{"id":11745,"date":"2021-02-07T19:48:50","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T19:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theologie.whp.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/?p=11745"},"modified":"2023-03-11T08:40:17","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T07:40:17","slug":"zephaniah-314-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/zephaniah-314-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Zephaniah 3:14-20"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Advent 3 \u2013 December 17, 2006<\/strong>
\n\u201cThe Days Are Surely Coming\u2026When I Will Bring You Home, Singing\u201d<\/strong>
\nA Sermon Based on Zephaniah 3:14-20 By Liv Larson Andrews<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

14 Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
\nRejoice and exult with all your heart,
\nO daughter Jerusalem!
\n15 The Lord has taken away the judgments against you,
\nhe has turned away your enemies.
\nThe king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;
\nyou shall fear disaster no more.
\n16 On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
\nDo not fear, o Zion;
\ndo not let your hands grow weak.
\n17 The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
\na warrior who gives victory;
\nhe will rejoice over you with gladness,
\nhe will renew you in his love;
\nhe will exult over you with loud singing
\n18 as on a day of festival.
\nI will remove disaster from you,
\nso that you will not bear reproach for it.
\n19 I will deal with all your oppressors at that time.
\nAnd I will save the lame and gather the outcast,
\nand I will change their shame into praise
\nand renown in all the earth.
\n20 At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you;
\nFor I will make you renowned and praised
\namong all the peoples of the earth,
\nwhen I restore your fortunes before your eyes,
\nsays the Lord.
\n<\/em> Zephaniah 3:14-20<\/p>\n

The Days Are Surely Coming <\/strong><\/p>\n

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: \u201cMay God bring you home rejoicing once again into our doors.\u201d In this last week of Advent, as Christmas\u2014and Christmas vacation\u2014fast 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 <\/em>rejoicing, as in with song, I confess I\u2019m always a bit conflicted this time of year. I love the beautifully haunting chords \u201cO Come, O Come Emmanuel,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But the prophet Zephaniah still exhorts us: \u201cSing, O Daughter Israel!\u201d 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\u2019s glorious works. Paul commands the Phillipians to \u201crejoice in the Lord always.\u201d Last week\u2019s 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\u2019s no mystery why one of the themes of Advent is joy. Joyful expectation is a consistent refrain among God\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

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\u2014not singing\u2014for 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\u2014Isaiah, 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 \u201cthe days are surely coming\u2026\u201d And what normally follows is pretty ominous\u2014judgment for a faithless people, condemnation for wayward leaders. It\u2019s 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: \u201cprepare the way of the Lord.\u201d Such prophecies are meant to bring judgment against God\u2019s people, but not a judgment that is void of promise and hope.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cday of the Lord\u201d prophecies. We hear the part of the song that describes what comes after<\/em> 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\u2026\u201cthe days are surely coming when\u201d\u2026<\/em>I will bring you home. Zephaniah leaves us with good reasons to rejoice.<\/p>\n

When I Will Bring You Home, Singing
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019ll 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\u2014an improved diagnosis, cancer that\u2019s in remission, the birth of a healthy child\u2014I hear cries of anguish and dirges of weeping. At times, John\u2019s image of humanity as chaff being tossed into a fire rings all too true.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s care for both of their daughters, and that this daughter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will gather you together; I will bring you home.\u201d Here in the hospital, when a person tells me, \u201cI\u2019m going home,\u201d the patient isn\u2019t talking about getting discharged from the unit. It is usually a signal that a person is preparing for death. \u201cI\u2019m going home\u201d means \u201cI\u2019m ready, I\u2019m letting go.\u201d 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 un<\/em>expected death, a death that made no sense, that came too early and brought tremendous pain.<\/p>\n

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\u2014how long, O Lord?<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

And I Will Sing to You<\/strong><\/p>\n

The promise and the hope in Zephaniah\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201crenews us in love,\u201d when God banishes violence and oppression, and, the prophet writes, \u201cHe will exult over you with loud singing, as on a day of festival.\u201d In Zephaniah\u2019s vision of the kingdom, we sing to God, and God sings back<\/em>. We will sing with the joy of being in God\u2019s presence, and God will sing right back to us.<\/p>\n

Last week we heard the prophet Jeremiah say, \u201cthe days are surely coming.\u201d Next Sunday, on Christmas Eve, we will hear the words of Luke: \u201cin those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.\u201d 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\u2019s voice<\/em> singing back to us. \u201cCome, O Come Immanuel\u201d\u2014God is with us, in the wilderness, in death and despair, even in the grocery store. And may God bring us home, rejoicing.<\/p>\n

\n

Liv Larson Andrews
\nliv_larson@hotmail.com<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Advent 3 \u2013 December 17, 2006 \u201cThe Days Are Surely Coming\u2026When I Will Bring You Home, Singing\u201d A Sermon Based on Zephaniah 3:14-20 By Liv Larson Andrews 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16794,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616,32,2,727,157,853,108,110,1401,349,1400,109],"tags":[],"beitragende":[],"predigtform":[],"predigtreihe":[],"bibelstelle":[],"class_list":["post-11745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-3-advent","category-zenfanja","category-at","category-archiv","category-beitragende","category-bibel","category-current","category-engl","category-kapitel-03-chapter-03-zenfanja","category-kasus","category-liv-larson-andrews","category-predigten"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17516,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745\/revisions\/17516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11745"},{"taxonomy":"beitragende","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/beitragende?post=11745"},{"taxonomy":"predigtform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtform?post=11745"},{"taxonomy":"predigtreihe","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtreihe?post=11745"},{"taxonomy":"bibelstelle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bibelstelle?post=11745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}