This Week's Sermon: "Nahum"

14 The Lord has commanded concerning you:

“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Eight

The older gentleman’s smiling face, creased with laugh lines and joy, peered over the bright yellow coffee mug painted with the words “You are my sunshine.” That photo of him something that immediately stopped my scrolling. He was the father of a fellow Armenian minister, and he had passed away a few years ago. A few months before he died, his daughter—my ministry colleague—took that photo of him as they sat in a favorite café together.

After he had passed away, she returned to the café, explained the significance of that bright yellow “You are my sunshine” mug to the staff, and asked them if she could buy it from them.

They gave it to her for free.

I share this story with her permission, because when I think of reassurance, I think of a moment like that—when you worry that something you need to do, want to do, will be more difficult than it has to be but is ultimately easier and more gracious than you could have expected.

It is the feeling of having a weight lifting from your shoulders or back. It is the knowledge that you are seen as a person, a child of God, loved and supported by that God. And I hear that in Nahum.

Today’s message on Nahum means we passed the midway point of the minor prophets, so this is not a *new* sermon series anymore, but it takes us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend up to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade. But it never quite fit into the arc of my ministry until now. After all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series has, I know, helped me get back in the rhythm of preaching to a sanctuary of people and not a computer screen of faces!

So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we are hearing from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.

To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed him up with Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah. If those last two prophets were more well-known among the minor prophets, today’s certainly isn’t—Nahum. But I promise you that, like all the others before him and all the ones after him in this series, he has a good word to share to us today.

Nahum is, just like Micah last week, acutely aware of the danger that the Assyrian Empire poses to the far smaller kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the entire first chapter of his brief, two-chapter missive concerns that existential threat and the privations it would bring. And it is a very hard read!

Yet nestled at the end of chapter one is a word of reassurance by God, through Nahum, to the people—reassurance not just of survival, but of being freed, of liberation: “Now,” says God, “I will break off his yoke from you and tear off your chains.”

Yokes are tools of oppression—they are meant to wrench people down and keep people down.

And God breaks them.

Chains are tools of oppression—they are meant to imprison people, keep them from being free.

And God tears them off.

What reassurance that is, to know that God desires more than anything for us to be free. Free from fear, free from want, free from any, all of the yokes in our lives that are meant to pull us down rather than build us up.

Free like a bright yellow coffee mug? Yes, maybe even that as well. Because like the coffee mug, God’s grace is free. Our salvation is free. We should find freedom in that, and authentic freedom, true freedom begets still more freedom. When we help others find freedom, we often find freedom ourselves as well. That is what freedom should do: motivate us to work for it for others, not keep it to ourselves. Deep freedom does not end with being content that you’ve got yours. No, your liberation is intertwined with my liberation. From coffee mugs to constitutions, setting ourselves free needs to result in everyone being free, or it is not full, deep freedom. It is not liberation.

If this sounds familiar, it should be—it was an essential lesson to our hearing two weeks ago of how the story of Jonah ends. Jonah was free to follow God’s call to Nineveh, or to not follow God’s call and flee to Tarshish instead, but because Jonah was so bitterly prejudiced against the Assyrians, he was never truly free, and nor, for that matter, were they. Full freedom was not achieved at the end of that story, because neither Jonah or the Assyrians could be truly free so long as Jonah wanted to see them destroyed.

Now, with Nahum it is in the other direction—the Assyrians want to see Israel and Judah destroyed, and neither will be fully free unless that stops. And it doesn’t. Assyria ends up conquering Israel in 722 BCE. But before the following century is over, Babylon will have in turn conquered Assyria, before being conquered itself by Persia, who in turn is conquered by the Macedonian Greeks of Alexander the Great, who are later conquered by the Romans of Pompey the Great, and then five hundred years later, Rome is sacked by the Goths.

Do you see a pattern emerging? Just as genuine freedom begets freedom, conquest begets conquest. And while we are talking about this on a collective, national level—for that is how Nahum speaks of it—this is just as true on an individual, you-and-me level. On a personal level, we are still just as called by God to seek liberation for one another as we seek it for ourselves.

And what are we called to do with that liberation, that freedom? We praise God: “Celebrate your festivals, Judah! Fulfill your solemn promises.” For even as Assyria beckons on the horizon, God remains faithful. Nahum makes sure we know that. And the word we have for that in the English language is “reassurance.”

The Assyrian king threatens. God reassures.                                  

The Babylonian monarch menaces. But God reassures again.

The Roman Emperor persecutes. And God still reassures.

Reassurance is divine. It is God-sent. We can live with reassurance not only because God created us, but because God outlives us, outlasts us, and most of all will always, always outlove us.

So we respond to God with our praise and worship, because God has shown us that empires and conquests will not have the last word. And we respond with our solemn promises to God to be faithful and faith-filled, to live out the essence of what Micah last week proscribes for us: to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

I hope by now in the sermon series you are beginning to see how the messages of each of these prophets can begin to build on one another, to creative a cohesive understanding of a God who desires what is best for each of us, and who is deeply interested in seeing it done.

For a god without such a desire, without such an interest, is not a god for us to celebrate and make promises to. We do not enter into right relationship with absentee landlords. Absentee landlords are not providers of reassurance or purveyors of liberation.

But God is. God always was. And God will forever be.

Let that be reassurance enough for you—enough for today, enough for the day after that, for however long you need it to be present.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

July 18, 2021