BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

(Preached on Sunday, December 10, 2006)

For he is like a refiner=s fire and like fuller=s soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.                                                                                                              -Malachi 3:2b-3

 

What do you want for Christmas this year?

For what are you longing, hoping, yearning this year?

Perhaps you long for family reunion, or for lost relationships; perhaps you wish for everyone to get along this Christmas, for the usual tensions, difficulties, to not appear; maybe you long for old hurts to be forgiven. Perhaps you long for simpler, less complicated times.

Maybe you yearn for peace on earth, good will for all people, justice and equality and acceptance and fairness to be the way of the world.  Perhaps you long for more meaning in your life, a stronger sense of purpose, of making a difference in the world or the lives of others.  Maybe you yearn for a deeper, stronger, more tangible relationship with God.

 

Be careful what you wish for C it just might come to pass.

But it might not come in the way you imagine. 

After all, our images of Christmas are largely tame ones.  Chestnuts roasting and silver bells ringing.  The peacefulness of Christmas Eve and the festivity of Christmas Day.  The beauty of angels, the simplicity of Bethlehem, the humbleness of the stable, and the sweetness of a baby.

In the midst of all that loveliness, Malachi=s note seems quite out of place.  AWho can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?@  Hardly the stuff of Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole.

 

Malachi is speaking of the overwhelming, purifying, presence of God, the Holy One, source of justice, and love, and compassion, and peace.

Who can truly stand to be in God=s presence?  Can you?  Can I?  

This is the One who knows us better than we know ourselves; the one who knows each and every last single moment of our lives, our behavior, our actions, our motivations, our most secret thoughts. 

We don=t like to think about it or talk about it, but it is part of what we fear about God and part of why we are not really sure we want to be close to God C because nothing gets past God.

Have we always been loving toward our neighbor?  How many times have we turned our heads and looked the other way when we saw someone in need?  Have we always shown mercy to the poor and helpless?  How many times have we judged them as not-worthy, lazy, con-artists, looking to take advantage of our generosity?  How many times have I passed on gossip, not pausing to consider how the spread of it might cause pain to the person it is about?  How many times have I refused to offer forgiveness for some slight, real or imagined?  How many times have I allowed some hurt to fester so that it poisoned my relationship with them?  God knows every single one of these actions, events, non-actions, thoughts, feelings.  Nothing escapes God.

 

That frightens us beyond words.

But Malachi offers a hopeful note.  God=s knowledge of all this does not turn God away from us.  God does not determine that we are worthless and thus should be cast on the rubbish heap and forgotten.

No, God=s presence in our lives is like that of a refiner of fine metal who understands that no matter how many impurities are wrapped in and around the silver, there is still precious metal of great value present.  The impurities can be burned away in a hot enough fire and the result is of tremendous worth and beauty.  Or, God is like a washer woman who uses the strongest soap and cleansing chemicals and stiff brushes to scrub the stains out of beautiful cloth instead of casting it in the rubbish.  All of this imagery sounds painful.  But it is pain with a purpose and the end result is a better reality than what went before.

 

We have the stereotype that God is with us only in peaceful and beautiful moments.  But the Scriptures tell us otherwise.  God is present and at work in our lives also when we are suffering the fires of affliction.  For example, we think that God is present only in a happy marriage.  The truth is that God may be most present in an unhappy marriage C troubling, upsetting, shoving, trying to get us to turn around and to walk in the ways of forgiveness and healing. 

Malachi reminds us that God is constantly at work in our lives C troubling us, prodding us, but always working to purify us, until we learn to rely totally on God and put behind our attempts to save ourselves.

 

John the baptizer and the prophet Isaiah announced that God would do whatever was necessary to restore relations with us: filling in the valleys, leveling the mountains, straightening the crooked pathways and smoothing out the rough ground.

That passage has always called to mind for me the old Diana Ross and the Supremes song from the 1960's, AAin=t No Mountain High Enough.@  Just like that song, God=s words come to us this Advent like those of a desperate lover: AI WILL come to you,@ our God says.  ANothing will keep us apart.  If mountains stand in the way, I will level them; if valleys stand between us, I will fill them up.  I=ll straighten all the crooked places and smooth over the rough areas.  I will do whatever must be done.@  AAin=t no mountain high enough C no valley low enough C no river wide enough to keep me from you.@

 

That is good news!  And it is good news that both comforts and purifies.  To the degree that we can accept that God accepts us and does not judge us we can be more accepting and less judgmental of others.  We are not sent to the world to judge, to condemn, to evaluate, to classify, or to label.  When we walk around as if we have to make up our minds about people and tell them what is wrong with them and how they should change, we only create more division. 

 

In a world that constantly asks us to make up our minds about other people, a nonjudgmental presence seems nearly impossible.  But it is one of the most beautiful fruits of a deep spiritual life.  The impact of our spiritual life, after all, has to do with the spirit in which we approach people and events.  That spirit displays itself as much in the moments of frustration as in the moments of inspiration.  The way we live our life is our spiritual practice.