Then I will change the speech of the peoples into pure speech,
that all of them will call on the name of the Lord
and will serve him as one.
10 From beyond the rivers of Cush,
my daughter, my dispersed ones, will bring me offerings.
11 On that day, you won’t be ashamed of all your deeds
with which you sinned against me;
then I will remove from your midst those boasting with pride.
No longer will you be haughty on my holy mountain,
12 but I will cause a humble and powerless people to remain in your midst;
they will seek refuge in the name of the Lord.
13 The few remaining from Israel won’t commit injustice;
they won’t tell lies;
a deceitful tongue won’t be found on their lips.
They will graze and lie down;
no one will make them afraid.
14 Rejoice, Daughter Zion! Shout, Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart, Daughter Jerusalem.
15 The Lord has removed your judgment;
he has turned away your enemy.
The Lord, the king of Israel, is in your midst;
you will no longer fear evil.
16 On that day, it will be said to Jerusalem:
Don’t fear, Zion.
Don’t let your hands fall.
17 The Lord your God is in your midst—a warrior bringing victory.
He will create calm with his love;
he will rejoice over you with singing.
18 I will remove from you those worried about the appointed feasts.
They have been a burden for her, a reproach.
19 Watch what I am about to do to all your oppressors at that time.
I will deliver the lame;
I will gather the outcast.
I will change their shame into praise and fame throughout the earth.
20 At that time, I will bring all of you back,
at the time when I gather you.
I will give you fame and praise among all the neighboring peoples
when I restore your possessions and you can see them—says the Lord. (Common English Bible)
“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Ten
I would climb the set of old creaky stairs, already hearing voices filling the upper room above. I would arrive and witness some of the most important ministry I have ever seen done anywhere in my career was in the upper room of the Disciples congregation I served in Longview, Washington for almost seven years. And the ministry was not done by the congregation itself—although it certainly lent its stamp of approval, and over time, there was significant crossover in involvement.
It was a twelve-step group affiliated with Narcotics Anonymous, and the honesty, pain, and redemption I saw on display whenever I would sit in on meetings simply to offer a pastoral presence and source of moral support were genuinely breathtaking. One of the twelve steps is to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself, and that step matters when almost every person in the room either has hit rock bottom or saw themselves headed towards rock bottom and pulled out of that downward trajectory before it was too late. The honesty that comes from such life experience is…overwhelming.
But before you even get to that point in the twelve steps, you first have to accept the reality that you are in crisis, and that only a higher power can restore you to wholeness. It is an act of surrender, not to the substances you were addicted to and had previously surrendered to, but to something that would hold you accountable and seek your betterment over time.
Even though I have never participated in a twelve-step program, I saw a lot of overlap between it and my own understanding of Christianity, specifically in that I believe my faith may have taken root in key individual moments of time, like my baptism and my call to ministry, my faith itself is something that I choose every day and decide whether I am going to be a good Christian…or not. I saw people decide every day that they were going to keep on the path of sobriety, and in so doing, make a daily decision to affirm their original decision to get clean.
And each of those daily decisions came from a recognition that no matter how good our choices are, and how hard we might work, we still will not be fully complete or perfect in our efforts, and so to reach something approaching perfection, we need a higher power—whom we, in church, call God.
It is August now (wow!) so this is *definitely* 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 I hope that you have not felt like you are behind if you have missed a sermon or three. And I hope by the end of this series at the end of this month, we have discovered a 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, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Gummo, Zeppo… (again, just seeing if you are paying attention). Today, we arrive at the prophet Zephaniah.
It is revealed at the start of his book that Zephaniah prophesies during the reign of Josiah, whom you may remember from my sermon series this past winter as the final righteous king in Judah before the Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar II conquer Judah and sack Jerusalem. By both a faithfulness and an effectiveness criterion, Josiah excelled as king of Judah. He ended the idolatrous practices of his predecessors while also effectively protecting Judah from the twin imperial threats of Egypt and Babylon. Why, then, would a king so effective and righteous as Josiah require a prophet?
Because as good as Josiah was, he was not, could not, would never be perfect. Despite Christ’s own command in the Sermon on the Mount to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect, perfection is the exclusive domain of God. We are given the impossible command to be perfect, but what Josiah did—and what we can do—is emulate perfection. We may not be perfect, we may not exist in a state of perfection, but we can reflect it, just as a mirror reflects us. The mirror is not us, it reflects us. So while we are not perfect, we can reflect perfection.
