of Advent is joy. Joyful expectation is a consistent refrain among God’s people.
There is one voice striking a bit of a different tune this morning. John, the promised son of Zechariah and Elizabeth who brought them great joy in his arrival, now stands a the banks of the Jordan shouting—not singing—for the people to repent. His voice is haunting, not sweet, envisioning axes and unquenchable fires. Yet the voice with which John cries out in the wilderness is the same voice of the prophets of old—Isaiah, Jeremiah and even Zephaniah. They too called for repentance, for change, for renewal, even by fire and axe. Often their songs were not of joyful expectation but of grief and lament. A common refrain we hear in them is “the days are surely coming…” And what normally follows is pretty ominous—judgment for a faithless people, condemnation for wayward leaders. It’s a refrain that fits into a whole prophetic tradition: expecting and preparing for the Day of the Lord, a day of judgment. It echoes through John: “prepare the way of the Lord.” Such prophecies are meant to bring judgment against God’s people, but not a judgment that is void of promise and hope.
In these Advent weeks, our lectionary spares us the more haunting, judgment-centered tunes, and so we hear only the last few verses of these “day of the Lord” prophecies. We hear the part of the song that describes what comes after all the judgment, the strains of promise and hope. From Zephaniah we receive concrete images of hope and promise: I will save the lame and gather the outcast. I will change their shame into praise. And at that time…“the days are surely coming when”…I will bring you home. Zephaniah leaves us with good reasons to rejoice.
When I Will Bring You Home, Singing
But lest we occupy ourselves with only the joyful refrains, only the sweet songs, this Advent I am thankful for the voice of John, still crying out there in the wilderness. I work in a large hospital as a chaplain resident, and in January, I’ll begin a unit of work in the Neonatal-Pediatrics wing, a place where expectations, even joyful ones, often change their tune. Amidst many songs of rejoicing—an improved diagnosis, cancer that’s in remission, the birth of a healthy child—I hear cries of anguish and dirges of weeping. At times, John’s image of humanity as chaff being tossed into a fire rings all too true.
Recently, I met a young couple who became parents to twins girls. After much expectation, preparation and hope, the girls were born at 23 weeks, too early to be viable. The first daughter lived one full day, though her younger sister died soon after being born. When I was called, her parents were seeking to baptize the first daughter, who they knew would not continue to have a heartbeat much longer. We talked about God’s care for both of their daughters, and that this daughter’s baptism would be more of blessing on her journey home. I baptized her and we prayed for her. When she died, I wrapped her in a blanket and carried her back to her parents. We let all the aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins who had come to the hospital remain together with both daughters, holding their tiny frames, crying out to God, praying for God to care for them.
“I will gather you together; I will bring you home.” Here in the hospital, when a person tells me, “I’m going home,” the patient isn’t talking about getting discharged from the unit. It is usually a signal that a person is preparing for death. “I’m going home” means “I’m ready, I’m letting go.” That is often the cause for rejoicing. For those who have lived long and suffered much, death is almost a joyful expectation. The tiny twin girls, so vulnerable in their short lives, confronted me with an unexpected death, a death that made no sense, that came too early and brought tremendous pain.
Yet even amidst the anguish of this young couple and the grief of their family members, there is a sacredness in their cries, a holiness in their tears. They are joining in a chorus of anguish that includes the psalms and prophets—how long, O Lord? The story of our faith dares to include that haunting chorus, to stand in the terrible randomness of suffering and death. The parents of the twin girls, and all of us who face death, are not standing alone. In pain and loss, we join John the Baptist, standing on the banks of the Jordan, crying to God in the wilderness, praying for change, longing for renewed hope.
And I Will Sing to You
The promise and the hope in Zephaniah’s urge to sing is that we are not left with just the sickly sweet carols. The songbook of our holy scripture spans the breadth of praise and pain, haunting chords and joyous refrains. The radical promise made to us at the end of Zephaniah’s brief hymn is that our voices will not go unaccompanied. In verse 17, the prophet sees the day when God gathers us home, when God “renews us in love,” when God banishes violence and oppression, and, the prophet writes, “He will exult over you with loud singing, as on a day of festival.” In Zephaniah’s vision of the kingdom, we sing to God, and God sings back. We will sing with the joy of being in God’s presence, and God will sing right back to us.
Last week we heard the prophet Jeremiah say, “the days are surely coming.” Next Sunday, on Christmas Eve, we will hear the words of Luke: “in those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Certainly there is a sweetness to our faith story, a familiarity that comforts us. But there is also the haunting side of the story that confronts us: the young couple who wrapped their baby in bands of cloth were on the run from a king who wanted their child dead. John the Baptist did not escape the hand of that king, and the baby born to this young couple will also suffer death. The joy that Zephaniah and John the Baptist give to us is that the voice of wild prophets and the cries of a vulnerable baby are God’s voice singing back to us. “Come, O Come Immanuel”—God is with us, in the wilderness, in death and despair, even in the grocery store. And may God bring us home, rejoicing.
Liv Larson Andrews
liv_larson@hotmail.com