Reading the Tea Leaves

 

Matthew 3:1-12

 

            Human beings love order. We make sense out of our surroundings by classifying and sorting, by putting everything in its place, and detecting patterns and trends.

 

            Which is why we don’t deal well with the future. The past is no problem for our order-loving minds. It’s the kind of puzzle that we find challenging but workable. All the pieces of the past are there; we just have to find them, sort them out and put them together and presto, we have what we call history.

 

            The present is the same way. We see and experience what’s in front of us; all we have to do is sort it out and put the pieces together and presto, we have what we call reality.

 

            But the future doesn’t work that way. It is like trying to work a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. It’s irritating and frustrating.

 

            Humans do not suffer this frustration quietly. When it comes to tracking down those missing pieces that will put the future all into a neat and orderly picture, we are a creative and persistent lot. We leave no stone unturned in our search for those missing pieces of information.   

 

            This search has been going on since before the dawn of civilization. The early Romans thought the missing pieces of the future were located in the flights of birds. In virtually every decision they made, whether it involved war or religion or economics or government, the most important factor was what the birds had to say on the matter. By carefully studying the types of birds in a flock, the size of the flock, the noises they made, and the direction and length of the flight, the Romans believed they could find those missing pieces and so would have in their possession all they needed in order to know what the future held in store for them. 

 

            Others have sought the missing pieces in tea leaves. The practice of reading tea leaves developed independently in many parts of the world, and is still practiced today under the scientific sounding title of tasseography. After the tea is drunk, the sediment remaining in the cup is examined. The patterns made by the spent leaf bits are supposed to reveal all kinds of information about the future. Tea leaves are to be read from the rim next to the handle which reveals the near future, down to the bottom of the cup which deals with the more distant future.

 

 

 

 

 

            The obsession with locating missing pieces of the future does not end there. A brief survey of future-divining techniques yields such areas of study as tephromancy—predicting the future through the study of the ashes of burnt offerings, oenomancy—the study of how the future is reveal by the flow of wine poured as an offering to the gods, geomancy—the study of future-revealing patterns in the rocks of the landscape, metoscopy—the determination of the future told in the lines of one’s forehead, and sortilege—the seeking of destiny in the random throwing of bones.

            People search for the missing pieces to the future in tarot cards, psychic readings, spirit seances, astrology, cloud reading, and fire reading. They search for the keys to their destiny in the shapes of human heads, in biorhythms, in the numbers and dates, in dominoes, coins, turtle shells, alphabet scrambles, in the lines of the palm, in the position of moles on the skin, the rolling of dice, and the rambling poetry of mystics such as Nostradamus.

 

            We find the same thing going on in the Bible. Those who could afford it, mainly kings and other rulers, hired people skilled in locating the missing pieces to the puzzle of the future. From the Pharoahs of Egypt to the kings of Judah and Israel, the royal courts were filled with people who claimed skill in locating these missing pieces. Skill in discovering the magic keys that could unlock the details of the future so that we could put them into order. 

 

            Into this mix of professional soothsayers came the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, and a New Testament prophet, John the Baptist. They, too, were very much concerned with the future. Only they made a startling claim: the pieces you need to understand the future are right in front of your eyes.

 

            The insight that God revealed to them was that the key to understanding the future lies not in the arts of magic: it lies in history and in behavior.

 

            The message of the prophets regarding the future can be boiled down to this simple statement: As the past has determined the present, so the present will determine the future. If you want to know what your future holds, all you have to do is look at where you have been, and where you are now. 

 

            When you do that, the future will be crystal clear. You will know exactly where you are going and what you are in for.

 

            My older brother has spent a career as a soils specialist for the DNR. Over a couple of decades I’ve asked him many times what’s the deal with global warming. He’s a cautious person, and for many years he was hesitant to draw conclusions. Needed more data.

            But a few years ago he revealed to me a piece of the puzzle that made the picture a lot clearer. He said that over the past 30 years, the lakes in Northern Wisconsin have been freezing an average of one day later each fall. In other words, these lakes are now freezing a month later than they used to when my children were born. Within the lifetime of my children, moose were common in Northern Minnesota; now they have almost all moved into Canada. Across the board, warm weather species are moving into the state, and colder weather species are drifting to the north.

 

            If you know where you were and you see where you are now, it doesn’t take a genius to see where you’re going to be in the future. 

 

            That, in a nutshell, is the message of the prophets.

