SERMON
at
Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
Advent II
December 6, 2009
by
The Rev. Stanley C. Kemmerer, AHC

This morning’s appointed Scriptures constitute a tale of three messengers:

The post-exilic prophet Malachi, addressing a Jewish people asking of Yahweh their God, “So, what have you done for us lately?”

The Apostle Paul, in a rare departure from his crabby, hit ‘em where they aren’t critiques of the behaviors of the early Christian communities, actually giving thanks for and praising the church gathered at Philippi.

And the Evangelist Luke recording the prophetic ministry of St. John the Baptist, almost universally now thought to be the fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy, “my messenger to prepare a way for me.”

Our recessional will celebrate him in verse and song:

Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding.
“Christ is nigh,” it seems to say;
“Cast away the works of darkness,
O ye children of the day.”

As is often the case with the lectionary, the portion of Scripture appointed to be read is either preceded or followed by some “good stuff” not included in the reading itself but which is helpful to our understanding of it. The Book of Malachi is one of the Bible’s “little books.” It is believed to have been written after the dedication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 516 BCE, so a little over 500 years before Jesus was born and after the Jews’ deliverance from their exile in Babylon.

So, OK: Yahweh has delivered the Jewish people from their oppressors, yet they’re whining. They’re free, yes, but it didn’t quite follow their script for how it was to roll out…Says Malachi in the verse preceding our appointed lesson:

You weary Yahweh with your talk. You ask, “How do we weary him?”

“Let me tell you,” says Malachi.

When you say, “Any evildoer is good as far as Yahweh is concerned;
Indeed he likes them best”; or when you say, “Where is the God of
justice now?”

It appears it’s not enough for them they’re OK; they want to see their oppressors suffer. In short, they want to substitute their justice for God’s! They apparently have not yet tumbled to the fact God often surprises His people by acting in ways they don’t expect. (As He is about to again---with a Messiah in the form of a helpless baby rather than on a white charger!) It’s an appropriate lection for this “in between” season of Advent, full of reversals: lowly things and people exalted, the mighty brought low.

“You want justice?” Malachi asks. “You’ll get justice all right!” He continues, speaking as Yahweh God,

Look, I am going to send my messenger to prepare a way before
me. And the Lord you are seeking will suddenly enter his Temple;
and the angel of the covenant whom you are longing for, yes, he
is coming, says Yahweh Sabaoth.

But are you ready for this…

Who will be able to resist the day of his coming? Who will remain
standing when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire and
the fuller’s alkali…he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them
like gold and silver, and then they will make the offering to Yahweh
as it should be made…

In other words, “Be careful what you pray for. You may get it!”

Our knee jerk reaction to a passage like this might be, “Uh oh. This doesn’t sound so good. What kind of punitive God is this?” But think about it. Think about those words “refine” and “purify.” They are the words of making better; they are the words of tough love. They are the words of “whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.” The better to prepare them for the challenges they are to face. Like the hated drill sergent the soldier hates but about whom, looking back after surviving combat using what he learned, he claims saved his life!

This is a season much associated with Handel’s Messiah. It contains many of these words from Malachi. Did you know that, after its first presentation, in London in 1741, Handel wrote to a friend, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them. (The audience.) I wished to make them better.” Or that that intent was so important to him, he so saw his oratorio’s function as participating in the reflective/repentant theme of Advent that, even though by 1751 he was blind, until his death he conducted it as an annual benefit for the Foundling Hospital in London, which served mostly widows and orphans of the clergy?

If you think about it, most things for which we hope and wish carry with them a combination of anticipation and apprehension.

Think of the Nativity and think of a pregnancy period: Families are eager for the arrival of the child. A room is prepared. Furniture is secured. Relatives and friends are notified. Some of us want to know if it’s to be a boy or a girl, or even twins! Others want to be surprised. But we also count the fingers and toes. The couple thinks, “We hope he/she is healthy. How will we support him/her? How will it be to change the diapers? The 3 o’clock feeding?”

Before a wedding, with all the excitement, the happiness, still in many places it’s custom for the father of the bride to whisper in her ear, even as the two are about to march down the aisle, or the best man to whisper in the groom’s ear, “You know, you don’t have to do this!” And a common folk comment is that the night before the bride sleeps like a baby and it’s the groom who’s up all night, sweating, thinking about the responsibility he’s about to assume.

As appears to be true of any passage: Getting ready for a vacation. Approaching retirement. As a child leaves for college or their first apartment.

We might consider the uncertainties and ambivalences of our lives as normal process, part of the refinement and purification of a loving God, happening under His control and on His timetable.

The messengers provide us material for anticipation and the reflection that leads to preparation, repentance or both. Pick the concept you find most appealing because they’re pretty much the same, if the reflection is productive.

We can hope and pray the result will be others being able to say of us what the Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians:

I thank my God whenever I think of you; and every time I pray for all
of you, I pray with joy, remembering how you have helped to spread
the Good News from the day you first heard it right up to the present.
I am quite certain that the One who began this good work in you
Will see that it is finished when the Day of Christ Jesus comes.