Sometimes,
you have to smile at God’s providence during the course of church work. First, I managed to have way too many
conversations on the idea that shame was nailed to the cross and left in that
tomb during the week, that there is no way I should have been able to finish the
administrative work of the parish AND still get my first day off so I
could surprise Robbie and watch him in a play at college. Then, on a week we are reading about the
eschaton or end times, we get our wonderful Collect for the second time this
church year AND I get a sign of the end times. I mean, Robbie played a middle aged Jamaican
bartender. If you have never met my
second oldest son, he is as Scandinavian as they come. Blond hair, pale skin—the very picture of a
Jamaican bartender in your minds, right?
Of course, the Collect is way more important because it inoculates us
against a temptation we have when we speak of the eschaton.
There is
always the danger to try and figure out the “when,” when it comes to end times
discussions, right? Some of the most
crazy conversations I have had with people over the years that I have been a
priest have been over their interpretation, and insistence of their
correctness, regarding the date of the eschaton. You’d think, given what Jesus says in red
letters about not knowing the mind of the Father and in teachings like today
from Luke. “Don’t follow the people who
say they know!” But what happens? Somebody, usually a guy because we are more
stupid, comes up with a date. And when
that date passes and Jesus has not returned, they mine the Scriptures again
looking for the error of their calculations, as if they forgot to carry the one
or dropped the negative sign by accident.
Then they have a new date and are just as certain as they were about the
last one, and they are single-minded unable to understand why I won’t support
their math or scare my people with their prediction.
Apparently,
our spiritual forebears, and Anglican ones especially, understood our tendency
to place ourselves above Scripture rather than below it. Twice a year we have the Collect of learning
and inwardly digesting Scripture, reminding us that we sit UNDER
Scripture and are in no way wise or powerful enough to cherry pick. God caused it to be written; God caused it to
be edited; God caused it to be collected.
The collection we call Scripture, then, is the Church acknowledging what
God wanted us to know about Him, about life, about Truth, and about His Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord. So it is good
when we talk about end times today that, before we begin, you and I sit under
God’s teaching. He is authoritative to
us, not the other way around. And,
please, don’t come in next week telling me you’ve figured out the date after
this sermon. If that’s your takeaway
from this sermon, you were not listening to me, let alone God. In fact, you were doing the very opposite of
what I said and He constantly says. Yes,
you have a puncher’s chance of getting the right date in the future by picking
one. But I sure would not bet money on
it.
The book of
Malachi is an interesting book. For
those of you who like to pretend to be holy, it’s a great book to read for Lent
and impress your friends and family who are not in church here today. What are you doing for Lent? I’m reading the book of the prophet
Malachi. Whoa! I’ve never even heard of that book! You must be serious about your faith. You can strike your most impressive pose and
assure them you are. Why the
laughter? Tell me none of you ever tried
to impress friends or clergy like that?
Ouch! Too sharp? It’s going to get worse.
Malachi,
whose name means “My messenger,” wrote sometime around 500 years before the
birth of Jesus in Nazareth. Experts
argue about the dating. For our
purposes, it is enough to know he wrote sometime after the return from Exile
and the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple by Ezra and Nehemiah, but four
centuries before the Advent of John the Baptist. His book, which is only four chapters long,
deals a lot with justice.
You’d
think, given the peoples’ recent return from the Exile, that folks would be
serious about their faith, right? After
all, the foreign king has decided to pay for the rebuilding of the Temple and
for the wall of the city. It is, to put
it mildly, odd. Babylon and Assyria
showed their gods’ power was superior to the God of Israel by conquering both
Israel and Judah and carrying the survivors off into Exile. The Jews heard another story. Earlier prophets reminded them that they caused
their Exile. God promised if they kept
His torah, He would bless them; if they failed to keep His torah, He would
cause the Land to disgorge them. Their
Exile, according to the prophets, was the outward and visible sign of their
covenant disloyalty.
Now they
are back! Things are as they should
be! Except the Temple is a pale
imitation of the one built by Solomon, and some of the luster is off the newly
re-founded city of Jerusalem. Those who
rebuilt them mourn over the glory that has been lost. Surely their kids and grandkids would keep
the torah to make sure no Exile is ever experienced again, right? Wrong!
