Sermon for December 10, 2006

THE REFINERS FIRE

by

Rev Dr. Harvey C. Martz

 Scripture:

 Malachi 3:1-4;

¹ See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. ² But 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; ³ 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. ⁴ Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

Luke 3:1-6

¹ In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, ² during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. ³ He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, ⁴ as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: "Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. ⁵ 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; ⁶ and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.' "

This is one of those Sundays of advent that we meet our old friend John the Baptist or John the Baptizer as I often call him. I like to use that image because sometimes people misunderstand who he is.

My example of that misunderstanding is from writer and Biblical scholar Dr. Charles Page who has written one of the books we have asked our, so far, one hundred Israel pilgrims to read before we take them to the Holy Land, and one that many of our Disciple Bible students have read also.

In the preface, Dr. Page tells about the time he was a seminary student in his mid twenties and his beloved grandmother was dying. Family members were taking turns sitting with her in those last days of her life, but she was still a feisty woman and could come up with some surprises. He reports that she did that during his shift by her bedside one night.

It was the middle of the night and he was sitting by her side reading as she slept. She woke up, she sat up in the bed and asked her 25 year old seminary student grandson this question right out of the blue: “Why did Jesus closest disciples, Peter, James and John, fall asleep on him that Thursday night in the Garden of Gethsemane while he was praying all night and when he had asked them, on that last night of his life, to stay with him and pray with him? Charles, why did they fall asleep??”

Charles Page, recovering from his surprise, said to his grandmother, “Well, I suppose those disciples went to sleep on Jesus because of what they had just experienced at the Passover meal, Grandmother; at the Passover meal, as part of the ritual, people drink four glasses of wine in that ritual as the flight from Egypt is recalled and as they thank God for God’s deliverance from bondage. So they fell asleep because they had too much to drink.”

His grandmother, ill as she was, spoke back sharply: “Nonsense, the disciples couldn’t be drunk because the disciples were Baptists and Baptists don’t drink.”

Page was taken aback: Grandmother the disciples weren’t Baptists! They were Jews, just like Jesus. Jesus was a Jew.

She said again, “The disciples were Baptists because Jesus was a Baptist—he was baptized by John the Baptist and so they were Baptists also and they could not have been drunk because Baptists don’t drink!!”

Well, you know that John the Baptist wasn’t a member of the Baptist church. He used the practice of baptism for the repentance of sin and his doing that as your bulletin cover says was a highly controversial act because in that practice he was defying and subverting the Jewish Temple authority as the only means of forgiveness. It was a revolutionary act, and Jesus, by later coming to John for baptism as well, was participating in his revolutionary movement also. 

That is why I often call John by the title of the Baptizer and not the Baptist to avoid the chance of any connection with Baptist churches today.

You know of course the difference in Methodists and Baptists today? Methodists are willing to speak to each other and acknowledge each other when they see each other in the liquor store.

We said last week that John and Jesus were cousins, second cousins, because their mothers were cousins, Mary and Elizabeth—you will see that portrayed well in the new film on The Nativity. And Judy and I were surprised this fall in our time in Italy preparing for the congregational trip there this April – surprised to see how often John the Baptizer is presented alongside Jesus in so many renaissance paintings—when both were children, and later as well. John had a place of prominence in Christian history and art history that we have forgotten about.

We have heard a description of John from a few verses in the Gospel of Luke: he lived in the desert, the wilderness, close to the Jordan River, in what is now the middle eastern country of Jordan, quoting the prophet Isaiah about preparing a way for the Lord—here is that advent motif of preparation we mentioned last week—Prepare yourself by clearing some things away, straightening out some things so the Lord can come.

If we had read further we would hear some uncomfortable words from John: he calls the religious folks in the crowd a “bunch of snakes” and he says that every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down—he is talking about people, not trees. He says that a leader is coming after him who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire and this leader will be like a harvester who separates the wheat from the chaff, the husks, and will keep the grain and throw away the chaff.

