Jun 25 | Heralds and Prophets: Summer 2018 Preaching Series, Part 3
Today’s citations:
Our third installment of our preaching series on kings takes a detour as we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist.
So far in our journey together, our stories have shown us the importance of letting God be the absolute monarch of our hearts, and about what kind of monarch God is. God’s will is never done solely through the work of the powerful, but becomes most purely manifest in the secret work of seeds and servants. This not only shows us that God is truly just, but that God and the kingdom are truly inclusive: all are invited to join in the celebration, regardless or colour, creed, gender, orientation, age, or ability. If this seems too good to be true, it would be, for an earthly kingdom.
And speaking of celebrations, let’s take a look at one of the tasks God has given those who proclaim Her kingdom: that of herald and prophet, performed by both Isaiah and our bizarre, beloved brother John.
We have two days in our calendar where we celebrate John the Baptist. The first is today, a happy occasion, where we celebrate his miraculous birth. The second, which we celebrate in August, is John’s beheading, a decidedly more complicated feast which nonetheless shows us that as beautiful as God’s kingdom is, it is nearly always opposed, often violently, by the kingdoms of earth.
We’re most accustomed to hearing about John the Baptist in Advent. Many of us can’t hear that Isaiah reading without also hearing Handel’s Messiah. The prophet Isaiah was active during the reign of King Hezekiah, lionized in Scripture as one of the righteous Israelite kings. He introduced many temple reforms and defeated King Sennacherib of Assyria, the empire seeking to claim Israel as a vassal state. Eventually, however, the kingdom was swept into exile by the Babylonians.
Isaiah was Hezekiah’s advisor, a courtly prophet unlike the poor vine-dresser Amos or the locust-eating wildman John, and the text that bears his name (which actually consists of three separate books) includes both poetry and prose. The three chapters preceding today’s are all narrative, stories about Hezekiah and his dealings with the Assyrians and Babylonians. We then shift abruptly into the poetic songs of Chapter 40, which anticipate a final restoration to Jerusalem embodied by the whole of creation, a reconciliation of the exiled to the arms of God.
You can understand why this would have been so important to early Christians, living under the yoke of Rome waiting for the return of the Messiah. The word Messiah means “anointed,†a royal ritual practiced across cultures for thousands of years.
Isaiah also offers us a window into perhaps the most important gift the Western world ever received from the Jewish people: the idea that God’s strength was not solely determined through the successes and failures of Her chosen people. The belief of the ancient Near East was that when nations went to battle, gods went to battle. The Jewish people, always at the fertile crossroads of vast empires, suffered many defeats and decimations. This difficult history pushed them into a more nuanced understanding of what a truly powerful and loving God would look like. Christians, attesting to God made man in Jesus, had an even steeper learning curve: what kind of God could not only die but be murdered shamefully by the state?
God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.
That’s one herald and prophet. Let’s look at the other.
While all of the Gospels attest to a relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist, it is only the Gospel of Luke which gives us a full birth narrative for John, and only in Luke is he said to be related to Jesus. Many scholars believe that the writer of Luke wrote to a community that included Gentiles who may not have been familiar with the recurring themes of Hebrew Scriptures, and so he wove many of those motifs into the story as both a nod to the Jews and a teaching tool for the new believers. Elizabeth, like Hannah, like Sarah, though righteous and devout, is barren, which in the ancient Near East was a source of shame. This sort of upside-down series of surprises is a constant theme in the Gospel of Luke, and dovetails well with our exploration of God’s upside-down kingship.
These stories are important not only because of the beauty of God’s redemption, but because they demonstrate that the theologians who collected these stories into our Bible were far more intelligent that we give them credit for. Unlike so many contemporary prosperity gospel heretics and theologically lazy autocrats, these theologians thumb their noses at the false doctrine of just-world theory, the idea that everyone gets what they deserve. In John’s birth we also a wonderful depiction of privilege transferred from the priest Zechariah – whose voice, which would have been held in high honour, is taken away, while his wife Elizabeth gains a voice. Not only that, but we see another comic irony where Zechariah doubts his incredible angelic visitor and thereby loses his voice, while as far as we know Elizabeth receives no angelic visitor but somehow knows the name God has chosen for the baby and recognizes Mary as the “mother of her Lord.â€
Once Zechariah gets his voice back, he prophesies – an anticipation of the work his son will do as the herald of the Messiah.
As heralds, we too are called to lead the whole world into pilgrimage, to point creation toward the shining sun of our King. This must be approached with joy and humility. Remember Christians did not come up with inviting the world to the party on our own. The Book of Isaiah proclaims that all the world will be gathered up into God’s embrace. This is a treasure we received from our grandmothers and grandfathers in Judaism. We march beside them, not ahead.
As prophets, we too are called to name God’s truth and intent for Her beloved cosmos. It’s important to note that while modern ears tend to think of “prophecy†as an utterance predicting the future, the biblical understanding of prophecy was more about “truth-telling.†You’ll note that Zechariah’s prophecy is more concerned with what he has already witnessed – the grace and mercy of God – than it is with what will happen in the future, which only takes up four of the eleven verses of his song.
All of us are capable of being prophets, naming truth and speaking out against injustice.
In the chapter of Isaiah before today’s passage, a Rabshakeh, or high ranking advisor of the Assyrian King, visits the Israelites to boast that their God will not deliver them from the empire. Let our conviction be so strong, because our world is full of such proclamations of disaster. Our world is full of petty empires who take delight in their own fascism, who have stopped their ears to the weeping of babies in cages and desperate parents. Our world is full of the so-called faithful who have so little faith in God’s power to redeem the world that they will throw their allegiance behind liars and manipulators. Our world is full of oppressed people who still have the strength to cry out against their oppression.
As prophets, we must remember that the wicked are like chaff that the wind drives away. As heralds, we must remember that the kingdom is breaking in:
In the powerful who set aside their voices to give space for the powerless; in the powerless who trust in their redemption; in the Body of Christ which is here and in countless churches across the world right now, doing its work of healing, redemption, and rejoicing. We must not fear, for our king is alive and enthroned forever.
Let’s end with a portion of Psalm 2, so appropriate in a world like ours.
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and his anointed, saying,
‘Let us burst their bonds asunder,
and cast their cords from us.’
The One who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord has them in derision.
Then God will speak to them in wrath,
and terrify them in fury, saying,
‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’