But how do we get the rest of the way there, to perfection? If Josiah could not attain it, if he needed a prophet like Zephaniah, what possible hope could there be for average randos such as us? This is where this specific passage from the end of Zephaniah becomes absolutely vital. The theme that Zephaniah chooses to end his book with is that of restoration—restoration through divinity. Zephaniah describes in this passage a restoration of Judah that is impossible on Judah’s own, even with a leader as righteous and effective as Josiah. It is a restoration that only occurs through God.
Sometimes, restoration—the act of bringing back something that was lost—can be done with human effort alone. Through replanting, we can restore lost forests. Through care and attention, we can restore friendships and relationships. Through the twelve steps, we can restore sobriety.
But, sometimes relying only on our own skills results in truly dismal attempts at restoration—attempts that may even do more harm than good. Occasionally, an amateur attempt at restoring a piece of very old artwork will make the news because the ‘restored’ piece of art looks so profoundly different or worse that it is painfully comical (or comically painful). I feel for the people who attempt such restorations, but they must know that they are in over their heads.
And so should we. We must be able to recognize when we, too, are in over our heads and that only God’s wisdom, guidance, and intervention that comes from billions of years of existence can bring about restoration or perfection. If we rely only on ourselves to restore artwork, or the earth, or our relationships, we will not experience the fullness of restoration because our own ways are simply too short-sighted. There will be a layer beyond our abilities that will remain closed off to us so long as we do not turn to God in the process of restoring whatever has been lost to us.
When I turned 30 and went through a premature mini midlife crisis, I decided that golf was the perfect sport for me to give the old college try. It was not. The fact that there is no such thing as perfection there, that you are always trying to take strokes off your score (and I was beyond terrible at it to begin with) made it the worst possible sport for me.
Or...every morning, I drive up 459 to drop my daughter off with
her grandparents, and I drive by that gleaming Mercedes-Benz building. Imagine
you have saved up and saved up for your dream car, one of those Mercedes, and
you can finally afford it. You take the plunge, you drive off in your new
ride…and then you never drive it faster than thirty-five miles per hour.
Would it still be a comfortably luxurious car to drive? Sure. Could you still get some pleasure out of driving it so slowly? Probably. But would you be getting everything out of the experience? No. There is a layer of it beyond what you are getting out of it.
God save me for comparing Christianity to car ownership, but I think it fits. Are we moving heaven and earth with our faith and getting every ounce of transformation and restoration possible from our connection to God as revealed through Jesus Christ? Are we relying too much on ourselves and not enough on the Holy Spirit? Have we made it this far on our own abilities and have not yet found a way to turn the rest over to God?
Because the sort of restoration that Zephaniah describes here—deliverance of the disabled, gathering of the outcast, *and* the transformation of the shame society has subjected them to into praise and fame throughout the earth—God not only wants that to happen, God can make that happen.
But we must choose to turn ourselves over to that restoration, to surrender ourselves to God’s transformative power. We have to choose God’s agenda over our agenda.
That is the core of this series of “minor” prophets. They witness humanity choosing its own self-centered agenda rather than God’s agenda and speak God’s response to such selfishness. They are every bit the mouthpieces of God that the burning bush or the angels were.
That can be you, too. That can be us. God did not stop speaking once the Bible’s canon was closed. God has never stopped speaking. It has always been up to us to listen, and to listen fully.
We in the Disciples of Christ, we call ourselves restorationists, because we were born from the Restoration Movement of the Second Great Awakening that sought to “restore” the New Testament church. How successful we were in that lofty goal, I leave to you to evaluate.
But if we are to live up to our billing as restorationists, as restorers of what was lost or what has been broken, then we must also live up to our billing as followers of God, which means following God’s will and not merely our own. It is not twelve steps, but it is a step, the first and most critical.
Can we turn over ourselves that fully and entirely to our higher—our highest—power, and then keep choosing, every day, to surrender ourselves so that God may restore us?
It is a holy, divine paradox, to give oneself up so that something else might be gained.
But such are the ways of a God who confounds our attempts to pare that God down to our size.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
August 8, 2021