Lay Homily by Mark Lloyd Taylor
The Second Sunday of Advent
(Year C – Revised Common Lectionary)
December 7, 2003
This Second Sunday of Advent also marks the second week of our use, here at St. Paul’s, of the Revised Common Lectionary as the basis for the selection of scriptures to be read during our liturgies. As was true last week, the new lectionary makes no changes in the epistle or gospel lessons for today. The differences come with the first lesson from the Hebrew Testament of our Christian scriptures and the canticle that follows. We have never before heard the lesson from Malachi 3 on the Second Sunday of Advent, although some of you may recall that we have used it for years on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple (February 2).
By the way, if you would like to learn more about the history of Christian lectionaries and their relation to preaching, please come to the St. Francis Room at 12:15 today for the beginning of a three-week Adult Education series on the subject.
Because it is a new element in our Advent liturgical experience, listen again to the lesson from Malachi.
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 fuller’s 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. (3:1-4)
One of the principles guiding the selection of specific scripture readings in our old lectionary was that there be a thematic or typological link between the first reading from the Hebrew Testament and the Gospel — some element in the story of God’s dealings with the people of Israel that points toward the story of God’s self-revelation in Christ Jesus as its completion or fulfillment. Malachi’s words about the messenger who will prepare the way for God’s coming have long been understood by Christians to refer to the ministry of John the Baptist introduced in today’s Gospel. When this same lesson is heard on the Feast of the Presentation, the line about God suddenly coming to the temple stands out — pointing toward the infant Jesus as he is brought to the Jerusalem Temple by his parents, Mary and Joseph.
While these are both perfectly good readings of the Malachi text and could form the basis for perfectly good preaching — depending on the preacher, of course — that’s not the path I choose to follow this morning. With your forbearance, I will not be preaching on our Gospel lesson concerning John the Baptist. Instead, I invite us all to linger with the lesson from Malachi, considering it independent of any connection to the Gospel of Luke, and listening for the good news it might already contain for us in its own right. You will discover over the next year, I think, that the Revised Common Lectionary often encourages such deeper attention to the Hebrew Testament.
+++
A little background on the little book of Malachi tucked away at the end of the Hebrew Testament of the Christian Bible. The historical setting seems to be somewhere between 480 and 450 B.C.E. after the Jews had been allowed to return to Jerusalem by their new imperial masters, the Persians. Malachi is about the struggle to re-build Jewish social and religious institutions, more deeply, it is about the challenge to Israel to live once again into its identity as God’s covenant partner. Central themes include the way Israelite priests have despised God and profaned their calling and the way well-to-do Israelite men have proved disloyal to God and human beings by divorcing their wives and oppressing hired workers, widows, and orphans. These two themes of religious infidelity and social injustice are directly connected, for disputes too difficult to resolve in the traditional courts of law held at the gates of Israelite towns were brought to the priests in the Jerusalem Temple for judgment. Malachi indicts these priests for their dual failure to nurture the proper worship of God and to protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of human society.
We have absolutely no personal information about the prophet named Malachi. In fact, the proper name Malachi occurs nowhere else in Hebrew scripture. The word Malachi means “my messenger.” It is as if a figure from within an anonymous prophetic book, the promised messenger who will prepare God’s way, has become personified as the author of the book. And the word messenger, malak, is a weighty one in Hebrew scripture. We could also translate it as angel, for in a burning bush the angel, the messenger of God, appears to Moses announcing the liberation of the oppressed Israelites; God’s messenger, God’s malak, stops Abraham’s hand when he is about to slay his son Isaac; the malak, the angel of God, ministers to Hagar the slave woman in the desert and leads her to a well of water that will spare her life and that of her son Ishmael. Unlike later Christian views of angels, in these ancient Hebrew stories the malak or messenger of God is not a lesser, created spiritual being but the visible, tangible form or incarnation God takes on in relating to human beings.
