Starting Over

"Starting Over"

Malachi 3:1-4
December 6, 2009

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. 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; 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. Then the offering of Judah
and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former
years.

Almost 400 years ago our forbearers, the Puritans, left Amsterdam, where they had fled
the tendrils of English persecution, for the city of Leiden in Germany, seeking yet
another safe harbor. Of course, most of you know that the Puritans and the Pilgrims—
which are actually two separate groups of early Christian dissidents—are our ancestors
in the faith—the Congregationalists trace their roots to these two camps of Christians
who had their problems with the establishment Church of England. The Puritans felt
that the Church of England was salvageable, and only need to be purified—hence the
name “Puritans,” while the Pilgrims thought there was no hope left for an institution so
soiled with politics and questionable practices, ones they did not see reflected in the
newly available Bibles that came off those also newly invented printing presses. The
Puritans had left England, gone to Amsterdam, found themselves embroiled in a
controversy with another separatist group, and so, in order to avoid even more
infighting, they decided to go to Leiden and were preparing for a journey into the new
world, and Leiden was simply a place to escape. After all the persecution suffered
under English church, now they were fleeing persecution and fighting from within, and
so they sought peace in yet another country, and then 11 years later they would cross
the Atlantic and arrive on our shores.

You know, I often wonder what it would have been like to be one of these brave souls,
facing persecution after persecution, controversy after controversy—and to have to
constantly start over. You’re born in England, you flee to the Netherlands, and then
you run off to Leiden, and then, finally, you start all over again in a new world, a world
you had never seen—and frankly, very few eyes had ever seen. How would you
survive? Who could you trust in this brand new world? And the work of starting over
again—if you’ve ever had to do that, to start over from scratch, from nothing, because
you lost it all, whether what you lost was financial or familial or emotional or spiritual,
then you have some small inklings of what our forbearers in the faith were going
through. To begin again, one more time, despite the odds, despite all that had been
lost, again, to pick up oneself and say yes to the next chapter of one’s life, well, it’s
amazing thing, these ordinary miracles that happen every day, when we, like the
puritans, like all those losers in life, choose to get up and get going, despite all that is
now gone, all that has been lost.

But there is something about being scrubbed down by life, by circumstances, by the
universe, that clarifies one’s thinking, that makes you get to the marrow of what really
matters in this life. When one finds when oneself at the bottom, it helps you sort out
the truth of the matter, and what is important in this life. And, in fact, there is research
to back this up—that when you find yourself at the bottom, depressed and feeling the
blues, it is then that your mind is at its best when it comes problem solving. I found this
little piece from a short article in the THE WEEK magazine (Nov 20, 2009, vol 9, issue
439, pg 24) and it reads:

“Happy” and “healthy” often go together, but being sad does have its advantages, new
research suggests. In a series of experiments, researchers in Australia found that
when people are feeling down, some of their cognitive skills are actually sharper than
those of their sunnier counterparts. Scientists induced happy or sad moods in subjects
by showing them various films and having them recall negative or positive events.
When asked the truth of certain urban myths, the sad subjects turned out to be less
gullible than the happy ones. They also had more accurate memories of events they’d
witnessed and could make more persuasive arguments. The researchers say that
though a good mood encourages creativity and cooperation, it also promotes reliance
on mental shortcuts; a negative mood prompts the sufferer to think more carefully and
to pay closer attention to the external world. Sadness “promotes information
processing best suited to dealing with more demanding situations, “psychologist
Joseph Forgas told the London Daily Mail. A “positive mood is not universally
desirable.”

So, there is something to this idea that bad times do something for us—they allow us to
see the world the way it is, and to think about what really matters to us, to think about
what core values we do ultimately hold in our hearts. I had that experience about 5 or 6
years ago, and honestly, after that horrible time, where I found myself mostly
disappointed in myself, I had to think a lot about what I had bought into over the
previous years, what I had come to believe that simply didn’t line up with what my heart
was telling me, and what I cared most about in this world. That year long experience of
hitting rock bottom, spiritually and emotionally and professionally, it felt like I had been
scrubbed clean, like I was starting over, a pilgrim in a strange new world, where what
was past was past, and what was future was going to be better, because of what I had
learned from that experience, because of what the shadows had taught me during
those times.

I think that is what our Scripture is trying tell us here, this odd and apocalyptic reading
from the book of Malachi, where the writer anticipates a day where he and all of Israel
will go through the purifying experience of the refiner’s fire, and the harsh cleansing of
the fuller’s soap, made of nitre, an element that came from the ashes of certain plants
in the Near East.   In Advent, we often coo and get sentimental about the baby Jesus
being born amongst once again, but there is a sense in which Advent is also that
clarifying event that Malachi speaks of here, that moment when all gets changed
because who is born amongst us, and how this radical answer to our needs, our need
for hope and salvation and the chance to start over again, can also be a razing
moment, a moment when all gets wiped out so that we call start over again, so that we
can resurrected once again.

And yet, frankly, we don’t know a whole lot about the writer, this Malachi, but we do
think he wrote during the time of Second Temple, in 515 BCE, when the Temple had
been rebuilt in Jerusalem, after all those years in exile in Babylon. The problem was
that the priests who staffed that temple had become corrupt, just like the Puritans felt
that the Church of England had been corrupted some 400 years ago. And so this
writer—actually, the word Malachi means “my messenger”—is writing to decry the
corruption he sees amongst the priests, and to point to a day, a day of the Lord, when
God’s messenger will change everything, will refine and purify, and make new, simply
because this One has walked into the room, and has been born into the world.

