The 2^nd Sunday of Advent | December 8, 2024 | Malachi 3:1-7b and Luke 3:1-20 | Paula Murray |

3“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, 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 sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord.^{[a] 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. ⁵ “Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the Lord of hosts. ⁶ “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. ⁷ From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts.

Malachi 3:1-7a

3 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, ² during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. ³ And 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 Isaiah the prophet,

“The voice of one crying 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 become straight,
and the rough places shall become level ways,
⁶ and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

⁷ He said therefore to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸ Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. ⁹ Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” ¹⁰ And the crowds asked him, “What then shall we do?”¹¹ And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” ¹² Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” ¹³ And he said to them, “Collect no more than you are authorized to do.” ¹⁴ Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.”

¹⁵ As the people were in expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Christ, ¹⁶John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” ¹⁸ So with many other exhortations he preached good news to the people. ¹⁹ But Herod the tetrarch, who had been reproved by him for Herodias, his brother’s wife, and for all the evil things that Herod had done, ²⁰ added this to them all, that he locked up John in prison.

Luke 3:1-20

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

We know we are deep into the blue season of Advent when we hear the brisk, impatient voice of John the Baptizer, the cousin of Jesus, as the Gospel of Luke tells us, and the forerunner of the Messiah. So accustomed are we to the Baptizer’s voice in the Gospel reading this time of year, that we fail to hear the same message elsewhere. We do not hear from the prophet Malachi often on a Sunday morning, but if we listen and listen well this morning we hear the same message that John conveys, and with the same sense of urgency even though Malachi prophesied some five hundred years earlier than John the Baptist.

“Behold, I send My messenger and he will prepare the way before Me.” The prophet Malachi, whose name means “messenger,” addresses the people of Israel who have lost their way even though God’s blessings are written in stone before them. The time is after the return of the exiled Jews from Babylon after Assyria had conquered it. The Temple and the walls around the city had been rebuilt long enough ago that Israel had forgotten how the Lord brought them home and built them up. Now, the old cycle of idolatry and sin repeats itself; they live as if there is no God, and they abound in sin: sorcery, adultery, oppression of the poor, the widows and the orphans.

But the Day of the Lord is coming, promises the Lord of Hosts through His messenger the prophet, and there will be judgment. Like a furnace used to burn away the impurities of newly mined gold, the Lord will purge them of their sin, and they will rue the day they turned from God. But if there is the promise of judgment for idolatry and sin, so also is there the promise of mercy, for God is always compassionate and forgiving. “Return to Me,” says our heavenly Father, the Lord of Hosts, and “I will return to you.”

“Repent! You brood of vipers, you poisonous snake babies,” snarls John the Baptist. What is it to repent other than return to the Lord God Who is our Creator and the agent of our redemption? Of all God’s Advent messengers, Malachi, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist, it is the Baptist that grabs our attention and forces us to listen. John’s office space is the wilderness, and it is there that he somehow meets us in the carefully covered-up wild places of our spirits. But half-naked John is not about covering anything up, least of all sin, so he rips off the covers and reveals the rot beneath. His eyes drill into us and see, somehow, all the occasional ugliness we disguise under a veneer of civility or niceness. And because he sees it, we see it, too.

Judgment is not a pleasure to look to, but a reality nonetheless. There is not a one of us here who does not have secret and not-so-secret sins to be revealed, repented, and forgiven. And so, John the Baptist, cousin to the Savior who is not only the balm to the wounds sin causes but their cure, confronts us on this pleasant though chilly morning. With all the urgency of soldiers preparing for war, John demands that we repent, that we not be lost to sin but saved. Who needs that just hours before we hit the mall or the laptop to finish the last of the Christmas shopping?

We do.

There is a battle between God and his adversary, a battle already won by Jesus Christ but still in its mop-up stages. We can see it every time we open a newspaper or our front doors. Whether it is squirrels dueling over the last few bits of corn on the stalks at the front door or Iran seeking to rid the world of Israel, we see the battle between good and evil in the world. But that same war is waged within us, within our spirits, as we turn hither and thither, to God, or away from Him. To turn towards God is to regret our sin and repent of it. To fail to repent is to remain mired in the darkness of our sin and the anxieties surrounding death, even, maybe, beyond the gateway of death. So, when John, semi-crazy as he appears to us in his sheepskin and sandals yells, “Repent,” take him seriously. This not a lesson just meant for first-century Jews of Jerusalem; there are true, potentially eternal consequences for not repenting for all of us.

Repentance does not just happen. Another phrase strongly associated with John the Baptist is “Prepare the way of the Lord.” We do not get the full force of John’s loud prophecy with just those six words. Luke reminds us that John’s message is not new, and to prove it he references the prophet Isaiah. “⁴ As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, The voice of one crying 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 become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, ⁶ and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” The illustration John uses comes from the world of construction, specifically the construction of a royal highway.

When a king announced he was going on progress, he meant he would progress throughout his kingdom and visit the small principalities, towns, and military installations. To assure the king that his rents and taxes were well used, the rulers of these places would construct new roads, making them as smooth and level as possible. Hence the talk about filling in the valleys, making the high places level, and taking the bend out of curves. It becomes clear that we are not really talking about roads so much as we are talking about faith when the sentence ends with, “and all flesh shall see God.”

To prepare the way of the Lord is to lay the groundwork to receive the saving grace of God. It is to remove the obstacles that get in the way of our grasping the Word as it comes to us from our Bibles and sermons. To prepare the way of the Lord is to look up and within, to the kingdom of heaven so we are freed from material cares. To prepare the way of the Lord is to spend a little less time gabbing at the Lord in prayer and a little more time listening for His replies. To prepare the way of the Lord is to go to the railing for His Supper hands held out in awe and reverence that we might receive His body and blood for our spiritual nurture and for the forgiveness repentance seeks.

This seems like a sort of a spiritual to-do list, a human response to God’s call. But of course, none of this is possible without the Holy Spirit blowing through us, giving us not only the means to prepare the Lord’s way but also the will. Nor does preparing the way of the Lord occur only at the level of the individual disciple. There is the family of faith that is the local church, and there is the community in which the church sits. What are the obstacles to faith within those structures? What prevents people from seeing Christ in His Church, receiving the promise of His salvation, or giving aid to those in dire need? Here too, the ground must be leveled, and the rough places made smooth. Who will prepare the way of the Lord for our neighbors except those of us sitting here who know ourselves immeasurably blessed by God’s grace?

Paula Murray