Sunday, December 8, 2024, Second Sunday in Advent
“Clean”
Psalm 66:1-12; Malachi 3:1-7b; Philippians 1:2-11; Luke 3:1-
Divine Service III, without Communion
#332 “Savior of the Nations, Come”; #344 “On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry”;
#392 “God Loves Me Dearly”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
When you were growing up, did you have rules in your house about washing your hands before coming to the table? My mother did! And she would check! She’d say, “Did you wash your hands, boy? No, no you didn’t. Look at those cuticles. Look at… whatever that stuff is under your fingernails. Go wash them again, and do it right this time!” What I thought of as “good enough” wasn’t good enough for her. My idea of “clean” and hers wasn’t always the same.
How clean does clean have to be? When God calls us to be clean, what kind of clean is He looking for? It was hard enough being clean up to our mother’s standards; how can we ever hope to be clean enough for God? I know for myself that I’m a sinner of great magnitude, and that all my efforts to wash myself are bound to fail, even if I should, spiritually speaking, attempt to scrub myself pink. How can we ever hope to be clean enough to stand before God?
The prophet Malachi was the last of the Old Testament prophets; his name means “messenger.” Between Malachi and the appearing of John the Baptist, Scripture tells us that God was silent for 400 years. No Word from God, no prophets to stand up and speak, no messages from heaven. Some call it a “pregnant pause,” a long silence for dramatic effect before something really important or significant happens.
In God’s last message to Israel, before going silent, He says through prophet Malachi: “See, I will send My messenger, who will prepare the way before Me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to His temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty. “But who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears? For He will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap.” Our Father in Heaven very much wants us to be clean – really and genuinely clean – so we can be in heaven with Him; and Malachi describes here two ways God is going to make that happen: By the soap and by the fire.
First, let’s talk about the soap – the launderer’s soap, God’s laundry; or God’s bathtub, if you want to look at it that way. The picture I’d like to give you here is of giving a bath to a small child, one still too young to be able to wash him or herself properly. That’s us; or at least, that’s what we need to be, and the attitude God wants us to have. Jesus says, “Whoever will not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter therein.” The call for us is to become as little children; that is, to be OK with being picked up and put in the tub and allowing our Father to wash us. Embarrassing, humiliating even, for grownups like us. But if we’re going to be clean, we have to understand we can’t do this necessary washing for ourselves.
When Jesus, at the Last Supper, stooped down to wash His disciple’s feet, Peter said to Him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus replied, "You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand." "No," said Peter, "You shall never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no part with Me." "Then, Lord," Simon Peter replied, "wash not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!" Jesus answered, "A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean.”
I saw this wonderful You Tube video about a Baptism in the Greek Orthodox Church. In the Orthodox Church, babies are given full immersion Baptism; naked and all the way down into the font they go. In the video, the child was a little older, maybe eight or nine months old; and when he saw what the priest had in mind, he grabbed on to the sides of the font with both hands and held on for dear life; no way was he going into the water! The message is, “Don’t fight it.” Little child, let God do what He has to do.
Think of Baptism as “the beginner’s bath,” the baby bath, the first time you were gently and loving washed by your Savior. That happens only once. After that, our hearts and minds take us back to the day of our Baptism, to the day when the pastor poured on the water, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Baptism reminds of who we are, and who Baptism has made us, and that we’re children of God. Remembering that we’re baptized should lead us to daily repentance, to daily confession and washing away of our sins. Every day, it’s back to the laundry, back to the washtub. Whatever dirt or sin I’ve acquired this day, “Lord, wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.” Then sleep in peace, and tomorrow we’ll get up and do it all again.
Now, we also know that babies can’t stay babies, and that children have to grow. From that first baby baptismal bath, hopefully we go on to learn and know what we can do to keep ourselves holy and pure and clean as we live our lives. “Spiritual maintenance,” that’s sometimes called. That’s the second part of Malachi’s message, the part about “the refiner’s fire.” Malachi says God “will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.”
