Second Sunday in Advent, Year C

“The Long Refining to Glory”

Dr. Lissa M. Wray Beal                    

Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1:68-79; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

Sometimes, the gifts we anticipate, are not at all the gifts we receive.

I remember a wedding gift. Wrapped, it was about this big: (sketch shape). I held in on my lap, while the gift-giver sat beside me. They told me it was from The Bombay Company. I knew the store, and imagined. . . and imagining, I determined exactly what the gift was: a wooden box, Hinged lid. The kind that you open up, and the insides are divided into little compartments big enough to hold packets of tea. I’d always thought I’d wanted a tea caddy of this type—it seemed so elegant!

So, certain of the contents, I opened the gift FILLED with expectation. I remember the smile I had on my face as I pulled off the wrap, and YES!! It was a box! I opened the lid certain of the compartments I would find within, expecting a few packets of tea to illustrate its use.

But my expectation had set me up for disappointment. When I opened the lid, it was simply an open box. No compartments. No tea. Just room for placing mementos. I was so shocked at the failure of my expectation that my smile faded and I stuttered, “Oh. . . my. . . how lovely!” It WAS lovely. But it was not what I’d become convinced it would be. And whenever I looked at that box in the years to come—even when it held treasured mementos and I realized a box for holding tea really wouldn’t have been a useful gift to me (as I don’t drink much tea!)—I was reminded of that shocked feeling of expectation dashed.

Expectations can be tricky that way. Set you up for disappointment. Require you to realign your thinking and adjust your expectations. And it is not just wrapped gifts that can raise these kinds of expectations. . . CERTAIN that we know what to expect. It can be people, too. 

So the people came in crowds to see John. There was that certain buzz about his celebrity status—sure, he dressed a little oddly, and you perhaps would not want to be invited to his house for supper—but people knew what to expect of him—they understood he was the long-awaited messenger who would come before the LORD to prepare his way. We read of this role anticipated of John in Luke’s gospel—both in the canticle this morning, and in the gospel reading.

They expected a prophet—the messenger spoken of in Malachi’s ancient prophecy. And he was a prophet – Luke tell us so (1:76). Like the prophets of old the word of the LORD came to him (3:2). As the LORD’s messenger-prophet, Luke tells us he came to PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD (1:76)

The messenger prophesied by Malachi (whose very name means “My Messenger”) would proclaim God’s pending arrival. God would then come in power and might. He would clean out all that was wrong in the religious establishment. You see, Malachi wrote at a time when Israel had faced the long years of exile in a foreign land. Now they had returned home, full of hope. They rebuilt the temple (though it was much smaller than Solomon’s temple). But that rebuilt temple, and the peoples’ rebuilt hopes did not change the realities of their sinful behaviours.

Malachi tells us that the priests still despised the LORD. They offered to him what was second best. They were bored in their worship; it was all so much ritual, with no relationship to capture their hearts and allegiance. They taught lies about God, and turned aside from the way.

The people weren’t that much better. They too were faithless in relationship with God. They continued to worship other gods, rejecting the relationship of love God offered them—yet they still expected that God should bless their lives—as if he was some cosmic slot machine. They said evil was good. They were law breakers, and treated those whom they were in covenant relationship with shabbily. The land was full of injustice.

In light of these wrongs, Malachi’s prophecy of the coming messenger was hopeful. That God would one day come and set everything right. He’d come and be a purifying fire—burning away all sinfulness. Refining religion, and life, and all those people who just didn’t get what it meant to belong to God. Change the false religion and make people love both God and one another. By the demonstration of his power, God would bring this about in a moment.

So, when John showed up and people began to call him this messenger who came before the LORD, everyone flocked to see him. Anticipation was high: surely now, God was about to show up. He’d set the Jerusalem religious establishment to rights. And the foreign Roman occupier? Surely this God of Power would kick them out. The land would be freed. And the people could settle down to a life of goodness. Of righteousness. All they needed was for God to come and change all those people who were wrong. 

All seemed just as they anticipated. . . until John opened his mouth and started to speak. Sure, he talked about God’s kingdom coming. He talked about everyone seeing God’s salvation. But (can you believe it?!!!) he didn’t talk about God coming to zap all those wrong people with his purifying power. No! He addressed the people who had come to him in the wilderness. And told THEM to repent. Told them about their own need for changed ways, and forgiveness. Addressed THEM as if THEY were the prideful who needed to be brought low.

As much as they wanted change to come. They just had not anticipated the gift that John offered. Repentance? Now that is a gift with “some assembly required.” That is a gift that called them to do something. Offer something of themselves. Admit that they were in need of God’s cleansing power.

It might be one thing to wait for God to come. But it is totally another to admit our own need of him. To turn the pointing finger from “the Other” to ourself. But that is precisely the message that John shares with us as we wait for God to show up and set the whole world to rights. And it is just as difficult for us to admit our need, as it was for the people of John’s day. I think we, too, would still just have The Other called to repentance, and be left to our own sense of self-righteousness.

