I dread getting God’s Word wrong.  In the interests of full disclosure, this proclaimer of God’s Word also dreads parts of God’s Word.  There are parts that seem hard to me, hurtful.  I don’t know how to share these parts of God’s Word.  How can I preach that?  Who will, who can receive that?  So I don’t talk about those parts, which doesn’t mean I don’t think about them.  Beloved, is the hardness in God’s heart, or my own?  Hurt is the sure sign that something is wrong.  I’m told hurt is a part of healing.

Through His prophet Malachi, a name or title meaning “My messenger,” God tells His people—it seems His priests specifically—that they “have wearied the Lord” with their words (2:17).  Oof.  What could that mean?  A pastor wonders.  Beloved, I speak many words—as you know, so well!  Every preacher speaks many words, yet the one word we all want to speak, hope to be speaking, pray that we are speaking, is God’s Word.  Not my words but God’s Word.  I fear I have not spoken God’s Word the way I ought to have; pray for me, please.

The priests of olden times ask, surprised, maybe irritated, “How have we wearied [God]?” (2:17).  Through His messenger, God answers, “By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’” (2:17).  “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord”—well who says that?  Beloved, we can process this in at least two ways.  I trust that you and I, now, can confess that we have all done evil in the eyes of the Lord.  How can He be pleased with us?  In Jesus Christ, we know His answer, praise His name!  We are forgiven, in Jesus Christ, who says go and sin no more.  How hard it is, though, to live according to this command, for it is a command.  Though we have done evil, as we now are in Christ, and as the Holy Spirit is now with us to lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, God is pleased with us, for He is always pleased with the Son.  This is one way to hear what we hear from Malachi.  Though we have done evil, though we still stumble—badly, sometimes—God sees Christ in us.  He is pleased with Christ, who is the forgiveness for our sin; Christ is our righteousness, the Lord our Righteous Savior.

The other way to process this word from God, the way I fear is too common even in the church, though I don’t say this congregation, is that God regards everyone as good, and what unenlightened, ignorant, hate-ful people call evil, God does not call evil.  Sin is not sin.  Immorality is not immorality.  God is pleased with anyone who will say he, she loves God.

What is love for God?  What does it look like?  Can anyone say?  Is there any standard?  If none of us really know or even can know what it is to love God, we’re all in more than a little trouble.  From where shall our help come?

“I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me” (3:1).  Remember, the name Malachi means My Messenger.  The messenger comes with a message, a Word for preparation, that prepares for the way.  The Word is the power that prepares the way.  If the Word has this power to clear away, to set in order, to remove obstacles, then this same Word has the power of a standard.  The Word that prepares the way tells us, shows us, what it is to love God.  God is indeed pleased with those who love Him, just as he is pleased with those who love His Word and live that love by living according to the standard of His Word.

It’s important that we know; it’s important that we not be misinformed about this, that we permit no deceptions, from whatever reason, for “suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come” (3:1).  Suddenly.  One word characteristic of Mark’s telling of the Gospel was this word suddenly, immediately, at once.  Without prior preparation, there is no preparation.  Live in readiness for the Lord.  Live and love the Word, and you shall live in readiness, because it is the power and blessed gift of the Word to prepare: love the power that prepares us.

The faithful, all who claim the faith, await the Lord’s coming, His Advent, which for us will be his Second Coming, Lord help us all!  We celebrate the first coming of the Son even as we live in expectation of his Second Coming.  Christmas isn’t just about looking back; we overlook that too often.  Remembering brings blessing and hope, but our faith isn’t about looking backward.  No one can walk forward with confidence and safety while looking backward.

“Where is the God of justice?”  Even we can wonder!  He is in His heaven; His Son is on the throne, ruling all things, bringing all things under him.  Justice will be done, but will it be justice as we would recognize or desire it?  We desire the return of Jesus—I hope we do!  Should we wish the world to continue like this indefinitely?  All this confusion and fear and anger unto hatred, such casual, self-righteous violence, claiming powerlessness while power from above, power for living, is being offered, freely?

Beloved, Christ will return on that day, and we shall be changed or raised, and all shall come before the Judge.  The books will be opened.  I trust my name is in the Book of Life, but that doesn’t mean I want all that’s written there read into the record!  I desire Christ’s return, sisters and brothers; I rejoice that I am in Christ, yet I do dread that day.  “But who can endure the day of his coming” (3:2)?  Amos was right.  This is why John 5:24 has been bright for me ever since the day nearly twenty years ago when I read it as for the first time, standing there by the light coming in through my bedroom window, as though hearing God Himself in Jesus Christ speak to me, as we were alone, a Word directly to me like a beachhead in my heart.  Is there power in the Word, beloved?  Oh yes!  The Word is power for life.

