A Messenger Of Promise
Sermon
The Presence In The Promise
First Lesson Sermons For Advent/Christmas/Epiphany Cycle C
A journal titled The Religion and Society Report once editorialized that people are tempted to treat religion and society purely in terms of sociology or in terms of the politics of religion. The fact is that church bodies and ecclesiastical institutions are fair game for the sociologists who like to try to measure the churches as being either to the right or to the left. However, most sociologists are not in a favorable position to make judgments in that regard, because they do not understand that they are trying to chart a miracle. That was not the point of the editorial, however. The article noted that the Christian faith is occasion for the people of God to act as a community of faith, worship, and discipline which transcends the social and political categories of the world.
What we confess is far more important than the observable consequences of what we confess. Both the prophets and the apostles understood that. However, regularly journals and books appear insisting that we should be able to set things right in the society immediately and that the results should be measurable now. On balance, we have before us a prophetic word in which a messenger is promised who will turn things upside down. The prophet suggests that God would send the messenger of great promise. In these Advent days it is good for us to understand in what sense the messenger can hold out great promise to us.
The Prophet
The name of the prophet who spoke or wrote the oracle that constitutes the First Lesson for today is unknown. The name Malachi simply means "My Messenger." The Hebrew name was assigned the prophet on the basis of the lesson before us. This prophet carried on his ministry in the period of the Return of the people from the Exile in Babylon. He carried on this work before Ezra and Nehemiah.
The original intent of this word of promise was that God wanted to use his messenger to announce the return of the Presence of God in the Temple at the conclusion of the Exile. With that, the people could also be assured of the restoration of the Covenant that God had made originally with the people of Israel. Clearly, whoever collected these oracles of the prophet thought that the prophet who wrote or uttered them was the one to make these assurances real for the people. In time, the people were able to see the promises fulfilled with the rebuilding of the Temple. Yet tensions remained between the ideal and the reality. The religious community was to experience dark days in the future just as they had in the past.
The Messenger Of The Covenant
It is unlikely that the prophet who delivered this oracle saw its fulfillment. The editor who collected his oracles, or sayings, chose to amend the oracle by adding the thought that God would send Elijah as the promised prophet. Elijah, who stood tall among all the prophets, had been assumed into heaven. Elijah, therefore, could return to prepare for the great and terrible day of the Lord by turning their hearts to reorder their priorities (Malachi 4:5-6). Jesus knew of that tradition. His disciples once asked Jesus if he knew that Elijah must come to prepare all things. Jesus answered that Elijah had already come, had performed his duties, and had paid the price for the ministry of preparation (Mark 9:10-12). Thus it is our Lord himself who identifies God's messenger as John the Baptist.
In the Holy Gospel for today (Luke 3:1-6), John the Baptist is identified as the one whom the Prophet Isaiah predicted. As such, John is pictured as "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness." In either description of the messenger, he is to be the one who "prepares the way of the Lord." In either resumé the prophet who comes is also the one who works out of the covenant which God has established with God's people. Malachi says he is "the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight." This suggests to us that we must understand the message of the one who prepares the way of the Lord in the light of the covenant which God had long before established with God's people.
The Message Of Change
The effect of what the messenger of change is to accomplish is considerable. The assurance is given that he will come. However, a question is raised as to who can endure his coming, because of the changes he will call for when he comes. Isaiah describes the coming of this messenger as a call for radically changing the landscape as an analogy of how people will have to be brought low in order the see the salvation of their God (Isaiah 40:3-5). The language in Malachi uses analogies of the refining of gold and silver and cleansing of fabrics in preparation for manufacturing. These analogies appear to suggest that the messenger comes with harsh words of judgment. Such thoughts would indicate that in order to set things right the messenger should use the power of the law to make sure everyone is worthy and well prepared to receive the God who comes to them.
The purifying language indicates that until the messenger is taken seriously the offerings the people make to God simply are not acceptable. The people should be enabled to "present offerings to the Lord in righteousness." Such talk sounds like a good deal of fire and brimstone preaching is called for to shake the people over the pits of hell to make them shape up. There are always a goodly number of preachers around willing to do that. The media are filled with messages from people trying to reform society from its drug culture, its violation of the environment, its violence, its wife and child abuse, its greed, and its disruption of the economy. Yet not much happens.
The Heart Of Change
The failure of much social reform occurs because it is built on the assumption that the law can change people. The basic idea is that if you educate people as to how bad things are and show them how good they can be, they will opt for change and turn themselves around. The fact is that we very much do need the law to curb and shape behavior in the society. It is also true that we can accomplish much in social reform through education and counsel. However, what the messenger of the covenant works from is an entirely different assumption. The message of the one who prepares the way for God is far more radical. The change is to be far more than conformity to law or social standards. The change to be effected out of the covenant is totally dependent upon the efforts of God. The people who would prepare for the coming of God must be open to the fact that God himself must effect the changes.
