Month: December 2021

“The Lord has proclaimed to the end of the earth: Say to daughter Zion: See your salvation comes; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him” They shall be called “The Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord” and you shall be called “Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken”.

Of all the prophets, the prophet Isaiah is the most well known to Christians, the most quoted one in all of the New Testament. I should actually talk about “the scroll of Isiah” rather than about the prophet Isaiah, since most scholars believe that the book of Isaiah was written over two hundreds centuries, by at least three different authors. I am not sharing these facts to teach a class about the prophets, as I am pretty sure that on Christmas Eve we’re not that interested in doing Bible History. What I think is important for us to know though, is that the scroll of Isaiah has been written over a very difficult time for the people of Israel. During those two hundreds years, the people of Judah had seen their kingdom falling apart, Jerusalem been besieged and attacked and fell at the hands of their enemies, the elite of the people being sent into Exile in Babylon where they lived as servants – until seventy years later they were finally allowed to come back – and although that day when they returned must have felt like a wonderful day, they still had to find the whole city in ruins and the Temple to be rebuilt from scratch. Difficult times indeed. And yet, covering the whole period, we have the Book of Isaiah – the prophet, or should I say the prophets and all the other prophets we’ve been talking about since the beginning of this season, the prophets being with the people all along, warning them, nudging them, comforting them – and in the voices of the prophets – the presence of God being manifested through them, in spite of it all, in the midst of it all.

I find it helpful in difficult times to be reminded of the difficult times people had before us, and especially I guess, for us as Christians, to be reminded of the difficult times of the people of God. Through adversity, sorrow and loss, their voices today can still be heard and they show us how they have struggled, doubted, lost their faith and then found it again – how they have managed to keep the hope alive and remained faithful through the messiness, the loss and the pain – and mostly, I find it helpful to see how God remained faithful to God’s people, in spite of all the suffering they had endured from the hands of others and in spite of the hurt they had inflicted on God, on themselves and on one another. In our passage today, after seventy years in Exile, the people are back to Jerusalem, after such a long time of repentance, a time so long that the scroll of Isaiah tells us that Jerusalem had now paid “twice for her sin”, seventy years reflecting and praying about how things went so wrong for the promised city, their kings and all the people and now they’re ready to start anew and God is ready to start anew with them, picking up where they left off for something better, rebuilding together their life and their story.

Seventy years of Exile. Let’s think about it for a moment. The people had been for seventy years away from their Temple, for seventy years they had been away from their city, for seventy years they had been away from their land, and for some of them, for seventy years they had been away from their family – that is, for the few ones who survived for such a long period. We’ve been two years in this pandemic – two years – and we are already at the stage where we feel that we cannot take it anymore, not for another minute. I am not going to tell you: “See, what are we complaining about?”, because one thing I have noticed over time is that it’s never useful when we suffer to be reminded that others have or had it worst. Generally, it just drags us down a little bit more, adding guilt to sorrow.

But as I have just mentioned, there are two things I find useful:

The first thing that may help us is to understand how God can use those times of Exile – whatever the Exile might be – to bring us to a deeper level of spirituality, a deeper level of wisdom and maturity, and this is certainly what God did with Israel. Maybe you remember how the prophet Malachi calls the Exile a time of purification – and yes, it can happen sometimes that trough suffering we become better people. We learn what really matters, we take care of each other. That happens sometimes. We also have to acknowledge that sometimes also suffering does not bring the best in ourselves: we get impatient, we fight, we try to survive at the expense of others.

So the second thing I noticed to be really useful – and really beautiful- is to see how God remains faithful to us – no matter what we do to ourselves, no matter what others do to us. God still comes to find us, to redeem us and to bring us back to life. This is indeed what we see in this passage of Isaiah: God ready to start it all over again with his people when the people thought it was all over, God ready to pick up where they left off, yet transformed and renewed, and God ready to rebuild Jerusalem, and to bring back joy, strength and abundance – wine and bread to all, reads the text.

And this is the story of the Bible you see: God finding a way for God’s people. God finding a way to God’s people.

