Coming Home

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Zephaniah 3:14-20; Luke 3:7-18

December 16, 2012 • Portage First UMC

In August of 2010, I desperately wanted to get home. Christopher and I had been with the group who went to see the Oberammergau Passion Play, and we had spent sixteen days traveling in Italy, Austria and Germany. We had a wonderful time, but we were more than ready to come home, see our family, and sleep in our own beds. So we got up in the middle of the night on the last day to drive to Munich, full of anticipation. Our guide got us to the airport, dropped us off, wished us “auf wiedersehen,” and left. Within minutes, we found out that the plane which was to take us home had not arrived and our flight to Atlanta had been cancelled. A mixture of panic and despair settled over our very tired group as we stood in another line to try to get new flights. I’ll spare you all the details, except that getting home involved a dash the length of the Munich airport, a stop in Frankfurt (not my favorite airport), two bomb threats in the Frankfurt airport, barely making the flight to New York, and still arriving in Chicago only about five minutes later than we were originally scheduled to arrive. It was a long, harrowing, tiring day, and I’ll never forget how it felt when we turned the corner at O’Hare Airport and headed down to the baggage claim, where we saw familiar faces, glimpses of home. There was a relief, a joy, an excitement that we were finally coming home. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever longed for home? Having moved several times in the last twenty-five years, I’ve discovered that there’s always a moment when a new place becomes “home,” when in some strange and mysterious way your heart connects with that place. For us, it’s often after a trip away and we “come home” for the first time. There’s nothing quite like the experience of coming home. It’s something we usually anticipate deeply.

“Anticipate” is our theme for these weeks of Advent. As we prepare for Christmas, for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, we’re slowing down, we’re learning the story behind the story, all of the promises of God that lead up to the birth of the baby in a manger. And so, if you’re keeping up with the readings in the devotional, you’ve read so far from Adam and Eve through Joseph and Moses and up to the choosing of David as king for Israel, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the chance in your FISH groups to talk about these stories and how they all fit together. The Bible, you’re discovering, is one complete narrative—a story that is ultimately about God and how God calls people to follow him. On Sundays, then, we’re discovering these strange folks called the prophets, people God uniquely used during the days of the kings of Israel and Judah up until about four hundred years before Jesus came. The prophets spoke words of challenge and words of comfort. Their job was to speak God’s word into their setting—into their culture, their history, their politics, their world. And yet their words have a timeless quality to them, too, as they remind us again and again that all of God’s promises will come to pass. This morning we have heard from one of those prophets, maybe one you’re not all that familiar with. His name was Zephaniah, and he offered one of the most powerful promises heard in the Scriptures: “God will bring you home.”

Zephaniah was probably a descendent of one of Judah’s kings, Hezekiah, and he preached during the reign of Josiah (who was one of the few good kings of Judah). Josiah was king when they found a copy of the book of Deuteronomy in the walls of the Temple, a book that had been lost for centuries. Picture someone coming to repair this building after it hadn’t been used for a long time and finding a Bible hidden in the walls, and no one in a long, long time had read it. It was that kind of discovery, and Josiah decided they needed to shape up and do what God had commanded the people so long ago. He was a reformer, and though his reforms didn’t last long, and seem to have come too late, it was a glimmer of hope for Judah. But it wasn’t enough. Zephaniah’s hope is for those reforms to penetrate deeper into the culture (Walker, “Zephaniah,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 7, pgs. 537-540). What Josiah did was merely superficial, as if the people just went through the motions, but didn’t let it really change their life. There are folks like that today. Maybe some of us are like that. We hear the message, show up at church, but don’t let the message really affect the way we live. For those, and for all of us, Zephaniah has a message.

