Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 12th of Twelfth Month, 2021
Speaker: Brian Young
Scripture: Zephaniah 3:14-20, NRSV, Matthew 22:34–40 (NRSV)
14 Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!
15 The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.
16 On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak.
17 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
18 as on a day of festival. I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it.
19 I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.
20 At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes, says the Lord.
Good morning, Friends!
The Scripture that we have just heard is a love song penned by the prophet Zephaniah. It’s a love song from the God of Israel to the faithful in Jerusalem, who are personified (symbolized, brought together as one in the image of) as a woman, a young maiden, “daughter Zion.” Sing aloud, shout, rejoice, daughter Zion, for there is good news! Disaster has been averted; there are no judgments against you; God is in your midst and will protect you.
Now, Zephaniah is not one of those prophets we hear from often. He’s numbered as one of the twelve “minor” prophets, and his book is fairly brief—really only three chapters. The last time I spoke, I mentioned that the work of the prophet is to “announce and denounce,” and if you read Zephaniah, there’s quite a lot of denunciation—he has judgment aplenty, both for the people of Judah and for the surrounding nations. He wrote sometime during the reign of the Judean king Josiah, in the middle of the seventh century BCE (so he’s a little later than Amos and Micah, for example). By the Biblical narrative, Josiah was one of the few righteous rulers of the Hebrew people; he was a religious reformer who re-centered Jewish worship in Jerusalem—a good guy, per the Hebrew historians. But in the wider world, the situation for Josiah’s kingdom was perilous: Judah was a vassal of the Assyrian empire, which was crumbling, and both Egypt and Babylon were vying to come in and take things over. So as Zephaniah was writing, the people of Judah were afraid of what might come next—would there be more conquest, destruction, and possibly exile? Who would come in to be their new masters? Who would protect them?
But at the end of Zephaniah’s denunciations comes this love song, what scholars call an “oracle of salvation”; the restoration of fellowship with God and the blessed community after disaster and war. Surely, those who heard these words during the time of King Josiah would have taken heart, and hoped for the full realization of the prophet’s words. And then a few generations later, when conquest did come at the hands of the Babylonians, these words would have taken on a new depth of hope for the exiled daughter Zion.
I want to say a little about just a couple of phrases from this prophetic love song. First, I’m struck by the phrase in the middle of v17: “he will renew you in his love”—God will renew you in God’s love. The people of Judah might have felt alienated from God, and so for them being “renewed in God’s love” might have meant repentance, restoration, coming back into right relationship. That is likely true for us at times as well, when we have wandered away from our Guide.
But I think renewal in love can also refer to the way that God’s love restores us to our true selves; to what we were meant to be; to who we were meant to be. And when we are willing to let that happen—when we say “yes”—God can lead us out into new works of love, new ways of loving. John Woolman, in his Journal, writes of being led to take a journey at one point, and he says of it, “Love was the first motion...” For Woolman, a sense of God’s love stirred in him a leading of love, in this case a leading to visit a Native American tribe, and to listen and to learn from them. To paraphrase a bit, we might say, “God’s love is the first motion”; or, as it says in I John 4:19, “we love because God first loved us.”
This, of course, connects with Jesus’ words as we heard them earlier, as the Advent candles were lit: that the greatest commandment is to love God, and then to love our neighbors (Matthew 22:34–40). God’s love renews in us our love for God; and then it renews also our love for our neighbors.
The second thing from this passage that I want to focus on for a little while is the image of being gathered, which comes at the end of the passage, in v20: “At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you...”
For people living under the threat of conquest and exile, or those already exiled,gathering meant salvation, restoration, return, belonging. It meant being brought back into fellowship with those from whom they had been alienated, both their human fellows and the God of Israel. And notice the phrase that is closely associated here: God’s action of bringing the people home. For the people of Judah, “home” was of course Jerusalem, but it was more than a physical place; it was especially the place where they experienced a home in God.
