Readings: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Isaiah 12:2-6; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

The Book of the Prophet Zephaniah was written in the early part of the reign of King Josiah, between 635 and 625 BC. The name Zephaniah means “the Lord has hidden” or “defended by God” and it is thought he was related to an earlier king of Judah, Hezekiah. Most of the three chapters that make up this short book of the Bible are devoted to God’s judgement of human wickedness, but the compilers of the lectionary have taken pity and provided the short passage at the end of the book, which deals with final blessings, in which a remnant of the people of Israel remains humble and is saved.

So it is a book of warning: refrain from your wilful sinning, or else! In this sense, Zephaniah has a lot in common with the last of the prophets, John the Baptist, who also warned the social elite to refrain from their wickedness and hypocrisy. Both prophets were voices in the wilderness, calling for social justice and pure minds, a plea that was just as ignored then as it is today.

In Zephaniah’s time, the cult of other deities – false gods, idols – has developed in Jerusalem. He warns of God’s impending wrath, which will come with the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonian army fifty years later, in 586. This led to the Babylonian captivity, when large numbers of Judeans were forcibly relocated to Babylonia. This exile is later referenced in Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion”, memorably turned into a song by Boney M.

So the warning goes unheeded. The Book of Zephaniah is often regarded as a reversal of the creation story in Genesis, chapter 1. After the wonderful creation of God’s world, order is now to give way to disorder and destruction. This reminds me of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted. Entropy, the gradual decline into disorder, is inevitable.

I have observed this. After you start something new, there seems to be a period of grace, a honeymoon period, when everything goes swimmingly and the earth appears to be a paradise. But then little by little things start to go wrong, difficulties arise that need fixing, a noisy neighbour moves in upstairs, the car breaks down, someone falls sick. Sometimes the obstacles to a peaceful existence pile up and they can appear insurmountable. Life on earth may not seem so desirable, as the aches and pains increase. But this is clearly a stage of human existence and, as such, we must understand it.

Clearly we are meant to be tested. The people of Zephaniah’s time must have felt that order as they knew it was falling apart all around them, as idol worshippers proliferated, forming a tide that King Josiah was unable to hold back. They are not the only ones. Those who trod the path to Babylon, condemned to exile, must have felt that God had abandoned them, just as the monks of Lindisfarne in 793 AD must have been dismayed when the Viking raiders arrived in their ships to pillage and plunder and a reduced group of the faithful – the remnant of Israel – plodded around the kingdom of Northumbria with their precious cargo, the incorrupt body of St Cuthbert, until founding the city of Durham and building a church to house the relics more than two hundred years later. Exiles are not short.

And clearly we are not meant to view life on earth as our final destination. We will be forced to move on. The Durham-born author Benjamin Myers has a wonderful book called Cuddy, in which he puts himself in the minds of that retinue of faithful followers who accompanied Cuthbert’s body on its exile from Lindisfarne. He describes this pilgrimage, this forced march, as follows:

Walking and thinking

         praying and fasting;

         the endless act of

         facing yourself.[1]

So perhaps this is a time for home truths, for facing up to ourselves and stretching our limits, the limits of what we believe to be possible.

We seek heaven on earth. We are uncomfortable with the idea of discomfort. There is a wonderful collection of stories on the Church of England’s website at the moment, “Women of the Nativity” (cofe.io/WomenNativity), which focuses on the experiences of women such as Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and Mary. In the first story, Sarah grumbles and complains when she is forced to up sticks and leave her comfortable home in Ur, next to the Euphrates. In her experience, the Lord appearing to Abraham means nothing but disruption and dashed hopes. She talks about this God who keeps messing with her life. When Abraham’s younger brother dies, his father, Terah, announces that they are leaving. They trail across the desert for months and come to a place called Haran. When Terah himself dies, they continue to Canaan. Sarah talks about her laughter, which used to be spontaneous, but the older she gets, the more jaded it becomes. This is in stark contrast to the unfulfilled prophecies of Zephaniah – “Sing… shout aloud… Be glad and rejoice with all your heart” – a message that is repeated in Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always.”

How many of us do this? How many of us “shout aloud and sing for joy”, as it says in the Canticle from Isaiah? Very few. That is because we are in exile, we haven’t arrived yet.

And now we come to the nub of the matter. As Sarah bemoans her fate, Abraham turns to her (in the imagined version by Paula Gooder) and tells her to “have patience”, to “have faith”. We are in the season of Advent. This also is a time of anticipation, of looking forward to events that have yet to happen. In this sense, perhaps the meaning of Advent is the closest to that of the lives we lead. The singing and rejoicing that they all seem to talk about haven’t happened yet. We are still on the way.

So we have a stark choice, like a path that forks before us. We can choose trust or we can succumb to its opposite, fear. I suspect most people’s faith is a combination of these two things. We would not be human if we didn’t feel a certain trepidation, especially when events seem to be spinning out of control. Where is this rejoicing, this singing for joy?

John the Baptist provides part of the answer. In today’s passage from Luke, he places great emphasis on bearing fruit and I have noticed that even in harsh circumstances, when the sun is beating down or the tent has a hole in it, it is still possible to bear fruit – if we put our mind to it. We need to do this, as well as avoiding the excesses John warns the tax collectors and Roman soldiers about.

When we put our trust in the Lord, we are tested, certainly. Every pilgrimage has its blisters. But can we see through the whirling storm to the calmness within? That is the question we must ask ourselves. What is our faith worth?

What touches me most about Zephaniah’s final epiphany is the way it will not just be us who are rejoicing, but God as well. “He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” God will also be singing. We all long for that look of unconditional love, the love of a parent, of a father in the home. We don’t want to be a wandering people forever. But God’s word is true. Sarah conceived Isaac. Abraham became the father of a great nation. Mary gave birth to the Saviour while remaining a virgin. All the women in these stories – Sarah, Huldah, Abigail, Elizabeth… – show one quality in common: patience. They have often waited twenty or thirty years for the outcome they wished for to disentangle itself.

It is patience that makes what appears impossible to become possible in time.

Let us pray:

Almighty God,

purify our hearts and minds,

that when your Son Jesus Christ comes again as

judge and saviour

we may be ready to receive him,

who is our Lord and our God.

Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

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[1] Benjamin Myers, Cuddy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), p. 111.