Reasons to Be Ready

Malachi 3:1-4
"Look, I am sending my messenger who will clear the way before me. And suddenly Adonai will come to his temple, the one whom you seek; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, will surely come," says Yahweh, Lord of hosts.
But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and the lye of the launderer. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to Yahweh as in the days of old and as in former years.

I have to tell you that I really struggled with the message this morning. I mean, did you hear the passage from Malachi that we read? Did you hear the words of John the Baptizer? They’re not exactly comforting images. Here we are only a little over two weeks from Christmas (don’t panic!) and we are in the midst of the Christmas preparation marathon and we would like to hear some words of hope and light and some soft music and be reminded of how comforting Christ’s coming is for a world that knows so much stress and sorrow.

But that’s not what we get today. Malachi says, “Yes, God is coming, but who can endure it? Who can stand when he appears? He will be like the refiner’s fire or caustic lye soap.” John the Baptist says, “Yes, the promised Messiah is coming, but you’ve got to get prepared. Mountains will have to be leveled and valleys be filled in. You will have to have a baptism of repentance. Don’t expect that this Messiah thing will be easy.”

So what can I say this morning that will sound like good news? What can I say that sounds like joy to the world or angels from the realms of glory? Where is the word we need to hear today?
Because if you are like me, you’re already feeling like you’re headed to tinsel tension, silver bells stress, and overmuch overload. You’re already feeling like you’ve eaten too much, wrapped too little, and complained too often. On the national front, our leaders seem helpless, our world seems disturbed, and our budget seems busted. And at church there’s this sense that something important is supposed to happen. The candles are lit. The crismons are on the tree. The carols are beginning to be sung. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but we’re not entirely sure what that means. We want to feel the richness and the depth of the season – we want to be swept up in it, like we were as children…to know the magic and to believe as maybe we once did, that animals can talk on Christmas Eve, that up on the housetop there are reindeer paws, that a manger in Bethlehem cradles a king. We want to believe this. Surely the stars are brightly shining. Surely unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. Surely there is joy to be spoken to the world for a lord is come. But there are days, aren’t there? There are weeks, aren’t there? There are years, aren’t there?, when we wonder how Christ will come into this world that seems so closed off to God. When we wonder how we can hear good news.

So I read Malachi and I think – refiner’s fire…lye soap. There IS a message in here. God is trying to get our attention. There are reasons for us to be ready. There are things that need to be purified. There are things that need to be cleansed. Something’s gotta give and I believe it’s me.

After much struggle, I think this is the thing that I need to say today: something’s gotta give in order for us to be ready for Christmas and that is good news. Let’s look at that from two perspectives – one old and one new.

First, the old. We might wonder what meaning the Old Testament prophet Malachi has for us today. After all, he is talking about a messenger who would come to restore justice, to restore right worship, to open the way once more between God and the people of Israel. Malachi was talking to a people who had returned from exile and who were trying to reestablish a kingdom in the land of their ancestors. And they were doing a pretty poor job. They had strayed so far from God that they were confusing evil with good. They were questioning whether God still cared about how they lived and whether there were any consequences for not living right. It was a time long, long ago, and surely we don’t have those same problems today. But of course, we do. We also live in a time when evil is confused with good…when people question whether God cares about our ethical choices and whether there are any consequences for making bad choices. You know that’s true.

But Christians look back on this prophecy from Malachi and they wonder, “Why are things the same if the messenger that the prophet talks about has already come?” The messenger was the precursor, the Elijah figure, who would come to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. Christians saw that figure in John the Baptizer, the one who came to prepare the way for the coming of the Christ. And in Jesus Christians see the one after whom nothing could be the same. When we beheld Jesus, we saw the God who had taken our form and lived our life and died our death and revealed to us what God was up to in the universe. We saw the end of all things, the purpose of all things, come to pass in our time, in a baby, in a manger, on the road, on the sea, in the boat, in the Temple, up a hill, and upon a cross, and through an empty tomb. Why is it then, after all of this, that we are still not any closer to being what God intends us to be? Why are we still waiting for Messiah to come?

What is different…what makes this time different…is that we have something new to do because we know the end of the story.

Now the new perspective. Once I worked as a youth director at church-related community center in West Dallas. West Dallas is the inner city and the inner city in Dallas has the same reputation as the inner city everywhere – it is the place where dreams go to die. And it certainly seemed well-deserved when I arrived there, full of optimism and a dangerous amount of theological education – two years at a United Methodist seminary!

I quickly became very discouraged with what I saw. West Dallas was severely divided. Our community center was located right near the dividing line. I could even name you the street. Vilbig. North of Vilbig, West Dallas was mostly black. South of Vilbig was mostly Hispanic. We were one of the few community centers that served both communities.

I coached basketball as part of my job there and I spent hours with my players. We got to know each other pretty well. Once I asked them what it was they wanted to be when they grew up. Just about every one of them said, “An NBA basketball player.” Thomas said that and he was probably going to have the height to do it. But Squirrel said that, too, and there was no way Squirrel was going to make it. He could do many things, but being an NBA star was not going to be one of them. I encouraged them to dream big, but I also tried to give them some other dreams, and other possibilities.