 

            One of the ways this prophetic message comes is in the form of a warning. Because you have done this, says the LORD, because you have strayed from my ways, because this is your past-- this is where you are now. If nothing changes, this is what your future looks like. And it doesn’t look good.

 

            God is a God of Justice. What does the present look like right now in terms of justice in this world? Is everybody getting a fair shake? Do all people have equal access to the resources of God’s creation?

            No? Then we don’t need a crystal ball to tell us that the future doesn’t look good. We just need a prophet to point it out to us.

            And John the Baptist is here to do that. He warns, “God’s winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clean his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

            You want to know the future; there’s the future. It’s written in our past and it’s written in our present.

 

            Is this grim future inevitable? No. For the prophets, the future is never inevitable. There is no such thing as predestination for them. All you have to do to change the future is change the present. John sums it up in a single word, “Repent.”

            If you don’t want the future to look like that, then stop doing what you are doing. Change your life.

 

            That is a grim message, and one we need to take seriously. But fortunately, there is another side to the prophets’ message. I said that the message of the prophets regarding the future can be boiled down to this statement: As the past has determined the present, so the present will determine the future.

 

            The good news is that this statement applies not only to us, but to God. What God has done in the past determined where we are now; what God is doing now will determine the future. If we want to know what the future holds, all we have to do is look at where God has been, and where God is now.

 

            The Old Testament is filled with testimony of what God has done in the past. How the God of infinite power and wisdom saw fit to share relationship with us and has been faithful in spite of all human failing.

            The Bible tells us that God is as the Psalmist says, a very present help in trouble. The New Testament proclaims that God is determined to share and to love and to bring us new life in ways we cannot imagine. That God is so close to us that nothing, not all the powers of the universe, not even death can separate us now from God’s love.

 

            If that is what God has been, and if that’s what God is, there is no doubt what the future holds in store. And it looks good.

 

            When viewed that way, John’s statement that “The Kingdom of heaven is near,” is not only a word of warning, it is a word of hope. If you understand how God has worked in the past, that God heard his people cry in bondage and brought them out of slavery, that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to die for us. If you know what the Psalmist felt when he wrote, “I was lost in the abyss and you heard my cry”. If you understand what Martin Luther meant when he thanked God for rescuing me, a lost and condemned person. If you understand that God does not desire sacrifice but mercy.

 

            If you understand all that about God, then you know everything you need to know about the future. 

 

            The future looks very much like what Isaiah depicted, “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

            “The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.

            “They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

 

            Because Isaiah knows God’s past and God’s present, Isaiah knows the future. He doesn’t know the details—and his words are not a prediction of an actual event. But he sees where the future is headed.

            Not because he peeked under the curtain or saw a copy of God’s plans, not because gazed into tea leaves and determined the details of the future in the patterns of sediment, but because he read the signs of the present and the past.

 

            While John the Baptist is primarily concerned with a general vision of the future, he does make one very specific prediction. He says, “The Kingdom of God is near.”

            Many in the first century expected the Kingdom of God to arrive in their time, to usher in a new age of a spectacular reign of God. It didn’t come then; and we don’t know if it’s coming now. Does that mean John was wrong when he said the Kingdom of God is near?

            No, because John is not dealing with time as we know it. How does he know that the kingdom of God is near?  Because he reads the signs. He knows the past. He knows that God has promised to be especially present times of greatest need. When we are faced with sorrow, death, and destruction, that is when God has promised to surround us with love and hope. In African culture, the elderly are treated with enormous respect because they are considered to be the people closest to God. Because they are nearer to death, they are nearer to God.

 

            As long as sorrow and death and destruction and pain and oppression exist, God will be near. That means that the Kingdom of God is always near, because where God is, there is his Kingdom.

 

            When John the Baptist says the Kingdom of God is at hand, we experience a shadow of fear, because we know things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be, and God won’t allow that to stand indefinitely. Creation is going to change, there will be upheaval and conflict.

 

            Yet the message that the Kingdom of God is near is also good news.

            Because God is not governed by time. God flows through time. The events of the first Christmas are in Isaiah’s future, they are John’s present, and they’re in our past. Yet it’s the same for all of us. Throughout it all God’s love and faithfulness never changes.

 

            The Bible does not claim any magical systems for predicting the future. It tells us there is one sure fire way to know the future. Keep your eyes open. See where you have been and where you are now. That will tell you where you are going, if you don’t change.

 

            See where God has been. See where God is at present. That will tell you what the future holds.