This Week's Sermon: "Zechariah"

I care passionately about Zion; I burn with passion for her. 3 The Lord proclaims: I have returned to Zion; I will settle in Jerusalem. Jerusalem will be called the city of truth; the mountain of the Lord of heavenly forces will be the holy mountain.

Old men and old women will again dwell in the plazas of Jerusalem. Each of them will have a staff in their hand because of their great age. 5 The city will be full of boys and girls playing in its plazas.

Even though it may seem to be a miracle for the few remaining among this people in these days, should it seem to be a miracle for me? says the Lord of heavenly forces.

I’m about to deliver my people from the land of the east and the land of the west. 8 I’ll bring them back so they will dwell in Jerusalem. They will be my people, and I will be their God—in truth and in righteousness. (Common English Bible)

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

The image of the C-17 aircraft’s hold was wrenching, a gut punch but to the heart, the sort that you do not ever really forget how it makes you feel. A massive aircraft hold filled cheek-to-jowl with humans leaving their homeland not because they want to but because they have to, because of what has just taken place in a matter of weeks, that does not fade with the summer sunset. Nor should it.

The photo of 823 newly-minted refugees fleeing Afghanistan in the hold of the military C-17 plane, bound for Qatar, ranks up there with the images of people fleeing Saigon in 1975 on helicopters, and of old helicopters being thrown overboard from aircraft carriers so that even more helicopters bearing South Vietnamese refugees could land. Several of the people fleeing the Taliban, I understand, died trying to escape on departing aircraft. What a devastating way to lose your life.

“Holy cow” was reportedly the uttered response to the news of this C-17’s human cargo of over 800 souls. That is certainly an apt term for it, if for no other reason than it is searching, almost scrounging, for words that convey a deeper impact than that, and the English language comes up empty. The images of the people of Afghanistan, though, speak plenty on their own. I worry for when or how the people in those images will be silenced.

For there is nothing about those images that is redemptive, no silver linings or easy positivity to be found beyond the reality that there are those who did live, who did make it out. And I think that is important to be able to confess to ourselves, and to God, that there can be things that are simply crushing, without feeling like we have to come up with a pretext to make them not crushing.

And I think a prophet like Zechariah may be able to help us get to such a place. Maybe not right away, maybe not today or tomorrow or the next day. But someday.

This is the penultimate installment of a sermon series that we began on the last day of May, and it has lived up to being a series that I wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade. 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!

Each Sunday this summer, we have heard 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 I hope that you have not felt like you are behind if you have missed a sermon or three. And I hope by now, we have discovered a newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them much 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 with Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello (again, just seeing if you are paying attention). Today, we arrive at the prophet Zechariah.

Zechariah, like Haggai before him and Malachi after him, is a postexilic prophet, meaning his career comes after the exile into Babylon has ended and the Israelites have been granted safe passage to return to their homeland by the now-dominant Persian empire. Zechariah also represents something of an expansion upon Haggai; while Haggai mostly focused on the restoration of the Jerusalem temple, Zechariah’s prophecy is lengthier and more broadly addresses the future restoration of Judah as a community or city-state.

Zechariah, then, is a book informed heavily by a traumatic past, but is concerned heavily with the future. That does not mean Zechariah has forgotten about the past or wants to see it forgotten. On the contrary, honesty with our history is crucial to faithfulness with our future. For a future to be as aspirational as Zechariah layers on here in chapter 8, with the holy mountain, Jerusalem as the city of truth, full of old men and women and children playing, it must be rooted in truth around the past.

The cold, hard truth of the exile in Babylon—what it meant to experience, what it represented to have survived, all of it—looms large in the background of everything these three postexilic prophets (Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi) write. Heck, it looms large in the background of some of the New Testament books that came hundreds of years later, especially Revelation. The memory of the exile did not fade from Israelite consciousness. Nor should it have.

So we cannot, and must not, read God’s hope for the future here in Zechariah 8 as either God or ancient Israel forgetting about the hardship of the exile. On the contrary, it makes a message of restoration all the more meaningful, because something deep and fundamental was lost in the exile.

Something deep and profound has been lost for each person fleeing Afghanistan, all 823 of them in that photo, all the thousands more beyond them. And there has been something deep and profound lost for those who remain under the resurrected governance of a fundamentalist theocracy.

Zechariah’s prophecy is why I would not, even if I could, separate out my faith identity and my ethnic identity, because when you are descended from great-grandparents who hid themselves in walls and closets to smuggle themselves out of a country burning all around them, you can appreciate exactly what would drive a person to risk their life to catch a plane ride.

In those circumstances, restoration of what is lost is a long way off, and survival becomes the order of the day. If that means you fling yourself into an airplane with naught but the clothes on your back, then that is what you do. And that is before we even get to what has been given up by our neighbors who fought there for almost twenty years. And for what goal in the end?

Like, imagine it's the Iron Bowl, Alabama against Auburn, and (I am on nobody's side here, think of me as Switzerland) one team goes up by a touchdown, and the other team comes back to win by a touchdown, a 14-point swing. That's definitely good for bragging rights for the week. But what if one team goes down by five touchdowns at still comes back to to win? You talk about that game for years, because much more was lost, yet the goal was still met.

Ancient Israel by the time of Zechariah has finally met at least a goal. They survived exile. The human cost was great, but in the end, Babylon fell, and that, by itself, must have felt miraculous.

There is no magic anything—words, process, self help, nothing—that gets you to that stage. I am here to tell you that there isn’t. God does not deal in easy fixes, or the theological equivalents of get-rich-quick schemes. Faith in God is not a Ponzi scam.

Faith in such moments of severe loss becomes a matter of endurance as much as anything else—it is what can help keep you putting one foot in front of the other, or even getting out of bed in the morning. And that can be enough. Faith may have led to the parting of the Red Sea, it may have led to the raising of Lazarus, it may have turned Saul into Paul, but if what you need faith to be in your moment of loss is a cane that helps you walk from point A to point B, that is enough. It is more than enough.

Faith may not extract you from the moment, it is not a magical teleportation device. But what it can do is strengthen you just enough to survive the moment so that restoration can take place sometime, someday in the future afterward.

That is why Zechariah’s vision of a restored Zion is so meaningful—it is a signal that those who have survived the exile can begin to think about next steps beyond survival. God’s faithfulness has seen those survivors through. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

Restoration takes on added meaning, added depth and dimension, in moments when you may feel like everything else is crashing down around you. This is why God says to Zechariah that such restoration may seem to be a miracle for the few remaining, because it is. Miracles are not defined solely by otherworldliness, or an element of the supernatural. They are defined by restoring what was lost—a clean bill of health for the leper, a meal of loaves and fishes for the starving, financial security and dignity for the impoverished, and, yes, a new home for the people who had spent almost fifty years homeless.

For me, I see it in restoring what was lost and left behind by my family in the dust of Anatolia…and not just the inviting house, or the financial freedom, or any of the material stuff, I am talking about our legal and moral innocence as people, our sense of security and stability, and our rootedness in the presence of family. Restoration of that…there is something miraculous in that.

If such restoration one day comes to the people on that C-17 taking off from Afghanistan, then we might well call it a miracle. And, according to Zechariah, we would not be wrong for doing so.

It may be hard for you to see, but the miracle is there, waiting. May it come, and aright the world.

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

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

August 22, 2021