Last Friday was the seventh anniversary of my father’s death. It is hard to believe he has been dead for seven years. Some days it feels like yesterday. Other times it feels like forever since I’ve heard his voice. Yet his messages remain etched in my memory. They guide me still. One such message reverberating within me comes in his encouragement to never underestimate the value of staying in the struggle, of doing the hard work. Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “main in the arena” quote spoke to my dad. “it is not the critic who counts but the one who stays in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood.” Alongside that message was a corresponding one about the value of injecting life with fu. There is deep joy, my father taught us, in play. Whenever we vacationed as a family, my mom guided the itinerary. She kept us organized to see the sites and learn the history. It was my father who noticed when our feet started dragging and would say, “Let’s find the ice cream store.” Certainly, his greatest, most enduring message was an imprint of abiding love. Such steady, unreserved love builds up a person. I can still hear his voice, speaking to me when I am struggling or undecided. I believe in you. I proud of you. That voice not that not only sustains but makes me long for that better day, when all the world is healed.
About four hundred years passed between the last prophet’s writings in the Hebrew scriptures and the writings of the New Testament. The Hebrew prophets spoke into a tumultuous world. Those writing at the cusp of Jesus’s life did so amid occupation and trauma. The four centuries in between were also uncertain and violent. Life can be one, long struggle. Born amid the suffering is that longing for a healed world, for a wholeness of life. It is a longing for God. We hear this in Malachi’s vision, “the Lord WILL come.” And in Isaiah’s promise, recited through John the Baptist, “every valley shall be lifted, the crooked shall be made straight, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Often when I preach on these texts, I focus on the preparation needed by humankind in advance of God coming. I emphasize straightening the path, turning around, or the refining fire of judgement. But on this occasion, I noticed the voices of the messengers. Before they can teach us what to do to be ready, they have to grab our attention, kindle our hope, and stir our imagination. Such heralds assure us that God still is, whatever appearances to the contrary. Such heralds urge us to watch, to notice, and listen. What might we learn about God’s coming from the messengers guiding the way?
First, God’s messengers speak from unlikely places. Their voices ring far from the corridors of power. These persons were not prominent figures in their day but ordinary, unassuming ones. Malachi isn’t a proper name. The word means “messenger.” In the time leading up to Jesus’s birth, the one speaking to his coming was not Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, or a high priest. The word of God came to ordinary John in the wilderness. So to hear God’s messengers we have to leave the hallways of power or prestige. We must venture into strange, wild spaces, where landscapes change and unlikely persons speak. John does not have a robe, but a camel coat. John does not have a marble palace, but a tent and makeshift fire. John does not have a microphone or podcast, and yet people flock to hear him. God chose to enter our lives through persons attentive to the hurt, despair and survival needs of the wider world. In what unlikely place can we venture to prick our ears for God’s speaking? How close can we move toward the needs of the world?
Second, from these wild places, the voices of God’s messages sound harsh at first. Their speech makes one uncomfortable; their message is one we might initially reject. The news they proclaim to call us toward God’s saving grace don’t sound like good news at first. Who wants to walk through a refiner’s fire? Who wants to approach God’s throne and confess “I have made so many mistakes, disappointed so many people?” So in addition to placing ourselves in unlikely places we must also ask ourselves what messages am I avoiding? What truth do I not want to see? What voices scratch my soul? In my hunger for God do I also encounter a hurdle I cannot overcome? It is the voices we dismiss or the messages that are too disquieting or seemingly impossible that might bring us closer to the God who comes in Jesus.
Messengers speak from wild, vulnerable places, far from normal chambers of power. Messengers can bring uncomfortable news. Ultimately God’s messengers cause us to dream anew. They give us a vision of valleys being lifted up, of highway being laid down, of God entering not such one sacred space but making a home among all of us as God in the flesh. Journeying with these messengers trains our eyes to see Christ as he comes.
Each year there comes a moment in the Advent-Christmas season when the realness of Christ’s coming hits me anew. Rarely can I predict when that moment will happen. But I know Christ is here, God-with-us, in that moment. One year Christ came on a cold wintery night as I stepped away from the office to get dinner before an evening meeting and encountered a person outside the care, asking me to buy him dinner. One year Christ came when the children’s choir sang “Glory to God, glory to God” in their sweet, pure voices from the balcony. Another time, in a former congregation, just as the reader finished Luke, chapter 2, saying “And she gave birth to her firstborn son, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger,” a newborn baby in the congregation gave a sweet, infant cry. It could not have been scripted more perfectly. The whole congregation felt the awe. It is different every year, but it is also reliable. Christ comes.
Seventeen years before my father died, my grandfather died, also in early December. He was a dairy farmer, a man of high standards and few words. He was the oldest in a large family with many younger siblings. As a teenager, his father, my great-grandfather, underwent a long-term hospitalization and so fell to my grandfather to manage the farm, care for his siblings, and also keep up with school. Christmas came. These were the Depression years in Oklahoma. There were no presents and no plans for any. On Christmas Eve morning my grandfather took the chickens from the chicken coop, went into town and sold them, using the money to buy presents for his younger siblings. And at his funeral his younger brother recalled that Christmas: the ache of an absent parent, the worries of depression-era economics, the looming war, risk of selling the chickens, and the love contained in the gifts.
We, too, are messengers for God. We see the lights in the windows. We put up the trees. We light the Advent candles. The music stirs our souls. All around are signs of God’s coming into the world. At the same time, we know the ache of the world, the longing for God to come and make it upright again. We speak that good news, not from hallways of power, but in the ordinariness of grocery stores, school hallways, and living rooms. We speak plainly of our own mistakes, of grief and hope. We offer forgiveness. We learn, through it all, of a love that does not leave. Each time we speak God’s language, we make the pathway to God a little smoother, a little wider, and we make ourselves and others a little more ready for God to appear. Come, Lord Jesus, come. Amen.