Refiner's Fire
December 10, 2006
When session meets a bit later this morning, our first item of business will be a conversation with incoming elders. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been having conversations with the elders-elect about their upcoming service, and in the midst of that I thought back to my own preparation for ordination and a, shall we say, negative object lesson in pastoral care that I picked up along the way.
In preparing for that service of ordination, I went to the interim senior pastor of the church that would host the service and asked him for a bit of guidance in several matters concerning the service. Without any response to the concerns I’d raised, he launched into a ten-minute story about his own ordination.
I suppose all of us do that to some extent from time to time. This man had raised it to an art form, such that he regularly worked out his own issues from the pulpit – right up to and including digestive issues. I kid you not.
That came to mind this week as I was reading Malachi’s words and then Isaiah’s words out of the mouth of John the Baptist. You see, we Christians have been in the habit for 2,000 years of interpreting the words of the ancient Hebrew prophets as being directly about Jesus, and, thus indirectly, about us.
Fact of the matter is, we’ve got is exactly backwards. The words are directly about us and only indirectly about Jesus.
Let me sort that out a bit. We read this passage during Advent in order to hear, in the Christ event, the events in history promised by the prophet Malachi. Indeed, the framers of our Christian Bible placed Malachi as the final book of the first testament just ahead of Matthew, the first of the gospel stories. This arrangement certainly means to suggest that Malachi’s prophetic vision is directly connected to the story of Jesus.
However, a bit of common sense tells us the Malachi wasn’t talking about Jesus. It’s not that prophesying a birth 450 years in advance strains credulity so much as it is that the promise of an event 450 years in the future is going to have no impact on the prophet’s intended audience. After all, no one suffering today will find comfort in the promise of a savior coming 450 years from now. No one acting unjustly today will find approbation in the promise of a judge coming 450 years from now. No one longing for God today, wants to wait 450 years for God-with-us.
No. Malachi was not speaking about Jesus. The words of Isaiah, used so often in our Advent stories and placed in the mouth of John the Baptist in our passage from Luke’s gospel, were written even earlier than Malachi’s – about 550 years before Jesus.
No. Isaiah was not speaking about Jesus either.
Nevertheless, the gospel writers – and quite likely Jesus, himself – used the words of the prophets to situate the story of Jesus within the broader story of Israel and Israel’s God.
And it is within that understanding that these prophetic words, written some 2,500 years ago for a premodern Middle Eastern Jewish community, can be seen as directly about us – Christians living in North America in the year 2006 of the Common Era.
Listen, again, to the words of the prophets:
John the Baptist calling out, “prepare the way,” the echo of Isaiah’s promise that “every valley shall be filled, every mountain made low, the crooked made straight, the rough way smoothed, and a vision for all people,” and the prophetic vision of the refiner’s fire from Malachi: these words are for us and about us. The promise that the mountains shall be made low and way made straight are for us and about us. The promise of a refining fire is for us, as well.
Isaiah’s words – “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low” – are not, as some misunderstand them, about making everything easy. Isaiah spoke to an exile community who knew better than to believe their way would be easy. No. Isaiah is not promising the exiles that they will return home on Easy Street. But he is promising them that the way to God is not blocked even by the difficulty of the present time.
That promise is for us – even now as we live in the shadow of the most violent, war-torn century in human history, as we live in the memory of Holocaust and the reality of Darfur. Even now, the way to God is not blocked for us. Even now, when the Holy Day of Christmas has become an excuse for conspicuous consumption, the way to God is not blocked for us. Even now, as some of us suffer illness and the disease of loved ones, as others of us suffer broken relationships or vocational distress. Even now, as we live our all too human lives, the way to God is not blocked for us.
Indeed, God speaks still and beckons us to deeper communion with the divine and deeper community with those who bear the imprint of the divine – that is to say, us, we who live these all too human lives.
Where Isaiah speaks words of comfort to us, Malachi’s words speak a particular challenge to us. With his images of judgment and refiner’s fire, these prophetic words remind us that though the way to God may be made level and straight in and through Jesus, the way of God, as revealed in the life of Jesus, is anything but easy. For despite the pastoral images of shepherds, mangers and new life, we know that the story of Jesus goes forth from Bethlehem toward the cross.
In using the words of the Hebrew prophets to shape our understanding of the Christ event, we draw upon a particular memory, a particular story told through particular texts. In the end, these texts are about us – but only insofar as they transform us.
Reading these stories these days may be the most radically counterculture gesture any of us can make.
For in the face of a culture that believes so clearly in redemptive violence, these texts guide our feet in the way of peace. In the face of a culture that believes so clearly that we are what we can buy, these texts promise their richest blessing to the poor. In the face of a culture that believes so clearly in power and domination, these texts tell us that the powerful have been brought down and the lowly lifted up. In the face of a culture of self-absorption – where magazines such as Us and Self call to us at the grocery store check-out lines – these texts call us to refocus our deepest concern on the other. And, most urgently, in the face of a culture of death, these texts – even though they take us by way of the cross – promise everywhere the gift of new life.
As Walter Brueggemann put it, “the recovery of the biblical text is urgent, the most urgent ‘social action’ that can be undertaken. For it is only when the past is brimming with miracle and the future is inundated with fidelity that the present can be recharacterized as a place of neighborliness in which
Ø Scarcity can be displaced by generosity;
Ø Anxiety can be displaced by confidence;
Ø Greed can be displaced by sharing;
Ø Brutality can be displaced by compassion and forgiveness.”[1]
The Advent story calls us to prepare for precisely such a place, such a site in our lives, in the lives of our families, our workplaces, our communities where conditions of scarcity, anxiety, greed and brutality are transformed into their opposites. Prepare, in other words, for a world turned inside out and upside down.
Further, they tell us to prepare as if by going through the refiner’s fire which leaves in its wake generosity, fidelity, sharing, compassion, forgiveness.
This is the way of Christ. It is the way for which we prepare in these days of Advent. May our hearts and our lives be open to its coming. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
5:55 AM
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