But a funny thing was happening to my own dreams. For the first time in my life, I was feeling like an absolute failure. The problems were so overwhelming and the resources so limited. Families were so broken and the despair so pervasive and the children so wounded and I was so different I might as well have been from another planet. I was also working in a situation without a whole lot of guidance. I had incredibly good people to work with but they were each so overloaded with their own stuff that I didn’t get much help. I was free to develop the program as I wanted, but that was exactly the problem – I was free…and alone.

I wasn’t alone forever, though. I struck up a friendship with a guy by the name of Juan Prieto. Juan worked for the Health Department at the time, but his great passion was to make West Dallas a better place. Juan had come from Colombia where he had experienced all the violence of the drug wars that were going on at the time. He knew the worst that life had to offer, but he was irrepressibly cheerful. Juan was the one who was given the thankless job of handing out flyers about a mandatory measles vaccination to every household on public assistance in the neighborhood. That must have been ten thousand houses. But he was so upbeat and he made it seem like such a party that he got us, youth workers from other agencies, to volunteer to do the job with him. It was like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. I still remember handing out all those flyers in some really rough neighborhoods and thinking that it was about the most fun I’d had in weeks.

The thing that made Juan so effective was his vision. He knew what West Dallas could be. He shared that vision with those around him and when he found companions for it, he moved us to action. The vision was not going to be realized without some changes and he was motivated to work for those changes, even when it meant a lot of work that seemed really hard to those on the outside.

Juan Prieto is still like that. Suzanne and I got to eat with him and his wife last February when we were back in Dallas. We reminisced about our adventures creating a Teen Advisory Council and starting a talent show and starting teen pregnancy prevention programs – things I would never have done had I not been dreaming with Juan about what could be. And Juan is still doing those things.

Why am I telling you this? Because the message is the same – when you know the end of the story, you have something new to do. I was absolutely stumped by that youth director job. Here I was trying to bring good news to the inner city and I couldn’t even hear God’s good news myself. But once I caught a vision of what God intended for West Dallas, a vision carried by Juan, I knew that there were new things to do, and we did them.

Christians talk a really good game at Christmas time. We make some really radical claims about what God is up to in the world. We make a huge fuss over the story of a baby in Bethlehem. We say that nothing could ever be the same after God came to us in Jesus.

But our words fall flat when we don’t claim that vision and change our lives as a result. My favorite question to ask in Bible Study is, “Well, if we take this passage seriously, what’s got to change?” The assumption built into that question, of course, is that we haven’t been taking the passage seriously and that there ought to be some consequence to our reading.

So ask that question of Malachi. Ask that question of John the Baptist. Ask that question of Christmas. If we take the coming of the Messiah seriously…if we take the message of repentance seriously…if we take the language of a refiner’s fire seriously…if we take Christmas to be more than just a wish-fulfillment fantasy, what’s got to change? Will we still pray for peace on earth and not work for its coming? Will we remember the poverty of the stable and not think about those whose poverty stunts their lives in our day? Will we sing about the gifts the magi brought to the child and withhold our own gifts to the work of God’s reign? Will we talk about love coming down at Christmas and continue to hate our neighbor? Will we let angels sing the heavenly chorus and not join in with praise of our own? Will we admire the shepherds’ immediate response to the angel’s call and explain away our own failures to do what we feel called to do?

This to me is the hard struggle of these passages we read today. It’s not that I don’t have the capacity to be what God wants me to be. It’s not that I am not able to be ready for the coming of Christ. Because Christ has already come and done what he did and promised to be with us to the end of the age, I know, on a certain level that I can do it – I can do all things through the one who strengthens me. But I often fail to be what I know that I can be. The things that I feel are my most persistent character flaws and personal weaknesses are things that I can address if I will only let go of the fear of change. Like the 5th century Saint Augustine I am a master at praying, “God, give me wholeness, but not yet.” I’m afraid to live without these chains I place upon myself. Something’s gotta give, and it’s me.

This Christmas, as I look around the world, I see very few people like my friend, Juan Prieto. This is a cynical age and we are prone to disillusionment and criticism. We find it far easier to find the flaws in the plans on offer than to offer up a vision that might cause us to actually risk something of ourselves, that might ask us to express our deepest longings, desires and passions for change. We would not go to the desert like John the Baptist. We would not dare to suggest that something within us needs to change. We are more than willing to wait on a savior as long it doesn’t require anything of us.

But this Messiah we wait on does require something. It’s not that we have to earn this salvation that Jesus brings. Don’t confuse this with a works righteousness argument. God’s grace goes before. It always goes before. But if we take God’s grace seriously, what will have to change in us? Something’s gotta give. And the process of getting ready is a continuing process of opening ourselves to God’s fire, letting it burn away the impurities within us, and moving us to action in this world.

I know I’ve used this quote before, but it says to me what needs to be said to a waiting people. Steven Long, a professor at Garrett Evangelical Seminary says, “Christians are people who put themselves in places they would not be if the gospel they believed were not true.” Christians are people who put themselves in places that they would not be if the gospel they believed were not true. Where do you need to put yourself? What’s the deep knowledge that you are hiding that needs to be expressed in your words and deeds? What do you need to confront that’s keeping you from God? Whom do you need to love?

Christmas is coming. The way must be prepared. Thanks be to God.