For those who want a change from the Gospel

Kingdom 3/2 before Advent – Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18

Last week our lectionary sent us to Amos chapter 5, where the prophet turned on its head the people’s understanding of the ‘Day of the Lord’. They expected it would be a wonderful occasion when God would come to judge all the other nations and leave Israel as top dog. Instead, said Amos, they would be at the front of the queue for judgement. What Amos said to the Northern Kingdom, Zephaniah said in the South to Judah 100 or so years later. We never learn!

But Zephaniah’s teaching goes deeper than that of Amos. I particularly like him, because he is talking about liturgy. Amos mentions worship, but his main point is that injustice and corruption are rife, and there is no concern in the land for the poor and disadvantaged by the rich and privileged. Their worship is almost beside the point, but for Zephaniah it is central. His key idea comes in the strange idea in v.7-8; that God is about to offer a sacrifice, and that sacrifice will be the corrupt nation of Judah.

So what does that actually mean, and what crime had the nation committed to demand such a punitive sacrifice? Our filleted passage doesn’t tell us, but v.4-6 do. It’s all about the worship of false gods. And, v.12-13 add, the complacency and accumulation of wealth which that false worship has engendered.

There is a strand of OT theology which suggests that the Temple was seen as a microcosm of the whole creation. Solomon knew that no earthly house could contain or limit God (2 Chron 6:18), but the Temple was the place where God was, as it were, available to his people. Israelite worship both re-enacted the mighty acts done by God for his people and celebrated them. But it also actualised God’s presence among them. He was present, and available to his people, in and through their worship. All creation is present in their liturgy. So what happens when that liturgy goes horribly wrong? All creation suffers. The terrifying postscript to Zephaniah’s pronouncement of judgement on Judah is that actually the whole earth is going to be punished. False worship will not just harm you: it will affect the whole created order, because that’s what liturgy does.

So in a terrifying twist, God is about to offer his own sacrifice. To purify the nation from their own corruption a sin offering has to be made – the whole of creation has to be consumed. The next couple of chapters are a Cook’s tour of the nations around Judah, and all of them are held to account. Particularly poignant at the moment is the fate of Gaza, which will be left in ruins 2:4). God calls the people to silence (v.7) with the onomatopoeic word ‘hassa’, like our word ‘hush’, a common call to worship in the OT. Then he announces his words of judgement.

Recently at our home group we have been studying evangelism, but last night we spent a period in intercession for the war going on in Israel and Gaza, most of us admitting that we really had no idea how to pray into that tragic situation. But I quickly made the link between evangelism and the terrible state of the world. Jesus called his followers to be salt and light, and the function of salt in his time was twofold: as a preservative and as a fertiliser. Christians are sprinkled in society to stop bad things from growing and to help good things to grow. Jesus warned against being so polluted with other chemicals that we lose our distinctive saltiness and become useless. But the other thing which would make salt ineffective would be if there simply wasn’t enough of it to make any difference. As our world has neglected both God and godliness, there are truly cosmic effects. We don’t engage in evangelism to get our church numbers up so that we can have help to pay the bills. We desperately need in our world more godly people who worship and live righteously.

It sounds a strange idea to suggest that if we don’t get our liturgy right war will break out in our world, but Zephaniah certainly suggests that what we do or don’t do in worship really does have cosmic effects. Perhaps we are beginning to see them now.

Coming soon – a new series on revjohnleachblog from Advent Sunday. Stay tuned!