The opposite of being gathered, of course, is being scattered; just about anywhere we see it in the Scriptures, at least when it refers to people, scattering is a negative. It betokens defeat, brokenness, disunity. At the end of the story of Babel in Genesis 11, once God has confused the language of the tower builders and defeated their efforts to get up to God’s level, it reads, “from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:8). That was it for them. And then in the Gospels, when Jesus foretells his betrayal, before he is arrested, he says, “You will all become deserters; for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered’” (Mark 14:27, cf. Matthew 26:31). Here he is actually quoting the prophet Zechariah(13:7).
In our own lives we are often scattered, mentally and spiritually; or let me speak personally—in my own life I am often scattered, mentally and spiritually. My attention is divided by various opinions, options, and priorities. It is often difficult to focus on one thing, especially when that thing is not right in front of me, and there’s something shiny in close view. My relationship with God suffers when I am this scattered, and also my relationship with all of you.
So to keep from being scattered further, I need, we need, to be re-gathered. We need the regular experience of being brought in to God’s presence and the presence of one another, where we can experience God’s love, and the love of one another, and be renewed.
We need “the gathered meeting.” That beloved Quaker phrase describes the experience of worship when God is truly present, and we are each truly present to God and to one another. Each of us has probably had that experience, whether here at West Richmond, or elsewhere among Friends, or with other people of faith. It doesn’t happen every time we come together, but God’s call to come from the places to which we have been scattered and to be a gathered people is always there.
And there is a new dimension to being scattered and gathered, since we’ve been coming together with the assistance of computers and webcams. (I’ll note that it’s been a year this month since we began using that new technology here to connect the worship room to Zoom.) As a blended congregation, we are now quite literally scattered across the US and the Caribbean, and even the UK, and possibly some other parts of the world, on occasion. Although we have all experienced the benefits of being connected across great distance by technology, we have to acknowledge there are limitations and pitfalls. Enumerating all of the positives and negatives is a matter for another time, and that’s because we will all soon have an opportunity for that: the Worship Committee is putting together a survey to ask about your experience of blended worship. That survey is in a final review just now, so look for it sometime soon, by e-mail, and please respond when you are able.
I will mention one specific thing, however, because it’s a concern that extends beyond meeting for worship: a number of us are grappling with the question of how to keep this blended fellowship from being scattered into two—one on Zoom, and the other in person. What shall we do to remain gathered, to remain blended, when some of us will never be able to be in this physical place, and some of us are here every Sunday?
One that has been suggested—a small thing—is that we return to greeting one another at some point during worship. When we first began blended worship, we tried this for a while, but it was less than satisfactory with just one camera that could only show the front of the room. Now that we have the second camera in place, we can cover much more territory. So, with your permission, I’d like us to try a greeting now, for a few moments, just acknowledging one another with a wave—
Folks on Zoom, we’re going to move through four views of the room, so keep waving; folks in the worship room, please wave at the new camera, here on the wall to my left...
(Camera operator goes through each view of the room, giving ample time for everyone present in person to wave to Zoom attenders and vice versa.)
As I said, it’s a small thing, but it’s important to remember one another, as we are part of the same body, and as we further discern how to remain gathered.
But there’s the question of how are we a gathered meeting, beyond the mechanical or the logistical: how is our blended worship to be gathered worship?
Mainly, I think it’s the same thing that enables any meeting to be a gathered meeting, regardless of how we gather: that each person comes prepared to be in the presence of God. How we prepare is going to vary from person to person, but we each need to bring a heart that is ready to be present.
And when we are able to do that, we will experience God’s love as the first motion. Renewed in that love, our response is to love God, and then love neighbors, as Jesus directed us. Being gathered, being part of the gathered meeting, assists us in more fully living out that commandment to love. And loving more fully enables us to be more readily gathered.
May God gather us in this time of open worship, to renew us in love.
New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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