an Advent 2 sermon on Malachi
I wonder if when you pray your prayers are quite formal, as if you’re addressing a Judge. Or your prayers are quite chummy as if you’re talking to an old chum. Or.. I gave Derreck a couple of Advent books and he gave me a couple that he’d found and within a few pages I just knew that the Penelope Wilcock Into the Heart of Advent was my favourite. It is a daily dialogue with Jesus who walks with Penelope as she goes shopping, gets on the bus, goes for walks, makes tea. It reminded me of Don Camillo and Adrian Plass – and has anyone ever read Mr God this is Anna? I need to find my copy of that as it did me a power of good when I last read it about 30 years ago.
They all have this easy conversational approach to prayer in which the person just talks to God about everything and nothing throughout their day and in the process it helps them stay focussed on God, on kindness and mercy, it helps them forgive and receive forgiveness.
Malachi is perhaps the first version of this sort of book. It is a conversation between God and His People. God says something and the people respond – What? How? Why? – go through your Malachi with a colouring pencil and look for the little questions.
Each question gets an answer – except one. We’ll come to that.
God says I have loved you. And the response is What? How? Really? Because it doesn’t feel like it.
There’s an honest way to start a conversation, a prayer. I don’t feel loved by God, where, show me?
To be fair the people of God have gone though a rough time. Let me give you a little context. After King David, King Solomon, King Rehoboam – the 12 tribes split into a north south divide, 10 tribes to the north, 2 tribes to the south.
In the north they proceed to have a succession of Kings who each make a bigger mess of it than the one before, prophets come along, Elijah, Elisha, and so on and they say Look if you carry on like this it will all end in tears. And then in 720BC, it all ends in tears and the northern tribes are invaded and exiled and carried off into slavery.
Meanwhile in Jerusalem they have a succession of Kings a few of whom are not too bad and the prophets come and say Look if you carry on like this it will all end in tears and then in 586BC, the Babylonians invade and the southern tribes are carried off into exile and slavery.
Then some time passes, about 70 years or so and we have books like Nehemiah and Ezra and some bits of Isaiah and Jerusalem gets rebuilt and the temple gets rebuilt and the people are released from their slavery and exile and begin to come home and here we are about 100 years later on from the return. So we’re talking about 400BC.
And it’s come to us as the last book of the OT.
And so after Malachi we have what’s called the 400 silent years – as if God isn’t saying anything during that time. God is, we protestants call it the Apocrypha – and though we can’t be sure this is the Word of the Lord we can be sure that God is at work because – well you’ll see.
The great thing about preaching really old OT stuff is that you can sit back and say this is SO long ago at a time and culture that I just cannot relate to and so its massively irrelevant to me. So you can relax.
And it is. Malachi is completely irrelevant – its about a time when a whole nation has suffered years upon years of war and the result has been wave upon wave of refugees and massive rise in slave trafficking – so already you can see how completely unrelatable this book is. That’s the back story to Malachi –
but the front story to Malachi is that that period of slavery has come to an end, and lots of people have been able to come home and rebuild their lives and Malachi is about three generations after the horror of what happened.
So God comes and has this dialogue with His People and the first conversation is about not feeling the love.
Actually four or five generations ago – yes you could argue, Where is God’s love – Go read Jeremiah and Ezekiel for an answer to that question – but actually this lot, in Malachi’s day, have it good – but they don’t see that, all they see is negativity and problems. They’re not feeling God’s love.
So God says Well yes I do love you. And I think if you pause and look and think about it you can see it. So at this point I could preach my favourite – Count your blessings sermon.
But the people come back and say ‘We feel like we’ve lost your favour’, things aren’t going well for us, economically, its tough, and that’s why we feel like you don’t love us.
So then God goes on to say – the thing is You dishonour Me. You weary Me. You rob Me. You are unbelievably obnoxious and arrogant.
And the People say Whaat? How? No? How? Really?
God says – you realise I’m summarising the whole, short, book of Malachi – God says – When you come to bring a sacrifice, you bring me rubbish offerings, you bring me the stuff you would have thrown out anyway, the stuff you couldn’t sell in a second hand shop, you’re bringing me lame sacrifices, literally lame and blind lambs – you’re cheating me – and what’s worse is that Everyone’s okay about it – the temple priests seem to say Okay, and you’re saying Okay, and so the blessing that I am going to give you is going to be along the same lines – its going to be a lame blessing.
You’re not just cheating me, you’re stealing from me, you know you’re supposed to give a tithe, you know you’re supposed to give sacrificially, but no you just find whatever small change you can from the back of the sofa and that’s what you give to God.
And then you wonder why you’re not feeling the love?
God is saying – It seems to me as if you’re / we’re not really invested in this relationship.
And while we’re on the subject of relationships, you husbands – says God – interesting how he picks on husbands – and that’s because of the male bias in ancient marital law – actually there’s lots of male bias in marital law around the world still today – you Husbands are too readily and quickly abandoning the wife of your youth (I do like that phrase) to go running after some new foreign skirt instead of working things through.
Remember? The wonderful thing about the prophet Hosea – (different prophet) – he marries a woman who is persistently unfaithful to him, and the whole point of the book is to show God’s persistent love, God won’t give up on this unfaithful wife.
God makes a parallel between husbands and adultery and between us and idolatry, and the different gods we go after in order for us to get our sense of self-worth and love – we to quickly abandon God.
And along the way we justify it to ourselves saying Everyone else is doing it and What’s in it for me? And why bother to serve the living God because evil people seem to get away with it all the time, its not fair.
So why bother giving justice to foreigners, to widows, to orphans? We can skimp and skip on paying full proper wages – after all evil people do it all the time and they get away with it.
So that’s the conversation that God and the people have together. Was that exhausting?
The one question that’s not answered is God’s call to return to me – but How? And that’s not answered. I wonder how you would answer it?
If you’ve been listening thus far you might think that the answer is to bring nice clean lambs to the temple, to bring in your tithe, your 10% of your income – to be generous – God even says in Malachi, Go on then test me, give me your tithe and lets see what happens to your economy.
I think it’s a great challenge – not because of some prosperity Gospel type approach but because in giving to God we show that we care about things beyond ourselves, about our community, other charities, the work of the Church, we’re showing that we care.
And we’re showing that all this stuff I have its because of God’s persistent love. And this is my token of gratitude
Return to me says God but How ask the people
I think the answer, in Malachi, can be found in two ways – firstly in
a couple of promises. God promises to send us Soap. If you get soap for Christmas you’re going to look at it differently. Why would you give me soap? Do you think I need soap? Am I that smelly that when you thought What shall I get the vicar for Christmas, I know I’ll get him some soap!
God says I am going to send you some soap. You smell. God says I’m going to send you some fire, you need the rubbish in you burned out, I’m going to send you a new Elijah, who will prepare the way for a Messiah.
And what will this Elijah will focus on is – not making us feel bad about how sinful and what a waste of space we are – but this Elijah he’s going to work with Kids and Parents. His job is going to be to help families connect and get along. Is that a weird ending?
Return to me says God, But How? says the People
Maybe the answer is found in the whole conversation – God talks to us, God wants us to talk to him, God cares, God hears, go ahead and shake your fist at Him and complain and stick around to hear the response.
God hears our hurts and pain – and He wants us to know that He hears us, He remembers you, He loves you, we are not forgotten and God has not given up on you, even if we have given up on God, even if we have given up on ourselves.
That’s the book of Malachi, that’s advent 2 the Prophets, and that’s the reminder God has not forgotten you, that God loves and persists with us in our struggles and strife and sin. And He sends us hope, and soap. Amen.