On the first Sunday of Advent, Lisa Thornton reflected on Malachi 3:1-6. She talks about how we often think of advent as a time of waiting — forgetting that as we wait we are asked to prepare for the coming of the Lord — cleansing, refining, purifying. With Malachi, we look at the gospel of Luke 3:2-6, where John John the Baptist proclaims from Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 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…’”

Lisa calls us to hear these passages from a community perspective. What is required for us as a community of people to prepare for the Lord? Not just our own church community, but as a community of followers of Christ across the world. John seems to be saying that the world needs to be the opposite of what it is now — and at the very least dramatic changes are needed.

The refining of metals is a process that moves things from impure to pure. For a people being purified, the process holds the prospect of pain. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that “The coming of God is truly not only good tidings, but first of all a frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.” This refining is not only for us as individuals, but about the work that a community needs to do in order to prepare the world for the One that the Lord intended for us. We know that this is a communal message because Malachi talks about the covenant — the only place in scripture where Jesus is referred to as a messenger of the covenant. Those in Malachi’s time — and the world we live in today — are living in open violation of God’s covenant — of what God intended the relationship between us and God to be. At its most basic, the covenant is about loving God and loving each other. Because of unfaithfulness, the community needs to be refined and cleansed before the Lord comes. In verse 5 of Malachi, the ways the people are breaking the covenant — through adultery, swearing falsely, cheating others out of wages, oppressing widows and orphans, and brushing aside foreigners — are all things happening in our world today. These are violations of the covenant. The consequence of being unfaithful to God’s covenant is that innocent people suffer.

As we wait in advent, we get to play a part in God’s work of transforming the world into the Beloved Community. Lisa reads about the Beloved Community from the words of Dr. Martin Luther King. The core value of Dr. King’s vision, and that of Malachi, is one of agape love. “[The Beloved Community] does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people. It begins by loving others for their sake — and makes no distinction between friend and enemy… It seeks to preserve and create community.” The journey to the Beloved Community involves a refining process. It requires an intentional movement from a worldview of scarcity to one of abundance. When we live in a world where we believe that there is enough for everyone — driven with generosity — it allows us to start moving on the path to the Beloved Community. Walter Brueggemann calls this a covenantal commitment to the common good. There is hard work involved. It’s especially difficult because we live in an empire with a worldview of scarcity. A lot of us feel the pressure of very real scarcity — but we all have a different role to play in the process of refining. As we prepare for the coming of the Lord, it’s our work to find our place in God’s refining — to transform the empire of scarcity, and to lift up a story of abundance and generosity.

What is the role that you find yourself in? What is the role that as a community we find ourselves striving towards as we go about doing the work of refining and preparation for the coming of the Lord?

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Images: by Corita Kent