December 10th, 2006: Advent II: St. Mary’s, Welwyn. 9.30 a.m. Eucharist: Sandra Campion.

Readings: Malachi 3: 1-4: Philippians 1: 3-11: Luke 3: 1-6

"Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. Amen."

On this tenth day of December, I wonder how many Advent calendar doors were opened this morning to reveal the emaciated chocolate figure of John the Baptist.  I think I am safe in saying that there won’t have been a single one. John the Baptist appears to be the complete antithesis of all we expect in the build up to Christmas and yet here he is this morning, speaking to us through the words of St Luke’s Gospel. Mind you, he is pretty hard to avoid as he punctuates the Church’s year at regular intervals. He features at the beginning of Lent, his birth is celebrated in June and his beheading is commemorated in August. Then today, the second Sunday in Advent, he turns up again.

On each of these occasions we are invited to consider him from a different point of view. The June and August commemorations are really to do with John in his own right and then he features at the start of Lent as the baptiser of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry.

But why are we reading about him again today? Today John the Baptist plays a pivotal role as the link between the Old Testament and the New Testament. He also heralds a distinct and vital change in the understanding of the nature of the relationship between God and Man, a change which makes our Christian faith significantly different from the Jewish faith and, indeed, from all other faiths.

We need to start with this morning’s reading from the prophet Malachi. The last book of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi is only three chapters long. The word ‘Malachi’ means ‘my messenger’ and it may be that the message and the messenger have become synonymous over the centuries. In any case, Malachi’s message is clear: God’s people are failing to live up to his exacting standards and they are not going to be found worthy when it comes to the day of judgement. In this morning’s reading Malachi warns that the messenger is coming:

"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 gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness."

The process of refining silver is a very old one. The silver was often found mixed with lead and it was put into a crucible made of bone earth before being put into a furnace. As the oxide of lead formed, it was blown off by bellows and the pure silver was eventually left. In order to be purified, the people of Israel would have to be subjected to the full force of the refiner’s fire. Until they were purified, their sacrifices in the Temple would be worthless. Only when the sacrifices were made to the Lord ‘in righteousness’ would they be ‘pleasing to the Lord’. Malachi’s message is a harsh one. The way to purification was through suffering. God, the refiner, will burn off all their wickedness and unrighteousness until they are able to be counted as worthy in his eyes to offer acceptable sacrifices in his temple.

Do we, as Christians, believe that God makes us suffer in order to purify us, to make us worthy?  I would suggest that to believe this is to fly in the face of all that we are taught by and about Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus was born as a human baby to show us that God is not a remote being who hands down punishments to his people. Rather he shares in our human experience. He does not send suffering: he suffered for us and he suffers with us. For me, the central core of the Christian message is that we do not need to be made worthy to God.

When Luke records the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry, he does not refer to John as the messenger we see in Malachi. He chooses instead to refer to the prophet Isaiah:

"Every valley shall be filled,
And every mountain and hill shall be made low,
And the crooked shall be made straight,
And the rough ways made smooth:
And all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

We cannot fill the valleys or lower the mountains and hills. We will see the salvation of God because he has straightened the path and shown us the way, through his birth, through his life, through his death and through his resurrection.

Luke tells us that when John was travelling around the region of Jordan, he was ‘proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. For the writer of Malachi it was all about people being worthy enough for God to accept their sacrifices made in the Temple. For John there is no Temple – rather there is the wilderness, untamed by the hands of man – and his teaching was of forgiveness through baptism rather than through making Temple sacrifices. When Malachi asks: ‘Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?’ we, as Christians are able to answer: "We can".

Advent is a penitential season. It is a time when we should be examining our consciences and seeking God’s forgiveness. And that forgiveness is there for the asking, not because we are worthy of it, but because of that almost indefinable thing we call ‘grace’. God’s grace means that God does not have to be sought out, he does not have to be won over or placated with temple sacrifices. He is ‘with us’ in every sense of those words. If we accept his grace and allow his love to truly enter our lives, then we will become as refined as we will ever need to be.  The notion of grace is what distinguishes the New Testament from the Old Testament, it is what distinguishes Christianity from Judaism and it is what John the Baptist was sent to proclaim.

In Advent we prepare ourselves to celebrate the fact that God took the form of a human baby and lived life with all the joys and sorrows that we experience. But we should also be preparing ourselves for the day when Christ will come again, when we will be called to account for what we have done and for what we have not done with the great gift that God has given us.

Our third reading this morning was from Paul’s letter to the Church in Philippi. For the young Christians the second coming of Christ was a much more immediate and urgent concept than we generally allow it to be now. We find it much more comfortable to think about nativity scenes and flocks of angels than to face up to the fact that Jesus said that he would come again. And yet the Second Coming is not something that we need to fear if we have accepted God’s grace.

Paul tells the Philippians that on what he calls ‘the day of Christ’ he believes that they will be found ‘pure and blameless’, not because they have been made acceptable by the refiner’s fire, but because they have allowed the love and grace of God to flow through their whole community and that is what will produce the ‘harvest of righteousness’. And that is surely what we must hope for ourselves, both as individuals and as a Christian community here in Welwyn.

At the start of the Christian year we are on the brink of an exciting new beginning for the Church in Welwyn. We have before us new and challenging possibilities with the coming to fruition of the New Church House project. The building is not an end in itself. We can certainly allow ourselves an interlude of celebration, but then we must prepare for the hard work that lies ahead in making the building a living and serving expression of God’s grace for the whole of the community in which we live and worship. Our reading from Paul’s letter this morning concluded with his prayer for the Church in Philippi. It is a prayer which is as relevant to the Church in Welwyn today as it was to the Church in Philippi in the first century. And so it is with this that I am going to end.

Paul writes:

"And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that on the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God." Amen.