But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts. Malachi 4:2–3

Malachi 3:1–2, 4:2–6 – Season of Advent, 2022
Third Sunday of Advent – December 11, 2022 (am)

Their names were Uncle George and Aunt Marian.  We visited them a couple of times on their farm in Michigan, near Pentwater, maybe.  They were sort of on the periphery of my childhood memories, but I vaguely knew that my mother had spent childhood summers there with her Aunt and Uncle.  Though our visits were few, I remember a couple of things about their place. I remember that they lived in a trailer on the property, and that the screen door needed fixing.  I also remember that the place was basically a junk yard of abandoned vehicles, rusted metal, trash, and debris. My mother described it like this:  if you opened the front door and tossed, say a spatula or some other kitchen utensil out into the front yard and then came back in six months it would have grown into a robust pile of junk, almost as if it had sprouted.  And so, in our family the term “seed clutter” was born! 

I can remember them and their eccentricities with a smile but there was more to the story.  They had several children, among them an alcoholic adult son who one day left home and never returned.  Every once in a while, they would get a letter from him with a return address to which they could send some money if they could.  And they did.  But one day the letters stopped coming.  It was as if he [let us call him Donny] simply dropped off the planet, leaving an aching, ever present longing.  A longing to know what had become of their son.  It was a longing that eventually morphed into numbness… but that surely bubbled to the surface at every trip to the mailbox, at every Thanksgiving dinner, even at their preparing a room for their much-loved niece who would come to visit every summer.  They lived in a twilight world of ache, somewhere between despair and fear and hope and guilt, longing, aching for a ray of light.  Their ache was never resolved, and they went to their grave presuming that their son was dead, but never knowing for sure. 

As I have thought about that I have become a bit more charitable in my assessment of their personal life style habits.  When you live in a twilight world, punctuated by a dull ache, that never goes away, who has the heart to clean house or tidy up!

This is a very unsatisfying story, yes?  The reason of course is that we long for resolution.  It does not have to be a Dickens like ending, but to have to live with unresolved ache for years and decades and to never know, to never hear…. that is something more than I care to contemplate for very long.  I can imagine what some of you may be thinking. “Thank you very much Mr. Walker, way to inject a healthy dose of buzzkill into our Christmas joy! I share this sad story with you for a couple of reasons. The main reason is to illustrate by example that longing is not always the same as anticipation!  Get the difference?  We anticipate birthday parties.  We anticipate upcoming weddings, birthdates of children and grandchildren.   Brothers and sisters, in this season of Advent, we join together with great anticipation for something that has already happened! Or so it might seem.  The second reason I burden you with this is that though the story hopefully is not our story, yet for some of us here, it may hit a nerve somehow and feel like its address is right down the street from we live!

For those of you who struggle a bit with the idea of an Advent season, who are suspicious because it sounds so liturgical somehow, allow me to define it for you in terms that may be helpful.

Advent is a season of the liturgical year observed in most Christian denominations as a time of expectant waiting and preparation for both the celebration of the Nativity of Christ at Christmas and the return of Christ at the Second Coming….

[It is] the first season of the Christian church year, leading up to Christmas and including the four preceding Sundays.

Thus, the season of Advent in the Christian calendar anticipates the "coming of Christ" from three different perspectives: the physical nativity in Bethlehem, the reception of Christ in the heart of the believer, and the eschatological Second Coming. Wikipedia! [1]

So, Advent, the first four Sundays before Christmas sets the context for the anticipation of the incarnation that we call Christmas. These four weeks are not merely punctuated by anticipation, they are steeped in it.  There is a now but not yet quality to the season, and so we see anticipation coupled with a growing, discernible longing, an ache for the ‘rest of the story’.

Our focus this morning is on the little book of Malachi, the final word in the Old Testament. [the last box car on the train of the prophets] We don’t know much about the author except that his name was Malachi, or perhaps that the appellation refers to his description as a ‘messenger’.  Either way he appears to be a rough contemporary to Ezra and Nehemiah, serving as a prophet to the newly reestablished remnant of Judah in the post-exhilic world, a world where they were nothing more than a frail vassal state to political powers that controlled their fate.  But it is a bit of an outlier from other prophetic voices.   The oracle he proclaims is not a unilateral message from God to a stubborn people.   It is instead an almost Job-like, Socratic, and surely sarcastic rebuke of the people of Judah presented in the form of a question-and-answer session before the very God that they profess longing for and loyalty to. It actually reads like a court room drama where the infidelities of this nation are submitted as evidence by a methodical prosecutor.  Each of the charges: defiance, arrogance, cheating, corruption, infidelity to their marriage partners, idolatry, calling evil good and good evil…………… build upon each other to form an iron clad indictment.  Yet, to each accusation from God through the mouth of the prophet they respond hypothetically with a question of their own, and by this means the condition of their hearts is revealed.  And each question is preceded by this statement from the prophet: “But you say….” 

