Advent 4 B December 18, 2011
Malachi 3:1-7; 4:1-2, 5 St. Alban’s, Austin
May the Force Be With You
My great-nephew Willem was born six weeks ago. I haven’t met him yet, but am assured that he is a remarkable child. He has been gifted with the talents of eating, digesting, excreting, breathing, and not sleeping quite as much as his parents would like. In time he will learn to focus his eyes, lift his head, smile, grasp objects, creep, crawl, walk, and babble. And then talk. But his dad has a fast forward button. He can’t wait to watch the Star Wars movies with him.
Our reading from Malachi this morning makes me think of Star Wars. Truly, tell me. Wasn’t that the first thing that crossed your mind when you heard Dave read it? I mean the real Star Wars. 1977 version. We’d never met Luke Skywalker or Han Solo or Chewbacca or Darth Vader before. Only really we had. They are archetypal characters. They are pilgrims and heroes and outlaws and villains and they occupy places in all human imaginations. We already understood the story of Luke’s pilgrimage and we understood something of the tragedy of Darth Vader’s evil. Han Solo is the Swashbuckler. Chewie is the noble savage. Yoda is the prophet.
It’s the fourth Sunday of Advent. Tonight we’ll watch our children enact the story of Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, wise men. That story is why we are here. But first there are the prophets, and Malachi is the last of all. I’ll bet you all don’t know that much about Malachi. I’ll have to admit that my own knowledge was a tad sketchy till I delved into this.
It’s good to begin by locating Malachi. What we are reading is the last book of the Old Testament. Malachi is the last prophet, or at least the last of the Hebrew biblical prophets. Like the others he is entrusted by God to speak God’s word to the people who are at risk of getting into trouble. He lived in the fifth century BCE at the time when the people had returned from exile in Babylon. The temple had been rebuilt, but just as a building is not sufficient to make us a church just having their Temple was not enough to make the people faithful to their God. Malachi is telling the people that the day of the Lord is coming and that now is the time to get ready.
He uses the language of refining metals, which involves exceedingly high temperatures and melting, and if you don’t take time to think about it, Malachi can sound pretty scary. I wonder if it sometimes it is best to get a little bit scared in order to get our attention.
You will hear people tell you that the God of the Old Testament is the mean and angry God but the God of the New Testament is the loving and kind God. Well, that would make it all easy to understand except it all falls apart if you actually read the Bible. The God of the Old Testament is just as loving and kind as the God of the New Testament. Actually it is in the Old Testament where we see God acting the most like a parent who desperately loves his children even though the kids are absolute train wrecks. He gets frustrated and punishes them so they will learn their lessons and all for the sake of waking them up to the fact that they have been given nothing less than the whole heart of the creator of the universe.
The language of the refiner is language of hope. It is God’s way of saying, “I believe in you. I see you as you are unable to see yourself and you are solid gold. Well, maybe not solid yet, but the other stuff we can get rid of.” The other stuff God will take from us because he is the God of love.
“See,” says God through Malachi, “I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me.” God sent many messengers, and this fall we have gotten to hear from several of them. They all carried the same message to the children of Israel. Their God loves them and their God wants the best for them. And God knows what is best for them better than they do. Every parent can identify with this. And every parent knows that it is not enough.
Christian and Sarah will learn that no matter how they forewarn little Willem he will learn most by failing and falling and getting hurt. That is when they will be there to love him and pick him up and encourage him. Yoda could tell Luke until the cows came home that he had the Force, but he had to let Luke learn through his own mistakes that the Force was with him always.
We’ll be back here next Saturday evening and will have a church full of greenery and poinsettias. The candles will shine in the darkness and the organ will play the carols we love, and all because God had a new idea. God realized that sending prophet after prophet was getting him next to nowhere. God stopped trying to tell us how he loves us and decided to show us how he loves us.
He became one of us. And he became one of us not only to tell us face to face how he wanted us to behave but rather to show us what love is and to be what we are all meant to be. As Ireneaus said way back in the second century, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
God came to show us who we can be if we dare to be fully alive. To show us that we are made of gold and that the parts of us that are not gold – I know what mine are and suspect you know yours only too well – the parts of us that are not gold are not essential to who we are.
In a wonderful new book, What Episcopalians Believe, which we are going to be using in confirmation class and Christian formation later this winter, Samuel Wells writes: “The heart of the Christian faith is that God came among human beings as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is God, fully present to humanity, and humanity, fully present to God. Jesus expressed the full possibility of being human, and made known the full reality of God. The coming of God in Jesus broke down the dividing wall between God and humanity, and the false separation between one human being and another – and, indeed, the whole creation. This coming is the central moment in history: everything before it was a preparation for it, and everything since has taken place in the light of it.” (2)
This is where we are today, stepping into the gap of our liturgical year. We are closing the Old Testament in this preaching series and waiting in the silence for the miracle of the Incarnation to come upon us. To overshadow us just as the Holy Spirit overshadowed little Mary. The Incarnation is not simply something that happened two thousand years ago. The Incarnation happens among us and within us every time we worship together and take the bread and the wine into our bodies. We ask the Holy Spirit to come down and transform what was the juice of grapes and harvested wheat, to enter into it, and then we take it into our bodies, not because it is foreign to us but because it is nourishment to us. It makes us who we most essentially are. God’s pure gold children. God’s body and blood become our body and blood.
Just a little more about Star Wars, though. At first there were three films, but then came the prequels, and to my grandsons all six comprise one great narrative, all of it archetypal, all of it profound.
I think it is OK to think of the Old Testament with its great stories and characters – Moses and Isaiah and Abraham and Elijah and even lesser prophets like Malachi as the prequel to the Incarnation. They are great stories in their own right, and while I myself question how much they are about prediction, they do indeed prepare the way of the Lord.
What God set out to do in creation, God was doing from day one. It came to fruition in the birth of Jesus but was at play from the day God said I think I’ll make me a world. It was all about love. And God overshadows us with that love and empowers us with that love and blesses us with that love and calls us to share it with wild abandon all day, every day. We are God’s own and God’s beloved. We are solid gold in God’s eyes. We have been given the gifts to do the work God needs us to do.
Let the Force be with you.
And also with you. Amen.
And also with you. Amen.
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