To Rejoice or Not: That is the Question

Sermon delivered on Advent 3C, Gaudete Sunday, December 13, 2015 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Zephaniah 3.14-20; Isaiah 12.2-6; Philippians 4.4-7; Luke 3.7-18.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent. Gaudete is Latin and means to rejoice, thus the pink candle we lighted on the Advent wreath. Gaudete Sunday signals a break in this season of Advent with its emphasis on penance and watchful expectation as we the Church prepare to look back and celebrate the coming (adventus) of Christ in his incarnation and also look forward to his final advent as judge at the end of time. As you recall, Advent is not part of the Christmas season but rather a preparation for it. But given John, whom we observed in lighting our third candle this morning, and his message about the coming wrath of God, what reason do we have to rejoice? It is this question I want us to look at today.

We start with our OT lesson with its emphasis on hopeful rejoicing over the Lord’s salvation of his people Israel. But if we are to grasp the full meaning of our lesson, we have to put it in its proper context. Zephaniah was a 7th-century BC prophet who spoke God’s word to God’s people during the reign of the great reformer king Josiah. The Northern kingdom of Israel had already fallen and been sent into exile about 80 years earlier. Now the southern kingdom of Judah and its capital of Jerusalem were following the same path. God’s people had fallen into idol worship, which had resulted in the people of Judah living in ways that caused all kinds of injustice and unethical behavior. After all, we become what we worship and Judah’s behavior was indicative of the pathology of their idols. Josiah was therefore trying to rid Judah of their idolatry so that God’s people would once again start living as the kind of people God called them to be, people who would embody God’s healing love and presence to his sin-sick world. But despite Josiah’s reforms, many of the people’s hearts were still turned away from God.

Now if all we read was today’s passage from Zephaniah, we might get the impression that God was going to give his wayward people a get-out-of-jail-free pass, that their idolatry and other sins really didn’t matter, because, well, you know. God really is kind of a doting old grandpa who doesn’t care that much about the way we act or think (wink, wink). So indulge me as I read a bit from the first chapter of Zephaniah to help give us some proper perspective about our OT lesson.

The word of the Lord that came to Zephaniah. “I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord. “I will sweep away both man and beast; I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea—and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble. When I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth,” declares the Lord. “I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against all who live in Jerusalem.” “I will bring such distress on all people that they will grope about like those who are blind, because they have sinned against the Lord. Their blood will be poured out like dust and their entrails like dung.  Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord’s wrath.” In the fire of his jealousy the whole earth will be consumed, for he will make a sudden end of all who live on the earth (Zephaniah 1.1a,2-4a,17-18).

I don’t know about you, but these words scare me. They really scare me. These are not healing words. They are killing words, enough to wake us even from our napping during the sermon and take notice. And if we take Scripture seriously at all, we need to pay attention to the prophet’s warning. God is warning us through the prophet that the day is coming when his wrath against all our sins is going to explode; and when it does, it will spell our total destruction. Nothing or no one will be spared, because as Paul reminded us, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God in whose image we were created (Romans 3.23).

We note too the chilling similarity between Zephaniah’s message and John the Baptist’s message in our gospel lesson. Both are aimed especially at us as God’s people, warning us that it won’t do to be a Christian in name only if we live our lives in open hostility toward God. It further reminds us that sin really does matter, and contrary to some of our delusions, God is not some gentle, doting old grandpa who looks the other way when the kiddies misbehave. If you believe that particular delusion about God, I would humbly suggest you might want to come to grips with the very different picture Scripture paints about sin and God’s reaction to it. But here’s the thing. When we do come to grips with the reality of God’s judgment, we are given the proper perspective to rejoice, contradictory as that sounds.

So how does that work, you ask? Glad you asked. Otherwise I’d have to end this sermon now and I know you’d really hate that! How can a healthy and realistic perception and understanding of God’s certain judgment on all our sin and evil help lead us to rejoicing? Put another way, how can the complete destruction about which Zephaniah 1.1-18 speaks and the hope of escaping that destruction contained in Zephaniah 3.14-20 both be true? John the baptist has the answer for us in our gospel lesson: Jesus the Messiah. John warns us to prepare for God’s coming judgment in the way Zephaniah and the other prophets had. But there’s an added urgency to John’s message because God’s Messiah will soon appear, and when he does he will bring God’s righteous judgment to bear on the world. We as Christians, of course, believe Jesus will do this fully at his Second Coming and this is part of what we wait for during this season of Advent.

But a funny thing happened between John’s announcement of Jesus’ coming to judge our sins and our waiting for his Second Coming to fully and finally execute that judgment. It’s called the cross. John was correct in a way I suspect he didn’t fully understand at the time, especially because he did not live to see Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. But having a full understanding of God’s will is not necessary for one to be a prophet. Speaking God’s word of judgment and salvation truthfully to God’s people is the only thing necessary for one to be a prophet. Jesus did indeed bring about God’s judgment on our sin and evil, but not in the way anyone expected until after his resurrection. As Paul reminds us in Romans, God condemned our sin in the flesh on the cross so that we would not have to bear God’s right but awful judgment—flesh of course being the part of our human nature that actively rebels against God, our fallen self, not our skin (Romans 8.3-4). Put another way, we are spared destruction because Jesus took our destruction on himself. On the cross, then, we see God’s perfect justice and love being fulfilled. God condemns our sins while sparing us, thanks be to God! Amen? This is what allows us to rejoice, even in the face of God’s judgment. God didn’t create us with the intent and foreknowledge of destroying us. What parent operates in this manner? To be sure, some parents tragically do destroy their children, but that is because we humans are flawed and profoundly broken. God is neither and therefore God does not and cannot desire the death of even the most wicked among us (Ezekiel 33.11). God loves us too much to desire this.