God will use the messenger to do the refining and the purifying. The people cannot refine and purify themselves. The first admission we have to make is that we are not capable of changing ourselves. Because we are sinners, our attempts at reform will always come up short of what God requires of us in the covenant. However, as the covenant helps us to recognize our own inadequacy, the covenant also helps us to recognize that God made the covenant with the intent of helping us. Not only is God able to help us, but the covenant declares that we should have been totally dependent upon God in the first place. That we failed to rely upon God completely was not only our first error, but it is our persistent problem. Sin is our failure to understand that we are completely worthless without the help of God. That is what John the Baptist was preaching about when he preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. People needed to be immersed in the fact that they were totally undeserving sinners, but that they could also be bound to a forgiving God who wanted to give them hope.
The Faith In The Change
In these Advent days we are called to make the confession for which John called. We cannot hope to celebrate the Birth of our Lord at Bethlehem with any kind of meaning unless we understand that at our birth we were destined to be the children of wrath and condemnation. The days of Advent are designed to be days of contemplation of why God was willing to take the drastic action of making his only Son incarnate in order to make the sacrifice on the cross for our sin. God decided to take on this move, because there was not one human being in the whole wide world who could come up with an answer that would deal adequately with the depravity of humankind.
The messenger was to deliver a message of refining and purifying that is for the best. The act of purifying gold is a drastic action that brings good results. The dross is melted away in the hot fires of purification, but the result is the pristine metal of shining gold. So as we get through the first step of contrition, that is the act of giving up on ourselves, we are purified to permit God to make us what we should be. So also our repentance is likened to the fuller's soap that washes away the impurities of our sins and our selfish desires. What opens up to us in the covenant as we make ourselves candidates for listening to what God is willing to do for us is that God is believable. In the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ we can have faith that change is possible. That is what Dickens attempted to portray in his charming Christmas Carol. However, real change does not come by the Christmas ghosts, but by the Spirit of God who refashions us in the likeness of God's Son.
The Change Is Service
As the prophet saw the change happening in the people of God, he wrote that they would be able to "present right offerings to the Lord." The prophet viewed the tragedy that existed among his people. The excitement of the Return from Babylon had subsided. The city of Jerusalem was in ruins. The people languished. They were in their homeland, but they were not at home. The Temple was destroyed. The people who had remained in the city were a sorry lot. They were neither prosperous nor industrious. The returned exiles were disillusioned by what they found. They had no desire to build or do anything. In Babylon they saw their enemies prosper and witnessed what power and might they could boast. The people of Israel had to ask, "Where is the God of justice?" Nothing seemed to work out as promised. Consequently, there was great skepticism, and the people reflected their unfaith in bad behavior.
Worst of all, the priesthood had been unfaithful, and the priests were very careless in their practices. They offered polluted food on the altar and manifested general indifference to the needs of the people. It was the offering of polluted food (1:7) that was most offensive to God and a serious indication of how bad things were. The prophet was convinced that all this would change when the people were thoroughly cleansed through the work of the messenger of the covenant, who would bring the people to a sense of repentance and faith. Then conditions for the people of God would be as they once had been. Not only would the people bring right offerings to the Lord, but "then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years."
The Change In Us
Justin Martyr, the foremost apologist for the Christian faith in the second century, described the Christian worship of the Church in one of his writings, Apology 1. He also described his understanding of the Sacrament of the Altar. He saw the prophecy of Malachi about the messenger as fulfilled in the Sacrament of the Altar, because he believed that Christians were able to make the perfect sacrifice. Not all Christian teachers agreed with Justin. We can agree only in the sense that we make the perfect sacrifice by faith. Actually God is the one who gives in the sacrifice as we receive the Christ who has died and is risen again. What we offer is ourselves as sinners, that we might be purified by our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who has refined us and cleansed us with the fuller's soap of repentance.
By the Risen and glorified Christ we are set free to offer ourselves in what we do in our callings and vocations. Going back to our original observations about sociology, we have to ask who is able to measure what goes on in the change and the work of the people of God. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar, gave us the landmark study An American Dilemma. He liked to think of sociology as social engineering, but he was quite disappointed in the directions that sociology took. He thought that sociologists should have behaved more as prophets who could call people to moral accountability. We can assert that not only do people fail at social engineering, but also they always will until they deal adequately with the kind of change the prophet called for with his word about the messenger. We do take the prophet seriously, and we are confident that this season of Advent is a precious time for us to renew our confidence in the kind of change God can perform in us anew. We can welcome any messenger of God who comes to us to share renewal in the light of the covenant of God's grace in Jesus Christ. We offer ourselves to be purified and refined as silver and gold that we may offer our lives to God in righteousness. Then we can properly pray, "Come, Lord Jesus."