• How have you loved us?  [1:2] [read verse 1-2]

• How have we despised your name?  [1:7]

• How have we polluted you?  [1:7

• What a weariness this is?.… and you snort [!] [1:13]

• How have we wearied him?  [2:17]
  

• Where is the God of justice?  [2:17]

• How shall we return to you?  [3:7]

• How have we robbed you?  [3:8]

• How have we spoken against you?  [3:13]

• What is the profit of our keeping His charge [!] [3:14]
  

Do you hear the dripping cynicism and bitterness of the last question? Do you notice how they refer to their God in the third person?  It reminds me of once when our kids were small, and I unwisely went into their room after they had been in bed a while to scold them collectively for something….  and as I left, I heard one of them stage whisper to the others [and I have never been able to put the finger on who said it] “I don’t like him…. do you”!! And yet even here, in the midst of a stunning and seemingly final rebuke and word of judgement we are presented with words of force and determination that contain a glimmer at least of future rescue and redemption long in the planning, and certain in its execution.

3:1-2    Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap.

[At first read, this seems like a reprieve, like a promise of good news.  And yet, when you break it down, it begins to dawn on us that ‘it ain’t necessarily so.”  When I was a kid, I occasionally heard words like these, “you know you kids have been little monsters this afternoon.  Don’t forget that your father comes in on the 6:03!”] 

And yet there is joy and hope to be had when we get to chapter four.

[4:2-6] But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.

4 “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules[b] that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.5 “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. 6 And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.

The imagery is stunning here especially in the context of the bitter, single minded self-righteousness and rejection by the people to whom this prophecy is written!  This final word, written 400+ years before its fulfillment is a clear window into the plan of God percolating for centuries for this irritable and hardened people. Consider the message:

First a messenger will be sent.  The way of the Lord will be prepared.  He will suddenly enter His temple.  For those who fear his name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in his wings.  You will leap like cattle from the stall.  You will have victory over your enemies.  Behold, Elijah is coming.  The great and mighty day of the Lord is coming.  There will be wholeness in this fractured land.  Hearts will be turned toward one another….  Wow!  Sign me up.  Can you understand the longing, the anticipation growing across 400 years, call it 15 generations!  Can we like Simeon and Anna, taste that great day? [ emphasize the word “will”]

And yet, there is an edge here, yes? “Lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.” []!]   Wow!  This feels a bit like giving a child a wonderful Christmas present, and there at the bottom of the box is a bill for past due rent!   It is possible to read this passage as if it were a warning, as if the real message is “get your act together folks or these glorious promises will turn to ashes in your hands…… Let’s pause on that for a moment.   This people have demonstrated over and over again for the better part of a thousand years that they have not the capacity to follow their preciously prized moral compass.   It is less of a warning than it is a statement of plain and simple reality.  Were not Elijah to come as a puzzle piece to a great and stunningly beautiful redemption……  the only recourse would be the unredeemable and utter destruction of this nation, this people who had been, and would continue to be relentlessly loved by God.

And the same message is consistent throughout the prophecies of the Old Testament.  Consider this from the shepherd/ prophet Amos:

Amos 5:18-

Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why would you have the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, and not light,
19     as if a man fled from a lion,
    and a bear met him,
or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,
    and a serpent bit him.
20 Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light,
    and gloom with no brightness in it?

So, which is it?   It is as if we are given two diverging paths to walk, one is light abounding and the other is descending darkness.  Which is it that we are to anticipate? The juxtaposition is probably nowhere made more clear than in ……  Isaiah 8:  20-9:

If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn. 21 They will pass through the land,[h] greatly distressed and hungry. And when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will speak contemptuously against[i] their king and their God, and turn their faces upward. 22 And they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish. And they will be thrust into thick darkness.

9 [a] But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.[b]

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shone.

And of course, this passage from Isaiah 9 rings with great resonance for us, yes?  It is quoted in Matthew 4 at the inauguration of Jesus’ public ministry when he moved from Nazareth and lived in Capernaum by the sea in the land of Zebulon and Naphtali! Brothers and sisters, in this season of Advent we herald the coming of that light, do we not.  