And for us Christians this passage is a reminder to us, especially during Advent, that
the coming of Jesus, even as a baby, has turned everything upside down, has pushed
the boundaries of so many, and has caused all of us to rethink who God is and what
God loves. But it’s not all good news, not for everyone—if you love rules and
regulations, if you love things nice and neat, if you love the institution more than
people, if you think that compassion has its place, but it’s more important to always hold
people accountable, to punish them harshly for their wrong doings, to make them pay
for their sins, then this isn’t good news for you. And, of course, all of us have probably
held these beliefs at one point or another, we’ve all struggled with grace and mercy,
especially when it is applied to others, people who we don’t think deserve mercy and
grace, or when we’ve wanted the rules to be followed, because that makes life nice and
neat, and then comes along a quandary, a dilemma, that shoots our rule book straight
to hell, so to speak. We all tend to think of the coming of Jesus as good news, at least
at first, and then his message and his life begin to really challenge us, and we quickly
realize that this Jesus will refine us, will cleanse us, will scrape away the pretensions
and religiosity that seem to so often seep into our lives. The world will be made new,
our lives will be made new, but they will be made new as much through the bad times as
through the good times, as much as through despair as through joy. The cross, the
resurrection, that is the truth of it, the way life is: both are used to make us new beings,
cleansed by circumstances that come with just living and following after the way of the
Christ.

Now, that is a hard thing, to understand the birth of Jesus as both being good news and
bad news, that it is good news that God loves us so much as to meet us in this way, in
this child, in this Jesus, and yet, it is bad news, in the sense that what this Jesus will tell
us about God and ourselves will challenge us to the core—for me, I would rather have
a clear sense of the rules rather than the simple commands to love God and love
others. I think I am like most people, because over and over again, we Christians
almost immediately begin setting up our own set of rules about what it means to follow
Jesus, in addition to these two simple commandments. Sure, I say love the simplicity of
Jesus’ ethics…but, wow, you know, it’s hard actually trying to apply them, so maybe,
could I have some clarification on that, and, not so surprisingly, a lot of our fellow
Christians have stepped up to the plate to tell us exactly what kind of people we are to
love, and how we are to love God. Don’t get me wrong—of course, we must think
through those commandments, but really, our instincts to add more commandments to
those simple ones point to our actual human desire for rules and regulations when it
comes to life and love.

But you know, if you’ve gone through those refining experiences, those difficult times,
you usually come to know how much of a failure all those attempts to elaborate on what
loving others, and loving God, actually means, what a failure all those rule books
everyone has in their heads, and for which a thousand books have been written, really
are! When you are scrubbed clean by life and hard times, when you get to the core of
who you are, its then you realize the powerful and wonderful simplicity, the wonderfully
complex simplicity, shall I say, of Jesus life and the two commandments he left behind
for us. If those Australian scientists are right, failure can teach so much, more than we
had expected, and failure is just something we can’t hide from, no matter how much we
may try or others may try to shield us from. In a recent commentary in the Christian
Science Monitor, Brooke Williams was lamenting the fact that nowadays parents often
try to protect their children from failure (Nov 22, 2009, Vol 101, issue 117, p 27), so
much so that there are parties in which the game of musical chairs, where one chair is
taken away every time the music starts and stops, has been changed so that no chairs
are ever taken away, and the children just go round and round, never having to
experience the moment when they are one without a chair to sit on. She writes the
following words:

Nobody wants their child to feel pain and rejection. However, it is our job as parents to
teach them how to cope with and overcome failure—a fundamental part of life—not
avoid it. The best place to start learning this lesson is at a party in the company of
friends and parents who will soon be passing out cake and goody bags to take home.
After the party, my son admitted that he was very sad when he lost his round. “Mommy,
I had to scrunch up my face really tight to keep the tears from coming out.” I started to
feel sad, and a little bit guilty, until his next comment: “Can we play musical chairs again
at dinner tonight?”

Now, I don’t know if we get goody bags as followers of Jesus when we get through the
hard times, when we get through those refining experiences that just come with being
alive, but I do like this columnist’s reminder to us that when we experience failure, there
is no better place to do that than in the presence of a parent who loves us completely,
and yet, who loves us enough not to always protect us from us our own mistakes.
Jesus comes and he is good news, always good news, and yet, his presence will cause
us to look within ourselves, to see if we are really are being our best selves, the self
that God wants from us. A commenter on this text has noted that when purification
happens within the refining process, there is something else that happens: for example,
“when silver is refined, it is treated with carbon or charcoal, preventing the absorption
of oxygen and resulting in its sheen and purity. One writer has suggested that a
silversmith knows that the refining process is complete only when she observes her
‘own image reflected in the mirror-like surface of the metal.’” (Feasting on the Word,
Year C, Vol 1, p 30) So too is it with us in going through those refining experiences,
those purifying experiences in our lives—we come to see ourselves more clearly, more
truthfully, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worst, but the One who has
allowed us to go through that experience, this One stays beside us always, like that
Parent with her child at the party, to make sure we’re going to be alright through it all,
one way or another. Amen.