This is to me the story of Christmas. We so often hear messages like that at church: “Have you found God?” or “Have you found faith?”, but in the end we know how unable we are to find God, or to find faith and sometimes to find any hope or joy at all in the world – in the end, it’s never us finding God, it’s God finding us, like the angels found the shepherds in the night, on that night we remember this night. I mentioned last week how Luke’s Gospel is the Gospel of the poor and the humble, and we can certainly see that in the way Christ came to us. Christ came to us in the darkest and longest night, in exhaustion, isolation and rejection. Joseph and Mary were away from their home, their family, their land, they had been pushed away by the people of Bethlehem and little did they know that they wouldn’t be back in Nazareth for several years because the king would want to murder their child. And yet, this is in this reality that God chose to visit them and to be with them and to start over with the people, and God will visit them and be with them in a way that God’s people have never experienced before – God will be with them in the flesh of a newborn. And of course for us as Christians we know how, throughout in life, Jesus will continue to visit humble people, people plagued with poverty, disease or handicap, people scorned by other people, people cursed by their own wrong doings, hurting themselves, hurting others, feeling lost and forsaken. Jesus came to all, had a message for all, had compassion on all and was ready to start it all over again with each one of them, as God was ready to start it all over again after the Exile in Jerusalem and on this Holy night where God made God present in the flesh of an infant. What Christmas tells us is that there is no situation that God cannot visit, assume and redeem – What Christmas tells us is that nothing is lost when God is present.

And so it is for us I guess. The example of our ancestors in faith shows us that however difficult the times, God will still find a way for us, will find a way to us, and even, maybe, be with us in ways God has never been before. It makes no difference to God the situation we are in, no matter how bad it seems to us, no matter the darkness, God promises God will find us, and will bring back to us joy, hope and abundance – bread and wine – as God did in the ruins of Jerusalem, as God will do once again in the upper room on Jesus’s last supper we will celebrate in a few minutes. The prophets remind us that through it all we are not forsaken, but rather sought after. That’s the story of the Bible, and it can be our story too. So maybe like the shepherds in the fields, the only thing we have to do is to allow God to find us in the depth of this night.

I wish you all a very blessed Christmas.

– We hear today a passage from the book of Micah, another one of the “twelve minor prophets” of the Old Testament. If you don’t know anything about Micah, you still might know something, this very famous quotation: “What Does the Lord Require of You? to Act Justly and to Love Mercy and to Walk Humbly With Your God.” (Micah 6:8). It reminds us of something we have already insisted on, that the prophets are mostly preoccupied with what we call today “social justice” but which is basically care for the poor – and beyond this care for the poor, choosing for oneself to become “poor” that is, humble. This way of living, according to Micah, is worth all sacrifices and offerings, of much more value than what was considered at the times the highest sacrifice one could do in the pagan world: the sacrifice of your own child – a sacrifice that the God of Israel supremely despises, but – so does the prophet remind us – it may happen with any kind of offering: Our gifts are of no value to God if not offered with a pure heart and living according to the rules God has given to the people.

It might not be useless to be reminded of that during Christmas time when we try to show affection or to “make up” relationships by the offering of the gifts. The gift may be of value if there is work being done on the relationships in the meantime, the gift being a symbol for the mending or the reinforcing of the relationship but it certainly cannot be a substitute for it. What matters is the intention of the heart and the conversion of the heart, this is how it should work with one another, and this is certainly how it works with God. In the Old Testament, all sacrifice / gift that is offered with no pure intention is considered as manipulative (=trying to obtain something from God without being willing to change). What might not be readily understandable for us is that, as they make this claim, the prophets inscribe themselves in a countertradition: they go against the tradition of the Temple and the tradition of the priests, whose job was just that: to offer the sacrifice. With the prophets’ counter tradition, we are, if you will, at a higher degree of spirituality than just mere religion: The true religion of the heart. And we have talked already about that last week, how the God of the prophets is a God who expects repentance from the people. Repentance not by offering wonderful gifts or by beating ourselves up about our sins, but by concretely changing our way of living, becoming humble, and by changing our way of relating to others, especially to the poorest among us and the most powerless.

– Now, it is interesting that we open the Gospel of Luke and this is exactly what the program is all about. Luke inscribes his Gospel in the tradition (or the countertradition) of the prophets. Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was the priest designated to serve at the Temple on that year and he is silenced by the angel, he is made dumb, although he was a righteous man, he cannot instruct the people. But the women will. Over the voices of the establishment, we hear the voices of the poor and the humble: Mary and Elizabeth, and even an unborn child – John The Baptist, bearing his first testimony to Jesus by kicking in the womb.

This is very important to notice because we will hear during all this coming liturgical year from Luke’s Gospel, and these are two major themes in Luke: Humility and poverty. With each story, each parable and even as Luke gives an account of Jesus’s passion, the same statement is made again and again: The humble and the poor, these are the people who are close from God, these are the people who, emptying themselves, can be filled with the Spirit, these are the people who “get it” even if they don’t get anything else. These are the real prophets. No doubt in Luke’s mind that Elizabeth, the barren old woman, Mary, the unwed pregnant teenager, and John, the six months old fetus, are prophets.

