Zephaniah
1:1-12
In the late
nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche declared, “God is dead.” In the 1960’s a group of American theologians
pointed out that as far as a large segment of the American public was concerned
(and it’s become a much larger group since then), Nietzsche might as well have
been right, because even if they use the word “God”, it means nothing to
them. As far as they are concerned,
“God” is a quaint concept left over from the Middle Ages. To answer the situation, the “Death of God”
theologians tried to formulate a theology without God at its center.
A writer for Time magazine heard about this project
and wrote an article for the April 8, 1966 issue. The
cover that week made
quite an impression.
Of course,
there was a backlash. One of my favorite
responses was printed in a Methodist student magazine called Motive.
It was written in the format of a newspaper column and under that
headline was the subheading, “Eminent Deity Succumbs During Surgery; Succession
in Doubt As All Creation Groans; LBJ Orders Flags At Half Staff”. I won’t read the whole thing, but I’ll quote
some of it to give you the idea.
“…God, creator of the universe, principal deity of the world’s
Jews, ultimate reality of Christians, and most eminent of all divinities died
late yesterday during major surgery undertaken to correct a massive diminishing
influence. His exact age is not known,
but close friends estimate that it greatly exceeded that of all other extant
beings. While he did not, in recent
years, maintain any fixed abode, his house was said to consist of many
mansions. …
Plans for the deity’s funeral are incomplete. Reliable sources suggested that massive
negotiations may be necessary in order to select a church for the services and
an appropriate liturgy. Dr. Wilhelm
Pauck, theologian of Union Seminary in New York City, proposed this morning
that it would be fitting and seemly to inter the remains in the ultimate ground
of being. …
Public reaction in this country was summed up by an elderly
retired streetcar conductor in Passaic, New Jersey, who said, ‘I never met him,
of course, never saw him. But from what
I hear I guess he was a real nice fellow.
Tops. …”[1]
That’s satire, using humor to
teach truth. However, you really do meet
that kind of condescending attitude in real life, and it is insulting to a
living God, who is not just “a real nice fellow.” Do not trivialize God. One contemporary politician speaks of his own
self-described spiritual practice,
“When we go in church, and I drink my little wine, which is
about the only wine I drink, and eat my little cracker, I guess that’s a way of
asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as I can because I feel
cleansed.”[2]
That demonstrates – at best – a magical view of the sacrament,
treating communion like swallowing a handful of Flintstones vitamins. At its worst it is outright blasphemy. It totally ignores the sacrifice of Jesus on
the cross; it laughs at the real death of the real God incarnate; it discounts the
true cost of our pardon and ignores the source of real spiritual cleansing.
And yet, such
attitudes, decry them as we might as the result of modern skepticism or
secularism, were known even to the prophet Zephaniah, around seven centuries
before Christ. To push God out of the
picture or to treat him as a disinterested, ineffectual, distant figure of song
and story who has nothing to do with the here-and-now, Zephaniah [1:12] warns, is
to stir the Lord up in a way that you do not want to do.
“At that
time I will search Jerusalem with lamps,
and
I will punish the people who rest complacently
on
their dregs,
those who
say in their hearts,
‘The Lord
will not do good, nor will he do harm.’”
Do not presume to treat the Lord of heaven and earth as expendable
or beside-the-point.
Our
relationship with God is exactly that: a relationship. It is not a tool to pull out of the box when
you need it and put back when you’re done.
Exactly because God’s love never ends or grows less, God can be
hurt. There is not an exact correlation
between human and divine ways – far from it – but we can say, in a way, that
God has feelings and feelings that are far, far, more intense than our
own. Think what it means to be
disrespected or trivialized by your own family, and then multiply that by
whatever degree to imagine what it does to God’s heart.
How often,
though, do we do exactly that? How often
do we set one side of life over here and God over there? How often do we act as if there is no place
for God on the ballfield or in the courtroom or balancing the books? How often do we make decisions in terms that
are, for all practical purposes, those of an agnostic? (That’s somebody who says, “I don’t know whether
or not God exists, so I guess I’m on my own.”)
So we don’t spend any time asking what God wants us to do or how God
wants us to live. Maybe we operate on a
vague sense that we should be good or do the right thing, but it never makes
its way into specifics like choices about when to speak and when to remain
silent or how to use our money or what medical treatments we go with or pass
up.
The whole
“God is dead” movement was right in some ways; modern people, even people of
faith, do not ascribe every last detail of what happens in the natural world to
specific divine commands. Of those who
do, only a handful of people like Pat Robertson have the hubris to claim that
God is directing wildfires to burn California or hurricanes to hit Texas, and they
can tell you why.
But the “God is dead” movement
was wrong in saying that God has no hand in anything that happens anytime or
anywhere. God is very much involved in
human life and human history. God is so
intimately involved that he became part of it.
He lived the life of a Middle Eastern peasant whose protest of the
world’s ways was crushed by the unjust rule of a local theocracy and a
multinational empire. God is so
intimately involved that he undid the wrongs perpetrated at the cross, going
against all that is natural and normal and raising Jesus from the dead.
And God still
goes against all that is expected, working wonders in the lives of people who
live in a world that pushes him aside. God
blesses the poor in heart and the pure and the merciful and those who
mourn. God fills those who hunger and
thirst for righteousness. God brings new
life to those dead in sin, including the sin of pride that so troubled the
prophets – and rightly so.
By the way, Time published another cover story, the day after Christmas, 1968. I think that Zephaniah
might have felt better about this:
[1]
Anthony Towne, “God Is Dead in Georgia” in The
Best of Motive (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House,
1990), 127-128.
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