And because God raised Jesus from the dead, we believe that those of us who put our whole hope and trust in Jesus will likewise be raised from the dead on the Last Day. This is what Paul was getting at when he talked about being buried and raised with Christ in our baptism (Romans 6.3-4). If God raises the dead, which we believe, then we are ultimately spared from God’s judgment when he raises us from the dead so that we can live with him forever in his promised new creation which Jesus’ resurrection launched, this despite our sin which causes us to die (Romans 6.16)!

And while I just urged us to have a healthy, realistic fear of the Lord, I want to also urge us not to have an unhealthy fear of the Lord, where we are always terrified of God’s judgment because we know our own disordered heart coupled with real lingering doubts about the efficacy of the cross (efficacy of course means having the power to bring about the desired effect, in this case our salvation). Too often I fear that we as Christians reduce the mercy, love, and justice executed on the cross to mere platitudes where we don’t truly believe that our sins really are covered by the blood of the Lamb—God himself become human for our sake. When that happens, if we really do believe in the reality of God’s judgment, we find ourselves living in constant terror of God and his wrath, forgetting completely (or ignoring) his great love and mercy shown for us on Calvary. And speaking from personal experience, we dare not, we must not do that, in part, because it is impossible to develop a real and healthy relationship with anyone, God included, who genuinely terrifies us. So I appeal to us all, my beloved. Take to heart the blood of the Lamb shed for us, and take it seriously, because when we do, we have the needed basis to rejoice, both in our present difficulties and in the face of God’s certain judgment. That’s what Paul is driving at in our epistle lesson. Try it, he says, and you’ll find out it’s true.

When we keep the cross fixed firmly in our heart and mind we can rejoice for two reasons. First, because we realize God loves us so much that he did the impossible for us to spare us from his right judgment on our sins. If that were the only reason to rejoice, that would be enough! But there’s a second reason to rejoice. In God’s righteous judgment there is not only the promise of punishment of the wicked (today’s judgment oracles make that clear). There is also a restorative dimension to God’s judgment. In other words, God brings his judgment about primarily to restore his good creation corrupted by human sin and the evil it unleashed (cf. Psalm 96.1-13). And a moment’s thought should make us realize that is a good thing. If we are going to get to live forever in God’s direct presence in his new creation, who wants to be plagued by sin and evil forever, except perhaps those who love their sin and evil and revel in it? But those folks won’t be in God’s new world! And so as Christians, we must learn to see God’s judgment as a good and necessary thing so that God can rid his creation and us of all vestiges of sin and evil. And when we consider that in the blood of Christ shed for us we will be spared the punitive dimension of God’s right judgment, why would we not want to rejoice?

Moreover, if we truly love others as we are called to love them, why would we not want to share this Good News with them so that they too can be spared God’s wrath and have a real basis for joy and rejoicing? Yet in this culture of ours with its increasing pathological hostility toward the Christian faith, we have allowed ourselves to be bullied and cow-towed into silence so that the Good News is not proclaimed with joy and gladness, if at all. Let us resolve this Advent as we watch and wait for our Lord’s return to change that!

This future hope of ours also gives us our marching orders here and now because God’s forgiveness also demands our repentance as John so rightly emphasized in our gospel lesson. Why is repentance so important? Because without repentance God can never truly forgive us so that we can have our relationship restored with him. Think it through. God can and will forgive anything and everything except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12.31). But if we choose to live our lives in ways that are patterned after evil and ask God to forgive us, we essentially ask God to condone our evil and even participate in it, and God simply cannot do that. Thus the need and call for us to turn our lives from evil and toward the goodness of God (see, e.g., Romans 8.5-9; Galatians 3.3, 5.24). It’s not about our ability to follow the rules. It’s about where our hearts are inclined. Given what God has done for us in Jesus to spare us from his awful judgment, why would we want to still act in ways that grieve our Lord’s heart? Again, I am not talking about the occasional slip-up or our inherent brokenness that only God can overcome. I am talking about a pattern of living in willful disobedience to our Lord’s good commands.

Therefore during this Advent season, if we really want to be able to rejoice always, let us focus on embracing the hope and promise offered us in Jesus and ask the Spirit to help us fully appropriate the Good News of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension so that we truly might live as people of joy and hope because we really do believe that God has done an unbelievably good and wondrous thing for us in Jesus. When we, by the power of the Spirit, really do embrace God’s gift to us, it can’t help but change us into new creations so that we become the truly human beings God created us to be. This is what it means to have faith in Jesus Christ. And as that happens, we will discover what Paul promised in our epistle lesson today: the peace of God that passes all understanding. This in itself is worth the wait, my beloved. I know because I have experienced that peace, and it affirms that we really are people who have and live the Good News of Jesus Christ, now and for all eternity. I suspect that John the baptist would surely approve. To Christ be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.