And this is interesting we have today in our lectionary this parallel with Micah, because Micah was probably the poorest and most humble of all the prophets in the Bible – a small town man, from Moresheth-gath, a peasant, who had no relation whatsoever with the power structure in Jerusalem and who actually refused the title of prophet for himself (when other prophets like Jeremiah or Isaiah would go at length about their calling) (see Micah 3:5-8).

So what does it say to us when we see that the real prophet not only advocates for the poor and the humble but himself embraces humility and poverty because this is where the voice of God can be heard and where the change of heart happens? The prophet lets go of power, goods and even titles, even their titles in relationships with God- Micah is a true prophet as he refuses to be a prophet as a status – in this, Micah actually reminds me of St Francis of Assisi who refused to become a priest because of his great humility.

Now what about us? Do we want to help the poor and the powerless and stop there, or do we accept our own poverty and powerlessness and above that, do we go as far as choosing poverty and pwerlessness? Not because it’s a good thing in itself to be poor and powerless but because this is actually where the voice of God is being heard, and this is where God brings true salvation – as described in Mary’s famous song we have just heard this morning. The prophecy from Micah about Bethlehem has something to say about that too. This prophecy has been, of course, used many times by Christians. As we have noticed several times, we might just use it as a “prediction”: Micah says that a king will be born in Bethlehem and oh, this must be Jesus because Jesus is born in Bethlehem. But beyond that, what really matters in that Micah, the small town man, saw the real King as a small town man too, poor and humble and yet full of majesty as he would continue in King David’s steps.

– So yes, the prophet preaches repentance for the people – humility and poverty. Now I think we would stop half way if we would just stop at that. I think this is interesting in another manner that Micah would point out to Bethlehem, the city of David, as the place where salvation was supposed to come. To me, Micah means by that that in spite of all the sins of the people, God is ready to start again. God is ready to start again, with a new David, before the throne became completely corrupted in Jerusalem, and not only is God willing to start again, but God is ready to do something even better than what God did in the past. The mystery – and I think this is true in all the books of the prophets and in all the prophecies – is that if the people would repent, if they are really willing to change, God will repent too. God is ready to change too. We noted last week how God’s anger was a huge part of prophecies and how the prophets saw the calamities happening to the people as a punishment for their sins (collective – not individuals) but yet, there is always this possibility that if the people change, God will change too, and again, not only bring things back to normal, but will make things better than they were. More than speaking about God, or on behalf of God, the prophets show us how God feel about people. As Mary and Elizabeth do not only bear a message but bear the messengers themselves, the prophets show to the people how it is like to be God: Angered by their sins, mourning for their crimes, and in the same time full of compassion for the lost and longing to make things new. The care and concern prophets show for the people is a reflection of God’s own care and concern. God is moved in every way by those God chose to call God’s own.

So you see, the God of the prophets does not care for karma and fate and destiny – the people won’t get exactly (the bad things) that they deserve, but they are free to reinvent with God a new way of being, should they choose to. The prophets wrote in the darkest times of History for the people and yet they were able to discern what God was willing to do beyond that. Once again, this is not cheap hope that we find in the Bible, but faith in God’s willingness and power to turn things around. In the words of Mary:

“His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever” Amen.

We continue today our series on the prophets, and we meet so many during this season of Advent! I don’t know if you’ve paid attention, but in our readings today we hear from not less than three different prophets! Zephaniah (OT lesson), Isaiah (Canticle/Psalm) and John the Baptist in the Gospel. Isaiah and John the Baptist are of course well-known prophets – Zephaniah not so much…so I would like to start by taking a minute to present this one.

– What we should notice right away is that Zephaniah is not well known to us because…he’s actually not well known at all! Unlike prophets like John the Baptist or Jeremiah whom I talked about in my last sermon, we know almost nothing about Zephaniah’s personal life and vocation – except for a very short genealogy at the beginning of the book. Most scholars assume Zephaniah lived and preached at the time of King Josiah, one of the last kings of Judah before the Fall of Jerusalem and the captivity in Babylon. And the Book of Zephaniah itself is very short: three chapters only, which is the reason why Zephaniah belongs to the category of the “Twelve minor prophets” as opposed to the three majors prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel). Now “Minor prophets” does not mean that they are “less important” prophets. The scroll of the twelve prophets contains as many verses as any of the three major other scrolls, and the minor prophets complete the predication of the major ones in a significant way (for reasons too long to develop here!).

Now if we start looking specifically at the reading we are given today by our lectionary, we will notice that once again we are presented with only one aspect of the predication of the prophet – if you remember from last time, we had three verses of Jeremiah out of fifty two chapters! Here we have a longer extract but the tone is actually very different from the rest of the book, so we have to turn back to the whole book to understand what it is really about.

