Judgment Day
By Rev. Daniel A. Smith
December 06, 2009
Second Sunday of Advent
Lessons: Malachi 3: 1-7
I wonder if our first reading conjured for any of you the sights and sounds of a large choir. Altos might recognize it best, though through an alternative translation. Malachi chapter 3, verse 2: “But who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner's fire.” This and two surrounding verses from our Malachi reading provide the lyrics to some of the first movements in Handel’s choral masterpiece, “The Messiah.” The full choir would follow the alto lines, singing, “And he shall purify the Sons of Levi.” Is it any wonder that when singing “The Messiah” we tend to stick with that other, far more well known, Hallelujah Chorus? We don’t have to work as hard to figure out what it’s saying, right? King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Got it. We can understand that. Appearing before God’s refining and purifying fires...what’s that now? Like it or not, and whether we know it from “The Messiah” or Malachi, this passage points to an overlooked theme of the Advent Season. The theme, and the fire if you will, is God’s judgment.
To really understand this theme and its place in the Advent season we need first to get our heads out of the clouds of “the holidays” and into a fire of God’s truth that can melt away all the shopping and other inessential baggage that we bring to this season. In Karin’s skillfully crafted sermon from last week about the already-and-not yet dimensions of Advent observance, the question was “Are you ready?” Are any of us ready, not just for the remembrance of the birth of Jesus that already happened, but are we ready, for what comes next? Are we ready for the end of time? Are we ready for an Apocalypse? Are we ready to even consider, let alone prepare for, the Second Coming of Christ? Our passage from Malachi introduces an even more pointed version of these very good and very big questions. The question before us today is this: are we ready for Judgment Day? Are we prepared to face up to a Christ that as our ancient creeds tell us will come again in glory ‘to be judge of the quick and the dead.’ Are we ready to stand up and endure those fires of God’s coming judgment? Ready or not, this is scary stuff.
These days, we don’t much like to talk about God’s judgment, let alone the judgment of Christ! For many Christians, the theological pendulum has clearly swung from earlier, decidedly more guilt-ridden and sin-aware times to an age of celebration of the boundless mercy, unconditional love, and extravagant hospitality of God’s grace. Here in this church especially we believe in the sweetness of God’s mercy! We love to know and to feel and to pass the peace of Christ. And all for good reason. Christ has already come once to assure us of God’s unconditional love, to free us from our sins, to teach us the ways of mercy, justice and peace, to tell us again and again through parable and story that we are beloved children of God. But even with this already, the work of God’s salvation is not finished yet -- already, but not yet. Just look at any newspaper, if not at some of the headlines of your own heart! Injustice is everywhere! And aside from our worthwhile efforts to bear prophetic witness and to create social justice, the contemporary mainline churches are practically silent when it comes to God’s judgment. We don’t usually even think to ask what God’s role is in correcting the injustices of our world. But according to our tradition, the answer will come later, on Judgment Day, which for better or worse feels to many of us like some vague, old-school notion that we’d just as soon not touch, not even with a twenty foot pole. This is especially true at this time of year. You want to throw a wet blanket on a Christmas party? Go ahead – just start talking about God’s judgment. I guarantee you could clear the room with just one mention!
The fact remains that our scriptures are filled with passages like this one from Malachi that paint pictures of refiner’s fires that burns away one’s dross and laundry soaps that bleach out human sin. Apparently, part of what it means to wait for God’s coming at this time of year is to wait for God’s judgment of humanity! And who among us is ready for that? And who needs it? I mean do we really need to be judged anyway? After all, as the saying goes, most of us are our own worst critics. Setting aside that issue, do we really need or want a judgmental God, or worse, a judgmental Jesus?
Dietrich Bonheoffer captures the dilemma this way in a 1928 sermon that is included in the collection that many of us are reading this season called “Watch for the Light.” He writes:
It’s very remarkable that we face the thought of God’s coming, so calmly, whereas previous peoples trembled at the day of God. We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no long feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for every one who has a conscience…Only when we have felt the terror of the matter, can we recognize the incomparable kindness. God comes into the very midst of evil and of death, and judges the evil in us and in the world. And by judging us, God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love.
More than most, Bonheoffer understood that grace does not come cheap. He knew that the assurance of God’s forgiveness is already made known to us through Jesus’ first coming. But he also knew that we can’t really know that amazing grace until our hearts have begun to know the fear of God, until we sense an awe at the fact that we ourselves are not God but are human beings who constantly make mistakes, sometimes even great big ones. He knew that part of being Christian means standing ready, with our feet to the fire of God’s impending judgment, if only because we know in faith that doing so will never be the end of our story.
