Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6

One day during my senior year at the real U of I, I had a rare afternoon off with no readings to do, no papers to write and no tests to study for. So I decided to simply take a walk around campus. During that walk, I came across the University’s art museum, a place I had never visited before, so I decided to explore that.

The first section of the museum had the usual paintings, many of which were created by artists who either were or had been students or faculty at Iowa. Some of them appealed to me, some of them less so, but that was based strictly on my personal taste.

To me the real treasure of the museum lay in a room filled with all sorts of exquisite jade carvings — many of which were purchased in Asia. Every single one showed a dazzling delicacy and a subtle sense of life. I’d never seen anything quite like the objects in that room and I felt ennobled simply by being able to have close contact with such amazing examples of the human ability to create beauty.

That remains one of my strongest impressions of that day. My strongest memory, however, comes from the room between all those paintings and those gorgeous jade carvings. As I remember it, it was a smaller room, which serves almost as a gateway to the jade collection.

There on the wall was a frame that was perhaps 14 by 20 inches with a massive matt. Inside the matt was nothing except an empty package of French cigarettes that had been carefully flatted to fit into the picture. It appeared to be exactly as it had come from the cigarette manufacturer — cellophane and all — although I’m not a connoisseur of Gauloises cigarettes, so I suppose this could have been a clever copy designed to look like a standard cigarette pack. However, I don’t think so. I think someone just flattened and framed a used pack of smokes and then sold it to the museum for $250.

My point is that it seemed totally out of place in the museum. In fact, it seemed as if the so-called artist had somehow managed to pull a fast one over on the university. It made you wonder about the sanity of the people running the museum if they would not only purchase, but apparently-proudly display that cigarette package.

Every year during the season of Advent, the church has its own moment in which people wonder whether they should question the sanity of its leadership. Every year in the middle of Advent, we interrupt the story of the angelic visits and the miraculous pregnancies to flash forward some 30 years to look in on a camel-hair-covered kook, who lives in the desert, eats bugs and screams at people to change their ways.

It’s easy to see that John the Baptist doesn’t fit in with our saccharine-saturated Christmas narrative. We’re looking for heart-warming tales of freshly-scrubbed shepherds and brilliant — if somewhat naïve — foreign kings who crowd around a sanitized manger to pay their respects to the newly-born Jesus, while a carefree Mary and Joseph look on placidly and with great pride.

Never mind that none of that fits what actually happened at the birth of Jesus, it’s still what we’ve come to expect from our Christmas festivities. So it always adds a discordant note when John the Baptist strolls onto the scene shouting things like, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

Those are hardly the kind of words we’d assign to one of our children in the annual Christmas pageant. And yet, here they are, staring us in the face during yet another Advent season. So what’s the point? Why does the church insist on dragging John the Baptist into the mix to drag down our holiday fun every year? The answer is simple: the church wants all of us to go deeper with our spiritual Christmas preparations. They want us to refuse to settle for the sweet and superficial, but rather to do some genuine soul-searching, so that we can use the celebration of the birth of the Son of God as an opportunity to make some very real changes in our lives.

John the Baptist lived and worked in one of the most desolate areas in the world, the Judean desert that covers maybe the southern half of the country of Israel. I remember visiting Masada and Qumran in that desert on New Year’s Eve one year and the temperature that day was in the high 80’s or low 90’s. So I leaped to the obvious conclusion that if it was that hot in early winter, it must be unbearably brutal in the middle of the summer.

John the Baptist was probably preaching only 20 miles or so away from the Temple in Jerusalem, which was the very center of the Jewish faith, but the difference between those two areas was absolute. John was the son of a priest who served in the Temple and, as such, he was also eligible to serve as a Temple priest. Yet, he turned his back on that life and chose to live as a hermit in the arid wilderness, where there were few distractions, life was stark and simple, and his very survival depended on God’s providence.