The portion we read today from Zephaniah is an extract from the third and last chapter of the prophet. What Zephaniah describes in this portion of the chapter is a beautiful and joyful vision, a vision of a better future for the people, where all will be gathered with God in their midst in the Holy City (And it’s the same idea that we have in the passage of Isaiah we have just read, and it should also sound familiar as it reminds us of the Book of Revelation.)

Now if you remember, we talked before about the way the prophecies bring comforting visions to people in difficult times. And with the Fall of Jerusalem and the Exile, Zephaniah certainly wrote at a difficult time when people needed hope and to be reminded that God would have the last word. Yet we would be wrong to assume that what the prophets say is that now is a dark time but sit tight, wait, because suddenly God will be here and make everything better. Unfortunately, this is often the way it’s interpreted. Yet if we look closer, the dark times – and this is certainly the case in Zephaniah – are understood as an expression of God’s wrath, a chastisement for sins, and even if only God can bring better times, dark times will turn into better times when people change their hearts, repent and get reconciled with God.

– Now of course this is not very popular for most of us…God’s wrath, chastisement for sins, or even repentance? In our Lectio Divina group, a few weeks ago, someone made a comment about never having heard an Episcopal priest preach about repentance – I had to agree, never did I! In our churches, we have to acknowledge that we cultivate an image of God who never gets angry and forgives even before we have confessed our sins (that is, if we still believe in sin!). We dismiss all this as an “Old Testament” understanding of God. Now we have to notice that this understanding of God is still present in the New testament though, we see that it is still present in John the Baptist’s proclamation who talks about the “wrath” and the “fire” that are coming, as well as “repentance” for the people. So should we dismiss this aspect of the proclamation too, or should we try to understand what it means?

As usual, I certainly don’t have an answer to all those important questions, but there are a few things we can keep in mind:

1 – In the messages of the prophets, God’s anger is not an expression of God’s hate – quite the opposite, anger is an expression of God’s concern for the people. God is not indifferent. Everywhere in the Old Testament, God is described as the one who sees and hears the people and is moved with compassion. Today many people wonder if God is touched by the suffering of this world, but the prophets didn’t wonder about that. God does not “allow” bad things as we say now, rather God is angry at the evil committed by the people, especially the injustices and exploitation of the powerless –and this is actually the source of God’s anguish and God’s wrath.

As we consider that, maybe we can question our lack of anger at many things that should make us angry – not out of hate, but out of concern for those who are suffering and even out of concern for those who wrong them. God desires repentance, change, rather than destruction.

2 – In the prophets’ message, the chastisement is a consequence of sin – those sins, that in the Bible are idolatry and injustices. Dark times are brought on themselves by the people, they are a consequence of the actions of the people for the very reason that the world God created is not designed to work with sin. When sin is present, things go wrong, because sin cut us off from God. Prophets have a very strong sense of God’s holiness. God cannot be associated with sin, if people are sinful they automatically set themselves apart from God. Now what is important to notice is that they do that as people, it’s a collective understanding of sin. Those who suffer the most aren’t those who sin the most, that’s actually often the opposite: the poor suffer while the powerful take advantage of them, and that’s part of the injustice God cannot tolerate.

As we consider that, maybe we can question how our choices affect others collectively and what society we contribute to create. A lot of our world problems today are a consequence of our selfishness and of our indifference. In this sense, at least in the prophets, God’s wrath is a tool to bring about change. God is not an angry God because this is God’s character, rather God uses wrath to lead God’s people to react and ultimately to save the sinful as well as those who are oppressed by the sinners. Wrath brings about conversion.

3 – And so, what it’s really about is repentance. Or to say it differently, the visions brought by the prophets are not happy dreams that would work as the “opium of the people”. Those visions of a better future may help us cope yes, but also they invite us to change. The times will change if people answer God’s call found in the predication of the prophets, and if the people respond by their willingness to change. Deeply, all prophecies are a call to repentance – this is very clear in the message of John the Baptist we have today. All of John the Baptist’s proclamation was about repentance (Same with Jesus, at least in Mark – If you remember, Mark almost never tells us what Jesus preached about, he only says that Jesus asked people to repent because the Kingdom was coming). The prophets are not dreamers even though they have visions, rather they are down to earth people who are passionate about justice, speak the truth to powers and call for profound social change, and that’s what the new Jerusalem is about.

As we consider that, we may understand that repentance is not about feeling bad about ourselves – the reason why we don’t like to talk about repentance! The Prophets don’t invite us to feel guilty or ashamed, they invite us to act, to “bear fruits worthy of repentance” as John the Baptist puts it, with very simple acts of justice and integrity in our everyday lives. We will participate in the kingdom announced by the prophets as long as we are willing to live according to what this kingdom is all about.