Raw silver ore contains impurities; there are lots of other things in that lump of rock that aren’t silver. The “noble elements,” as they call them – the silver and gold – are mixed together with the “base elements” – the minerals and assorted crud that have no value. The smelting process that was used in the ancient world (and is still used sometimes today) is known as “cupellation.” That involves heating the ore in a shallow dish or “cupel,” until the base elements are oxidized or fall away as slag, and only the noble elements remain. That process can then be repeated; and the more it’s repeated, the purer the silver becomes.
God in His mercy is “cupellating” us. He’s running His baptized children through the fire, until the baser elements in us are gone, and only the noble things remain. Anything in us that’s sin is the baser element; and the trials, troubles, and tribulations we go through in our lives are the fire, for the testing and purifying of our faith. “No discipline is pleasant at the time, but painful,” St. Paul says; being cupellated hurts! But there’s always a purpose in it for the people God loves. “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus,” Paul says, “…that you may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ.”
“I will come near to you for judgement,” God says there in Malachi. God gets to decide what’s good in us and worth keeping, and what has to go. He’s the silversmith, not us. He knows the silver from the base things and the crud, far better than we do. Maybe none of us are guilty of sorcery, adultery, perjury, or fraud (at least I hope not); but nevertheless the list of our sins and the things we are guilty of is a long one; may we fear God enough to see that it’s so, and admit that we need to be washed.
“I the Lord do not change” is a comforting statement, is it not? Our Heavenly Father isn’t going to change His mind about us or give up on us. He isn’t going to decide that we’re filthy beyond redemption and relegate us to the rag bin. Every day is another new day, another day for redemption. Another day to be convicted of sin by the good Holy Spirit; another day to confess and repent; another to take a forgiving bath in God’s baptismal grace; and another joyful day to praise God for His mercy and walk away clean.
“Return to Me,” God says, “and I will return to you.” Once more through the holy wringer, to be scrubbed and washed and purified. Once more through the smelter (sigh!) to remove more of this unholy dross that still remains in me, and to be left a little purer when the fire has died down.
In our Gospel reading today, God’s 400 years of silence have passed, and John the Baptist, the messenger who’ll prepare the world to meet Christ, has arrived and begun to preach, and to call people to come and be baptized. Have you ever wondered what the difference is between John’s baptism and the Baptism of Jesus? John himself said, “I only baptize you with water; but the One who’d coming after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”
John’s baptism was not for the true and thorough cleansing that people need, but for the willingness to come to be. John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance and sorrow, a baptism to soften the heart to be ready for the coming of the Savior. It was a call to come and be like a little child, and to submit to the humbling, somewhat embarrassing bath called confession. It was a call to straighten out the rough and crooked and prideful places in us, to allow Jesus to come with that scrub brush of His and have His way with us. The scribes and Pharisees, full of human pride as they were, sneered at John’s preaching and refused to confess or repent or get in the water; so when their Savior came, they refused to see or recognize or believe in Him.
Jesus’ Baptism, Christian Baptism, is a Baptism of forgiveness and grace. It’s not something we do for God, but something God in His mercy does for us. True Christian Baptism is God our Father opening heaven, and the Holy Spirit, along with the water, being poured out upon our heads and into our souls. It’s a Baptism done by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that connects us forever to what happened at the cross.
St. Paul says in Romans 6, “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Into the water, with all our sins, to die with Him; up from the water to be free of our sins and live. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that sinners is what all of us were; filthy, dirty, stained beyond hope; “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
We have a Savior who loves us so much that He’d gladly kneel down to wash our dirty feet, then call us to walk through the fire with Him, so we can be clean to stand before God. Christmas is coming, folks, when God Himself becomes a child, laid down in a manger for our sakes. Who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears? You can, and I can, clean and pure, forgiven and sanctified and glorified, by both the soap and by the fire. May we welcome Him when He comes, to the glory and praise of God. In Jesus’ name; Amen.