Advent 2, Year C | Malachi 3:1-3
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 8, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
Due to technical difficulties, there is no audio or video available for today’s sermon.
“But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” – Malachi 3:2[1]
Last week we tried to shift our understanding of Advent, redirecting our expectations from the culturally ingrained distraction of readying the house for a baby Jesus to more clearly recognize the reality of this Season, the purpose of which is, in truth, preparation for the Day of the Lord, which is not a pleasant thing. The Bible describes the Day of the Lord as “terrible,”[2] “a day of retribution” when “the sword shall devour and be sated, and drink its fill of [the] blood” of God’s foes.[3] Despite what commercialized Christianity has trained us to imagine, there is no magical or supernatural escape from this day, which Jesus himself declared “will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth.”[4]
But God isn’t interested death or pain or destruction. Since the days of Adam and Eve, God has been sending warnings. God tried to alert people to the Great Flood with Noah’s preaching and example. Toward the end of the Exodus, God cautioned the Hebrew refugees through Moses, saying, “I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live…and the Lord your God will bless you….But if your heart turns away and you do not hear…, I declare to you today that you shall perish….I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”[5] Even in the midst of the Babylonian Exile,[6] Ezekiel cried on God’s behalf, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live,” ending with the plea to “turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die?”[7]
Unfortunately, we humans have both remarkably short attention spans and minimal generational memory. Recognizing that, God has continued sending prophet after prophet bearing admonishment after admonishment.
God is not without mercy, which is why these messages continue to echo for us today. However, to draw from C.S. Lewis, sometimes God’s mercy may appear alarmingly severe.
That’s because none of us, myself included, can come close to imagining what it would be to stand before God, to bear the full weight of pure and unmitigated Love—not a Love rooted in high fives and hugs and permissive winks but actual, unfettered Love itself. Love shining so brightly it blinds not only the eyes but the mind. Love blazing so intensely it can’t help but consume all flesh. Love of such ferocity that it desiccates the sea, melts the sky, and dissolves in an instant any imperfect reality that dares darken its path.
Words cannot express the furious virtue of the Love that God is. Listen to the cry from today’s Hebrew prophet: “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.”[8] And then remember this statement isn’t talking about God. Malachi’s simply describing the presence of God’s messenger, just a lowly herald sent to remind us, once again, to ready ourselves for the real thing.
This, then, is God’s mercy: the constant warnings—the continuing call to prepare. This is the severity: the measures it will take to come close to what we need to do. Measures best described as refining metal, superheating what we already find precious so intensely that it abandons its preferred form and combusts its own impurities, leaving it free to be reforged into something new, something that might be precious to a god. Measures that feel like abrading skin with soap. The changes we need to accomplish go far beyond simply making an effort to lighten a major stain or two; this is a desperate striving to truly and permanently erase every spot or blemish, even if we have to expose our own bone to do so.
God’s messengers keep calling us to rid ourselves of anything and everything incompatible with raw and raging Love. What time we have remaining is yet another mercy. If it can take us decades of struggle to prepare for God’s presence—refining and forging and burnishing and polishing ourselves again and again until only the purity of devotion to God and neighbor remains—imagine the terror and agony of being forced through that transformation in an instant—the split-second cremation of a lifetime of grudges and distain and deception and delusion. Perhaps that moment is what we try to capture with any description of Hell, for what then would remain of any being dedicated simply to themself? Only misery, lack, and eternal self-abasement, ongoing shame recognizing ourselves as something less than a spiderweb’s shadow at God’s celebration of unending Joy.
So as I said last week, I remind us again today: Love is coming. Make its paths straight. Fill what’s lacking. Flatten even the slightest rise of pride. Expose what’s hidden, and outright raze whatever remains rugged. So may all flesh rejoice in our God’s reign restored.
“…who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Joel 2:11, 31; Malachi 4:5
[3] Jeremiah 46:10
[4] Luke 21:35
[5] Deuteronomy 30:15-19
[6] One of the consequences of the Hebrew people’s descendants turning from God’s paths
[7] Ezekiel 33:11
[8] Malachi 3:2