Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · December 6, 2009

The Second Sunday of Advent

Litany of Praise and Invocation

From Psalm 85  

This place where we stand is hallowed ground, a blessing received.

            Speak your ways of peace to our waiting hearts.

Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace join together.

            Righteous harmony is as close as the ground and falls down like rain.

Let us pray:

            Your ways are goodness and truth and your path the way to peace.

            Set our feet upon that way that we might delight in you!  Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

O God of timeless grace, you fill us with the joyful expectation. We wait for the arrival of your son, our savior, Jesus Christ. In the darkness of the winter days, when the nights are long and cold, sometimes even overbearing, we wait for the light that ushers in your arrival, the dawning of yet another day spent with you.

The next few weeks are full of energy and excitement. There are the Christmas parties to attend, the presents to purchase and wrap, but in the midst of our preparations, in the drama of Advent and Christmas, we pray that you will meet us where we are. Some of us are joyful. Some of us are hurting. Some are lonely. Some are afraid. Some are grieving a loss. Some are unsure of what the future holds. But we know, O God, that no matter where we are in life’s journey, you are the light that shines in the darkness, a lamp unto our feet, and a light unto our path. 

This morning, make us ready for the message that prepares the way. Be with us as we begin this day. Guide our actions as we reach out to one another. Help us through the difficulties. Inspire us to love. Hear us now as we say together the prayer that your son taught us:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.

Old Testament Lesson

Malachi 3:1-4

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?

For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendents of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

Message

Transformation vs. Adaptation

Tim Carson

You will remember that in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), the Spirit of Christmas-Yet-To-Come stood in the graveyard pointing to a gravestone and Scrooge said, “Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they the shadows of things that may be?”

In other words, wonders Scrooge, has my past sealed the future? Or is there a way that even now the future may be redeemed by this present moment? We wonder that, too, don’t we?

After he sees his name carved in the stone he cries out, “Spirit! Hear me! I am not the man I was…Why show me this, if I all my past has no hope?”

In Judaism, there is an understanding that the present can heal the past; what we do right now has the power to make right a hopelessly tragic past. You find that idea in a lot of fictional ghost stories in which a troubled spirit can’t move on until things are made right. Once it is, then it is able to move on, the bondage of the past is released.

Can our actions of the present transform 9/11? Or Abu Ghraib? Or the murder of a wife and children by an estranged husband and father? Can anything in our present transform those, transform the past? 

Scrooge is asking even more than that. He is asking if his transformed soul of the present (I am not the man I was) can change the future, can alter the future. 

That happens to be the same question, asked in another way, of the messenger, Malachi. In fact, his name, Malachi, means messenger. This is the last of the twelve books of the Minor Prophets and the last book in the entire Hebrew canon. I have a Rabbi friend who likes to tease his Christian friends by saying, “Yea, it was the whole thing. It was from Genesis to Malachi.”

Malachi is post-exilic, that is, it is written from the vantage point of those who have returned from the long exile in Babylon. They are rebuilding their lives, their cities, their walls, their temple practices, their faith, their spirituality. Malachi knows the past – what led to their long exile and suffering. He knows where they are now. “Suddenly,” says he, “the messenger of what-is-yet-to-be is going to show up.” And Malachi starts asking a question that sounds a lot like Scrooge’s: Is the future something that must be or may be? How does our action in the present determine that? Can we change the future from the present?

The answer to that question by today’s physicists and Malachi is the same one, a resounding “yes.” You can change the future with the present, because they are inexorably linked. Actions have consequences. The future can be modified, transformed. But today, we can also do something about what will be. There is something special sleeping inside the text. It is a great surprise. The messenger from the future says that what is coming will utterly transform your present moment, too. “It not only will come,” says Malachi, “but is already coming.”

So where are we? We are at the fulcrum of time, the intersection where our past and unfolding future collide. And that intersection is where things happen and happen big. Rudolf Steiner (Metamorphoses of the Soul, vol. 2) put it this way:

“There are these two streams, one from the past and one from the future, which come together in the soul … and produce a kind of whirlpool, comparable to the confluence of two rivers.”

Have you ever been to the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers? That state park is there. You can go out of the promenade that looks out onto those two currents and the two volumes of two rivers. You can see the two compositions of those two rivers come together and flow together. There is an intersection of turbulence where they meet and mix and join to create something new. That river confluence is much like the confluence of time when past meets future.

Think of the close of this decade. When the calendar turns over in a few weeks we will be closing not only a year but also ten years, at least according to our arbitrary calendar. And what will be turning over? Many things, too many to count or even remember, on both the macro and micro levels. But just think of some of the landmark aspects of the last decade:  It was ushered in with 9/11, punctuated mid-way with Katrina and the worst tsunami in history, and concluded with an economic meltdown. That’s quite a decade. Not the worst in world history, but all the same incredible in its own right.

What future will collide with all that? What has been learned or lost? What new thing will birth as a result? As the river of the future intersects with the river we are floating into it, what will it do to our little raft?

Here’s what Malachi says: This confluence, this intersection, this collision of time offers more than a simple adjustment. This collision will bring about the possibility of utter transformation.

When we listen to the strains of Malachi come through the King James Version as it makes its way into the Messiah, we hear the basso profundo singing, “For he is like a refiner’s fire… Who shall stand when he appeareth? Who can abide the day of his coming.”  It sounds a lot like final judgment, doesn’t it? A wild fire is roaring through the forest and everything is toasted in its wake.

