Introduction

This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 5-6, 2009, the weekend of the Second Sunday of Advent.

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Readings

Malachi 3:1-4 or Baruch 5:1-9
Luke 1:68-79 (ant. 78)
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

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Prayer

As we hear and heed your Word, O God, may it be for us a voice crying in the wilderness of our lives, calling us to prepare the way of the Lord, your Son and our Savior. Amen. (based on Luke 3:4b, NRSV)

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Message

Today we continue our journey through Advent.
We listen to Malachi’s prophetic vision of a messenger
who will come to deliver a Word from God
that shall burn and cleanse and purify his people,
making them holy and pleasing to him.

We overhear a call issued by John the Baptist for God’s people
to be washed for the forgiveness of sins,
to turn our lives around,
to head in a new and repentant direction,
to see our days as ways to be straightened,
our shortcomings as valleys to be filled,
our pride as hills to be leveled off,
our straying as crooked paths to be made straight,
and our errors as rough spots as to be made smooth.

The readings are clear.
When God prepares to come into our lives,
he desires for us to be fitting to receive him,
to be holy to contain him,
to be pleasing to worship him.
And desire may not be a word strong enough
to say what God expects us to do.
It might be better to say he demands
that we be renewed, rebuilt, refreshed, and restored.

The power of that pronouncement makes cringe a little.
We shrink back from that word—demand.
We hesitate to hear and heed this message;
that response may not be admirable, but it is understandable.

Demand is a word of law.
It says to us, “Do this. Be this way. Change.”
We can see how this word works
with a little test when we get home today.
Try saying to your husband or wife,
you mom or dad,
“I demand that you …,” and then finish your sentence.
See how well that works
to bring peace and harmony to your family life.

This is what the law does it human life.
It asserts one’s will upon another,
and relies upon the one on the receiving end
to make good upon the demand,
or suffer the consequences.

But God is not like you and me.
He speaks a single word, his Word,
and that message is both Law and Gospel,
Demand and Promise—
both at the same time.

We hear them as two different messages,
but only because we are divided within ourselves.
The sinner in us hears Law and Demand,
while the saint in us—the forgiven child of God—hears Gospel and Promise.

In this life,
these two aspects coexist in each one of us,
but do not listen as one.
And so in any moment,
we hear God’s Word as Law or Gospel, Demand or Promise.

In Malachi, God assures us
he will send a messenger to speak that Word.
And his Word does demand
that we be burnt like impure metal in a refiner’s fire,
that we be scrubbed with the strongest soap to wash us clean of our filth,
that we be freed of every impurity that taints our hearts and minds and bodies.

But God does not demand anything
he will not also empower us to accomplish.
Malachi’s messenger comes equipped
with the Word of God.
Its demand tells us what he wants in his people.
And its promise makes it happen.

As Malachi proclaims,

“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, NRSV)

Right there is the promise of God.
The one he sends will carry out the divine plan in human life.
God sends a messenger to speak of his demands,
but he also promises
that the message will have the power
to make the demands come to pass in us.

And beyond that,
we trust that God kept this promise
to “send[] [his] messenger to prepare the way,” (Malachi 3:1, NRSV)
when he raised up John the Baptist.

And as the last in the line of prophets,
John spoke God’s Word and pointed beyond himself,
directing our attention away from him,
turning our gaze to God’s coming in our midst.

This is why we listen to Malachi and John together during Advent.
They lead us to watch and to wait
for the coming of God into our lives.
This is our time of preparation, of getting ready.

It’s like emptying the garage, sweeping it out, and painting it
so that it is made fitting for the graduation party.
It’s like cleaning the house and setting the table with the best dishes
before long-awaited relatives come to dinner.

This is a time when we are getting ready
for Christ to come into our world,
to dwell among us, in our families,
to inhabit the depths of our hearts.

And for us to be ready for Jesus Christ
is for us to be burnt and cleansed and purified,
to repent, to be straightened and leveled and smoothed.

This is what God demands of us,
and it is more than we can accomplish on our own.
But he knows that, and so he promises he will work in us
to make his will come to pass.
And wherever he does that, there is his kingdom.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray,
“Thy kingdom come.”
Martin Luther guides us in the Small Catechism to ask a question:
“What does this mean?”
The answer tells us,
“God’s kingdom comes indeed without our praying for it,
but we ask in this prayer that it may come also to us.”

And it goes on:

“When does this happen?
“God’s kingdom comes
when our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit,
so that by his grace we believe his holy Word
and live a godly life on earth now and in heaven forever.”
(Small Catechism, “Lord’s Prayer,” Second Petition.)

It’s only by the grace of God
that we can live godly lives.
We do so by virtue of his Promise, his Gospel.
This is why John the Baptist
comes into the lives of God’s people
and tells us that Isaiah’s prophecy shall come to pass in Jesus Christ:

“Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Luke 3:5-6, NRSV) Amen.