Malachi 3:1 - 4; 4:5 - 6
“I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty.
But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.
“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”
Reading this text from Malachi, I feel like breaking out my bass part for a line or two from Handel's "Messiah." No, I won't subject you to that . . . though in my uninitiated observation, that has to be one of the toughest solos around.
In our canon of Scripture, Malachi's words are important because they are among the final words of the Hebrew Scriptures before the New Testament begins. As is the case very often with prophets, the words sound a warning. You can find little that is gentle and consoling in Malachi's words.
I'm grinning to myself as I write . . . so often the Hebrew prophets act like that drill sergeant-turned-therapist in the car insurance commercial. When the fellow on the couch sheepishly says something about "yellow makes me sad," the therapist with the burr haircut yells back, "MAYBE WE OUGHT TO TRUCK ON OVER TO MAMBY-PAMBYLAND WHERE MAYBE WE CAN FIND SOME SELF-CONFIDENCE FOR YOU, YOU JACK-WAGON!!!" Granted, it's not very pastoral, but I find it funny.
So I wince when I hear Malachi's words. But I understand that prophets intend to shock. They mean to shake us from our stupor. They speak with blunt and direct images. They want to move us out of our complacency and comfort. In the end, they want us to consider God again after we have been busy closing too many God-doors. Like other Old Testament prophets, Malachi overstates his case in order to get our attention, in order to elicit from us a reaction. Prophets tend to call for us to get in or get out. They don't leave many middle options.
The biblical prophets did not foretell the future. Dr. Dan Kent, my mentor in all things Old Testament, used to say that prophets were not fore-tellers, they were forth-tellers. In other words, they didn't predict the future; rather, they spoke forth the truth of what they saw at the moment, which often had long-range consequences into the future.
I might say it a little differently. Prophets were truth-tellers, at least to the extent they could see and had experienced truth. It is not easy to see the truth about ourselves, God, others and the world, much less speak it out. Truth-seeing is one of the difficult exercises of our lives. We all see life with tinted glasses, with foggy glasses which make it difficult for us to see what is real. To see life stripped of pretense, stripped of illusion, stripped of our own ego-centeredness is extremely difficult.
There is a sense, then, in which we are all called to be prophets. We are all called to the vocation of living more and more into the truth . . . the truth of God . . . the truth about ourselves . . . the truth of who we are in relation to others and the world. Old Testament prophets spoke of this in a way that was stark and sometimes abrasive. But you don't have to be abrasive to see and speak the truth.
In fact, the spiritual posture most required may be humility. Authentic prophets don't speak the truth because they enjoy seeing people plunged into the refiner's fire, but rather because they so deeply desire to see people healed and be made whole. True prophets don't delight in the misery of others. They do, however, celebrate the wholeness and healing others experience.
Malachi, echoing other prophets, says that when the day of the Lord comes, the day we see most fully God's intention for us and the day we hear most clearly God's invitation to step into the life for which God created us . . . that day will be "great and dreadful."
It will be great in that it will open up before us all the possibilities of who we can be, living into the purpose for which God made us and placed us on the planet.
But it will also be dreadful because for us to step into this invitation means laying aside our ego-driven agendas in order to take up a Divine agenda for live. And that letting go is always painful. None of us do it well. We dread being asked to change. Even more, we dread being forced to change. So the "day of the Lord" is great, but it is also dreadful.
That's the picture Malachi paints as we inch closer to Christmas. We're each invited into truthful and authentic living. To accept that invitation leads us to step into our prophetic vocation. But to do so means life-change, the shifting of frameworks and the reordering of alliances and allegiances. It is great work, but also work we dread.
The child born on Saturday, the Christ whose birth we celebrate, bears Good News in his life and in his very being. The angels announce as much to the shepherds . . . good news which shall be for everyone, everywhere.
But this Good News is also bad news for us and for the part of us which wants to hold onto life as we know it -- and perhaps life as we want it! That is the life we must slowly release, so that we may take into ourselves his life.
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