I forgot to start recording until after I'd read the verses from Zephaniah! Podcast Garden has become so unreliable I am experimenting with uploading the audio from Google Drive. Bear with me if it doesn't work!
"Rejoice in the Lord always;" says St Paul, "Again I
will say, Rejoice."
And Zephaniah knew something
about rejoicing, too.
It was our first reading:
"Sing
aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult
with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!"
I
don't think I know very much about Zephaniah, do you?
He's not
one of the prophets we usually read.
Apparently, though, nobody
knows anything more about him than what he writes about himself.
He
was a great-great-grandson of a king called Hezekiah –
and
Hezekiah was the last so-called “good” king of Judah for several
generations.
But when Zephaniah was prophesying and preaching,
his cousin Josiah was on the throne, and Josiah was another
good king.
This is one of my favourite stories in the
Bible, actually!
You see, Josiah's father Amon and his
grandfather Manasseh had preferred to worship Baal, rather than God.
This is not too surprising, actually, because the next-door
kingdom, Israel, had been taken over by Assyria,
and although
Judah was nominally free,
in practice it was a vassal of the
Assyrians,
so it made sense to worship the same gods that the
Assyrians did.
What's more, those gods were a lot easier
to worship than the Jewish God was.
They didn't ask you to
behave in special ways.
You could influence them.
If you
said the right words and did the right actions at the right time,
they would make the harvest happen, that sort of thing.
And
they didn't really mind who else you worshipped, or how you behaved,
or what your thought.
It was much easier to worship
them.
Josiah, however, probably prompted by his cousin
Zephaniah,
decided that he was going to worship the Jewish God.
And in 621 BC, when Josiah was about 26, the King of Assyria
died, and was succeeded by a much weaker person who didn't mind much
about what the people of Judah did.
Josiah had already cleared
out altars to other gods from the Temple, but apart from that, he
hadn't dared do much more.
Now, however, he reckoned he could
risk cleaning it up a bit.
So he sent his secretary, a man
called Shaphan ben-Azalia, to go and ask the High Priest how much
money they'd had in the collection lately, and to tell him to give it
to the builders to repair the place and make it look smart
again.
You are going through a lot more than just
renovations, at Lambeth Mission, but I am sure you can empathise a
bit with the High Priest here!
The High Priest was a man
called Hilkiah.
While he was looking in the storeroom for the
money,
he found a book about God's law.
And he decided to
show it to the king.
We don't know whether Hilkiah had known
the book was there and decided that now would be a good moment to
show it to Josiah,
or whether it was a shock to him,
too.
Scholars think that this book was at least part, if
not all, of what we now know as the book of Deuteronomy.
They
reckon it was written down during the reign of Josiah's grandfather
and hidden away safely.
Up until then the priests had basically
kept their knowledge of God's law in their heads, and it hadn't
really been written down,
but this was a time of both
persecution and indifference, and they were afraid that the time
might come when there was no priest in the Temple,
and the
people's knowledge of God might be lost.
As it was, a
great deal had been lost, and the result of the discovery of the book
was a great religious reform.
And it's in this context,
scholars think, that Zephaniah was preaching.
It's actually
thought that his book may not have been written down until a couple
of hundred years later, because of the style of the writing and so
on, but it seems to be based on contemporary happenings.
So it
was probably written before about 622 BC,
and is definitely set
in Jerusalem.
Most of the book is rather doom and gloomy.
Again, remember that this is being written in a time when most
people aren't bothering to worship God,
and even those who want
to aren't really sure how God is different from the neighbouring
gods.
So there's a lot of prophecy about gloom and destruction
and the usual sort of stuff you expect to read in the minor prophets,
but after two and a half chapters of that, we suddenly get this
glorious piece that formed our reading today.
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.
So, you see, it's not just we who rejoice,
but God rejoices, too.
That's a great comfort, I think.
We
are called to rejoice in God –
there are, apparently, over 800
verses telling us to rejoice and be glad,
so I rather think God
means it.
And with God, if he wants us to do something, he
enables us to do it.
We sometimes find it very difficult to
rejoice, to be joyful.
But joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit
–
it's not something we have to manufacture for ourselves.
Joy
is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.
And this means that it isn't
something we have to find within ourselves.
It is something that
grows within us as we go on with God and as we allow God the Holy
Spirit to fill us more and more.
Joy grows, just as love, peace,
patience, gentleness, goodness, kindness and self-control do.
We
become more and more the people we were created to be, more and more
the people God knows we can be.
That doesn't mean we'll
never be unhappy, far from it.
It doesn’t mean we will never
grieve.
It doesn’t mean we’ll never suffer from depression
or other mental illnesses.
It doesn’t mean we’ll always be
in perfect mental or physical health.
But we know, as St Paul
also tells us, that God works all things together for good for those
that love him.
Even the bad things, even the dreadful things
that break God's heart even more than they break ours.
Even
those.
We may be unhappy, we may be grieving, we may be
poorly, we may be depressed.
But we can still be joyful, we can
still rejoice,
because God is still God, and God still loves
us.
Okay, sometimes it doesn't feel like that, but that's only
what it feels like,
not what has really happened.
God will
never abandon us, God will always love us.
God will weep with us
when we weep.
And underneath there always is that joy, the joy
of our salvation.
Christmas can be a very difficult time
of year for many of us.
People who are alone, people who are
ill, people who have been bereaved. Many rocky marriages finally come
adrift at Christmas.
Last year was particularly difficult, when
plans, however tentative, had to be cancelled at the last moment,
and I expect many people are jittery in case the same thing
happens this year, although it seems less likely.
But we are
still commanded to rejoice!
Not because of the tragedies, no
way.
But in spite of them.
"Do not worry about
anything,
but in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God.
And
the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will
guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
For
John the Baptist, preparing for the coming of the Messiah meant,
among other things, turning away from the old, wasteful ways and
starting again. Sharing our surplus with those who haven't
enough.
Tax-gatherers and soldiers are told to be satisfied with
their wages, and not to extort extra from people who can ill-afford
it.
John got very frustrated when people just wanted to
hear him preach and laugh at him, rather than allowing their lives to
be turned around.
There hadn't been a proper Old Testament-type
prophet for a very long time, and naturally people flocked to hear
him,
but they didn't want to deal with what he was actually
saying.
But enough people did hear him to begin to make a
difference in the world.
And they were ready when Jesus
came.
We are going to be celebrating the coming of Jesus,
of course we are.
If we are allowed, we may attend parties or
family celebrations.
We're probably also going to eat and drink
more than usual,
and give one another presents, and watch
appallingly ghastly television,
and that can be quite fun, too,
for a couple of days.
So we will rejoice, but we will be
sensitive to those for whom it's almost impossible to rejoice at this
time of year.
We will remember that the Israelites had to go
through terrible times,
and their nation was all but destroyed.
Paul himself suffered dreadful things – scourgings, imprisonment,
shipwrecks, beatings....
But we can still remember, as we
await the coming of the King, that:
"he will rejoice over
you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will
exult over you with loud singing."
"And the
peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will guard
your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
Amen.
