Homily Advent December 9 2018 (1)

Bring Forth Peace

Rev. Amanda Lewis

Malachi 3:1-4

Our text from Malachi this morning is a snippet of dialogue arranged as though between God and the people, with this messenger set in the middle. Malachi’s message is to people who are in the midst of religious and cultural dispute. How should they worship? And live? Everyone has their own perspective – and no one wants to compromise.
Surely, they are peoples who have been through traumatic experiences: some of them taken into exile forced to live and make do in a land and culture that was not their own, others remaining just trying to get by. I can’t fathom the determination it must have taken to pull together the remains of their former way of life and build new lives! Over the decades that tenuous new normal became their way of life unique to each group. But then things change again! The descendants of those in exile sent back to a place they’ve only heard stories about. And for the people who had stayed- they’re meeting folks they’ve only heard rumors about. Like long lost cousins gathering on the family farm. Maybe it was exciting at first, but now here they are- together- and it seems like the joy of the family reunion is long gone and the arguments have started.

It makes sense that after the trauma they’ve faced that relations between these people would be tense. Throw into the mix prejudice, a thirst for power, and a few dashes of greed and we arrive on scene with Malachi. The people are cheating laborers out of their hard earned wages, they’re taking advantage of the widows and the orphans, and they’re denying people who are different from them justice. And the priests aren’t any better.

Just before our passage Malachi is addressing the corrupt priests –calling them out for having the nerve to try and tattle on other people and to tell God that the way they’re being treated isn’t fair. I confess that I hear Malachi’s message from God in my mother’s voice – in that same frustration that she would tell my sister and I “just you wait until your father gets home.”
I can imagine Malachi saying “Justice? You who are all trying to take advantage of each other… you want justice? Fine, I’m sending someone to prepare the way. And just you look out because he’s not going to put up with your nonsense- he’s going to clean things up – scrub the cloth till its as white as snow and refine the silver so you can see your reflection in it. Lookout, because I’m going to put things right.”

So Its been thousands of years and things don’t seem to be too different, the issues in Malachi’s day sound pretty familiar. People afraid of change choosing hatred instead of imagining a new future, the rich trying to get richer while the laborers struggle to make ends meet, people vilifying families seeking asylum and safe place to call home. We’re in a similar boat and we too need to hear God’s message. But why today, during Advent, on a day dedicated to peace?

Though the promise of fullers soap and the refiners fire may sound intimidating- they’re not weapons of destruction- they’re stored in the cleaning closet, there to make things better. For God’s work is restorative not retributive, bringing about a full shalom- a peace founded in justice.

I know Martin Luther King spoke truth when he said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But at times I confess that I find myself impatient. Did God give up? No. I don’t actually think it’s an unfulfilled promise, rather, I think it is an invitation into that change.

Malachi reminds me of that piece of school yard wisdom – remember when you point a finger at someone else there are three more pointing right back at you. It’s all too easy to make a list about so and so, from that group, who is doing wrong. But we too contribute to systems of injustice. We take for granted our privilege: that we benefit from the color of our skin, our education, our way of speaking English. And at times we are passive in the face of injustice.

Like Malachi’s audience we have the opportunity to change, to turn our hearts towards God and reflect like shiny silver God’s love into the world. We have the chance to be a part of bringing forth God’s peace in everything that we do- day in and day out.

Shane Claiborne describes what it means to be part of God’s work, to be a peacemaker: “Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. Peacemaking is about being able to recognize in the face of the oppressed our own faces, and in the hands of the oppressors our own hands.”

So in this season of Advent, and every day after, may we take part in God’s holy work of bringing about the justice, healing, and restoration, to bring forth God’s peace!