The book of Malachi has the literary form of a court case between God and the people of Israel prosecuted by its author-messenger. Malachi begins with God’s unequivocal declaration to Israel: “I have loved you.” To which the people cynically respond: “How have you loved us?” (1:2) Several such exchanges follow, including one immediately before today’s reading. God’s accusation: “You have wearied the Lord with your words.” Israel’s response: “How have we wearied the Lord?” God’s answer through God’s messenger-prophet: “By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the sight of the Lord and God delights in them’ and by asking, ‘Where is the God of justice?’” (2:17)
Then comes today’s lesson — the promise that God is sending God’s messenger to prepare for the sudden coming of God to the Temple. But what Israelite, what human, will be able to endure the day of God’s coming and stand when God appears? For God is like refiner’s fire and fullers’ soap — bleach, we would say. Upon returning to God’s people, the Lord will behave like a refiner of precious metal and purify the descendants of Levi so that righteous offerings can once again be made to God.
+++
Our problem this morning here at St. Paul’s Church, I suspect, is not that Malachi’s message is unclear, but that it is so alien to our customary, comfortable ways of imaging and thinking about God. The portrait of God as a sudden outburst of fire before which none can stand might seem more fitting decoration for a fundamentalist church than an Episcopal parish. Don’t we tend to speak of a gracious God and avoid speaking of the powerful and wrathful God of those terrifying Biblical stories? God as fire seems far removed from both our popular secular culture where God is viewed as an impotent vestige of pre-scientific ways of thinking and our popular religious culture in which God becomes my best buddy: “I’m o.k., God’s o.k.” Today’s lesson from Malachi might as well be played on a dog whistle — for it seems, at first, as if it is in a frequency our ears simply cannot detect. What can we do to expand the range of our hearing so that this lesson might speak to us?
Having the text set to music might help you as it helped me. You can hear these words of Malachi’s sung early on in Handel’s Messiah, numbers 5, 6, and 7 in Part I, to be exact. The agitated violin parts, the angular runs and fractured intervals in the aria (especially when written for the second soprano) and in the chorus convey to me something of the uncanny power and awesome otherness of Malachi’s God. I’ll spare you even the slightest attempt on my part to sing this music and just encourage you to pay attention if you happen to hear Messiah this Advent season.
What I will attempt in your hearing is to tell three brief stories that I hope might enflesh Malachi’s words concerning God as a refiner’s fire and make them available to us.
First story.
Blaise Pascal was a brilliant mathematician who lived in the 17th century, at just the time when modern science first seemed to be making God into an irrelevant hypothesis. Doubt was considered to be the proper method for achieving knowledge. Those of Pascal’s intellectual peers who still used God language, often pictured God as a distant watchmaker who had designed the world so flawlessly in the beginning that no further relationship with the world was in order. Well, something happened to Pascal one night when he was 31 years old. This experience was so momentous that he wrote out a brief testimony to it on a single sheet of paper and then wore this piece of paper on his body the rest of his life — either in a little leather pouch or sewn inside the lining of his coat, where it was found after his death eight years later. Allow me to read you some of Pascal’s words.
In the year of grace, 1654,
On Monday, 23rd of November, Feast of St. Clement, Pope and Martyr,
From about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve,
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your God shall be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and everything, except God.
God is to be found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.
“Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.”
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
“This is eternal life, that they might know you, the only true God, and the one whom you have sent, Jesus Christ.”
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have separated myself from him: I have fled from him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be separated from him.
We keep hold of him only by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day’s training on earth.
I will not forget your word. Amen.
Who can endure the day of God’s coming? Pascal could not endure it, in his own strength. And yet Pascal did endure the coming of God, by God’s grace — for the God he encountered was like a refiner’s fire, not a consuming fire of judgment or anger. Pascal did indeed endure God’s coming, but he was radically transformed. His doubt was refined away in the fire of God’s love, leaving behind the pure silver of certitude and the solid gold of joy.
Second story.
