December 20, 2020 “Refiner” – Malachi 3:1-4

Malachi 3:1-4
“Refiner”
December 20, 2020 – Fourth Sunday in Advent

One occasionally sees a product labeled “99%” or even “99.9%” pure something or other, be it in old ads for Ivory soap, fruit juice, or isopropyl alcohol as a solvent or cleaner. Such purity is desirable. We measure the quality of gold in karats, with each karat signifying one twenty-fourth of an alloy. So 24-karat gold is pure gold and 18-karat gold is 75% gold with other metals mixed in.

As we come to the last of the prophets, particularly the last book of the Old Testament, which is the prophet Malachi, we find the prophetic word concerned with another sort of purity, spiritual purity. After the exile, after all that God’s people had suffered in punishment for their sins, they were, just like you and I, a not-so-precious mix of sanctity and sinfulness. They were certainly not pure enough to meet God in person.

Malachi pointed out various points of impurity. Priests who offered sacrifices were giving God leftovers. Those who brought sacrifices gave animals that were blind or sick or lame. Men committed adultery and divorced the “wives of their youth,” in order to marry trophy wives. Justice was perverted. The tithe, that tenth of their income which belonged to God, was being held back and not given. God spoke to Malachi promising to purify the people from all these sins and more, particularly those of their priests, the Levites.

Purification would begin with the Lord’s appearance in His Temple. We heard Haggai last week speak God’s promise to fill the rebuilt Temple with His glory. I played a bit from Handel’s “Messiah” in which that promise in Haggai was joined to this promise here in Malachi on the bottom of page 425, “‘Then the Lord you seek will suddenly come to his Temple. The messenger of the covenant, whom you look for so eagerly, is surely coming.’ says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.”

For the past two Sundays we heard Gospel readings from Mark and from John tell how John the Baptist preached that same message, that the Lord was coming soon. John also called for purification. He asked people to repent and to be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. Jesus told us John the Baptist was fulfilling Malachi’s at the very end of this book that Elijah would come ahead of the Messiah, calling for purity and repentance. We read those messages because they are also addressed to us.

We typically think of Advent as time to get ready for Christmas. We’ve been opening those windows on our on-line Advent calendar, counting down. This year it is all strange and different, but many of us probably still spent time putting up decorations, writing cards, and buying gifts. Some of us may have been moved to give an extra gift to the Mission or to Dove Medical or to a community organization providing presents for needy children. We may have planned a small get together with close family or made arrangements for a Zoom conversation Christmas morning. We want to be prepared to properly celebrate the Birth of the Lord. But during that long, long season looking toward the first Advent the emphasis was a preparation of purity, of spiritual refining.

When Malachi prophesied that the Messiah whom we know as Jesus was coming, he called Him “the Lord you are seeking,” and the “messenger of the covenant, whom you look for so eagerly.” Those words were chosen to help us see that message of this last prophet echoes what the first prophet we read said about those who were looking forward to the “Day of the Lord.” Amos told them, “You have no idea what you are wishing for.” The Covenant of God is both good news and bad news. For those prepared and purified, there is blessing, but for those who are unrepentant and sinful, there is judgment.

The sudden arrival of the Lord is not going to be pleasant if we are not ready. It could be a rude awakening. Thursday afternoon I got a call telling me the outfit which cleans the leaves and pine needles off our roof and out of our gutters on our house would be there the next day. “Good,” I thought, “it’s about time. It really needs it.” But then they showed up earlier than I expected on Friday, at 7:30 in the morning, stomping around and starting up their leaf blowers. It rattled our men’s Zoom Bible study and woke up Beth. Even something good can be distressing if it comes when you’re not ready.

So Malachi asked his people and asks us the burning question about that wonderful coming of Jesus we hope and pray for, “But who will be able to endure it when he comes? Who will be able to stand and face him when he appears?” Let us think about that as we get ready to celebrate a sweet little Baby in a manger, and all the comfort and peace the image brings us. That Baby grew into a Man who came to His Temple where He overturned the tables of moneychangers gouging worshipers for profit. He stood by that same Temple and predicted, as I said last week, that it would be torn down.

Malachi says the Lord will come like fire, but not a safe, quiet Christmas flame in your fireplace to make you feel cozy on a winter evening. No, this is “a blazing fire that refines metal,” a blast furnace hot enough to melt metal and minerals so all the impurities in them can be skimmed off to leave only the purest alloy remaining.

