Case Dismissed
Zephaniah 3:14-20
You may recall that about six months ago my wife Sandy got into a minor traffic accident. She was driving home after having visited her mother in Queens. It was dark, about 9:00 PM. She had just made a right turn after stopping at a red light, so she wasn’t going that fast. As she was preparing to merge on to the highway she heard a thud against the right front corner of the car. She immediately stopped the car and got out.
A woman was lying in the street, dazed certainly, but conscious and showing no signs of bleeding. Still, Sandy called 911 in a panic and then waited with the woman. The ambulance arrived within minutes, and the EMTs helped the woman sit up and began talking with her. Fortunately, she didn’t appear to have any life-threatening injuries.
For her part, Sandy tried to figure out how this could have happened. She never saw the woman. As she examined the scene—the placement of her car, the woman, the traffic light, the crosswalk—she noticed that the woman was dressed all in black…black coat, black pants, black shoes, rendering her nearly invisible. And she was a petite Asian woman with dark hair.
What’s more, given where she fell, the woman clearly had been crossing the street far from the crosswalk and against the traffic light. No matter, the police officer tending to the scene gave Sandy a citation.
Let me tell you how much this all weighed on Sandy. First of all, the thought that she might have seriously injured someone wracked her with guilt and self-loathing. On top of that, she feared being sued and owing tens of thousand of dollars in damages. “John, What if we have to sell the house?”
Despite my downplaying her worst—and from my perspective—exaggerated fears, Sandy couldn’t help but go there. And then there was the added worry of the hit we would take on our insurance premium. The whole thing made her sick.
A couple of months later I accompanied Sandy to traffic court in Queens. We got there early in the morning, took our position in line, and waited. Going to traffic court in Queens is like being at the U.N. General Assembly. Spanish, Arabic, and some dialect of Chinese were among the languages I think I heard. And the court clerk whom we all were waiting to speak with spoke English in a thick Russian accent.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when it became our turn. Would we be assigned to a courtroom? Would we have to pay a fine straight away? Sandy was prepared to make her case like Clarence Darrow. The night of the accident she somehow had the presence of mind to photograph the scene and even gather security-camera footage from a nearby house.
When we got to the window, Sandy handed the traffic citation to the clerk who punched the citation number into his computer. Without lifting his head from the screen, he handed the citation back to Sandy and said, “Your case was dismissed this morning.” It was only 9:30 in the morning. I wondered, did we miss the court hearing? What time do they start?
Sandy looked at me with puzzlement, then looked to the clerk. “What does that mean?” she asked.
He said again, “The case was dismissed.” He then printed his screen so that Sandy could see the words in black and white. She held the paper in her hand like it was a winning lottery ticket. Her voice trembling, she asked me, “John, does this happen?”
“Well, it just did,” I said.
Case dismissed. With those two simple words, all the weight that had been pressing upon Sandy for two months suddenly lifted. All the guilt, all the self-loathing, all the self-recrimination rose from her shoulders like dust blown into the air. Case dismissed.
Through the prophet Zephaniah we hear the Lord speak similar words to us in the phrase, “The Lord has taken away the judgments against you.” The Lord has taken away the judgments against you. Your case is dismissed.
On this third Sunday of Advent we hear from our third prophet, Zephaniah. No, I did not make that name up. Zephaniah was a real prophet, and this is an actual book of the Bible, not to be confused with Zechariah, which is the name of another prophet and another book. Both Malachi, whom we read last week, and Zephaniah—and why not, let’s include Zechariah too—are all among the twelve so-called minor prophets. They’re minor not because they’re less important than the major prophets but because their prophetic writings tend to be brief. The Book of Zephaniah, for instance, is just three chapters. And if you’re wondering who are the major prophets—that would be Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.
As was the case last week with Malachi, Zephaniah also tells us little about himself. Pretty much all we know is that he was a prophet in Jerusalem in the years leading up to the destruction of the city by the Babylonians in 586 BC. What followed the city’s destruction was the darkness of exile, as many of the people were led away in chains to Babylon. With exile, all the light and the life of Jerusalem was extinguished.
