Whose Messenger Are You? (And What Message Are You Announcing?)

Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6; Philippians 1:3-11

Look, I am sending my messenger who will clear the path before me;
suddenly the Lord whom you are seeking will come to his temple.
The messenger of the covenant in whom you take delight is coming,
        says the Lord of heavenly forces.
Who can endure the day of his coming?
Who can withstand his appearance?

Those verses sum up Advent. They are rife with the tension of anticipation and apprehension. We haven’t lost that wide-eyed childhood glee for the approach of Christ’s birthday celebration. Yet it is in a life-and-death fight with our life experience that tells us that not everything will be like we expect it to be. If God really comes as God has promised, the impact on our lives will be major. “Who can endure the day of his coming?”  Not any of us.

And yet, here we are, pledging our loyalty, our faith, our very spirits to the reality that God has a plan for Creation, a plan for our prosperity. But the truth of the matter is that what we tell children about Santa Claus watching out for naughty and nice, if it applied to us, would make things pretty dicey for us when Christ appears. Malachi’s message applies to both the first coming of Christ – his birth as well as his three-year ministry – and his second coming at the culmination of Creation.

Malachi didn’t lay out a simple responsibility for his hearers. The message is magnified and perpetuated through the work of Christ. Remember the words in Acts 1 with which the risen Jesus commissioned his disciples at the close of his earthly ministry and post-resurrection appearance: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The work of the messenger has been laid on the people who would follow after Christ. You and I are in that great relay of witnesses.

I had an old AM radio in my room when I was growing up. It had a small, round, lighted dial and a knob to turn to tune in the stations. It took a lot of work to get a more distant station to come in clearly. Just the slightest twist of the tuning knob could get a clear signal or miss it in a roar of static. The static sometimes happened because there were signals from several radio stations on the same frequency trying to be tuned in at the same time. It wasn’t until I studied physics in high school that I learned how and why static existed.

We live in a world that is full of static. Malachi, along with his fellow prophets, understood that in their day. The hereditary priests and Levites connected with the Temple were saying one thing about God. And the prophets whom God appointed from outside the Temple institution spoke a different thing about God. Everyone spoke about God, but it was like the different radio stations trying to come in on the same frequency. All the people heard was static.

Our radios have improved a lot. With digital tuning, there isn’t any fiddling with the dial. Extraneous and weak signals are ignored. That’s not the case with our lives. The static is still there – in the church, in the world. The messages are fighting with each other as they try to be heard in the midst of every other message. The result is that no single message is getting through.

The refiner’s fire and cleaner’s soap is desperately needed. There needs to be honest reflection on our church and our broader society. What might be refined and purified in God’s promised refining fire? When God’s promise, spoken through Malachi, is finally fulfilled, what will look different in our church? our world? our lives? But before we start to attack enemies or to point out all the things that some imagined “they” are doing wrong, we need to pause and examine ourselves purposefully. We don’t get to escape the divine smelting. We are going to be refined along with all the people we think need it. We are in need of refining.(1)

The prophet calls us to look inside. Look inside ourselves, each of us. Then to look inside our congregation, then our community. What will God’s refining look like? Perhaps the faces in our pews will reflect the rainbow of pigmentation in God’s world more than they do now. Perhaps there will be young as well as old. Perhaps there will be no high cost cars in the parking lot and more beds for the homeless. Perhaps there will be hours of prayer and minutes of meetings rather than minutes of prayer and hours of meetings.

What will our worship and our stewardship look like if “the offering of Judah and Jerusalem [and Chicago and Little Rock and Phoenix and First Presbyterian and New Covenant and St. Mary’s Churches] will be pleasing to the Lord”?

Malachi challenges us to a very different kind of preparation than hanging tinsel, ladling eggnog, and singing carols. Like John the Baptist, the prophet challenges us to look at our lives, our values, our priorities. John’s message of repentance cannot be avoided. John and the prophets of Advent challenge us to recognize that we have been doing things after a wrong life message and must choose to make a radical change in our lives. That’s an impossible task for us by ourselves, but possible with the working of the Spirit in us.

Like the Advent prophets John confronts us, commands our attention, and demands our responses. John’s challenge is to repent and prepare. True repentance means literally, to change one’s mind, turn around, reorient oneself, or to use Malachi’s word, to be refined.(2)

So what is your message? Is about calling God a handyman who can fix everything? Does it describe God as a kind of benevolent grandparent who let’s you get away with things? Is it picturing God as kind of cosmic ATM handing out whatever you want? Does it make God into a cruel and impossible taskmaster ready to crush life out of people? Is it crying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace? Is it the message that appeared on the front page of the New York Post this week following the shooting rampage in San Bernardino: “God Isn’t Fixing This.”

The real message is that God did not will this massacre. Death is an interloper and is not God’s will. The one who hates this violence more than we do is God.

And the real message is that God is in the agony of innocent lives lost. God knows what it is to lose a son. God was with each of those wounded and killed. None of us can say how, or if they knew it, or believed it, or cared. But from the perspective of the Christian faith there is no such thing as a God-forsaken person. When evil intentions enter a room and snuff out life, what they don’t snuff out is the God of life who abides with those in the room more intimately that we can imagine. St. Augustine taught us that God is closer to us that we are to ourselves. Psalm 139 teaches us that we cannot escape God’s loving presence. Nothing can change that.

And the real message is that God wants us to join with God in the community to speak truth to power, as the prophets of old did, as John the Baptist did, as Jesus did, as Peter and Paul did, as the 16th century Reformers did, as the faithful have done across the ages.

In Advent, Christians prepare to celebrate the deepest mystery of our faith – the Incarnation, God’s unique union with humanity in the person of Jesus. Among other things, Incarnation means God is still with humanity and works through humanity. At Christmas we will be remembering that God came as a weak, vulnerable child into our world.(3)

John the Baptist is to us a great prophet who prepared the way for Jesus, but compared with the political and religious leaders of his day, he was just an ordinary guy. Yet God chose John, and not the luminaries of his time, to be the messenger. God sent the message to John, not in Rome, not in Jerusalem, but out in the wilderness. Not the seat of political or religious power, but the wilderness, the often scary and confusing place where God had spoken to God’s people in the past and through which God had led God’s people to a new and promised life. God’s choice of John and where God spoke to John are indications of what God expects from us. Our repentance, our turning around, will likely involve us looking at the structures and the systems and the people of the world around us in new and different ways.(4)

Whose messenger are you? And what message are you announcing? John wants to know. Malachi wants to know. God wants to know.

(1) Seth Moland-Kovash, “Malachi 3:1-6 Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) Year C, Volume 1, 29, 31.
(2) Kathy Beach Verhey, “Luke 3:1-6 Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting, op. cit., 47, 49.
(3) “God Isn’t Fixing This,” Rev. Dr. L. Roger Owens, associate professor of leadership and ministry, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, PTSBlog, Ministry/Theological Reflection, http://www.pts.edu/blog/god-isnt-fixing-this 
(4) Verhey, op. cit., 49.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.