My mother grew up in the midst of what was then the largest copper mining and refining operation in the world, in and around the town of Jerome, Arizona. Mom was raised in Cottonwood, down in the valley below the mines, but in between Cottonwood and Jerome sat Clarkdale, where they refined the copper.

As I thought about this text from Malachi and then studied the process of refining copper, it was interesting to discover that one form of copper ore is the semi-gemstone, malachite Though malachite was not actually named after the prophet, I took it as a sign that this story fit the text.

In any case, at that smelter in Clarkdale and in others around the area, malachite and azurite and other ores were crushed and treated and heated until they melted down into a copper “matte” which was about 70% copper that could be separated from a liquid “slag” of junk minerals that were bled off and discarded. Since I was a boy, I’ve ridden or driven by the huge leftover slag piles hundreds of times. A look at them is now part a tourist train ride on the Verde Canyon Railroad. The heaps of slag look like a low dirty black ridge surrounding where the smelters used to be. Retaining fencing has itself started to rust and flake away.

Malachi and John the Baptist tell us that Christ came to melt the slag out of our lives, out of our hearts, out of our souls. Malachi did not write for spiritually healthy people, prepared in every way to meet their God. He spoke to a nation of people who, he said in chapter 2, had “wearied the Lord,” with their sins and with words which displayed their indifference to their sins. He promised that God would come and refine them, purify them. Listen to how Handel put to music those words from Malachi about the refiner’s fire and the purification of the Levites.

Handel used just the words about fire, but the second image here seems a little friendlier, a little gentler. Instead of fire hot enough to melt metal, we read about “strong soap.” God wants to wash His people, brighten them up like a load of dirty laundry. But even with this we need to remember that “soap” in Malachi’s time was made from lye. We should perhaps think of bleach. It was caustic, it would burn if it touched your flesh.

No, this promise to refine us is not all that gentle. We are talking about an aspect of the coming of Jesus which ought to intimidate us, maybe ought to terrify us a bit. Have you every been intimidated by anyone, by their skill or by their power or even just by their goodness? Wednesday as we talked about music in our worship meeting, I asked if Kendal every watched TwoSet Violin YouTube videos, something my wife enjoys. Kendal said, “No, I’ve watched a couple times, but they’re just too good. They make me feel so inadequate.”

That’s how it is with spiritual life as well. Someone really, truly good, morally or spiritually, intimidates us. I love to read Eugene Peterson. He’s a pastor’s pastor. He loves Scripture. He has great insight on how to have a true pastor’s heart. But occasionally as I read what he says, I begin to feel, “This is just too much. I can’t be that humble, that prayerful, that devoted to my calling.” Eugene Peterson makes me feel inadequate.

That’s how it is to meet a person who is everything you would like to be but are not. She might be physically fit or he may be fiscally responsible. You are not. He might spend lots of time with his kids or she may sew her own clothes. You don’t. You feel convicted and challenged just by who this other person is. Jesus brings that experience to its zenith. Jesus is loving but He is also firm. Jesus is strong but not dominating. He is self-sacrificing but never compromising. He is compassionate without any wrong motivation. Jesus always has the right response. Jesus is never immoral. Jesus is wise and He is gentle and He is always, always, always good. And you and I are not, not, not, not very much at all.

“Who will be able to endure it when he comes?” Who can measure up? Who will ever be refined as pure as Jesus is? Who can possibly match God? But that may get it all a little backwards. The fact that Jesus is truly God is tremendous and even frightening. But the fact that Jesus is also truly human is what’s really terrifying. Here, said G. K. Chesterton, is “something more human than humanity.” When we see how truly human Jesus is, you and I have to confront how inhuman we are. His perfect humanity shows up all the flaws in our fallen and flawed humanity.

But Jesus Christ did not come just to intimidate us. Malachi’s promise is that He came to refine us. When God took the awesome step of pouring His own being into human form, He meant for humanity itself to be changed. His advent at Bethlehem was to transform us, to make us over, to melt us down with an awful heat and mold us into His true design for life. He promised to refine us.

What you and I need to see in the Nativity, besides the peace and serenity and delight which surrounds it, is a fierce challenge to our complacency. Christmas is meant to change us. When we look into the manger we must not see only a sweet, harmless baby nestled there. We must also see the burning power of God which wants to leap like fire out of the straw and consume us.

That’s why Jesus “is like a blazing fire that refines metal.” His perfect humanity blazes up in our sinful darkness. His light and heat can feel overwhelming. John the Baptist told the crowds who came out to hear him a little parable about the Messiah gathering in the wheat kernels but burning up the chaff, the straw left over, with “unquenchable fire.” All the slag in us is to be melted out.