It was there that the word of the Lord came him — an obscure hermit in the least likely of all places. But somehow, even though he’s in that unlikely spot, people hear about him and, rather than writing him off as some sun-crazed kook, they go far out of their way to listen to him.

What did they hear? John told of God’s coming judgment and of fire. They heard a call to re-examine their relationship with God, to give up their sins and to turn back to God. They heard all the kinds of things that make modern Presbyterians squirm in their pews.

And yet, there in the desert heat — away from the mirages of life-as-usual — John’s preaching struck a responsive chord. People flocked from all over to confess their sins and rededicate themselves to God. But they were dedicating themselves to a God whose reality is far different than the way they were used to thinking of him.

Stephen Sylvester says: “John the Baptist invites the people out into the wilderness to meet the God of the Exodus, that wild untamed God from whom the people did not know exactly what to expect, the God who was so different from the predictable Temple God of ritual and law. The people of John’s time had domesticated God as thoroughly as we have by bringing God indoors and penning God into scrolls.

“The wilderness...God, however, is a God who still [messes] on [the] carpets and shreds the furniture, in other words a God who is inconvenient, and not only inconvenient, but dangerous — not the housecat or lapdog we’ve turned God into with all our weepy Jesus portraits and theology of glory hymns. In the wilderness, apart from all the accretions of religion and custom, the people were being called to meet God on God’s own terms. Meeting God [in that way] the people could begin to have a real relationship with God. Pretty scary stuff.

“It seems to me that rather than being a time when we (churches and individuals) retreat into tradition, Advent should be a season during which we strip tradition away to place people in the presence of the God who still has the ability to surprise, shock, destroy and resurrect us. The best our god of tired tradition can do is hold our hand and perhaps sympathize with us and feel our pain.

“If we come out to meet God in this way, on God’s own terms, then the news of the incarnation is not just the ho-hum conclusion to a month-long pageant, [but] it’s the amazing news that God has come to live with us on our terms — [and that’s] truly shocking. No blasé ‘we’ve been there before’ blather, but real and new stuff that grabs us by the [collar] and lets us know this is no god of wood and stone.”

I love that image of God as a wild animal, raging through the house. It’s unusual enough to capture our imaginations. And it’s true that, at times, we all unconsciously attempt to put God into one box or another — to understand him or to set him aside until he’s more convenient or because we may think our problems or the world’s problems are too large and too complex for even God to handle. Of course, when we do that, it’s just a sign that our understanding of God is too small.

The truth is that nothing God touches remains the same. And that’s exactly what scares us. But the reality is that when we have contact with God, we are recreated into something better. Yet, that process is not always gentle. Malachi describes it as being like refiner’s fire that burns away our impurities.

Malachi says that God will send a messenger to prepare the people for his coming. But the message to be given isn’t focused on God’s fiery judgment, but on the good news that, despite our sins, God finds something in all of us that’s worthy of being refined.

Malachi wrote to an ancient community of faith that was sunk into apathy. It wasn’t much different from the Christian church in North America. We’re called to rouse ourselves from our spiritual slumber — to prepare ourselves so that we may become living Bethlehems for the coming Christ. And, we’re called to pass on the transforming power of Christ when we have received it.

How do we do that? Luke notes that the word of God came to John in the wilderness. How many times do we crowd God out onto the peripheries of our lives? For that matter, how many opportunities are there for service out on the peripheries of our lives? Where better to find Christ than in the wilderness with the poor, the outcast and the hurting?

God is making preparations to visit his people once again, by way of a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. Nothing will get in God’s way. Not high mountains, not low valleys, not crooked ways, not rough ways. Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

And yet, God’s love comes to us as a fire whose power will consume us if we try to hold it in. “We believe that through Christ God opens doors we thought were closed, reclaims those we thought were lost, transforms for the good that which we thought was beyond help, [and] brings resurrection where all we can see is death.” (Rob Elder)

Therefore, let us share the good news of God’s refining fire so that “all humanity will see God’s salvation.” Amen.

(Comments to Jim at :jmfpc@sbcglobal.net.)