The first two chapters of this book are words of judgment: “I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against all who live in Jerusalem” (1:4). Zephaniah calls the people to account because they’ve been worshipping idols and bowing down to things that aren’t God. God’s judgment is coming, Zephaniah says. Punishment is coming. Destruction is coming, and the people will be taken away from their homes. They will be exiled. It’s not a new or uncommon message among the prophets of that day. In fact, I would think it would have been hard to avoid that message wherever you went in Judah. The prophets kept assuring the people that, if they didn’t change their ways, their way of life would come to an end. It would all be over. A foreign nation would come in, just as it had with Israel in the north, and destroy them. They, too, would be exiled, taken from their homes. God says, through Zephaniah, “Of Jerusalem, I thought, ‘Surely you will fear me and accept correction!’…But they were still eager to act corruptly in all they did. Therefore…I have decided to assemble the nations and gather the kingdoms and to pour out my wrath on them…” (3:7-8). It’s not a popular message, by any means. Other prophets, like Jeremiah, were abused because they preached this message. And yet Zephaniah, like Jeremiah, could not help but proclaim the message God had given him: judgment was coming on those who refused to follow God’s leading.

But then we come to the last part of Zephaniah 3, which we read this morning. And in these verses, God gives a song to the people. Actually, it’s a song for the future (cf. Bruckner, NIV Application Commentary: Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, pg. 330), because it’s a song to be sung by those who come home. And so the promise is that there will be an end to exile, there will be a return home, because exile is not the end. Jeremiah, which we read a couple of weeks ago, said similar things. And like Jeremiah, Zephaniah speaks more than he knows. He promises a future that is bigger and brighter than even those who heard him preach could imagine. “Sing, Daughter Zion; shout aloud, Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, Daughter Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy. The Lord, the King of Israel, is with you; never again will you fear any harm” (3:14-15). In these few verses, Zephaniah gives us two truths that still ring out today.

The first truth is this: no one is beyond hope. Zephaniah has just spent two and a half chapters telling Judah what they’ve done wrong, the gods they have worshipped, the ways they have offended the one true God. And yet, it is to those same people the prophet says, “God has taken away your punishment. God is still with you” (cf. 3:15). Even your disobedience, Zephaniah says, will not stop God from accomplishing his purposes, because God can still bring hope out of hopelessness and life out of destruction.

About seven centuries after Zephaniah, it was another spiritually dark time in Israel. Most of the religion that was practiced was formal, stiff, ritual-based. You did what you were expected but there was little energy or passion in the practice of faith. And then, out in the desert, appeared a preacher. The people hadn’t heard a prophet since Malachi, more than four hundred years before, but this preacher dressed and spoke a lot like they would have expected a prophet to dress and speak. His name was John, and Luke tells us he was a miracle baby. His parents were past child-bearing age when he was born. His father was a priest, and yet John joined a community that went to the desert because they rejected the way religion was run in Jerusalem. And after a time there, he started preaching in the desert—the hot, dry, desolate desert. In that place, people came to see him. They would spend hours listening to him, which, as I stood in that same desert this last summer, I find hard to imagine. But they came, even though John’s message was not a “feel good” message. It wasn’t a “power of positive thinking” message. It wasn’t a “it’s all about me” message. John gave the people a difficult word: “You brood of vipers,” he begins. You know, in none of my preaching classes was I advised to begin a sermon that way! John goes on: “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance!” Then he proceeds to tell them that just being Jewish will not save them from God’s wrath. They need to repent, to turn back to God and stop relying on their heritage. “What should we do?” the people ask. And so John gives them some instructions, and then Luke tells us that some very unlikely people were in the crowd as well: tax collectors and soldiers! Tax collectors were considered traitors to their own people because they worked for Rome. And soldiers were not only employees of Rome, they weren’t Jewish at all. They were essentially professional killers; they regularly broke the “do not kill” commandment. And yet, John doesn’t dismiss them. He doesn’t tell them there’s no hope for them. He gives them instruction as well. Tax collectors: only collect what you’re supposed to. Soldiers: don’t extort people, treat people fairly. Do you see what he’s doing? Everyone is welcome. No one is beyond hope. Can you imagine what those short statements did for the tax collectors and the soldiers, people who normally were assumed to be outside of God’s grace? No one who is willing to repent, to turn their life around, is beyond hope.

