Restoration/Reboot
Reflections on the Lectionary for December 15th
Before we launch into the lectionary reflections for this week, a couple of housekeeping items. First, thank you to those who have been leaving tips. I can’t always tell who has left them (they are not attached to a name the way a subscription is), but I’m grateful for the support of both tippers and subscribers (and of course those who are both!). Second, I wanted to let you know that Substack enables gift subscriptions. You can give someone a subscription to this Substack for Christmas, a birthday, or as a gesture of appreciation for the clergy in your life. Just click this button below to get started!
Now, on to this week’s lectionary reflections….
A meme has floated around the internet for a few years now. The text reads something like, “I’m tired of living through once-in-a-lifetime historical events.” The meme feels resonant to me, as someone whose adulthood has felt like a parade of epochal moments: 9/11, the Great Recession, the election of Barack Obama, the election of Donald Trump, the pandemic, January 6th, cascading climate change, and most recently the re-election of Trump. It speaks to the cumulative cognitive exhaustion of life so far in the 21st century—the way each new day seems to bring some unprecedented crisis. It’s hard to sustain the kind of emergency footing that life these days seems to demand.
Of course, most ages have their version of this; emergencies and outrages intervene in most times and places, and they punctuate the lives of most people. However it might feel, we aren’t special in our sense of bewilderment and helplessness about the world. I was thinking about that dynamic as I read the lectionary texts for this Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent. Two of the texts in particular—the passage from Zephaniah (3:14-20) and the one from Luke (3:7-18)—speak to moments when the zeitgeist smacked of crisis, and the instability of the world intervened in the lives of regular people. The responses to those two texts have me thinking about possible ways forward in our own unsettled and unsettling times.
Scholars debate Zephaniah’s origins. To make a long story short, there are some who think that Zephaniah was active during the reign of the king Josiah, who ruled Judah in the mid-late 600s BCE and enacted a number of reforms. But there are others who see problems with that dating of Zephaniah, and place his career just after Josiah’s reign, when increasing foreign influence and a weakening structure for religious life might make more sense of what the prophet writes. No matter which one is the case, Zephaniah seems to have been living through a parade of epochal moments, just like us: the encroaching presence of the Assyrian empire, a series of kings of various quality, the religious reforms under Josiah, and the reigns of Josiah’s sons, who in many ways turned away from their father’s ways. Zephaniah’s oracles, then, are a response to the kind of once-in-a-lifetime events that we have come to experience in our own time—upheavals in politics, geopolitics, and religion.
This passage from Zephaniah 3:14-20 is fascinating for a few reasons. I’m tempted to devote a lot of time exploring the gendered nature of this section, which casts Israel as a daughter who has been ensnared in shame and disaster, and God as a male warrior who loves her and rescues and restores her honor. There are several places in the prophetic literature that describe God and Israel in male/female terms, and there is some good scholarship on why that’s both effective and very problematic. But this passage from Zephaniah is leveraging gender for its dynamics of honor and shame in a really interesting way that I think deserves some attention.
But as I read this passage from Zephaniah today, I am thinking less specifically about gender and more about the theme of a reset or a restoration. Zephaniah, whenever he was living and working, was living through upheavals, and here his response (couched as an oracle from God to Israel) was to promise a return to old ways. “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.” The prophet is promising, on behalf of God, that the things lost in the chaos of the times would be restored and regathered—that everything that had been cast down would be lifted up, everything lost would be recovered, and everything forgotten would be remembered. It’s a way of looking forward by looking backward, seeing the future in terms of a reconstructed ideal past.
Think about how much of our 21st century political and social life is dominated by that kind of thinking. Donald Trump and his political movement has gained prominence and power on the backs of a promise to “Make America Great Again,” without specifying which point in the past they mean. A major legislative achievement of the Biden administration was called “Build Back Better,” with decline and restoration lurking as a central theme. Climate change scientists and activists talk about CO2 levels in terms of “pre-industrial” or “pre-1900” levels, harkening back to a time when the world was not as polluted and imagining a return to that. Even today’s teenagers are grasping at old music (the music of my teenage years and my parents’ teenage years, to be precise), making artists like Billy Joel and John Denver and the Beatles and Blink 182 popular again, and a prominent aesthetic among Gen-Z kids (as my own children inform me) is called “Y2K-core,” which lifts up the fashions of the turn of the millennium. We might be doing so much looking backward because in contrast to the exhausting and terrifying present, the past starts to look quaint and simple. It might be easier to imagine restoring something lost to the past than it is to imagine building something new for the future. Like Zechariah, we find ourselves dwelling on a lost past, and wondering how we can restore it—and restore ourselves—to what we used to be. And don’t even get me started on churches, who spin their wheels asking “how can we get young people back in the pews” and how the Sunday School classrooms can be as full as they were in the 1960s. The church world, as much as the political world, is steeped in nostalgia for a mythical past that’s lost to time.