Injustice reigns again. The rich
are grinding up the poor. Widows and
orphans are neglected. In short, nothing
has changed for the people . . . or for
the professional clergy. In fact, for
the latter, things may be even worse.
God accuses the clergy of sacrificing blind animals and animals with
skin diseases and other blemishes and selling the unblemished animals out the
back door! Are they behaving as if they
understand the reason behind the Exile and the grace behind the return? Of course, not, they are just like their
ancestors who crossed the Red Sea, witnessed God destroying Egypt, and decided
to hold an orgy and make a molten calf, as a result. And they are just like their descendants, you
and me, who, although we live on this side of the Passion, Crucifixion, Death,
Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord Jesus, still sin, who still practice
injustice, even though our Lord is justice.
Speaking of
which, that sure served as a spiritual wedgie for some folks last week. Apparently, during the sermon, I made the
comment that God was just, holy, and other adjectives every bit as much as was
love. That unsettled a few folks, as it
probably should. We would not know that
God was that had He not chosen to reveal it to us. Be He did, so we do. We just forget. Heck, we don’t even know what the terms mean
anymore.
What is
justice? That’s not a rhetorical
question. What is it? Most of us, if we were awake, would come up
with a definition that was more in line with fairness rather than justice,
truth be told. To move things along this
morning, somebody pull it up on a dictionary site. Administering or judging between right and
wrong or good and evil. Great. How do we know what is right or wrong or good
or evil? That’s right! God!
God instructs us what is good and evil or right and wrong. It makes sense. He’s the Creator; He knows. He knows what’s best for us. To put it in the terms of Wrestling with
Faith, there is no way that you or I could reason to the ideas of good and
evil. Oh, we might think we can. We might align with God’s teaching sometimes
accidentally, but it would only be at those times when our interests happened
to align with His. No, He is the arbiter
of what is just and what is unjust because He has revealed to us that He is
just. He can no more act unjustly than
you and I can cease to breathe or we can cease to blink or we can cause our
hearts not to beat. Anthropomorphically
speaking, that is, speaking about God as if He was a human being, by nature, He
destroys sin and evil and unjustness, what we call sin, whenever He comes into
contact with it. Part of the problem our
sin creates for us is how we can come into His presence without Him destroying
us. The sacrificial system allowed human
beings to be righteous . . . for a short time.
If you or I lived in the days of the OT, we could make appropriate
sacrifices and be righteous, until we sinned again. The problem, of course, was that we sinned
again and again and again. Our hearts,
to use the language of Scripture, were turned away from those things He loves
and, often, toward those sinful things He hates.
Malachi
gives several examples, chief among them are the perversions of justice. But Malachi also recognizes that there is
still unjust suffering present in the world.
Those doing Psalm 44 on Monday’s can really speak to this, but there is
this problem where God’s faithful suffer through no fault of their own. Does God see?
Does God know? Does God care?
Our reading
today carries the resounding answer of “YES!” from God. Better still, Malachi is teaching God’s
people that one day, one glorious day in the future, God will act definitively
to judge the earth. Those who rejected
God will be burned away like chaff; those who claimed God’s mercy will feel
that heat as a healing, restoring, wind.
Put more simply, God cannot let evil stand forever. At some point, He will act to judge. Those who reject Christ as Savior will be
cast from His presence; those who accept Christ as Lord will be completely,
totally restored or redeemed. It’s His
nature, to use that anthropomorphic language.
He will not allow injustice to exist forever.
I was
watching one of those geeky science shows about space I like to watch—it always
makes for great conversations at Wrestling with Faith when we begin to consider
the transcendent claims of God. Anyway,
scientists were going on and on about how relatively few, given the numbers of planets
now discovered, that live in the so-called “Goldilocks Zone,” the range where
they think life might be possible. That
scarcity had caused the scientists to ponder whether life would be possible in
other worlds and moons—the real point of the show. Suns are tough because they are basically
big, bright nuclear reactions. Too close
and not enough atmosphere and magnetic field, and life is burned away or
irradiated. Too far and there’s not
enough warmth.
