Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Malachi 3:1-4 December 6, 2009

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight - indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. 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; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

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Every time I hear this passage of scripture, Handel's Messiah suddenly pops up in my mind. "For he is liiiiike, a refiiiiiiiiiinerrrrs fiiiire." Handle seemed to have a thing for complicated sixteenth note runs. Anyone who has ever sung or heard the Messiah knows how beautiful it is. But take if from me, those runs are really hard to sing. More than that though, whenever I hear it, I wonder how the writer of Malachi would have felt if he knew his words were going to end up as a musical set piece.

I say, "the writer of Malachi" because we don't actually know who it was. Malachi is a Hebrew word meaning "my messenger." It may very well not have been the prophet's name. But clearly, like Jeremiah last week, he was someone who was exceedingly frustrated with the failures of his fellow Israelites. They weren't living up to his notions of what it meant to be faithful followers of Yahweh, and he wasn't going to take it anymore.

If you were here last week, you'll remember I was talking about the historical setting in which Jeremiah was preaching. The Babylonians were coming to destroy Jerusalem and the prophet blamed it all on Israel's faithlessness. Despite his impassioned preaching, the city was destroyed and the people were taken off into exile. In Malachi, although the tone of his prophesies sounds very similar, he is actually speaking to an entirely different situation. Some seventy years after the fall of Jerusalem, Cyrus of Persia had conquered Babylon and the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem. They rebuilt the city and the temple, praised God for their salvation and went on about their lives.

But, it wasn't long, perhaps a generation or two, before the Israelites were once again taking their freedom and their faith for granted. They had become sloppy about their worship practices, sometimes offering blemished animals to God, and they had begun to intermarry with people from other countries and faiths. All of which sent the prophet into a tizzy. He claimed that the day of God was surely coming, just as Jeremiah had said, but that if they thought that Day of God was going to be some kind of picnic, they had better think again. God, he said, was coming to burn away all their impurities in the furnace of his wrath. "Who can endure the day of his coming," he wanted to know. "And who can stand when he appears?"

It's hardly any wonder we don't spend a lot of time talking about the prophets. Although there are some wonderful and affirming prophetic passages in the Old Testament, most of the time the prophets themselves come across as dark and angry. My Old Testament professor in seminary was talking once about the prophet Jeremiah. He said that in our preaching we have to be careful not to soften the edges of the prophets too much. He said that if we wanted a good modern day comparison for Jeremiah, we should probably think of someone along the lines of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Now there's an image for you. I know I said last week that my heart goes out to Jeremiah because of the very painful ministry he was called to. I do stand by what I said, but I'm not sure I would have been so sympathetic if I'd been one of the people he was preaching at.

Malachi, whoever he was, wasn't any better. I'm sure he was afraid for his people. After all, look what happened to Israel the last time they got out of line. God, using Babylon as an instrument of His divine wrath, swatted Jerusalem like a fly. That's probably what Malachi was thinking, something along those lines. But let's face it, the man was a religious idealist. He was a fanatic, who apparently believed his version of the truth was the one and only right way of understanding the will of God.

Does that sound familiar? It should. We've got a lot of people around like that these days. Arrogant self-righteousness seems to be going through something of a renaissance. There always have been, and I suppose there always will be, people who think they are among the select few who are right with God in a world where the overwhelming majority are soon to be burned up in the flames of God's wrathful justice. That is a perennial message among fundamentalists of all stripes, and, like it or not, most of the Old Testament prophets fit that description.

Malachi was speaking to his own time and his own condition. That doesn't mean there's no point in hearing what he had to say. It just means we shouldn't assume he was speaking directly to us, to our times and our conditions. You would think that would be obvious, wouldn't you? But people make this mistake all the time. People of faith have often taken the scriptures out of context, imagining that the prophets, and writers of books like Daniel and Revelation, were actually speaking about modern day Europe and America, instead of the ancient Israel in which they lived.

The fact that we're talking about the book of Malachi today at all is a case in point. The Christian church had hardly gotten its feet on the ground before people, particularly Matthew, began pouring over every verse, every "jot and title," of the scriptures looking for things that sounded like they predicted the coming of Jesus. In today's passage, "I'm sending my messenger to prepare the way," sounded to them a bit like John the Baptist. "The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant," bore a distant resemblance to Jesus. So this passage of Malachi was selected, way back then, to be one of the collection of Old Testament scriptures that they believed was actually talking about Jesus, and we have used it as an Advent reading ever since.

Now think about that for a minute. We have a lot of people in our own day making predictions about the future. Some of those predictions are pretty scary, though it helps to keep in mind that prophets almost always predict a future that is dark and forbidding. However, the point is, the future they are talking about is the immediate future: our generation, our children, maybe their children, although that's stretching it. No one, no one I know of, is talking about anything past about the next fifty to a hundred years, and most of the predictions focus on an even shorter time frame. The reason for this, it seems to me, is that all of our modern day prophets are talking to us. We are their audience. We are the one's they are trying to reach. Right?

With that in mind, try to imagine our modern day prophets making predictions about what they believe will be happening in the year 2650; several centuries from now. Who would care? Who would take them seriously? Who would bother hanging on to their predictions to see if they came true? The one thing that would be crystal clear, is that a prediction like that would be worthless to the generation in which it was made, except maybe as fantasy or science fiction. Under those circumstances, it's hard to imagine what the point would be, why anyone would bother to make predictions like that. However, that is essentially what the early Christians were saying Malachi was doing, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah; five hundred some years before that first Christmas, the prophets predicted the coming of the Jesus. And modern day Christians are doing exactly the same thing when they claim that Revelation was written about an end of the world that was only going to arrive in our generation, two thousand years later.

Now of course, as a person of faith, I believe it's entirely possible to hear God speaking to us through a prophet in ways that the prophet himself didn't intend or imagine. If we didn't believe that, then the whole Bible would be mostly worthless to us, except as history. The Bible can and does speak to us in deeply meaningful, insightful, powerful and helpful ways, if we let it. It's just that we need to be more careful than we have been about the assumptions we make. We need to not assume it's saying more than it actually is.

On the other hand, we shouldn't assume it's saying less than it is either. Malachi may not have had Jesus in mind specifically, but he certainly recognized how much we need someone like Jesus. He certainly understood that people easily become caught up in things that aren't helpful to us and aren't pleasing to God. He saw with great clarity our need to separate out in ourselves those things that are bright, good and clean from those that are unhealthy, and he knew that we don't make those kinds of separations easily all by ourselves.

Malachi's image of the refiner's fire is all about separating out that which is pure from that which is impure. I don't find that I have the same need that Malachi seems to have felt, to express these things in angry, impatient and threatening ways. I don't feel a need to claim that God condemns us for falling short of His expectations. But I do agree with Malachi when he says that there are things we need to separate ourselves from in order to be the people God calls us to be; in order live our lives in harmony with the example of Jesus. It's important, I believe, to be very clear about what the prophets are and are not saying; about how much of what they said in their own time might apply directly to us in our time. But I also believe that there is great and timeless wisdom in the words of the prophets that we can take advantage of if we choose to. And whether they intended it or not, that great and timeless wisdom can and does indeed point us in the direction of Jesus, our Christ.

Amen