In the gospel text this week, Luke is doing something similar to that work of restoration—but something that I think is also at the same time very different. This passage is an account of a dialogue between John the Baptist and the crowds coming out to the Jordan River to be baptized by him, and in it, John comes across as an extremely prickly critic of the status quo. “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” John foretells, and “therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” And then, a few verses later, John switches his agricultural metaphors. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” he says, referring to Jesus, and “His winnowing fork is in his hands to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” These analogies to the sorting and pruning of farm produce suggest that something is broken about the world and that not all people (not all trees or plants) are equally valuable to the future world that God (the farmer) is trying to build. John’s language is full of judgement and impending punishment, like he wants his audience to understand that the status quo will not hold for much longer. When members of the crowd ask for specifics (“what, then, should we do?”), John gives some examples. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise,” he says. Tax collectors must “collect no more than the amount prescribed for you,” and soldiers should not “extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages” (probably also a reference to extortion). In these instructions, John is giving some very specific directions to specific classes of people, asking them to change their behaviors.
Notice two things about this. First, John has imperial power and economics squarely in view, and he’s criticizing the individualism and wealth-seeking fostered by hierarchies and hierarchical systems (like empires). Second, John is not arguing for a restoration, really, but instead he is arguing for a societal reboot. He doesn’t so much want to roll the clock back to before the Roman Empire’s conquest of Judea; instead, John wants to reconstitute society on the basis of a different ethic. He isn’t trying to eradicate tax collectors (which might have been an easy argument to make at that time); he is just insisting that tax collectors be just. He isn’t trying to get rid of soldiers (which, again, would have been a popular proposal), he just wants them to be ethical. John is arguing for an egalitarian spirit—sharing of food and clothing, and fairness in unfair systems, for example—to replace the zero-sum competition of life under an empire. John is asking, in other words, for a social and ethical reboot.
A reboot is different from a restoration. Zechariah is imagining putting things back they way they used to be, restoring the world to a time before it all went wrong. Meanwhile John the Baptist (or maybe Luke himself) is imagining remaking the world better than it is, rebooting it to begin again with a new set of circumstances and baseline conditions. Zechariah wants Israel to be free of disaster and shame like it used to be; John the Baptist wants the world to hum on a different frequency.
As we live through our parade of epochal moments—outrages and catastrophes, unprecedented calamities and unforeseen misfortunes—we too are faced with how to think about them. As I said above, a lot of our thinking seems to be backward-looking, aimed at restoring a lost golden age and reclaiming something that we have lost. Donald Trump’s political movement is the most obvious example of this, but I think it shows up everywhere across politics, religion, and culture. (When’s the last time you saw a decent blockbuster movie that wasn’t a dredged-up reimagining of some intellectual property from forty years ago?). The past always has a draw for us because we have already lived through it, and we have survived whatever difficulties it had to offer. The present, in contrast, is new in every moment, and the future looms full of uncertainty. The urge to restore the past can be really powerful in the moments when we are simply tired of living through unprecedented things. We want something precedented, for a change.
But I think the other response—the reboot response—might be more useful. Instead of asking how we can turn back the clock to restore the past, a reboot asks how we can begin with a new set of premises and circumstances. A reboot wants to change the conditions of the world, and play it out from a new starting point. For John the Baptist, the reboot looked like practices and communities based on justice, and relationships based on mutuality. I’m reminded of Afrofuturism, which engages in just this kind of imaginative world-building that begins with different cultural assumptions than the ones that have tended to shape our world, and science fiction, which draws us toward the future by imagining where we might end up, rather than remembering where we have been. But I also think that there are powerful reboot movements unfolding in the worlds of politics, science, and religion. What would it mean to imagine a world in which the violence of empires was not determinative? What would it mean to imagine a church animated not by nostalgia but by imagination about an unfolding future? What would it mean to build a world for the climate we have, rather than the one we have destroyed? Where would our relationships and our communities lead us, if we began anew with different assumptions and different premises?
John gets labeled as an apocalyptic figure, and he is that. “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” and all of that. But I don’t think he gets enough credit as a visionary for an unfolding world, a prophet for emergent ways of being. John the Baptist was calling people into a world that did not yet exist, into ways of belonging that had not yet coalesced. We are still waiting on the world he imagined; that world is not the world we live in. But that world is still possible, and we can still remake ourselves and our institutions so that it comes into being. In that sense, John’s prophetic voice is still as strong as it has ever been.