What we confess is far more important than the observable consequences of what we confess. Both the prophets and the apostles understood that. However, regularly journals and books appear insisting that we should be able to set things right in the society immediately and that the results should be measurable now. On balance, we have before us a prophetic word in which a messenger is promised who will turn things upside down. The prophet suggests that God would send the messenger of great promise. In these Advent days it is good for us to understand in what sense the messenger can hold out great promise to us.
The Prophet
The name of the prophet who spoke or wrote the oracle that constitutes the First Lesson for today is unknown. The name Malachi simply means "My Messenger." The Hebrew name was assigned the prophet on the basis of the lesson before us. This prophet carried on his ministry in the period of the Return of the people from the Exile in Babylon. He carried on this work before Ezra and Nehemiah.
The original intent of this word of promise was that God wanted to use his messenger to announce the return of the Presence of God in the Temple at the conclusion of the Exile. With that, the people could also be assured of the restoration of the Covenant that God had made originally with the people of Israel. Clearly, whoever collected these oracles of the prophet thought that the prophet who wrote or uttered them was the one to make these assurances real for the people. In time, the people were able to see the promises fulfilled with the rebuilding of the Temple. Yet tensions remained between the ideal and the reality. The religious community was to experience dark days in the future just as they had in the past.
The Messenger Of The Covenant
It is unlikely that the prophet who delivered this oracle saw its fulfillment. The editor who collected his oracles, or sayings, chose to amend the oracle by adding the thought that God would send Elijah as the promised prophet. Elijah, who stood tall among all the prophets, had been assumed into heaven. Elijah, therefore, could return to prepare for the great and terrible day of the Lord by turning their hearts to reorder their priorities (Malachi 4:5-6). Jesus knew of that tradition. His disciples once asked Jesus if he knew that Elijah must come to prepare all things. Jesus answered that Elijah had already come, had performed his duties, and had paid the price for the ministry of preparation (Mark 9:10-12). Thus it is our Lord himself who identifies God's messenger as John the Baptist.
In the Holy Gospel for today (Luke 3:1-6), John the Baptist is identified as the one whom the Prophet Isaiah predicted. As such, John is pictured as "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness." In either description of the messenger, he is to be the one who "prepares the way of the Lord." In either resumé the prophet who comes is also the one who works out of the covenant which God has established with God's people. Malachi says he is "the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight." This suggests to us that we must understand the message of the one who prepares the way of the Lord in the light of the covenant which God had long before established with God's people.
The Message Of Change
The effect of what the messenger of change is to accomplish is considerable. The assurance is given that he will come. However, a question is raised as to who can endure his coming, because of the changes he will call for when he comes. Isaiah describes the coming of this messenger as a call for radically changing the landscape as an analogy of how people will have to be brought low in order the see the salvation of their God (Isaiah 40:3-5). The language in Malachi uses analogies of the refining of gold and silver and cleansing of fabrics in preparation for manufacturing. These analogies appear to suggest that the messenger comes with harsh words of judgment. Such thoughts would indicate that in order to set things right the messenger should use the power of the law to make sure everyone is worthy and well prepared to receive the God who comes to them.
The purifying language indicates that until the messenger is taken seriously the offerings the people make to God simply are not acceptable. The people should be enabled to "present offerings to the Lord in righteousness." Such talk sounds like a good deal of fire and brimstone preaching is called for to shake the people over the pits of hell to make them shape up. There are always a goodly number of preachers around willing to do that. The media are filled with messages from people trying to reform society from its drug culture, its violation of the environment, its violence, its wife and child abuse, its greed, and its disruption of the economy. Yet not much happens.
The Heart Of Change
The failure of much social reform occurs because it is built on the assumption that the law can change people. The basic idea is that if you educate people as to how bad things are and show them how good they can be, they will opt for change and turn themselves around. The fact is that we very much do need the law to curb and shape behavior in the society. It is also true that we can accomplish much in social reform through education and counsel. However, what the messenger of the covenant works from is an entirely different assumption. The message of the one who prepares the way for God is far more radical. The change is to be far more than conformity to law or social standards. The change to be effected out of the covenant is totally dependent upon the efforts of God. The people who would prepare for the coming of God must be open to the fact that God himself must effect the changes.
