Zephaniah 3:12-17
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
December 15, 2024
It actually happened 43 years ago. The story of it has made the rounds ever since. So, you may have heard it before, and heard it from me before; but it’s still a true story and still one worth our reflecting on again.
Doug and Sue Whitt had just had a beautiful wedding, followed by a lovely reception that lasted nearly all night. Tired but happy in the wee hours of the morning, they stumbled exhausted into their hotel’s fancy bridal suite. There they saw a sofa, chairs and a table; but no bed. Finally, they determined that the sofa was a hide-a bed, and they folded out a lumpy mattress on sagging springs. They spent a fitful night trying to get comfortable on it, and woke up with sore backs and hot steam coming out of Doug’s ears.
He marched down to the front desk to give management a tongue-lashing. When Doug paused to catch his breath, the clerk gently asked, “Did you open the door on the back wall behind the sofa?” “No,” Doug snapped, “We were too tired to even think about putting our clothes away in the closet.” “You might want to try that door,” the clerk replied with a look that made Doug do an about-face, race back to the room, fling open the door and find behind it a large, luxurious bedroom with chocolates, a fruit basket and ice-encircled champagne.
Opening all the doors in a honeymoon suite is like coming to know all the joys in the great grace of God. There are always more delights than we even hoped for!
If we believe in God’s unmerited and thus unlimited goodness, we look behind every door just in case there’s some yet-to-be-discovered gift of His grace.
Keeping an eye peeled for happy surprises does not, however, mean turning a blind eye to lumpy mattresses, sagging springs and missed opportunities. It is only to see such things, and worse, in the light of God’s perfect generosity and faithfulness and of His promise to make His perfect will perfectly fulfilled in the end.
Back in the challenging days of the eighties, then Secretary of State Candoleezza Rice spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. Being the first African-American Secretary of State, she recalled how American slaves used to sing: “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen – Glory Hallelujah!” She then shared how, growing up in the church, she struggled with the seeming contradiction in that line. It was only when she’d become older and wiser that she saw there was no contradiction at all. She said, “I believe the same message is found in the Bible in Romans 5, where we are told to ‘rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’”
Those who believe this can, even in hard times, “rejoice in hope”, as Romans 12:12 commands. They rejoice in the hope that through the Holy Spirit God will lift them up and see them through life’s often daunting challenges, and in the hope that some day God will set everything right, both in the world and in themselves. The faithful, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, hold on to infinite hope even when they have to accept finite disappointment. For they hear the melody of the future, and by faith dance to it in the present.
Zephaniah was the first prophetic voice heard in Judah in sixty years. His ministry spanned the reign of King Josiah, and he spoke to the ups and downs of that good king’s efforts to return God’s people to the way of their Lord. But the words God gave Zephaniah to deliver mainly focused on the end of history when God would make a fresh start and recreate earth and heaven and people. Thus, God opens Zephaniah’s book of prophecy with this radical declaration: “I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth, says the Lord.” On that great day, the mighty warrior who is Lord will come down upon the evildoers to punish them in His justice and come to His faithful remnant to renew them in His love. He will make them those from whom enemies and judgments have been “taken away” and hence those who “fear disaster no more”. He will make them “humble and lowly” and thereby people who “shall do no wrong and utter no lies”.
God proclaims to the faithful who “seek refuge” in Him that on that great day it will be an everlasting reality that “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.”
Notice that it’s not the people who obtain this victory and bring about this happy state of affairs. It is the doing of the One beyond them who comes into their midst and makes happen what they never could.
All the faithful have to do is to follow the lead of this God who rejoices in them. All they have to do, as they wait through their struggles and suffering for the arrival of that great day, is to imitate God and in turn rejoice in Him. Therefore, God commands them here and now, to “sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem.”
And we should do the same here and now, as some of our brothers and sisters do every Sunday.
In a talk entitled “The Sense of an Ending”, Jeremy Begbie tells about attending a worship service in a poor South African township. That week, a house around the corner from the church had been burned to the ground by arsonists seeking payback, a tornado had ripped apart 50 homes and killed five, and a gang had murdered a 14-year-old member of the church Sunday School.
The pastor began his opening prayer, lamenting, “Lord, You are the King. Why did You let all this happen? We are ever in the midst of death.” As he prayed in this vein, the congregation responded to his words with passionate sighing and heart-felt groaning. Then, once he finished praying, a listening silence fell upon them all, until very gradually everyone began to sing of God’s glory, at first quietly, but then louder and louder. They sang and shouted and exulted, thanking and praising the God who had, to use Begbee’s words, “plunged into the worst of this world to give us a promise of an ending beyond all imagining.”
And their exalting God’s name with faith, joy, hope and fervor lifted their spirits in defiance of their circumstances and gave them a foretaste of the end of history and their destiny in Christ. Rejoicing in hope takes thinking about the future but it is fulfilled today by “breathing in the fresh air of that great ending, tasting its spices and sipping the wine of the feast to come.”
Let us, this Sunday at church and on any cold cloudy weekday as well, radiate the joy of believing that there is for us every step of the way uplifting and empowering help from beyond. For there is in our midst a warrior God who rejoices over us and gives us victory in the end!
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