John said to the Pharisees and scribes in his audience, the religious elite, that they should stop feeling smug and stop saying to themselves that they were part of the in-group because they are the chosen people. God can raise up chosen people out of these rocks, he said. John was not full of sweetness and light and peaches and cream.

His listeners were sobered and a bit intimidated and asked him what they should do now. Do you remember what he said? He talked to them about ethics and honesty and integrity and living unselfishly and with humility. He told the soldiers in the crowd—interesting that soldiers came to hear him—don’t take advantage of your position by extorting people. He told the tax collectors to stop gouging poor people. (There is another good scene about this in the new nativity film). He told others, “If you have two coats, give one away to someone who has nothing”.  He has really started meddling hasn’t he?

John was blunt and plain spoken and controversial. He was willing to speak truth to power and let the chips fall where they may. He was a prophet. Prophets in the Bible and in our culture are willing to tell the truth and not be intimidated by others. It was the prophet Nathan in the Old Testament who confronted King David after the king had broken four of the Ten Commandments. Nathan told David he was wrong and needed to repent and turn in a new path and ask God’s forgiveness. It was risky on Nathan’s part. But his loyalty was to God and to the truth and not to the king. He was, like John and like Jesus, a prophet—willing to speak for God and to invite others to a new life, a new direction.

What did John’s bluntness get for him? Do you remember? He criticized Herod the Roman ruler of Judea, for marrying his brother’s wife. He spoke truth to power and paid for it with his life. The story of that is in your study questions in your bulletin and I encourage you to read it.

John’s entire message is perhaps unusual in December as we move toward Christ’s birth, but it is very important in helping us prepare. He quotes the prophet Isaiah from those words in Handel’s Messiah. Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low and the crooked made straight. That will happen and it needs to happen for the Messiah to come into our lives and our worlds.

We are to repent, John says. We are to repent. That means more than just feeling remorseful or feeling sad or bad about where we are and what we have done. It means turning onto a new path. Straightening some things out. Starting to go in a new direction. Cleaning up our act. To repent, in the Bible means to turn, to turn in a new direction. Turning back to God. And John says, if and when we do that, then we will see and welcome and recognize the One who is coming to us.

There are some examples of people doing what John does in our own time—just the past few days—inviting us to take an honest look at ourselves, inviting us to take our measure again against some eternal values and make some changes.

Some people see the report this week from the Iraq study group as a sort of John the Baptizer moment inviting our leaders and our country to take a new direction, to see that what we have been doing in Iraq is not working and to face that and then to take a new direction. I have bought the book of the report and will be reading it just as I read the bi- partisan 9/11 commission report which our country still has not implemented in full.

I am encouraged by the collaboration of conservatives and liberals on the Iraq study commission in contrast to the shrill evaluations of that group by some on the radical right, and I pray that what they have done will be a John the Baptist moment of speaking the truth even when it makes us uncomfortable because when we know and admit the truth, we can be free of some things that have bound us up.

That is what John was saying and there are others doing what he did—inviting us to take a new look to turn, to revaluate, to clean up our act, to straighten the crooked ways so we can be ready. Let me tell you about others who have offered that invitation like John and how people responded.

Darrent Williams, Broncos cornerback, grew up in Fort Worth Texas as an only child raised by a single mom, raised in a tough neighborhood. He could have gotten into some very bad trouble, even become part of the neighborhood gangs. His mother had two jobs and he hung out with his cousins. He said in a Denver Post interview last week that he was going down the wrong road for a while. But here is what saved him: He went to church. The preacher became a John the Baptist figure for him. He told the congregation that he knew some of them would go home from church and do some destructive things but he invited them to pray every night and ask God to help them turn in a new direction—to repent, to change course. And Darrent Williams took that invitation to heart and made some changes and began to look to God regularly and, he says, “That’s what stopped me from going down the wrong road.”

Someone said, take a new look. There is a better way. There is a different path from the one you have been on. There are some healthier practices you can take up. Be willing to revaluate. Methodist Minister John Indermark in Washington state tells about a pastor friend of his who did a sort of John the Baptist thing by suggesting in a church newsletter that families revaluate the amount of time they devote to sports and athletics for their kids and be willing to spend just a third of the amount of time on the spiritual formation of their kids as they do on the athletic formation. That’s sort of meddling isn’t it? It is the kind of meddling that John would do to help us prepare, to straighten things out, get on the right path.