God will use the messenger to do the refining and the purifying. The people cannot refine and purify themselves. The first admission we have to make is that we are not capable of changing ourselves. Because we are sinners, our attempts at reform will always come up short of what God requires of us in the covenant. However, as the covenant helps us to recognize our own inadequacy, the covenant also helps us to recognize that God made the covenant with the intent of helping us. Not only is God able to help us, but the covenant declares that we should have been totally dependent upon God in the first place. That we failed to rely upon God completely was not only our first error, but it is our persistent problem. Sin is our failure to understand that we are completely worthless without the help of God. That is what John the Baptist was preaching about when he preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. People needed to be immersed in the fact that they were totally undeserving sinners, but that they could also be bound to a forgiving God who wanted to give them hope.
The Faith In The Change
In these Advent days we are called to make the confession for which John called. We cannot hope to celebrate the Birth of our Lord at Bethlehem with any kind of meaning unless we understand that at our birth we were destined to be the children of wrath and condemnation. The days of Advent are designed to be days of contemplation of why God was willing to take the drastic action of making his only Son incarnate in order to make the sacrifice on the cross for our sin. God decided to take on this move, because there was not one human being in the whole wide world who could come up with an answer that would deal adequately with the depravity of humankind.
The messenger was to deliver a message of refining and purifying that is for the best. The act of purifying gold is a drastic action that brings good results. The dross is melted away in the hot fires of purification, but the result is the pristine metal of shining gold. So as we get through the first step of contrition, that is the act of giving up on ourselves, we are purified to permit God to make us what we should be. So also our repentance is likened to the fuller's soap that washes away the impurities of our sins and our selfish desires. What opens up to us in the covenant as we make ourselves candidates for listening to what God is willing to do for us is that God is believable. In the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ we can have faith that change is possible. That is what Dickens attempted to portray in his charming Christmas Carol. However, real change does not come by the Christmas ghosts, but by the Spirit of God who refashions us in the likeness of God's Son.
The Change Is Service
As the prophet saw the change happening in the people of God, he wrote that they would be able to "present right offerings to the Lord." The prophet viewed the tragedy that existed among his people. The excitement of the Return from Babylon had subsided. The city of Jerusalem was in ruins. The people languished. They were in their homeland, but they were not at home. The Temple was destroyed. The people who had remained in the city were a sorry lot. They were neither prosperous nor industrious. The returned exiles were disillusioned by what they found. They had no desire to build or do anything. In Babylon they saw their enemies prosper and witnessed what power and might they could boast. The people of Israel had to ask, "Where is the God of justice?" Nothing seemed to work out as promised. Consequently, there was great skepticism, and the people reflected their unfaith in bad behavior.
Worst of all, the priesthood had been unfaithful, and the priests were very careless in their practices. They offered polluted food on the altar and manifested general indifference to the needs of the people. It was the offering of polluted food (1:7) that was most offensive to God and a serious indication of how bad things were. The prophet was convinced that all this would change when the people were thoroughly cleansed through the work of the messenger of the covenant, who would bring the people to a sense of repentance and faith. Then conditions for the people of God would be as they once had been. Not only would the people bring right offerings to the Lord, but "then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years."
The Change In Us
Justin Martyr, the foremost apologist for the Christian faith in the second century, described the Christian worship of the Church in one of his writings, Apology 1. He also described his understanding of the Sacrament of the Altar. He saw the prophecy of Malachi about the messenger as fulfilled in the Sacrament of the Altar, because he believed that Christians were able to make the perfect sacrifice. Not all Christian teachers agreed with Justin. We can agree only in the sense that we make the perfect sacrifice by faith. Actually God is the one who gives in the sacrifice as we receive the Christ who has died and is risen again. What we offer is ourselves as sinners, that we might be purified by our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who has refined us and cleansed us with the fuller's soap of repentance.
By the Risen and glorified Christ we are set free to offer ourselves in what we do in our callings and vocations. Going back to our original observations about sociology, we have to ask who is able to measure what goes on in the change and the work of the people of God. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar, gave us the landmark study An American Dilemma. He liked to think of sociology as social engineering, but he was quite disappointed in the directions that sociology took. He thought that sociologists should have behaved more as prophets who could call people to moral accountability. We can assert that not only do people fail at social engineering, but also they always will until they deal adequately with the kind of change the prophet called for with his word about the messenger. We do take the prophet seriously, and we are confident that this season of Advent is a precious time for us to renew our confidence in the kind of change God can perform in us anew. We can welcome any messenger of God who comes to us to share renewal in the light of the covenant of God's grace in Jesus Christ. We offer ourselves to be purified and refined as silver and gold that we may offer our lives to God in righteousness. Then we can properly pray, "Come, Lord Jesus."