          What do you seek in this life?  Where is your joy?  What is justice?  What will a just world look like?  Who will have what?  Who will be rewarded?  Who will be punished?  I wonder.  What I know is that there is what I seek and there is what God seeks.  Sometimes, by the mercy and grace of God, these are the same.  To the extent I proclaim God’s Word, not my words, what I seek and what God seeks are the same.  To the extent we treasure up God’s Word given, and cease to treasure words of earth—what the supposedly wise of this world smoothly assure us—when we cast their wisdom aside for the Word of God, what we seek and what God seeks will be the same.  Woe to those who do not, for though they may think they seek as in the name of God Himself, what they seek is not what God seeks.

“But who can endure the day of his coming?”  “[T]he Lord alone will be exalted in that day” (Is 2:11, 17).  Not me, not you—not my way or yours, my notions of justice or yours, your vision of faithful living or mine.  Here there is confusion and wrangling—how badly people want to be right!  We’ll fight, we’ll even kill, to be right, God knows.  Let us all, rather, long to be holy.  If we would be holy, let us first be humble.  How shall we be humble?  Who can show us?  Who can help?  Christ is the sure foundation of our humility, as we remember him, treasure him, devote ourselves to making him known among our fellow men and better known among ourselves.  We don’t yet know him half as well as we might!  “In that day you will say: ‘I will praise you, Lord.  Although you were angry with me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted me’” (Is 12:1).  What comfort we have, safe in the arms of Jesus!

He comes to wash and to refine.  Who will say to him, “I don’t need to be washed”?  Who will say to him, “I am pure”?  Advent is a season for anticipating glory.  Christ came among us with signs of glory—angelic messengers, dreams, star, angel choirs, prophecy fulfilled, God’s Word suddenly, at once with us, so strangely!  Christ shall come in glory, to judge the living and the dead—those who have died and those who, though living, are dead.  The apostles beheld his glory at the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, and again at the Ascension.  What word best expresses what they beheld: joy? peace? fullness? light?  There was light, brilliant, dazzling.  The best word for what those disciples beheld is clean, pure.  Christ shone with a cleanness unseen, a love unknown here below: holy clean, without spot or stain, without blemish, as the lamb who was slain; holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.

Water flowed from the side of Christ there on the cross, beloved.  Have you wondered why?  On that day, the day of the Lord, from the eternal Temple, a river shall flow, the waters of Life; waters for cleansing and for healing—purification.  How shall we be washed, washed of our sins, the grime of life in this world?  Christ Jesus, who by his coming, his living, his dying and his rising, washes us perfectly clean, be we ever so grimy.  Don’t you feel that grit, under your nails, perhaps, in your mouth, your eyes, the back of your neck, on your feet?  Christ washes away the grime that the glory may shine in us, shine through us.

It’s a strange trial, brothers and sisters!  The old hymn asked Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb.  At the judgment, Christ may well ask a different question: would you be washed?  You and I, in Christ now, may well think that, at that point, who could possibly answer No?!  Who would be foolish enough, outrageous enough, so hardened there before Christ as to say, No, I will not be washed?  There are those who will say they are clean, who will come before Jesus, saying God is pleased with them.  They will say they just know in their hearts that they are good in the eyes of the Lord.  They will ask, in all seriousness, since ours is a loving God, how could He possibly not receive them?  We know love is rejected, sisters and brothers, but does love reject?  We know love says Yes.  Does love also say No?

The Lord wants those who will bring offerings in righteousness.  The offering God seeks is the offering of our own lives: living our sacrifice for God.  Life lived for The Word, according to The Word.  This is the imitation of Christ, proclaiming the glory of his righteous name.  This is the sacrifice acceptable to God.  The old Temple, over lifetimes, became sick and stained with disobedience and idolatry.  Let us keep the new temple—our bodies—in righteousness.  In Christ, we shall not come into the judgment of condemnation; only remember, trial and judgment are not the same.

Trial is not for punishment, beloved.  Trial is to reveal the truth; can there be justice, without truth?  God who is Truth, loves truth.  If we live, we live in Spirit and Truth.  Those who live in Spirit and truth are fed, abundantly, by God’s Word and have no appetite for words of earth, be they ever so supposedly wise, kind, or good.  The words of earth serve sin, serve self-justification, self-righteousness: this can never please God.  Let us know God better, me and you, together!  Here, we can.  Here at this table, God has provided; here we are fed; here, the Word is made visible for us all, tangible; here, by the fullness and love that we have by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we can get the Word in our mouths, in our bodies, in our hearts and lives.  Here, we say Yes to Christ’s Amen, Amen.  Here, with full confidence and great joy, we sing, O come, O come, Immanuel.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.