But in the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a very different sense to this, something more fluid than that. In my Oxford Jewish Study Bible the Messenger asks, “Who can endure the day of his coming and who can hold out when he appears?” This parallelism – who can endure/who can hold out – has the sense of “who can stay the same, who can remain unchanged when you are in that presence?” This is not a tune-up; this is a new engine.

It will be like a refiner’s furnace, a smelter, and the heat that purifies actually changes the metal. It not only purifies, but also transforms. When we come out of the oven, we will be different than before we went in. Cooked is different than raw. Do you know why toast tastes so good? Yum! Toast tastes good because the heat has changed its molecular structure. Toast is not bread. Toast is something else. That’s why it tastes different. Cooked is different than raw. The clay pot’s molecular structure has actually been changed in the kiln. It has become something else.

One of the verses of the poem we sing, “How Firm a Foundation,” goes this way: “… the flame shall not hurt thee; I only design thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.”

Can we embrace this intersection of past with future, this confluence of time, and its whirlpool as a gift? There’s the question. Here is the location of God’s great ongoing creativity. Here is the time and place where life is transformed. Here is the smelter of the spirit. In the Greek, it is called a Kairos moment – a God-overfilled moment. That requires us to stop, pause, and circle in that whirlpool of transformation, to pass through that refiner’s fire.

Have you ever considered that the sound of screeching brakes, that involuntary grand pause of life, may really be a gift to you? When you think about it, that’s the place where the new creation most often takes place. It is also where hope makes out.

There is a journalist by the name of James Opie, and he was travelling in Afghanistan for a story (Parabola, Fall 2009, “Good Driver”). And he wrote,

An hour and a half south of Mazar-i-Sharif, the driver and I came upon a startling scene. A public bus had crashed into an enormous rock on the right hand side of the road. Passengers had spilled out of the bus and were gathered in clusters. There were no obvious signs of injury. My driver slowed down, but not too much, for a dozen bus passengers had turned their attention toward us and came so close to the car that I wondered if some might grab hold of our vehicle. A few shouted, begging for rides.

Only when we drew fully abreast of the accident could we see that the entire front end of the bus was caved in, pressed against a house-sized boulder.

My driver exclaimed, “Good driver! Good driver!”

We regained speed and traveled another kilometer before I spoke. “You said, ‘Good driver.’ Please tell me what is good about crashing a bus full of people into a large rock.”

The driver thought for a moment before answering. “You not understand,” he said.  “Driver lose brakes. Bus will crash. It must! Where crash? Driver must decide. Not easy decide. Must decide! Easy thing…wait. Easy not crash now, here! Then bus goes much fast! If crash here, a few might be hurt. No one die. There (he pointed down the mountain) everyone die. Everyone!” He concluded, “Good driver!”

We were silent for the remainder of the trip south to Kabul, even when we stopped for tea. Perhaps during some of this time, the driver was organizing his thoughts. After we had unloaded all of my goods and were sitting together in front of my hotel, he shaped our shared experience into words.

“You young man,” he said. “Not realize, sometimes better crash early, when damage not great. Sometimes you wait and wait. Damage very great! In life, must know when crash.”

You see, what Malachi is proclaiming is good news even when it might not sound like it. The very finest gift in the world is often the sudden stop that is the best option in the room. It makes room for a different kind of flourishing future.

This week someone stole all our outside Christmas decorations right off our house – garlands, wreath, the whole shebang. We looked out and thought, “Well, somebody has undecorated for us. But that same day, a UPS truck pulled up to our house and left a box by the door. When we opened it, we were shocked. It was a fresh wreath sent by friends. It was just like the other one that left. It was green, and the same size. We had no idea it was being sent. Within the span of several hours, one disappeared and another appeared. And we were living between the two wreaths, watching one stop and the other start. It wasn’t bad; it was time. It was like that confluence of the two rivers. It was the past colliding with the future and us standing in between.

Better yet, when our Disciples Volunteers in Mission went down to Galveston recently, they came back telling the story of two churches. These two churches – one white and one black – were utterly destroyed by the storm. But the God thing has to do with what came out of the storm that seemingly stopped everything.

The people of these two churches scarcely spoke and had little to do with one another. But in the time of dire need, they found each other. In two different missions, volunteers helped rebirth faith in both places. And the community took note. New people started coming to those churches. And in the end, when those churches were dedicated, put back together with Christian love, it united people who had been divided by a past that had kept them separated for generations. But then, the future came crashing in and in that confluence, in that whirlpool where the past and future meet, the refiner’s fire where the dross is consumed leaving only silver, they found each other. And they began to worship together, serve together, and fellowship together. God has done a new thing and drawn a phoenix out of nature’s ashes. A storm ended one thing, but God started another.

Imagine what takes place when a new messenger arrives on the scene with healing in his wings, the proclamation of the kingdom on his lips, and the love of God causing his life to be poured out for the world that had forgotten its Maker. Imagine how final that ending seemed when the shroud was folded in the tomb. But when that storm was past, and the refining was done, the new world was created, and his Spirit was set free into the world with twice as much power as before.

In one of the readings this week from our 40-day journey with Maya Angelou, they shared what has perhaps become her best-known poem. It is entitled “The Caged Bird,” and the chorus goes this way: 

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

Call it Scrooge’s re-hoped world. Call it Malachi’s refiner’s fire. Call it the birth of God in the world, or the resurrection from the dead. Call it anything you like. But it’s singing from the cage with the future on its way. You can’t stop it. You don’t want to stop it, because it’s the best news.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Benediction

On this second Sunday of Advent, Peace Sunday, I remind you that we must first become the peace that we dare to proclaim, lest it not come at all. Now, may the peace that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ. Amen.