So, what about the Elijah who is to come? The Jews set an empty chair at the table for him as an emblem of a longing for the herald for Messiah to come.  It is their belief that Messiah will come unsuspected upon some Sabbath day.   Here are the words of Jesus:

Matthew 11:11-16  “Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist! Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force. For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you are willing to accept it, John himself is Elijah who was to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear…”

And just as the picture begins to clarify….  the words of John the Baptist add another layer of ambiguity!

John 1:19-23 Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.” They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” He answered, “No.” Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’

So, is he Elijah or is he not? When John proclaims that he is not Elijah he is actually making a necessary and corrective statement.  Contrary to popular suspicion John is telling his interrogators that his identity as ‘the messenger’ and the voice in the wilderness crying out to prepare the way of the Lord is not based on a shared DNA with the prophet.  Nor is he some sort of sensational reincarnation.  Jesus words “if you can accept it” are a key.  His identity as Elijah is not rooted in blood and bone, but in his ordained role as the herald of the one who is to come, the messenger, a role he has faithfully filled even while he was in the womb!   Do you remember the words of Elizabeth to Mary in Luke ch 1?

44 For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.  [as an unborn child he was the herald and messenger prophesied in Malachi 3!  That is worth thinking about for a while!]

 And that phrase, “if you can accept it” in the passage I read from Matthew 11 gets at the heart of the takeaway from this message, which we will come back to as we conclude.

In 1987 the # 1 popular song on the pop charts was sung by a woman named Belinda Carlisle.  The title of the tune was “Heaven is a Place on Earth.” One of the verses goes like this: 

Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth?
Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth
They say in Heaven, love comes first
We'll make Heaven a place on Earth
Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth.  [3]

What do you think?  Have you found it to be so?  Uncle George and Aunt Marian did not find it so……  The song actually was adopted as a book title by Adrian Shirk, [4] subtitled Searching For An American Utopia.  The word Utopia cranked into existence by Thomas Moore in the 1600’s comes from the Greek word for “no-place”.  Or so I am told.   The United States has been, in the words of the author, a “ferocious and focused laboratory of utopian experimentation since the beginning” [p. 8] Currently it is estimated that there are no fewer than 1200 utopian communities in the U.S. with approximately 100,000 members.

From the Shakers to the Harmonists, the Oneida Community, the Amana colonies, Robert Owen’s New Harmony, the early Mormons and more recently communities with names like New Day, Bronx Co-Op city, to [ my personal favorite] Father Divines International Peace Mission Movement, to the Megiddo Steamship ministry and many many more had a few common characteristics.  They mostly relied upon Acts Ch. 2 for their economic pole star.  They also tended to be white, young [ish] and generally protestant in their roots and heritage.  But there is one particular thing that they all, universally have had in common.  Can you guess?

They failed, every single one, every single time.  And the few that have seemingly survived have morphed into institutional clones of the culture from which they were trying to escape!   [The Mormons for example] The point is this, and it is simple.  Heaven is not a place on earth! Our attempts to build Utopia fail and fail and fail again.  The reality of our longings and our helplessness and our pride and our anger and our cluelessness ensure that it will always be so! Our salvation, should it come at all, must come from somewhere out of this world!    But, folks therein, in that wasteland of shattered dreams lies our only and our best hope.  And that leads to the first takeaway this morning……

Takeaways:

1. We have been found! We have not by our own efforts or intrinsic worth somehow lured the Messiah down to earth.  It is not as though Messiah had been pacing the floor in heaven, waiting endlessly for men and women to raise themselves up by their moral bootstraps to a higher plane of sufficient worthiness, to in effect make heaven a place on earth.  That is a trap that has ever ensnared the world.  Many years ago, I read a great book, The Source, by James Michener.  There was a scene in the book where the Jewish rabbis in the small Palestinian town of Safed hoped and prayed that the Messiah would come walking over the Galilean hills ….  perhaps this very Sabbath!   Because of that ever-dashed hope, the day after Shabbat would be a day of inconsolable ache. Here is how Michener describes it:

   “This dawn Zaki looks at no one and he prays alone, as do the rest of us.  And then, when the day has well broken and the sun is upon us, the rabbis of Safed meet glumly on street corners and try to decide what went wrong last week.  If we have been truly God’s men throughout the entire week, Rabbi Yom Tov complains, the Messiah would surely have come.  What did we do wrong?  And the rabbis discuss the errors of the past, the faults of Jews who keep barring the Messiah from his Holy Land. ……to preach with new dedication his simple formula:  More charity, more love, More submission to God’s Torah.  And so, as each new week begins, the Jews of Safed again try to live such devout lives that through their example the Messiah will be lured down to earth, for as Rabbi Zaki never tires of reminding us, It is written in the Talmud that if a single community repents, the world will be saved… [5]

   Can we praise the Lord this morning that the security of our anticipation does not rest in our good works, in our worthiness or our piety.  It rests ultimately on the utterly determined will of God to save his people, attested to by His word, by the testimony of the world around us, and strangely even and especially by the deep unresolved longings of our tired and troubled hearts.  And so, in the midst of unresolved pain, we find our true place of peace in this season of so many contrasts by pausing to thank our heavenly Father, and marvel at the babe in the manger who would provide our rescue.  And as we do we may well begin to understand that there is probably no better or more important question in the universe than this, “Who is He in yonder stall?”