Have you ever felt beyond hope? If you have not, be thankful. It’s a difficult and hard place to be. I’ve been there. Some writers refer to it as “the dark night of the soul,” the time when we believe we’ve fallen so far even God can’t find us. The poet Christina Rossetti repeatedly suffered from many serious illnesses, including breast cancer and Graves disease, which resulted in recurring bouts of depression. Much of her struggle came out in her poetry, some of which we still sing today—for instance, one of her most well-known Christmas carols is “In the Bleak Midwinter.” The image she paints of Jesus’ nativity is not our typical Christmas card picture: “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone…” (UMH 221). Rossetti’s world was one where hope was hard to find, and yet she clung to the Gospel story as her source of hope, because over and over again the story of the Bible is that no one is beyond hope. Even in our darkest night, we are not beyond hope. God knows, God cares, and God is coming to save us. That’s the message Zephaniah gives to the people. That’s the message that comes through the actions of John the Baptist. And that’s the message so many people need to hear this Advent season. Have you ever felt beyond hope? Do you know someone who, right now, believes they are beyond hope? This Friday evening, we will be having a service of hope for those who are struggling to find it. Friday is the first day of winter and the Longest Night, the time of year when it is the darkest, and so we take that night, symbolically, and seek to bring light and hope into the darkness that sometimes comes in our lives. If you’re struggling this Advent, I encourage you to do whatever it takes to be here Friday night. And if you’re not struggling but you know someone who is, then do whatever it takes to bring them with you on Friday night. All of us need to remember that no one is beyond hope. In fact, Zephaniah says, not only are you not beyond hope. God actually enjoys being with you. Listen again to what the prophet says: “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing” (3:17). Can you hear God singing over you? Can you believe you are someone God would sing about? No one is beyond hope.

And that brings us to the second truth Zephaniah puts forth in this passage: God promises to bring his people home. “At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home” (3:20). Certainly, those who heard this message the first time understood that to mean a return to the land of Judah, and it did mean that. There is a promise here of the end of exile, of a gathering of those who had been scattered by the enemy, and of a return to the land. And that did happen. In 538 BC, the first group of exiles were allowed to return, but that group probably included more who had been born in exile than those who had been taken away from the land originally. Children, maybe grandchildren—and yet the hope of home had been kept alive as they lived in Babylon. The land was their inheritance, their home, even if they’d never lived there. It was home.

So there is the promise of the land, but Christians also hear, within this prophecy, echoes of a deeper promise. Pastor Randy Frazee talks about it in terms of “an upper story” and “a lower story.” The “lower story” of Scripture has immediate, earth-bound implications, while the “upper story” has longer-range ideas in mind. The “upper story” is more about what God is doing behind the scenes. So when Christians listen to Zephaniah (and other prophets) talk about a return home, we think about the way Jesus talked about the promise of a home beyond this world, a mansion or dwelling place he was preparing for us (cf. John 14:1-4). Jesus promised his disciples and us that he was going away to make room for us to come live with him, and that one day, he would return and gather us to himself. You see, that’s a major difference Christians and Jews have when it comes to talking about the Savior, the Messiah. Jews were and are looking for the Messiah to come and establish justice all at once, in a single day, whereas Christians have come to understand Jesus came, gave us the job of bringing justice and reaching others for his kingdom, and one day he will return to finish it. We live in the “now and the not yet.” We have Jesus living among us, but we won’t experience all he has for us until the day when either we go home to be with him through our death or when he returns to take us there. We live in the in-between, and we anticipate his coming each and every day. He has promised to come to us—whether in the moment of our death or at the end of the age—and take us home.