Christmas may be more of a challenge than you thought it was. In this cheerful season of peace and love, God may be asking more than you expected. He wants to refine peace and love in your own being, to heat things up and melt off all the impurities which keep peace and love from shining more brightly in you.

You may be thinking, “This is not what I signed up for. This is not the kind of Christmas I want! Let’s get back to the little baby, and joy to the world, and peace on earth, and just be a little more merry.” “This is no promise,” you say, “this is a threat!” I’m with you. I too like those other parts of Christmas better. Yet it really is a promise.

It’s a promise because God believes you have so much to offer. You are made in His image. There truly is gold and silver in you. Malachi looked at corrupt priests in his day, descendants of Levi offering shoddy, cheap sacrifices and acting as if they were doing God a favor. He said God promised to purify them, “refining them like gold and silver, so they may once again offer acceptable sacrifices to the Lord.” He wants to do the same for whatever you and I have to offer Him.

As we approach Christmas and look beyond to a new year, what needs refining in you and me? Maybe it is simple thankfulness and joy in our blessings that has been contaminated by fear or by anger at the trials of this past year. Perhaps it’s love for spouse or family or friends that has been dulled by being polluted with lust or selfishness. It could be genuine care for those in need but which has gotten hopelessly mixed up with pride in our own accomplishments or resentment of that neediness. God wants to refine all that good in you and me and burn out all the dross of sin mixed with it.

Can you see the hope in this promise to refine you? It’s a hope that you and I will be made better than we are, be made like we want to be, be made like Jesus. No matter how impure the ore of our lives is, He can refine it. It’s taken decades, but an outfit called Searchlight Minerals is now going back to those old slag heaps by Clarkdale in Arizona and reprocessing them to extract gold and silver. No matter how much slag, how much sin we’ve gotten mixed up in, the Lord Jesus can forgive it and melt it out of our lives. He can melt down our hearts and souls and pour them liquid and shining into bright new molds. God’s love in Jesus refines you because you are worth refining.

There is hope for anyone. There is hope for you. This Advent, this Christmas let your heart be melted and purified. George MacDonald said the fire of God’s love has a strange property: the closer you get to it the less it burns. At a distance from God, holding onto our sins, our secret impurities, all the stuff mixed into us, God’s love is an inferno threatening to consume us. But come close to God in Jesus; draw near to Him, and His fire becomes the warmth of grace. It’s like a cup of hot coffee. Spill it on yourself and you will be burned. But draw it close and sip it slowly, and what would burn you outside will warm you inside.

Some of us are feeling the heat. Refining, smelting, requires heat and pressure. We are experiencing it. Things are hard. Health or work or family—or all of them at once—have melted down and burned us deeply. “Where is it all going, why would God do this?” we ask. There is an answer, a comfort in this promise.

God never causes the pains and troubles that come to us. Yet God often allows us to feel the heat. He lets it happen because He can use the heat and the pressure of our trials to melt and purify and remold our souls into a shape that will please Him. He brings us close to the fire of Jesus’ perfection in order to make us more like Jesus. The heat you are feeling is a love that wants to draw you nearer to Himself.

The old hymn, “How Firm a Foundation,” sings,

When through fiery trials your pathway shall lie,
My grace all sufficient shall be your supply;
The flame shall not hurt you; I only design
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine.

Your trials do not mean you are far from God. They mean you are very near. You are near to someone who loves you and values you like precious metal. In the heat, you are feeling the warmth of His love. He loves you and wants to make you shine like silver and gold, with all the worth that He intended you to have.

This Advent, then, draw near to Jesus. He Himself did not turn away from the refining fire. He let Himself be melted down in the crucible of the Cross for you, so that His own perfect life could be poured into you to form a perfect alloy. That’s what He’s making in you, a shining blend of all the good you have to offer and the perfect grace and love He brings you. He’s burning, melting off everything that doesn’t belong in you so that what’s left will be pure.

The Lord is refining you. That’s His promise. By the grace and love and fire of Jesus Christ He is creating something bright and new in you. We said together today Mary’s song about all the burning judgment God would bring to the mighty, the proud, and the rich, but then we heard how He would also lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things, because, “He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy.” In Jesus Christ, God is going to refine us because He is merciful, because He wants us to be pure and holy like He is pure and holy. Let the refining start again this Christmas.

Amen.