dare to hope again

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15^th, 2024

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 

Zephaniah 3: 14-20

For the Psalm, Isaiah 12: 2-6

Luke 3: 7-18

 

John the Baptist stands out as one of the great prophetic figures of the Christian tradition – slightly ironically because he was of course executed before the birth of Christianity. But I’ll just put that out there for a moment.

John was almost a caricature of his own role. Hell, fire and damnation, or at least the great doctrine of “turn or burn,” was embodied in this one fiery kinsman of Jesus.

We need to hold on to that fiery tradition. Christianity without the intense prophetic voices that have challenged society, rocked complacency from time to time, is Christianity neutered. When our voice is cosy and compliant our soul is stagnant.

But there is another form of unsettling prophesy, strangely enough often equally unpopular; that is the voice that prophesies joy, reconciliation, hope, light. That voice appears for example in the writings of the second Isaiah.

It is the voice that startled William Wordsworth leaving him, as he put it, and CS Lewis later echoed, “surprised by joy.”

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

But how could I forget thee?

Wordsworth, or his persona, crippled by grief, finds himself startled by the thought he dared to face memories of his lost daughter, dared to be thankful that she has, while far too briefly, passed through his universe.

Any of you who have lost loved ones, especially loved ones of next generations, your children and grandchildren’s generations, know the depths of that struggle. You may know too the tentative nature of any steps towards new hope, new beginnings, in a life post-trauma. Only those who know that journey can speak of it with integrity, and the rest of us can and must only listen.

But sometimes the loss is collective, not individual. Sometimes whole communities experience loss. The loss of lives in a calamitous event – the earthquake or shootings of Christchurch, the fires that have far too often wiped out whole communities in Australia, Spain, or California, the HIV pandemic of the 1980s, or even the slow erosion of confidence in the farming community, brought about by both unruly climate change and callous market forces.

It is a brave prophet who dares to speak of hope, or joy, in such a context. Such speech must never be plastic, trite, clichéd. Indeed, all speech runs those risks until the speaker shows the resilience of a marathon runner, preparedness to listen, to embed themselves with the hurting hearts he or she addresses.

Zephaniah was such a speaker. He dared to speak of hope from within a devastated community. He dared to speak of restoration when all was lost. While Winston Churchill was no embodiment of Christlikeness there is no doubt that he found the words to transform his British people at a time when hope was unimaginable.

The Māori leadership and citizens of military struggle of Gate Pā (Pukehinahina) in the 1860s, or the non-violent Parihaka resistance in the 1880s, were likewise. Their story thank God is far better known in the 2020s than when I was a privileged Pākehā child in the 1970s. Seemingly lying dormant for a century, these prophetic actions and voices inspired those striving for justice ever since, and are now proclaimed widely

Zephaniah dared to speak of restitution of the fortunes of his people at a time when all was lost. At a time when the place of credible Christian witness in society is crumbling, when we are pushed to the outer edges of social consciousness, I believe we are experiencing our Zephaniah moments. I find it weirdly interesting and exciting to see that there has been no mention of Anne’s election in the Otago Daily Times. The ODT in, for example 1954, dedicated some 850 words, about the length of this sermon, to the election of Bishop Fitchett. By the time Bishop Johnston was elected, 1953, interest had slipped to 275 words. With the exception of the world’s first female diocesan bishop, Penny Jamieson, interest has been minimal ever since.

This is a gift from God: like the child born in a manger, or John his cousin-prophet who leaped in his mother’s womb, we are no longer on the radar.

We are set free to be the people God calls us to be.

We are set free, as Zephaniah foretold, to be a people renewed in divine love, justice, peace, hope, standing with the lame and the outcast wherever God has placed us. We can be a people who, by our behaviour, our prayer, our rites of worship and perhaps our words, can be both surprised by and surprise others, with divine joy once more.