Parachutes Don't Save People

Introduction: Parachutes Don’t Save People

You would think that wearing a parachute while jumping from a plane would decrease your chances of dying.

However, if you keep up with the British Medical Journal you would already know this supposed fact to be questionable at best.

Just this last Friday, (12/14/2018) the British Medical Journal released a study on the subject of parachute effectiveness to save lives. They had 23 volunteers subject themselves to the test. One half of the participants wore parachutes as the treatment group while the other half jumped while wearing empty North Face backpacks as the control group. They found that the parachutes made no difference as to whether study participants lived or died. The death rate was the same.

Researchers wrote, "Our groundbreaking study found no statistically significant difference in the primary outcome [death] between the treatment [parachute] and control [no parachute] arms. Our findings should give momentary pause to experts who advocate for routine use of parachutes for jumps from aircraft in recreational or military settings."

The study mentions several paragraphs in that they did find some difficulty finding participants willing to jump out of a plane moving at hundreds of miles an hour while flying thousands of feet up in the air.

A “minor caveat” to the study, as researches called it, was that the plane was neither thousands of feet in the air nor moving at hundreds of miles an hour. In truth, the plane was sitting quite stationary on a grassy field. It also includes near the very end of the study that the death rate was the same in both the control and treatment groups because there were no deaths.

The study done by the very reputable British Medical Journal was, perhaps, a bit misleading. But that was the point. They were painting a humorous picture of how data from scientific studies can be manipulated toward a particular end result.

History of Judah

It is also a reminder that we tend to trust that which we can see. It’s much easier to trust a backpack with a parachute in it than it is to trust an empty backpack. And even with that parachute, it can be hard to jump from an airplane.

Our first reading today was from the prophet Zephaniah. If you’re not too familiar with the book, I don’t blame you. Today is one of two occasions in our three year lectionary cycle where we get to hear a few verses from the ancient prophet.

The book itself is only three chapters long. It was written about 630 years before Jesus was born. It was written in the Kingdom of Judah under the reign of King Josiah who would come to be known as the last Great King of Judah—partly because shortly after his reign, Judah no longer existed.

You see, the Kingdom of Judah was under siege. The great Super Power Kingdom of Assyria who had brought some stability to the region was beginning to collapse. Babylon and Egypt were both vying for power throughout the Middle East. Land grabs were common as great armies marched against one another. Within 50 years of the book being written, the small kingdom of Judah would be no more. Jerusalem itself, the capitol of Judah, would be in Babylonian hands… and many of the greatest minds of Israel would be carted out of the kingdom and brought to Babylon in what would come to be known as the Babylonian Exile.

The Kingdom of Judah, during Zephaniah’s life time, was constantly on the precipice of destruction. It was a fearful time. It was a time when the proud but vulnerable people of Judah began to look for God in new places—in places that they could see and touch. They began to turn away from the God of their ancestors and instead turned to gods made of wood, stone, and gold. Gods that they could touch, feel, and hold.

The people wanted gods that they could feel close to. The people of Judah wanted to place their trust in something that they could see rather than a seemingly empty bag of faith built on promises to their ancestors.

The people of Judah wanted to place their trust in something they could _______.

Zephaniah the Prophet

“The Happy Prophet”

And that brings us to our Minor Prophet of the Day!!! Zephaniah!!!! One seminary professor made a cheeky comment about our reading today in Zephaniah and called him the “Happy Prophet.” He said:

We usually do not associate a prophet of the Old Testament with joy and jubilation. Zephaniah 3:14-20 makes a delightful exception. Gladness engulfs God, as well. God is happy for the redeemed who will now experience evil no more. What a lovely ending of a book that begins with the threat to wipe away everything from the face of the earth...

And indeed, the first two chapters of Zephaniah harken back to the Great Flood. It includes calls to repentance from that idolatry I mentioned earlier. Zephaniah gives the standard Oklahoma forecast—tornadoes, blizzards, and floods--to the folks of Judah and tells them that crazy things are on the way if they don’t change soon! He says:

The New Revised Standard Version The Coming Judgment on Judah

The Coming Judgment on Judah

2 I will utterly sweep away everything

from the face of the earth, says the LORD.

3 I will sweep away humans and animals;

I will sweep away the birds of the air

and the fish of the sea.

I will make the wicked stumble.

I will cut off humanity

from the face of the earth, says the LORD.

