Sermon

Malachi 3:1-4

Who Will Prepare the Way?

Dr. Mickey Anders

 

Hard work is involved when we prepare for the coming of important people.

In Biblical times, thousands of workers had to prepare the way before the king traveled anywhere. They fanned out across the countryside, removing debris from the road, sprucing up the public buildings along the way, and generally making sure everything would be at its very best for the king to see. Preparing the way for the king was hard work, and it still is today.

At our house, we have found that preparing is hard work. We’ve been hard at work already, preparing for your coming to our annual open house. Remember, the date is Friday night, December 22; and we are expecting you. We have worked all year long to make handcrafted gifts for each of you. Many of you have already hung on your tree the little paper angel Sarah made for you last year. Well, our tree is up, and Sarah has big plans for all the food and all the decorations. She is making lists for her working elves named Mickey and Will. Preparing for your coming is hard work, but worth it.

We have found that preparing is hard work at church too. Last Sunday afternoon our members swarmed over the church like busy bees digging out Christmas trees, the lighted star, the Nativity set, and the Advent wreath and candles. The men climbed ladders to replace the light bulbs in the most inaccessible locations of the church. And after all the work was done, we shared a meal of homemade chili and cornbread. Preparing is hard work, but worth it.

But the prophet Malachi calls us to a deeper kind of preparation as we anticipate the coming of Christ again at Christmas. He calls us to serious spiritual preparation.

The book of Malachi is the last book in the Hebrew portion of our Bible. His is an appropriate prophecy to precede the New Testament, because Malachi encouraged the people of Israel to get ready for the coming of the Messiah. That also makes him an appropriate prophet for us as we prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas.

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Malachi lived about 450-500 years before Christ. As we discovered last week, the Babylonians had conquered the Southern Kingdom in 587. The people were deported to Babylon, but King Cyrus later released them about 538. So in Malachi’s time, the community had long since returned from exile. The Temple and walls of Jerusalem were likely rebuilt.

But there was slackness of spirit and slackness in worship. The cause was not corruption, but profound despair born of life falling short of divine promises. The age of God’s final triumph and reign had been expected to begin when the Temple was consecrated. Many years had passed since the consecration, and the community was still waiting. Their city was still small and rather insignificant. The Temple did not compare favorably to the one of former days. Enthusiasm had all but evaporated. The community had deep doubts about the worth of their faith.

They had paid dearly for their sin. Now they hoped to restore the kind of kingdom that David had. But as the years passed, they found themselves in despair. They had practiced their faith as sincerely as they knew how, but they were still a weak nation, just a shadow of their former greatness. And things were not improving.

They were tired of waiting for God to do something great among them. They were beginning to wonder if God really blessed people for their faith. It seemed to them that evil people prospered better than the faithful did. They wondered if their faith was worthwhile. Was it worth the effort?

Because of their despair, they lost all enthusiasm for their worship. Malachi was especially concerned about their empty worship. People began to offer blind animals to God rather than the very best that they had. Even the priests had become lax in their behavior. Much of Malachi’s call to repentance is aimed at the priests.

For these people in despair, Malachi has good news – God will indeed appear. He begins this particular chapter by saying, “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me; and the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, behold, he comes!”

His message was one that would excite the people of Israel. “The Lord is coming to the temple,” he says. It was not unlike our Christmas message – Jesus is coming into your hearts again at Christmas.

But Malachi says there will be a messenger to prepare the way. No doubt he had in mind the kind of messengers that I mentioned earlier who prepared the way for the kings as they traveled.

Christians know that the messenger who prepared the way for Jesus’ first coming was John the Baptist. He came on the scene wearing camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist quoting Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

One of the most haunting portrayals of John the Baptist comes in the beginning of the musical Godspell. The scene is a busy New York City street when the outlandishly clad John blows his rams horn and sings a cappella, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!” That clear voice ringing through the streets, calls to us again today – Prepare ye the way of the Lord!

But Malachi had a message of warning. He said that the coming of the Lord means judgment. He asks, “But who can endure the day of his coming? And who will stand when he appears?” (v. 2). And the assumed answer is, “No one can.”

Then he adds, “For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like launderer’s soap; and he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi, and refine them as gold and silver; and they shall offer to Yahweh offerings in righteousness” (v. 2b-3).

Preparing for the Lord’s coming is a matter of purification. True spiritual preparation involves repentance and judgment.

Today I want to join with John the Baptist and Malachi and call our community of faith to prepare spiritually through repentance. If we truly hear the Christmas messenger, we will heed his warning of judgment.

Albert Camus had a wonderful short story entitled, The Fall. In it, the main character is a man named Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste was a Paris lawyer, self-described defender of “noble causes…widows and orphans as the saying goes.” One evening, he heard a laugh behind him. He turned around. No one was there. It wasn’t much, but for Jean-Baptiste, it was the laughter of judgment.

But that night, with the strange, from-out-of-nowhere, mocking laugh at his back, self-awareness began to dawn for Jean-Baptiste. He saw that what he really wanted was not to help others but to strut the stage in front of others. He saw, in the echo of the laugh, that he was a hypocrite, a lousy actor, a fake, a fraud. In his own words:

“…shortly after…[the laughter], I discovered something. When I would leave a blind man on the sidewalk to which I had conveyed him, I used to tip my hat to him. Obviously the hat tipping wasn’t intended for him, since he couldn’t see it. To whom was it addressed? To the public. After playing my part, I would take the bow.”

The haunting laugh led Jean-Baptiste to a self-examination. He concluded, “I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said.” (Albert Camus, The Fall, New York, Vintage Books, 1957. Quoted by William Willimon in a sermon 12/04/94.)

Will it be a haunting laugh that will be God’s messenger to you?

Sometimes it is those who are closest to us that become God’s messengers. The famous preacher, Carlyle Marney, was just grabbing his coat and suitcase to board a train for a preaching tour of the Midwest. He wife, Elizabeth, stood at the door, handing him his hat. She laughed to herself and muttered, “You are not doing all that you do because you love Jesus.”

“If you’re so smart,” says Marney, “tell me why I’m doing it then.”

She said, “Because you’re insecure, vain, ambitious, and driven.”

Marney brushed off his wife’s impetuous comment. But as he sat on the train that day, he came to hear her words as the judgment of God, and he knew that she was right. (William Willimon, 12/04/94.)

Who is God’s messenger that calls you to prepare? Who is your John the Baptist crying in the wilderness?

For one member of our church, it was the beautiful three-inch snow of last Sunday. As she drove to church, she almost stopped all the traffic on Chloe as she saw the breath-taking beauty of the snow in the mountains around our church. For her, the snow was God’s messenger.

Sometimes God uses children to be messengers. On Friday morning, I slipped into the sanctuary to hear Regina’s choir from Pikeville Elementary as they presented their Christmas concert. I was amazed that children so young could sing so well, especially when Regina told me that they only practice for one hour one day a week. The Christmas song “The Holly and the Ivy” has always perplexed me with its lilting melody, but it seems so hard to sing. As those children effortless flitted from note to note, I found them to be messengers of the coming of Christ for me.

For many of our folks, the Bible itself is the messenger. Our people are reading the Bible in earnest both for Sunday school and for our Disciple Bible Study. We have found the Bible to be a treasure chest of wisdom calling us back to God.

Who is God’s messenger that calls you to prepare? Who is your John the Baptist crying in the wilderness? All of us will have a messenger if we will only listen and look for it.

Scripture quotations from the World English Bible.

Copyright 2000, Mickey Anders. Used by permission.