Malachi says fire is coming. Can that be good? The school system I attended required all 9 th graders,

Transcription

1 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 1 Malachi says fire is coming. Can that be good? The school system I attended required all 9 th graders, freshmen in high school, to take Qualitative Physical Science, QPS. With a name like that, we were scared to death. If only half of stories from our older siblings were true, we would never survive the experience. I don t remember my teacher s name, but I remember her clearly. We ll call her Ms. Jones. It was her first year to teach, and she was a ball of fire. She didn t dress as professionally as the other teachers, and she didn t seem to associate with them much. We always knew what mood she would be in: bad. Intense might be a better word, and her expectations for us were higher than any teacher we had before her. Do you remember that old adage meant to encourage class participation, that there is no such thing as a stupid question? Ms. Jones thought there were plenty of stupid questions, and she sniffed them out immediately, questions that revealed you didn t read the text or didn t listen the first time she gave instructions on how to use a caliper. And woe to those who asked those kinds of stupid questions. She threw things. Erasers against the blackboard. Pencils down on her desk. What s wrong with you guys? she shouted, a dead giveaway that she wasn t from the South, but had dropped in from another world. You have to focus. Pay attention. Get your

2 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 2 act together. You re not trying hard enough. Our thick skulls were a personal insult to her. Ms. Jones didn t tolerate excuses, either. Work was due when work was due. Never mind that you were going through a personal crisis, real or imagined, and don t tell her you didn t understand the assignment. You might as well look her in the eye and call her a failure. I responded to Ms. Jones. Something in me wanted to do well in her class. Was it fear? Probably. There was a price to pay for disappointing her. But I also knew she cared. Though I couldn t have articulated it then, she wanted every single one of her students to succeed, and it drove her ¾ crazy when they didn t. Making us smarter and better was her passion. In response, we stepped up our game. I owe Ms. Jones. By the time we finished her class, she had scrubbed off all the remaining residue of middle school. We left competent, tested, with greater tensile strength. Her fiery presence turned our immaturity to ash. Ms. Jones burned hot. That was a good thing. Malachi told the people of Judah fire was coming. And while that was a fearful prospect, it wasn t all bad. I had to relearn several facts about the book of Malachi this week in order to hear what the prophet was saying. Did you know that Malachi was

3 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 3 written around 450 to 500 B.C.? This was after the exiles of Judah returned home. They had been carted away to Babylon around 587 B.C. But then Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon and allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem with their holy vessels to once again live and worship in the Promised Land. The people were exuberant as they returned. The desert blossomed beside them as they traveled, and the wilderness and dry land were glad. The joy quickly left them, however, once they reached home. Their Promised Land was in shambles, and the task of rebuilding was overwhelming. In response to the devastation, guess what many people did? They turned cynical. Some began to ask what was so great about being God s covenant people if it didn t protect them from disaster. They wondered what the point was in being good and faithful, if being evil seemed to be rewarded as much if not more so. Most everyone gave up trying to rebuild the wall of the city and the temple, and focused instead on remodeling their dilapidated houses. Why worry with restoring the city? You couldn t count on God to protect it anyway. Even the priests dissipated into unfaithfulness. Bored with the never ending sacrifices and unanswered prayers, the priests accepted the half-offerings of the people, animals they brought that were lame, sick or otherwise inferior, a clear violation of rules. It wasn t worth fussing over. You couldn t blame these struggling

4 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 4 people for keeping the best animals to themselves. Besides, it wasn t like lightning would strike them dead for going against the terms of agreement. The whole covenant thing God being God and them being God s people was feeling more and more like a joke. Indifference, laxity and easy excuses had set in. Too much history had passed between the people of Israel and the last good fire. But Malachi said, Oh, he s coming. And when he comes, he ll burn and so will we. Given our religious environment, we think of hell whenever fire is spoken from behind the pulpit. So we have to listen carefully to the prophet. The fire is judgment for sure. But we re talking about a refiner s fire, not punishing in its essence, but purifying. Malachi told his people to put on their sunscreen because the conveyor of the covenant, God himself, would appear suddenly in his temple. When he did, their failure of confidence, their excuses for indifference, their rationale for unbelief, their flip offerings would go up in smoke. They would have their Ms. Jones moment. They would have to step up their game. And that would be a good thing. 450 years later, which is a long time to wait, Jesus came along, lying in a manger. Would you believe me if I told you Jesus fulfilled the promise of Malachi? John the Baptizer prepared the way for our Lord. He ran a pretty high fever himself, burning a