4 I will stretch out my hand against Judah,

and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem;

and I will cut off from this place every remnant of Baal

and the name of the idolatrous priests;

“Happy Prophet” indeed. Nothing to bring a glimmer of hope to a frightened people like threatening them with another great flood! And yet, there might actually be some truth to that.

Bad News is Good News

In this case, reminders of bad news might indeed be good news.

Reminders of bad news can sometimes be ___________________.

Psychologists suggest that some of our most emotionally vulnerable times in life are in our teens and twenties. Why? Because the older we get the more hardships we have experienced—and gotten through.

As we encounter stressful moments in life, it can be extraordinarily helpful to recall past difficulties in life that seemed insurmountable at the time. Times when we felt like the world was crashing in on itself and we had a hard time imagining a life beyond whatever hurdle we were facing. And then… suddenly... that hurdle was behind us. And so as we grow older we can recall those past hurdles… we can recall that we got through other challenges and made it to the other side—and so perhaps our current challenges are not as impossible as they might otherwise seem.

So as Zephaniah warns Judah of impending floodwaters… he is also reminding them of floodwaters that have already receded. He reminds the people of a moment that the whole world struggled to survive… and yet life managed to continue through the grace of God.

Zephaniah 3:14-20

That is why in what would otherwise be a horrific sounding future, our reading today is a call to celebrate.

Our reading today is a call to ______________________.

The New Revised Standard Version A Song of Joy

14 Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;

shout, O Israel!

Rejoice and exult with all your heart,

O daughter Jerusalem!

But still, why on earth should there be celebration? Remember all of those enormous armies lurking about? Remember the forecast of destruction for Judah with a high probability of exile to Babylon? Here’s what he says.

The New Revised Standard Version A Song of Joy

The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst;

you shall fear disaster no more.

It’s not that their circumstances change. It’s not that all external threats are no longer on the radar and they can just happily live without concern. What Zephaniah reminds the people of Judah of--is that while invading armies come and go, God remains.

While invading armies come and go, ___________________.

YHWH, the King of not just Judah but of ALL of Israel is in their midst, with them, amongst them… standing beside and for them.

The people who had turned away from God for the sake of some inanimate idol are called to cry out not in fear but with hope as they are reminded that the God of their ancestor is with them, verse 16:

The New Revised Standard Version A Song of Joy

The LORD, your God, is in your midst,

a warrior who gives victory;

Now, as you might imagine, if you had turned away from God and suddenly are reminded of God’s very near presence, there might be reason to have some fear. But Zephaniah goes on to describe the kind of relationship that God brings to the field:

The New Revised Standard Version A Song of Joy

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.

Another way to understand that final verse is that God will remove disaster so that you will not be shamed for it. In other words, all of our failures, all of the things we wish we hadn’t done or that we had done a better job of—all of that will be removed so we do not need to feel the shame of those things as we encounter the Lord our God.

Zephaniah paints a picture of a God who comes not so much with destruction on his mind… but with REconstruction... with restoration… with renewal… with new life. The lame are brought in and saved. Those who had been cast out will be sought out and brought back. And God will take the shame of all his people and transform it into songs of praise.

And so finally, ultimately, the relationship is restored—and the people, despite all of their attempts to rely on themselves and find their own parachutes, are shown by God that they didn’t need those parachutes after all. That the ground was closer than they realized. That God was closer than they realized.

Conclusion

We are not so different from those people of 2,600 years ago. We also wish to control our own fates. We wish to trust in things that we can see… while we might not be looking to idols of Ba’al, we do tend to trust in our bank accounts, or houses, or cars, or political parties, or friends and family… or a number of other things. We want to find something to be our parachute as we jump into what can feel like a very uncertain world. But the reality is parachute or no parachute, the death rate is the same. 100%.

What is something that I tend to put my trust in other than God? Family? Money? Something else?

And that’s the beauty of today’s text. As we find ourselves in the midst of Advent, we are reminded by the writing of a minor prophet from many millennia ago that we are called to celebrate even and especially in the midst of a sometimes extraordinarily uncertain world.

And that while much (if not all) that we hold on to as precious in this world will fall away,

the LORD your God,

the King of all Kings,

the Creator of the Cosmos,

the Breather of Life,

the one who has called you and claimed you in the Baptismal waters

The one who has suffered and died for you upon the cross…

THAT God, the LORD your God, is in your midst now and forever.

Peace to you in this third week of Advent. May we all cling less to our parachutes, and ever more to our Creator and his call for us in this world. God is with us. This is most certainly true.

May we all cling less to our _______________, and ever more to ______________________________________________________.

Amen.