The American poet Kathleen Norris reflects on repentance (Amazing Grace, Riverhead 1998, pp. 69-70). She tells a story of visiting elementary schools in her role as a poet. She gets the kids to write poetry—psalms—and they show their sense of vulnerability in a Big People’s World; their fears, and angers. Even their sense of wrongdoing.

One young child wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry”. In it, he admitted he hated it when his dad yelled at him when he’d done something wrong. The child’s response? In childish poetry he said he thought he’d like to throw his sister down the stairs. Wreck his room, and then finally wreck the whole town. The poem concluded, “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”

Norris concludes that the comment about the child’s “messy house” says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out.

If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?

And that is where repentance begins. That is it not The Other who is the monster I need to worry about. It is my own monster: my anger. My greed. My injustice.

John says to people who were waiting for God to show up in power: come in repentance and turn to God. Experience his forgiveness for sin. And then you will see the dawn from on high breaking. Then you will see the salvation of God. It is repentance that begins the Preparation for the LORD.

Advent calls us out to the desert, too. Advent is meant as a hopeful intrusion. A time to stop—when all the world wants to rush to dote over a baby. It is a time when we stand with the ancient Israelites, and with those in the wilderness with John. A time when we too hear the call: The LORD is coming. So be ready. Become the “Monster Who Was Sorry” and experience God’s great forgiveness. See the salvation of God.

But (we might protest), John came as one to prepare for the coming of the LORD. A LORD who said he’d set everything to rights. Refine away all the dross of our lives. But did it happen?

And it is here that we enter the paradox of Advent. Because we wait to mark the birth of a baby. But one born not in the halls of power that Luke notes in his gospel. By the usual measures of power, Jesus was a nobody. With no apparent power to do any of the powerful things so needed in government, and religion, and in peoples’ own hearts. He came, instead in weakness and humility. Grew to manhood.

But in his death. Ah. . . here we enter the mystery. For though he died as a poor carpenter’s son, he died as God in the flesh. Conquered all the power that death has ever held. And showed that he is the God of whom John spoke; of whom Malachi spoke.

Advent is also the time we wait—not for the helpless baby, but for the powerful, Divine LORD who showed this power by conquering death. Some day—how long we cannot tell—he will come again. Not as a helpless baby, but in power to purify and—in a moment—set this broken world right. 

That is the day that Paul anticipates in our epistle reading. For he and the Philippians (like us) were Advent people. Paul reminds the Philippians and us to wait for the coming “day of Jesus Christ.” This is the day of Malachi’s Refiner’s Fire. The Day of God’s power openly revealed. 

But Paul knew the truth that during the long years of Advent waiting, we do not wait without God’s power working. Here. And Now. Paul say, “the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” And then he goes on to urge these people—who began by acknowledging that they were the “Monster Who Was Sorry”, and who received God’s forgiveness. Who received his powerful Spirit. Who knew what it was to live in God’s love. Paul urges these people to “share in God’s grace”. To let their “love overflow”. To live “pure and blameless, producing a harvest of righteousness.” 

They were living examples of the Refiner’s Fire. Oh, not the fire of a cataclysmic future day when God would put all things to rights. But a fire here and now, in the Advent waiting. As God quietly, slowly, secretly, but powerfully, works his life into his people. Changes them. Converts them into the image of the Christ they love who now empowers their living.

Because the Refiner’s Fire is powerful—whether working in the final cataclysmic day of Christ Jesus. Or whether it is at work in our own days of waiting.

Joan Chittister, in her book The Liturgical Year (Thomas Nelson 2009, pp. 59-60) tells the story of a friend who gave her a Peruvian textile wall-hanging. It is a pastoral scene of palm trees and rural lean-to’s. The scene covers the top portion of the hanging, and the bottom portion has pockets—one for each of the days of advent. Each day, you take the fabric item from the pocket and attach it to the picture. Some of the pieces are benign and beautiful things; some are not. There are bumble bees and angels, wild animals and dry straw, a branch-laden peasant man and a weary-looking woman. But it is the last day. . .the day long anticipated. . . that you take the Christ-child from the last pocket. The pocket of Christmas Day. This child—the one who knows what life is like because he has lived it with us is placed in the picture. And then, it is complete and the time of waiting shown to be utterly worthwhile.

Our lives are the canvas of that Advent Calendar. And slowly, over all the years of Advent Waiting, Christ adds to the canvas of our lives. Little things. Repentance - Changes of attitude and action. Acts of justice and mercy. Difficult things: sorrow that draw us closer to our Lord, and make our longing for his return more acute. Joys. Triumphs, Challenges. Together, they form the fabric of our life, shot-through with the Christ’s own presence.

This is the gift of Advent. A time to wait. To be reminded that we are always invited to repentance and faith. Always invited to allow the powerful Christ to work his refining fire through our years, burning away our dross to leave the image of Christ: pure and precious. It is a long Refining to Glory. 

And when he does come—some day—in fully-revealed power, we will recognize the One who has worked in power in our own lives, through all the years of Advent Waiting.

O Come, LORD Jesus.