It’s impossible to overstate just how much of an existential crisis the exile was, not only to the Jews who experienced it, but even to those who were born after the exile ended. When so much of your identity as a people is tied to the land—in this case, the Promised Land—to be separated from that land is to question your whole identity. Who are we if we have no homeland? Are we still God’s people? Were we ever?
In Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Civil War, the writer Shelby Foote describes the Civil War as the lynchpin of American history. Everything that happened before was leading up to it, he claims, and everything that happened after flows from it. The same could be said of the exile. Everything in the history of the Jewish people was leading up to it, and everything that came after flows from it.
Much of the Old Testament, not just the prophets, wrestles with it, including the first and foundational story of scripture, the Garden of Eden. Don’t believe me? What is the punishment that Adam and Eve receive for their rebellion? They are exiled from the garden, their homeland. Among other things, the story of Adam and Eve is an attempt to make sense of the exile, to explain how people who had been given an idyllic place in which to live could could lose it as a consequence of their own reckless and willful sin.
God’s judgment upon human sin comes early and often in the Book of Zephaniah. In chapter 1, the nation of Judah bears the brunt of the Lord’s judgment. The people have become indifferent to God, saying,
The Lord will not do good,
nor will he do harm (Zeph. 1:12).
God may be up there or out there somewhere, but no matter. He’s mostly a caretaker at this point. We offer him some sacrifices now and then, send him a card on the holidays, but if we want something done, we have to do it ourselves.
In chapter 2, it’s the prideful enemies of Judah who face judgment:
because they scoffed and boasted
against the people of the Lord of hosts (Zeph. 2:10).
The nations surrounding Judah are like the man who kicks a man when he is down. They delight in the suffering of God’s people. Serves them right, thinking they’re better than us and that their God is more powerful than our gods.
Chapter 3 begins with God’s ire directed at Judah’s capital city, Jerusalem:
Ah, soiled, defiled, oppressing city!
It has listened to no voice;
It has accepted no correction.
It has not trusted in the Lord;
it has not drawn near to its God.
The officials within it are roaring lions;
its judges are evening wolves
that leave nothing until the morning.
Its prophets are reckless, faithless persons;
its priests have profaned what is sacred;
they have done violence to the law (Zeph. 3:1-4).
The situation in and around and surrounding Jerusalem is bleak. Human sinfulness runs rampant, soiling, defiling, and oppressing. The people who were set apart to be a light to the nations have shrouded themselves in darkness. Even those who were called to serve God and the community as priests and prophets serve only themselves.
At this point you may be asking yourself, “Doesn’t that Advent banner say “joy?” Did Pastor John not get the memo?” Trust me, I got the memo. And the passage from Zephaniah that the lectionary assigns for today is truly one of great joy. But the thing is, to understand the cause for joy, you first must understand how desperate the situation was. Not only Judah’s situation but our own. Like Judah, we stood condemned for our rebelliousness, our callousness, our indifference to God and neighbor. Like Judah we said, “The Lord will not do good, nor will the Lord do harm.” God is asleep, or indifferent, or dead. Therefore, anything goes. You can shoot an unarmed man in the back in Midtown Manhattan and be celebrated as a hero. We are shrouded in darkness.
“And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, but the people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” it says in John 3:19. There is no light of Christmas without the darkness of Advent, just as there is no joy of Easter without the horror of Good Friday. There is no resurrection from the dead without death. And there is no grace of God without judgment.
But hear this: “The Lord has taken away the judgments against you.” The Lord has taken away the judgments against you! All of them: the judgments from others that expose our faults and foibles and cause us shame, the judgments from ourselves that whisper in accusatory tones that we are not the person we pretend to be, and the judgments from God against the whole litany of human sin—individual sins and communal sins, sins of commission and sins of omission, what we have done and what we merely entertain doing.
God has taken away all of the judgments against us and taken them upon himself. The Lord is a warrior who gives us victory—not over our human enemies but over the existential enemies of sin and death, whose powers have been defeated and will one day be entirely destroyed.
And finally, with today’s theme being, yes, joy, the Lord taking away the judgments against us is certainly cause for joy, but Zephaniah speaks of another joy as well. From verse 17:
[The Lord] will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.
The Lord, your God, rejoices over you with gladness and exults over you with loud singing, loud enough to wake the neighbors. What is the cause of all this celebration? Your case has been dismissed.