Celie is the main character in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. Hers is the story of an African-American woman’s struggle for survival amidst the flames of physical and sexual abuse and racial oppression. The first lines in the book read: “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy” (p. 3). That’s the voice of Pa. Celie obeys and, at the age of 14, begins to write letters to God telling how she bears the man she thinks is her father two children, only to have then taken away; how she encourages her beloved younger sister Nettie to run away from home when Pa starts to chase after Nettie sexually; how Celie was forced to marry a man who beats her, as Pa did, and treats her like just another farm animal — good only for hard work. How does she survive? Celie says: “Never mine, never mine, as long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along” (p.18).
Suddenly a woman named Shug Avery, a lover of her husband’s, comes into Celie’s life. Shug teaches Celie to love herself and to love and be loved by Shug in return. Together, the two women discover that Celie’s husband has been hiding years of letters to Celie from long-lost sister Nettie living in Africa with Celie’s long-lost children. Nettie’s letters expose the hidden truth that the man they called Pa was not their father at all, but a drifter who had married their mother after their real father’s death. As a result, Celie pens her shortest letter to God:
Dear God,
That’s it, say Shug. Pack your stuff. You coming back to Tennessee with me. But I feels daze. My daddy lynch. My mama crazy. All my little half-brothers and sisters no kin to me. My children not my sister and brother. Pa not Pa. You must be sleep.
Celie does leave her husband, moves to Memphis with Shug, begins sewing and selling pants for women and men, writes letters now not to God, but to Nettie, and comes, with Shug’s help, to replace her former image of God as a stout white man who works in the bank with a bone-deep feeling for God as everything, as the irrepressible power of beauty and goodness in nature and human beings. Celie eventually inherits a farm that belonged to her real father, is reunited with Nettie and the children, and even forgives and becomes friends with her once abusive husband. The final letter in the book indicates how Celie has changed. It is once again addressed: “Dear God,” but goes on: “Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God” (p 242).
Who can endure the consuming fire of injustice and oppression? Celie could not endure it alone; through the power of human and divine love, Celie did endure. But her self-image and her image of God were both radically transformed. The sense of her own worthlessness and God’s inattentiveness was refined away, leaving behind the gold and silver of beauty and confidence, strength and compassion.
+++
The third story is for us all to create and tell, as individuals and as a parish.
Perhaps some of us have already have felt the refining fire of God’s love in our lives. Like Pascal, we may have spent luminous evenings in God’s presence that have changed us for ever, the witness to which we wear sewn inside the linings of our hearts. Do we feel safe enough with each other to tell such stories publicly, or at least in small gatherings? I pray that we do.
Perhaps some of us have already suffered the consuming fire of loss and injustice like Celie — years of struggle for survival, for dignity, for a place at the table, for a voice in the world, for the ability to recognize and claim our own worth. Do we feel safe enough with each other to live out such stories in community? I pray that we do.
What of the future? What of Malachi’s promise that God’s coming as a refiner’s fire is still to come? What might be awaiting us this Advent? Here’s one possibility. You may sense others.
Malachi indicts his people for separating liturgy and social justice. Does our distinctive liturgical practice and spirituality here at St. Paul’s — our deep eucharistic sense of Christ Jesus present in bread and wine, our Benedictine rhythms of prayerful living in time, our devotion to Mary the handmaid of the Lord and mother of God — does this liturgical practice and spirituality await God’s refining fire, so that it might more truly shape our way of being in the world of economics and politics? What would it mean, for example, if we took our practice of bowing or genuflecting in reverence before the body and blood of Jesus in the sacrament and showed the same reverence to every poor and oppressed human being throughout the world; bowing or genuflecting to them as the body and blood of Christ in our use of money, in our consumption of energy and food, in our commitment of professional and volunteer time and energy, in the very company we keep?
Who can endure the day of God’s coming? In our own strength, I cannot, you cannot, St. Paul’s cannot endure it. By God’s grace, however, we can endure the coming of God, for the Lord is like a refiner’s fire, not a consuming fire of judgment or anger. We may indeed endure God’s coming; but not without being radically transformed. Transformation awaits us this Advent. Let us welcome it with joy.
Amen.
