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n my sermon last week I noted that the longest season in the church year, which stretches from early summer to late fall, is called “Ordinary Time.” For much of our lives, that is what our faith is like. We seek God’s presence in the everyday and the ordinary experiences of our day to day lives. But there are times when we need to be jolted out of the ordinary, to see God, the world, and our own lives in new ways. In exactly this manner, the season of Advent– the four week period leading up to the celebration of Christmas– jolts us out of ordinary time, reminding us of the God who also acts in ways that are unexpected, unpredicted, unforseen. Advent declares to the church and to the world that they way things are is not the way they will always be, because God is about to do a new thing. This is the faith we celebrate in Advent.

        What we learn this morning is that God may act in ways that are unforseen, God may invade our world in surprising ways, yet nevertheless, God always has a messenger to prepare the way. Malachi– whose very name means messenger– proclaimed to the exiles just returned from Babylon, that the Lord whom they seek, in whom they delight, is indeed coming to the temple. And in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of the Lord came to John in the wilderness. While John and Malachi were indeed messengers of God, it’s not entirely clear how many people heeded what they had to say. That too may be part and parcel of being a messenger of God. You often find yourself crying out in the wilderness.

        When Mohamed Yayha was a student living in Cairo in 1995, he began receiving reports from friends and relatives in his native village in Darfur that the Janjaweed pro-Arab militias, with the support of the Sudanese government, were engaging in activities such as burning down entire villages, killing all the men and boys, even raping women and young girls, that appeared to be part of a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing to rid Western Sudan of its Black African population. Mohamed and other Sudanese students living in Cairo immediately sought to alert the international community of this unfolding humanitarian crisis. They literally carried letters on foot to the embassies in Cairo, the very first to sound the alarm about the atrocities that were taking place in their homeland.

        Since that time, according to international human rights groups, more than 400,000 people have been killed; more than 2 million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in camps in Sudan or in neighboring Chad; and more than 3.5 million men, women, and children are completely reliant on international aid for survival. In the past few months, things have actually grown worse, with escalating violence and displacement, and a ramped up campaign of violence against women. International aid workers have been killed; the feeble African Union peacekeeping forces have been completely stymied in their efforts to protect civilians. Finally, our own government has begun to speak up, but it is far from a high priority. It took years of concerted effort for the Bush administration even to acknowledge that what was happening there constituted genocide.

W e often anticipate the coming of Christmas with delight. Influenced more by our cultural festival of consumption that takes place on December 25^th than we are by the actual stories of Jesus’ birth, we approach the birth of the Christ child with the nostalgic wonder of children. Yet our Advent texts remind us that the coming of the one whom we await brings both judgement and promise. This is the terrible hope of Advent. The one in whom you delight is coming, Malachi announces, but then he says, “who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” In other words, be careful what you wish for. The God who comes in love and peace also comes to judge the world in righteousness.

        So we pray for peace, but are we ready to do the things that make for peace? We pray for the poor, but are we prepared to make the changes in our own lives that would help bring poverty to an end? The call of the season of Advent is to live in to the reality that we believe in faith is coming in to being.

        The reporter Shankar Vedantam had an interesting article in The Washington Post last week about the phenomenon called psychological entrapment. That’s where we get trapped into a certain course of action, even when it is no longer working, because we have invested so much previous time and energy that we do not want to acknowledge that we have been pursuing the wrong path or wasting our time. It happens, for example, when we buy an old car, and continue to throw good money after bad, because we have already invested so much in the damn car already that we don’t want to admit that we are wasting our money. It also happens, Vedantam notes, at times of war, when we are reticent to withdraw our troops because so many soldiers have already lost their lives and we don’t want their sacrifice to be in vein. So as a world we continue to be devoted to the escalating cycle of violence to resolve all our differences, though there is scant evidence is the most effective means to advance our own or others’ interests.

T he prophet Malachi employs an arresting pair of metaphors to describe the sort of human transformation that is necessary. The messenger of the Lord, Malachi proclaims, will be like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap, or to put it more colloquially, like laundry soap. Frederick Gaizer, who teaches Old Testament at Luther Seminary, and has lived and taught for many years in Zimbabwe, notes that Malachi masterfully combines both masculine and feminine images from an ancient rural setting to describe what God will be like. In the villages of Africa, Gaizer writes,

        “Men gathered near the villages, [as they would have in the ancient world], stoking and fanning a refining fire, feeling its heat close at hand, knowing the power and danger of its presence with a directness that we moderns rarely experience. God is like that, says Malachi. A blazing fire. Hot and close. Because God is God, to be in God’s presence is always a bit dangerous. No impurity, no sin, no wrong can survive in the presence of God. God will burn away our faults and make us pure.”

        Or, to use another image, Malachi says, God is like laundry soap. In the ancient world, Gaizer notes, this would have been primarily a female image of household and intimacy. Again, Gaizer writes,

        “Malachi suggests that God is like the tribal mother washing the family’s clothes in a stream; she won’t rest until everything is clean and fresh. Hers is a hands-on labor of love, working to make sure that those she cares enough about to touch the dirt of their bodies can be clean and presentable to the world. God is like that, says Malachi—a washer-woman, bent on cleaning up her family.”

        So the Lord is coming, writes Malachi, but like a refiner’s fire, to purify, like laundry soap, to wash clean, employing whatever it takes to cleanse and purify God’s people. Gaizer concludes:

        “Is this good news or bad news? Hearers, then or now, can answer only for themselves. No doubt there will be a measure of ambiguity even for believers. God is coming! How wonderful it will be to be in the loving arms of God forever. God is coming? What good news! Let me go out and meet him! But God is coming! How terrible it will be when he finds me not loving my neighbor as I should, not tending the earth as I ought, not caring for myself as I might. God is coming? What bad news! Let me find a place to hide!”

I said last week, quoting Walter Brueggemann, that prophetic imagination is declaring to the world that newness is possible, even when there is no evidence on the ground. And the church is called to be the community that lives into that newness, unbeholden to the world as it is, because in hope we believe that God is about to do a new thing. This morning I would like to add to that image. In the season of Advent, the church is called to be that messenger of transformation, calling the world to account on behalf of the justice and righteousness of God– and we are called to be that messenger, just like the prophets of old, whether the world is listening or not. We are called to be that messenger because this is who God has called us to be in this moment.

        So today we take a very small step in that direction. We are invited to gather today in solidarity with the people of Darfur and to say, once again, the strong words “never again.” So the world said, at the end of World War II, “never again.” So the world said, in Bosnia, “never again.” So the world said, in Rwanda, “never again.” Yet here we are again, as the atrocities unfold, while the world once again stands by and watches, but does nothing. If God is coming, surely God will have something to say about what the world allowed to take place under our watch. If it is entirely up to us, there is little reason to do more than despair.

        But our hope is in the God Immanuel, God-is-with-us, God who will burn like fire and purify, God who will wash us clean, like a mother who will not let us go, like a father who will not give up on his children, but who comes among us again and again in justice and righteousness.

So we pray,

        Holy Spirit, Advocate and Comforter,

        In you we celebrate

        the liberating presence of the living Christ.

        You blow where you will,

        refreshing, renewing and inspirit;

        Like fire you purify.

        Holy Spirit, Advocate and Comforter,

        You expose what is evil in the world.

        You convict the world of sin;

        Like fire you purify.

        Purify us, carry us beyond

        our narrow personal concerns;

        Uphold, preserve and care for your creation.

        Nourish, sustain and direct your creatures.

        Holy Spirit, Advocate and Comforter,

        Like fire you purify.

        Purify us, we pray.                     

                                 ✞