FINDING GOD IN ADVENT

(Preached on Sunday, December 17, 2006)

The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing...                                                      -Zephaniah 3:17

 

This is a really strange passage of scripture.

It is a most joyous song of promise, a bright message, from one of the most dour, dark and foreboding prophets in the Hebrew scripture.

These final six verses of Zephaniah=s writings seem totally out of character. 

All the rest of the short book is spent pointing out to the people of Israel how badly they are behaving and how unhappy God is with them.

What was so upsetting to Zephaniah?

The people of Israel in Zephaniah=s day were surrounded by a network of global terror C Babylonians, Assyrians, Cushites, and Medes.  Infiltrating their nation, haters of their values and way of life, and seeking to undermine it were the dreaded Philistines.  The Israelites responded to the terrorist threat by aspiring to become a world power C and act just like their enemies.  Zephaniah accuses the people of playing a fatal game of stolen identity by Aattiring themselves in foreign costumes.@  The Israelites don military gold braid and epaulettes; they dress for success in three-piece suits as financiers and corporate executives, sporting their power ties.  They strut before the mirror, but they see nothing because their moral eyes are Ablind.@  The Israelites dress as entrepreneurs and go exploring and exploiting the environment for their precious oils in the ANWAR (that=s the AArabian Nard Wilderness and Refuge@).  They cook the books on climate change and environmental degradation.  When questioned, they reply, ANothing to worry about.  We=ve crunched the numbers; our weather god, Baal, will take care of it.@  They slash aid to the poor and elderly allowing nothing to threaten their bottom line.  AMilcom will provide,@ they say, Aas long as we offer your first-born to the fire.@ 

 

The people of Zephaniah=s time were awed by wealth, power, and military might.  They chased after spoils of war and a success measured by counting the vanquished trod underfoot.  As such, they were unable to see the presence of God in their midst.  They could not imagine God as one who cared for the lame, oppressed, and marginalized.  They could not picture a God who came not in power, but rather in weakness.  And so they missed God=s presence.

What about us?  Are our eyes blinded by wealth, power and military might so that we have trouble finding God in Advent?

 

Like many modern pilgrims, I experienced that difficulty this past February in Israel.  One of the motivations for my pilgrimage was to deepen my faith by getting in touch with the presence of God in this land we call Holy.  In a sense, I was looking for Jesus in the places where he walked and taught and lived his life.  The difficulty I encountered in that quest is illustrated by my experience in Bethlehem.

 

The patch of this planet where, according to tradition, a cave once stabled animals, and where Mary gave birth to a son, is truly, as Annie Dillard describes it, Aone of the queerest places on earth.@

Generations of Christians have churched over the traditional Bethlehem spot to the highest degree so that the grotto site, now covered by the Church of the Nativity, provides no sense of what Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus may have actually experienced.

After entering the Church one takes worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels, and dungeon-like corridors where hushed people pass.  The floors are black stone or cracked marble.  Dense brocades hang down old stone walls.  Oil lamps hang in layers.  Each polished silver or brass lamp seems to absorb more light than its orange flame emits, so the more lamps shone, the darker the space. 

In the deepest basement one reaches the Grotto of the Nativity.  The grotto is at the back of a stone cave, far beneath street level.  This is the place.  It smelled of wet sand.  It is a narrow cave about ten feet wide; cracked marble paved it.  Bunched tapers, bending grotesque in the heat, lighted a corner of the floor.  People have to kneel, one by one, under arches of brocade hangings, and stretch into a crouch down among dozens of gaudy hanging lamps to see it.  A fourteen-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall.  This silver star is the X that marked the spot: Here, just here, the infant was born.  Two thousand years of Christianity began here.  (Actually many Christian scholars now think Jesus of Nazareth was likely born in Nazareth.  Early writers hooked his birth to Bethlehem to fit a prophecy.  In truth, Nazareth is not much more accessible and there, too, they believe the people in Jesus= day actually lived in caves and grottos.)

 

In the center of that silver star was a circular hole.  That was the bull=s eye.  Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole=s flat bottom.  When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under the fringed satin drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole.  I could feel some sort of soft wax in it.  The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide Petri dish.  Hundred of thousands of pilgrims travel to this site every year and for many, perhaps most, of them it is a deeply moving experience.  But it wasn=t for me.  It was not attractive, it did not convey the beauty of holiness,  the awesomeness of that night of birth so long ago.  It spoke more to me of our desire to cover the simple over with our pomp and elegance and wealth.  We end up blinding our eyes to the true presence of God.

 

But Zephaniah proclaims to the people of Israel, and to us today, that God is in our midst.  What clues might help us discover the presence of God in our Advent this year?  Zephaniah says that God will not come in judgment and destruction, but with love, rejoicing over us, saving those limping through life, gathering together the outcast, replacing shame with praise. 

In other words, just as God came at Bethlehem in Jesus C something small, tender, and vulnerable, something hardly noticeable. 

 

We keep looking for loud and impressive events to convince us of God=s saving presence; but over and over again, we are reminded that spectacles, power plays, and big events are the ways of the world.  Our temptation is to be distracted by them and made blind to the mysterious sacred beauty in our midst.  When we have no eyes for the small signs of God=s presence C the smile of a baby, the carefree play of children, the words of encouragement and gestures of love offered by friends C we will always remain tempted to despair.  The small child of Bethlehem, the unknown man of Nazareth, the rejected preacher, the naked man on the cross, he asks for our full attention.  The work of salvation takes place in the midst of a world that continues to shout, scream, and overwhelm us with its claims and promises.  But the promise is hidden in the small beauties, simple kindnesses, gentle caring that is right before us, all around us.  This is the presence of God.