C. S. Lewis wrote much in the way of theology, and a lot of that theology he then put into understandable form in his fiction works, books like The Chronicles of Narnia. The final book in that children’s series is called The Last Battle, and it pictures the final struggle between good and evil in the magical world of Narnia. The end of the story pictures the heroes who have been present through many of the books running into a place called “Aslan’s Country.” Aslan, you might remember, represents Christ in those books, and “Aslan’s Country,” is the place we were made to be forever. In fact, at the very end of The Last Battle, Lewis describes their entry into Aslan’s Country this way: “For them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” I can’t think of a better description of the place that is our ultimate home. Lewis once said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” An old song put it this way: “This world is not my home, I’m only passin’ through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven's open door and I can't feel at home in this world anymore.” To those who are faithful, God promises, “I will bring you home.”

Just a little over a week ago, I had the privilege of celebrating the life of one of our oldest members, Ed Ingram. Ed was 95 years old and married to his lovely wife, Dorothy, nearly 73 years. Dorothy passed away in July, and the last few months were very hard for Ed. But that last week, I had the privilege of being with him a couple of times, and the memory that stands out for me is the last time I saw him over at Rittenhouse. He was only awake periodically, and he would look up, but not at me or at his daughter, Betty Evensen. Ed was looking beyond us, and he was talking—to someone? I don’t know. But as I watched him, as I stood in that holy place, I became convinced Ed was seeing home. Betty said she even heard him laugh out loud a time or two in those last few days, as if he was sharing a joke with someone, but not anyone we could see. I’ve been with others who were moving from this life to the next, and the experiences are very much the same. I don’t know what we see or what we don’t see as we near death. I only know this: God has promised to bring us home. For the one who trusts in Jesus, there is a promised home, a place Jesus said he was preparing for us himself.

Getting home from our trip this past summer to Israel and Egypt wasn’t as hard as in 2010, but we did leave in the middle of the night from Cairo and fly to Frankfurt, Germany again. And I remember when we landed we just wanted some American food. Any American food. I was, as you might imagine, desperate after eighteen days for some chai tea from Starbucks, and so when we got through customs we stopped the first official-looking person we could find and asked, “Where’s Starbucks?” We diligently followed the directions, and soon enough, we were in line to get lattes. And just down a flight of stairs from there was a McDonald’s! Ah, glimpses of home! Nothing had ever tasted so good. But what if we had stayed there? What if we had decided, “Eh, that’s close enough to home. We’ve got Starbucks and McDonald’s. We don’t need anything else.” Well, we might have eaten all right, but we never would have known the full joy of coming home. And that’s the way we often treat Jesus’ promise of home. We get content. We get weighed down with stuff here. We focus only on what’s here, on our own comfort and wants, on just getting what we can for ourselves. And while I’m not saying we shouldn’t enjoy life here, I am saying we should never lose that longing God places within us for our true home. This world, as wonderful as it is, is not all there is. There is no substitute for home. And I know that because when we got home that evening, the memories of Starbucks and McDonald’s paled in comparison to the love and welcome we had when we stepped through the door into our home. As hard as it was to wait through the long hours that it took to travel home, it was worth every minute.

And so it will be for us, on that day when Jesus calls our name. If we have that kind of reaction to coming home here, how much more will our hearts rejoice when we come to our ultimate home. Advent reminds us there is more. Advent tells us there is hope for all, and Advent says there is a home promised to those who place their faith and trust in Jesus. He came to this world as a baby in a manger to make it possible for us to come and be with him for all eternity. As wonderful as the carols and the manger scenes and the movies are this time of year, the true message is that Jesus came to make a way for us to go home.

So as we anticipate the celebration of his first coming, I wonder if you are ready for the time he takes you home. Advent is about hope. Advent is about love. Advent is about joy. And Advent reminds us that we live in the now and the not yet. We live in the in-between time. And this time is given to us to ready us for “the great story.” This Advent, have you welcomed Jesus into your life? And if not, why not? What are you waiting for? Even in the midst of her darkness, Christina Rossetti knew the best gift to give for Christmas.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Amen.