As they
droned on about other places that might support life, I was, as you might
imagine, drawn to the prominence of the image of the sun in the ANE. In many cultures it was a god. In some cultures, the rulers were viewed as
descendants or favored of the sun. Not
unsurprisingly, the Scriptures use the sun to describe God. God’s glory is brighter than the sun, but the
image helps us understand. Too close and
lacking the proper protection, we get burned.
But clothed in the righteousness of Christ, we can see God face to
face. It’s an appropriate image in light
of God’s consistent revelation to His people, especially as described by
Malachi today.
The
question left hanging of Malachi’s audience and us is how? How will this be accomplished? Malachi, as you should but probably do not
know, ends his book with the promise that the Lord will send Elijah! Malachi’s prophesy ends with this warning and
promise: “Be mindful of the Teaching of My servant Moses, whom I charged at
Horeb with laws and rules for all Israel.
Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the
awesome, fearful day of the Lord. He
shall reconcile parents with children and children with their parents, so that,
when I come, I do not strike the whole Land with utter destruction. Lo, I will send the prophet Elijah to you
before the coming of the awesome, fearful day of the Lord.” What is the answer to the problem of justice
and sin? Jesus! How is God able to bring us back into His
presence, back into full communion with Him as we were in the Garden without
utterly destroying us because of our sin?
Jesus! God can no more overlook
our sin than you and I can overlook our need to breathe or blink.
So, to
solve that problem, He sent His Son, who lived an unblemished life and who
chose to die in our place, willingly chose.
I don’t think we truly understand that Jesus had to will to hang there
and die for us, that His blood might cleanse us from our sins. Had He, at any moment, changed His mind, we
would have been utterly and irredeemably lost!
But He did not. And so we give
thanks and glory for what He did for us.
He made it possible for our hearts to be transformed.
And we
understand, of course, that He was the Elijah of whom God spoke in
Malachi. For God’s people, Elijah became
the source of hope that would precede God’s Day of Judgment. Now you know why the Elijah seat is empty at
seders. Now you know why, when Jesus
asked the Apostles who people said He was, some said Elijah. Now you understand the appearance of Elijah
and Moses at our Lord’s Transfiguration a bit better. He was and is the promised Figure; He was and
is the perfect sacrifice for the whole world, not just for our own sins, as our
Prayer Book reminds us!
So, why did
I spend so much time and energy explaining a couple short verses from a book
nobody reads or knows? We are
Adventers. It is our calling to proclaim
Christ’s first coming, the Incarnation, and His Second Coming, the Day of the
Lord or the Day of Judgement. You and I
are called to have an eye to the past and an eye to the future. Our message is not unlike that given to
Malachi. In fact, we are His messengers,
His heralds, every bit as much as Malachi was in his day.
One tidbit of history I left out was the fact
that Malachi was the last voice of God in the Old Testament. Once Malachi speaks, God seems to go silent. Israel will wonder as the years drag on
whether the Covenant is still in place.
Are they still God’s chosen people?
Will salvation be made possible for the rest of the nations through
them? As the years turn to decades and
the decades turn to centuries, those fears will grow. That’s part of the reason when John the
Baptist comes on the scene, to proclaim a baptism of repentance, that people
flock to him. The messenger who prepares
the way for the Lord is the first prophet since Malachi! John’s preaching and teaching gives hope to a
people who fear God has forgotten them, who fear that God has abandoned them
because of their stiff-necked, willful ways.
You and I
live in a world that bears all the signs of that coming day. We see and hear of wars constantly. Our leaders serve their own interests and not
those of those who voted for them.
Disease runs amok. Natural
disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, and whatever else ravage us
and the earth. The poor are chewed up
and spit out by a bunch of our systems.