5 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 5 path in the wilderness. But he preached that one was coming after him who burned much hotter. While John baptized with water, the one to follow would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire! If we ve been in church at all, we ve seen this fire burn. We ve watched Jesus scorch those who settled for form in religion and neglected substance. We saw him throw out the money changers from the temple and crack the whip over the heads of the irreverent. We ve heard him say things like, What s wrong with you guys? Don t you have any faith? How much longer am I going to have to put up with this generation? And of course, Branches that no longer bear fruit are fit for nothing but pruning and roasting hot dogs. Be perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect! You couldn t be around Jesus and not feel the heat. By the time he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, his intensity had transformed his disciples. They were a leaner, meaner version of themselves. He did for them what a furnace does for steel. And he is coming again, according to Advent, having not cooled off even one degree Fahrenheit. This part of the Christmas story you won t hear at the mall in Johnson City. They aren t equipped to tell it. Santa Claus and snowmen and Norman Rockwell are about as far as they can go. I m not mad about this anymore. How can we expect them to tell a story they don t live by? Most of the Christmas specials on

6 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 6 television will skip right over the fire, too, and land softly at the manger. And they will talk in very general terms about love, peace and the Spirit of Christmas. How can they refer to Malachi and still draw an audience? I understand. So the church will have to tell the story of a God who wants his people alive and well, and therefore will not settle for half-hearted faith and devotion. There s no one left but us to be brave, and welcome the Advent fire. God comes as fire, and I know a group of people who have been purified as a result. Their lives have not been what they expected, causing them to endure great losses and to face uncomfortable truths about themselves. But the heat also has burned up false gods, taught them to be real, and given them the ability to love themselves and others in ways they could not otherwise imagine. Faith for them is no longer perfunctory. It s a living thing. And if we were to ask them if they would like to go back to the days before the fire burned, they would say no way because they wouldn t be who they are today without it. The fire, intense as it was, was good. I ve heard of a few ministers who go to counselors every few years to take inventory. They assume they have problems, and they want someone else to help them find them and smoke them out. The process is difficult, uncomfortable, and often reveals

7 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 7 subtle, but powerful sins at work in the minister s life. It s like being on the hot seat. But they are better ministers, better followers of Jesus Christ, better people for it. I take this as welcoming the fire, seeking it actually. Burn, baby, burn. We lived in Arkansas while we were in seminary. So we travelled to Memphis on Tuesday and back home across the never ending rice fields on Friday afternoon. In the fall of our first year, we were stunned to see those fields on fire. Huge plumes of black smoke all across the horizon, the stink filtering into our car. I asked some church members about it the next Sunday. They explained the fires were intentional. It removed the dried stubble and fertilized the fields for the next year. So what was useless and in the way was turned into food for new growth by fire. If Jesus is coming to clear out what s dead and feed new life, hot as it may get, burn, baby, burn. New Hope church sits somewhere in the boonies between Madisonville and Sweetwater, Tennessee. It s a beautiful church, so well-structured and appointed it looks a little out of place in the country setting. Several years ago when presbytery met there, we were giving a brief history lesson. The first church building, a white clapboard structure, caught fire a few years earlier. The people were devastated to lose their home place. But the new brick building had indoor plumbing, insulation, reliable air

8 2 nd Sunday in Advent, Year C, 12/06/2015, Greeneville, Tennessee 8 conditioning and simple, elegant beauty. A small revival of the congregation even broke out once they needed to rebuild as they rallied around their project. I saw a picture of the old church hanging somewhere inside the new building. It was brittle and breaking down. I don t think they would go back. They like themselves better after the fire. We spent a bunch of money replacing an old electrical system here so that what happened to New Hope won t happen to us. But I wonder if this Advent we might catch fire, and be better afterwards than before. The baby who is coming has the heat of the sun in his bones and lightning in his eyes. The closer he gets the higher the temperature. In his fiery presence, the finer we become. He is coming to set the whole world on fire, and we welcome him. Because we know the intensity means God cares enough to clean out the garbage.