SUMMONED. The prophet Malachi: See the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the

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1 SUMMONED Malachi 4:1-2a; 2 Thess. 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19 The prophet Malachi: See the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the God of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. Angry words of the prophet, the words of one who is fed up with present conditions and looks to God to introduce a new order in which justice and righteousness will prevail. This is a common theme in the Hebrew prophets. The prophet Malachi wrote around the year 450 BCE. He believed a time of great change was at hand, and, in fact, in a few years from the time he wrote the governor Nehemiah brought about certain reforms, though nothing so extensive as Malachi seems to anticipate. Christians have liked to read Malachi, which is the last book in the Old Testament, as pointing to Jesus, especially when Malachi writes, the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. Hark, the herald angels sing Perhaps you have a sense of the prophet s anger with the leaders and the people of his own time when you consider our own nation s suicidal war in Iraq, a country with no ties whatsoever to the events of 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while at the same time sending billions of dollars to Pakistan where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under General Musharref who serves as host to Osama bin Laden. (I should point out that a recent study concludes that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan have to date

2 cost every American family of four $20,000.) As this war continues, we are treated to the spectacle of the confirmation of our new Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in our land, a man who cannot bring himself to say that waterboarding, a practice of torturers since the Spanish Inquisition, is torture and therefore illegal. I wonder if Attorney General Mukasey s mind would be cleared regarding this question if he were made to experience the simulated drowning of waterboarding himself. In any event, with Mukasey s confirmation we can see how low our principles have fallen in this nation. It is not, I think, too much to say that what was once shocking and unacceptable in the United States has now become normal. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found the Democrat controlled Congress and President Bush are roundly and deservedly despised in their leadership, with only 24 percent of Americans believing the country is on the right track. As the columnist, Frank Rich, has written, Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been thoroughly vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration any time soon. (New York Times, 11/11/07) This is probably a pretty decent echo of the exasperation that motivated the Hebrew prophets of old to their condemnations. The temple of Herod in Jerusalem was already 40 years in the making and still not finished at the end of Jesus life. Some of the blocks of marble used measured 67 feet in length and 7 feet in height by 9 feet in width. The eastern front and part of the side walls of the temple were actually plated in gold to reflect the light of the sun. The interior of the temple was richly decorated and contained many priceless memorials from important dignitaries. The temple was apparently a very impressive place, built for the ages. This great structure was meant to inspire patriotism and religious awe. It was the house of

3 God, the gate of heaven. When Jesus speaks of the destruction of the temple, he is talking about something that would have been unimaginable to people familiar with the vast project. He speaks like the prophets before him and announces the end of the age. In so doing, is he as angry as Malachi seems to be? Insofar as he is not portrayed in our Gospel as saddened by the coming end, there must be some anger in him with respect to what the world, represented by the temple, has become. It will thus be a good thing if this present world passes away, an opportunity for God to do a new thing, to put things right. The fact is, though, we cannot know how Jesus felt about any of this. Scholars do not think these are Jesus words at all, but rather that Luke is writing down his understanding of Jesus in light of events that would occur long after Jesus was killed, after the temple was actually destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE in the course of putting down Jewish uprisings. And yet, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Jesus looked at his world with a deep sense of pessimism as did the prophets before him. We are fast approaching the end of the Church Year, and with this we read lessons like the ones for today that talk about a great cataclysm and the end of the world as it is before the coming of God s new age. In the little world of Emanuel Lutheran, we have considered this cycle of lessons together twenty times. And Christians have gone through these seasonal readings hundreds and hundreds of times in the history of the Church. This talk of end times is a ritual replaying of an expectation that Christianity inherited from Judaism that God from on high would make all things new, bringing judgment on the wicked and vindication to the righteous. As you know, the first followers of Jesus expected him to make a return soon after his resurrection to make all this happen, and it was the great crisis of the early Church to come to terms with the fact

4 that Jesus did not return. The event of his arrival was postponed and postponed, again and again, and there are those today who still interpret world events as signs of the time when Jesus will return. I don t know about you, but I don t believe that Jesus is coming back, if what this means is Jesus descending through the clouds as in the mural over our altar. I don t think Christ Jesus is coming back because I believe the Holy Spirit of Christ Jesus is with us now, present in Word and sacrament, present in the community of people of good will, present wherever people work for peace and justice and live by grace with generosity. Christ is with us! At the same time, I think the lessons that are part of the year-end rituals of the Church should not be sloughed aside and forgotten as antiques of a bygone era. It is crucial that Christians take stock of our world in light of God s will as we know it in Christ, which is that we live by grace with mercy at peace. It is crucial that we take stock of our world in this light and acknowledge by this light how miserably things are being carried on all around us: nations and people rising against each other; natural disasters in which the stricken are left to suffer; famines because for all the surplus of food in the world it seems we have not the will to see that all are fed; plagues that go unaddressed or untreated because of indifference or ignorance; and persecutions of all sorts of people who seek to live decent lives in their homelands or in our homeland, citizens and immigrants alike. We need to take stock, to open our eyes if we have been asleep, open them and look around at what is going on and, in this democracy, at what is going on in our names. We need to take stock of our world in order to come to grips with our world, to see where and how we can be of use in the making of a world where love is more

5 possible. We all have a part of play and if we all played our part, perhaps what we would see is something like the coming of Christ into the world. These end-of-year rituals are a summons to us to wake up and work for the world we have been told to hope for in Christ. Perhaps when Paul writes to the Thessalonians that, Anyone unwilling to work should not eat, we may read him as saying that anyone who is unwilling to challenge the world of lies and violence and greed that are an affront to God and godliness is not working for the new world that is hoped for in Christ, and that if we are not working for it, we should not expect to enjoy it you don t work, you don t eat. Or to put this more traditionally, we can only expect to see the Second Coming of Christ when Christians who are Christ s body in the world, live as Christ to their neighbors. It is in so living that a new world will be born. Amen. The 25 th Sunday after Pentecost, November 18, 2007 Emanuel Ev. Lutheran Church