So how do we shake our discomfort with this language and theology of God’s judgment? We could start with a sample of how this theme played out in an even earlier time. The great Jonathan Edwards puts it this way in one of his more famous 18th century sermons, called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards put the terror of God into his listeners when he depicted this image of God’s hand dangling us over the gaping mouth of a fiery hell, with nothing but God’s grace and mercy to suspend us! Hear his thunderous words for yourselves…
And if God should let you go, you immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock!
Anyone care for a little more?
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God . . . that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.
Now . . . who says the church never changes? I mean come on! Just look at how far we’ve come! For better, and to a lesser degree, for worse, we have indeed dropped the appeal to such a fearsome, judgment-filled theology. But, Edwards, Bonheoffer and other Malachis throughout the centuries knew something that we too readily forget: that a health dose of fiery and deeply respectful fear – the fear of the Lord - was a fine motivation for the transformation of souls and the transformation of the world. And he had people lining up outside giant tents to hear his preaching. His homiletic method, in part, was as follows. Speak the truth to people that we are sinners, everyone of us, and then ask what can we do to protect our souls from God’s judgment. His answer: Repent. Come clean. Step into the fires of your deepest secrets and truths. Acknowledge your sins before God and neighbor. And then, accept and experience the grace of God’s forgiveness and love.
If we can see through the heavy-handed rhetoric, whether of Edwards or Malachi, there’s something we can all learn from this old, old school. Imagine how our lives and our language might change if we were asked, daily and deeply, to acknowledge that we are all sinners, perhaps not before an angry God but before a loving God. How would our lives and world change if we were to take God’s judgment more seriously, if we were always preparing our souls for that great day of reckoning? We just might find ourselves joining in that fearsome humility of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote “Indeed, I tremble for our nation when I reflect that God is just.”
A little trembling in our souls just might do our church and world some good! And we might even wonder if God would have some trembling to do as well. The great Rabbi Abraham Heschel has suggested, “the suffering of man is a blot upon God’s conscience.” That line alone could start a sermon for another day, but for now, just consider that this day of reckoning may also be for God’s sake, a chance for both us and God to set the record straight about how and why there is so much evil, pain and suffering in our world! Talk about Judgment Day!
As fascinating as it may be to speculate about God’s conscience, lets keep the reckoning focused on our conciences, at least for now, shall we? Imagine, if you will, a coming judgment day of our nation. Imagine what it would do to burn through the trajectory of centuries of dominance of other peoples and set us on a new course. Imagine the fiery truth telling and reckoning about the ways America has been responsible for our own barbaric acts of terrorism against entire races of people, killing and enslaving innocents. Were the day of reckoning to come tomorrow, we as individual and as a nation would also surely have to face the fires for not being better stewards of God’s creation. Some may rightly feel like those fires of judgment are already starting to burn!
If the grand scale of all this is losing you, allow me to offer a more immediate example. Those of you who have been through marriage counseling or who have a good therapist of the proactive variety, surely you have some context for what it means to face day after day of reckoning, of owning what we have done and what we have left undone, even to those we love the most. Talk about a modern day refiner’s fire! I’m still smoking from my last session! Oh…the things we can learn when we press through that terror and leave ourselves open to being judged in a safe and loving environment. And oh the things we can learn from the kind of incomparable kindness that would follow and that flows out of covenantal relationships whether with partners, or with church members or with God. Perhaps by imagining God’s judgment in these ways we can begin to see some good news and light emerging. We might even call it the afterburning of God’s grace.
Jonathan Edwards can keep his angry God, but let us all remember and learn from the prophets through history that God’s coming judgment, when properly understood, can lead us, even now, to a grace and truth that can set us free. Sooner or later, God’s judgment will lead us back home, right where we belong. In the end and at the very end, God is always inviting us to return, to draw near even as God’s presence and future draws ever nearer to us. In the words of God spoken through Malachi: “Return to me, and I will return to you, say the Lord of Hosts.” Return, in terror if you must. Return to me with the individual and collective truth of who you really are. Return to me, and I will return to you with fires of judgment, yes, but also with incomparable and incomprehensible kindness. What’s more, I will not only return to you, but I will refine you and turn you into something more precious than gold. I will return you to the precious child of God that you are and always have been. Amen.
Jonathan Edwards, “Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God”, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Third Edition (W.W. Norton & Company, New York: 1989), 336-7.