2. The second takeaway is a question: Will He find faith on the earth?  So many of our deepest longings are unresolved.  We ache for what ought to be.  We lament that this life is “Not the way it’s supposed to be.”  [Plantinga] We are not asked in this Advent season to deny the ache in our hearts or to pretend that our longings matter not!  What we are called to during this Advent season is to carry our challenges and our ache with an open hand, and our anticipation of our rescue and hope in the other.  Do we have the faith to believe that even our deepest ache will be made right in God’s timing? That timing which   was made manifest in this world at long last, on that morning long ago now, when a weary woman and a worried man came to a barn or a cave in the village of Bethlehem.

3. The third take away is that we anticipate together, as one.  The promises of the Old Testament about Messiah are for the people of God and   the longing ache that you may carry is shared by your brothers and sisters here, and we bear the ache of that together, for as long as it must be born.  And if you buckle… we are there walking side by side.   And because of that shared longing of the heart, may it be that our anticipation for what has come to be and for what is still yet to come, will grow in depth and layers and melody within us together, day by day and year by year.

4. Finally, our last take away, or perhaps our conclusion this morning is this:  All is prepared. It only remains that you should be willing. [6] [I know that the syntax of this sentence feels somehow awkward, but it probably felt a little more comfortable to the guy who first stated it 400 years ago! [ Our anticipation for the coming of the Messiah, and for the return of Christ at his second coming, and for the dawn of salvation in the heart of the believer hinges on a pivotal phrase that we noted earlier from Matthew 11… ‘If you can accept it. 

   That is the question for us on this the second Sunday of Advent, “Can you accept it?”  All is prepared.  It only remains that you should be willing. There is a catch of course and it is as simple as it is frightening.  It will take a miracle! The quickening of a cold and dead heart…… is   beyond our capacity for sure!  But not beyond the capacity of our God and Savior who according to his word will indeed turn the hearts of his children toward   their Heavenly Father…. “And if that question is one that you have never been able to answer with joy or conviction………….  Come and talk with me afterwards!  Seriously, I don’t bite!

   It is a pretty simple matter of two paths actually.  When the dawn of our salvation comes it will bring joy and peace, or it will bring judgement and disabling fear and unspeakable regret.  Our prayer is that each of us here today in this room and on the stream will surrender to this sun of righteousness and really and truly, finally and for the first time, actually rest in peace.

Amen.  

__________________ 

End Notes:

1.     This definition of Advent is from Wikipedia, and I have found it helpful to frame this season of anticipation in the ‘now but not yet.’ It embodies an anticipation for the incarnation as well as the future return of Jesus.  It incorporates a third element as well, the dawning of salvation in the heart of the believer.

2.     The importance of the phrase ‘if you can accept it’ in Matthew 11 was highlighted for me as I was looking for some clarity about the identification of John the Baptist with Elijah.  I found this article to be helpful. L
Was John the Baptist really Elijah reincarnated? | GotQuestions.org

3.     Heaven is a Place on Earth, sung by Belinda Carlisle, 1987

4.     Adrian Shirk, Heaven is a Place on Earth [searching for an American Utopia] 2022, p. 8

5.     James Michener, The Source, 1965, page 849. I read this epic novel many years ago and was captivated by its depiction of Jewish life in Palestine over the past 3000 years.  I actually had a difficult finding this quote which I only vaguely remembered. So, I spent nine dollars and ordered it used from Amazon.  Eureka!

6.     The phrase “All is prepared.  It only remains that you should be willing.” originates from a source that I must confess I have never read,] Johann Albrecht Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament.   I discovered it when searching online for some insight into    Jesus’ statement in Matthew 11:14 “if you can accept it”.   The grammar feels awkward to our ear, as well it might both because it found its way from Latin to German and finally to English, and also because it was written some 400 years ago.

 

 

Next Week’s Sermon: God With Us, Isaiah 7 and Matthew 1, Kipp Soncek