It is the sort of invitation our social justice team is offering today as they hand us an energy saving light bulb and invite us to go down a different path, a more constructive path that will eventually help our planet and make us better stewards.

There was a John the Baptist moment in California this week in Saddleback Church where Pastor Rick Warren did something controversial, something out of the ordinary. He was sponsoring a conference on AIDS, helping people’s awareness about the global AIDS crisis. He had invited several speakers but he really took the heat for one speaker who didn’t pass the litmus test that some Christians have. Warren had a panel of speakers but he took flak because he invited Barack Obama as one of those speakers, even enlisting Obama to join him as they both took a test for the HIV virus.

Someone asked Pastor Warren recently if he was right wing or left wing in his theology and politics and he said he was in favor of the whole bird!

I saw another John the Baptist moment last week in one of the national newspapers I read regularly when there had been a large article about the increase in the kinds of physicians who are doing variations of cosmetic surgery—Botox injections and other procedures—even though that is out of their specialty. Two persons wrote to the paper after the article and raised the kind of question John would raise: one said, “We train our best students to be doctors and then we get spoiled physicians squabbling over cosmetic surgery like kids over the last cookie. Wake up. Some 16% of Americans don’t have health insurance and numerous health disparities face our people. Working with underserved populations isn’t as glamorous as Botox but it will do a lot more good.”

Another wrote, “Three days ago I spent five hours in the emergency room of a major urban hospital. It was understaffed, so the patients, mostly poor, waited for hours to be seen by a doctor. Some gave up and left. Who knows where or when they will receive care? It is morally wrong that our medical system offer greater rewards to doctors for smoothing away wrinkles from the foreheads of perfectly healthy upper class patrons than for restoring the breathing, setting the bones, or delivering the babies of the poor.”

Tough words. Words that sound like they came from John in preparing us to receive the Messiah: if you have much, and others around you have little, John said, something is wrong. If you have two coats and someone has none, give one away.

John makes some people uncomfortable it is part of the role of the prophet to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable and if you feel that occasionally in church, it is normal, and probably healthy!

Our last message comes from the prophet Malachi and it is similar. Let God help you remove the dross, the garbage, the trivial things we think are important when we get seduced and major in minors.

It was an honor to so some shopping this week for the two children of prisoners that Judy and I received from the Angel Tree project. I was blessed, in the same way you have been blessed as you took some of those names or other names of families in need and as you have been shopping for persons in need as well. I heard that message also from our 28 year old daughter in NYC last week as she began her Christmas shopping by looking for some gloves and clothing for the homeless persons sponsored by her church, Marble Collegiate, and bought those things purposely BEFORE she looked for gifts for her family. I like that kind of prioritization. It is what our book asks us to do, to let God help us get our priorities in the right order.

I close with another story about priorities and being sure we are going in the right direction—letting God help us reevaluate. Leroy Sievers is a journalist who was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago and he is telling his story on a web log accessed on npr.org/mycancer. He tells about how his diagnosis has helped him realize what is most important and how it gives people permission to do some things that we don’t ordinarily do. He saw a father and adult daughter hugging each other openly in the chemotherapy. waiting room and wondered if they would have ordinarily done that before the father heard his diagnosis. Then he says, what happens with this disease is that we have all been humbled. Before he got sick, he would have been embarrassed to talk as frankly and as openly as he does now about life and death. He says, “Cancer has freed us patients and families to not worry about what other people think and it has freed us to do some things we should have been doing all along. The walls of our pride have been broken down and we can relate as one vulnerable person to another vulnerable person. It lets us tell each other how much we love each other and mean to each other, to rediscover what is most important instead of what we thought was important.

The One who is coming will help us look honestly at our values and priorities and will purify/refine/reorder our lives so there will be room, really be room for him to be born in us again. Let it be so, dear God.

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