We live in the wealthiest land the world has ever known, and yet people
hunger among us, struggle for health care among us, get a less than acceptable
education, have no hope among us. Even
among the new Israel, the Church, things are run amok. Theologians can confess publicly that their
teaching is heretical, be called out by a faithful priest, go to a bishop and
complain their feelings were hurt when they were chastised for teaching heresy,
and have the bishop spend the first few minutes of the conversation with the
priest chewing the priest out for denouncing heresy, until the priest got
through to the bishop that such is ours and the jobs of bishops. And, even after the bishop recognizes the
truth of those words, still admonish the priest that we don’t want to make too
big a deal about heresy, that it does not lead away from God and to eternal
death, as if sin is not a big deal to God.
Newsflash,
folks: God takes sin so seriously that He sent His Son to deal with it! And lucky for us, because only His Son
could deal with it for our sakes.
All that,
of course, brings us back to the call of our patronal season. We are Adventers. We proclaim that the Christ, Jesus of
Nazareth, has come into the world. How
do we know this to be true? All the
Scriptures teach us about Him. All of
His disciples and Apostles testified to His Resurrection from the dead. And those in His closest circle witnessed His
Ascension into heaven after His promise to return again. Our choice, like that of Israel, is simple. Do we believe what God has taught and
promised, or do we reject Him in lieu of whatever bauble catches our eye or
whatever melodious song catches our ear?
That decision has consequences, eternal consequences.
If you find
yourself arguing with my words in the back of your mind, ask yourself if you
are sitting under God’s Word or placing yourself above His Word. What has He taught? What has He revealed? I know it’s unpopular. I know the world is put off by the
“exclusivity” of the Cross. The world is
full of good people is a popular lie. No
one, no one save Jesus of Nazareth, was good.
The rest of us sin. And that sin
has a consequence. That sin separates us
from the Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. That He sent His Son to make it possible for
us to get back is the greatest summary of His grace. Guess what?
The world has always been put off by the Gospel, yet here we are! You and I gathered here this day are a
testimony to the power of God’s grace in the world! His Gospel has survived emperors and despots
and all sorts of anti-Christian rulers.
His Gospel has survived the indifference or outright rejection of the
world. His Gospel has survived even the
death of countless martyrs. So here we
stand!
And as a
result, it falls to us, to Adventers and all Christians, but especially to
Adventers, to remind ourselves and to teach the world that He will, one
glorious day, return! One day, He will
come with healing and redemption and vindication for His people consequences
for those who, in every generation, have rejected Him. We live in an age that sees wars, sees
natural disasters, sees and hears of martyrs for the faith daily, sees plagues,
sees famines, and all the other signs of those things that will take place
before His return. Those signs, that so
leave the world clucking their tongues about suffering and pain and death,
ought to inspire in us a real passion to share the Gospel because, one day,
time will be up! Like the thief in the
night He will return to claim what is and who are rightfully His. Our work is of that kind of salvific
importance.
Is it a
hard teaching to remind ourselves that God is love and just and righteous and
holy and patient and whatever other adjective we most want or need Him to
be? Sure. Is it fair that those who reject Him are
burned away, leaving no root or branch?
Think of it like this: Is it fair that we get to dwell with Him
eternally because Jesus died for my and your sins? I know it was not for Jesus. But that’s why it’s good news of great
joy! That’s why it’s Gospel! God loves us! God wants us to return to Him because one day
He will return to us! The question for
us and for those whom we know and love is whether His presence will be the
healing warmth of His love or the destructive fire of His wrath! It really is that simple. It really is that offensive. It really is that wonderful!
The people
during Malachi’s time and certainly after wondered whether God cared, whether
God would act, whether they would be vindicated for choosing Him, and whether
evil would be punished. Just as the
people of our time, just as you and I do today.
Our Lord’s answer is far more glorious than we could ever have hoped or
dreamed on our own. Malachi prophesied,
and so we proclaim, Elijah (Jesus) will come.
And on that day when He returns, those who reject God will no longer
prosper; more important to us, though, those who claim His Son as Lord will
receive healing and blessing and life beyond imagining! And that promise, brothers and sisters, is
why we, we who call ourselves Adventers, exist.
It falls to us to remind the world that love and mercy of God is every
bit as real as He has promised, as is His promise to return and dwell with us,
driving away all the consequences and servants of sin! Christ has come! Christ WILL come again!
In His peace,
Brian†
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