I’ve been amazed at the Altar Guild.  The thing that I love about them is that I must be very careful what I ask them to do because their efforts are ten times better than what I was thinking. Observe these beautiful symbols against the wall.  Each of them is a symbol for a Sunday of Advent and illustrates the text for that Sunday. The Star of David represents Sara’s sermon last week when the scripture that she read referred to the tree of Jessie and David’s lineage.  Directly below it you see two turtledoves in a basin with a cross. And that is a symbol of purification that is central to the text for today.  I point those things out to you so you will have those things to think about over the next few weeks.

I am going to begin my sermon today with a reference to a movie and then return to today’s text.  One of my favorite Christmas movies is a Chevy Chase film.  It’s the story of a man who wants to have the perfect Christmas for his family but nothing goes right. They invite relatives to Christmas dinner and ask the grand matron of the family to say a prayer. Instead she says the Pledge of Allegiance. Then they discover that the fine dish that she brought for the family potluck is cat food. And things get worse. The father decides that he will have more lights on his house than anybody else in town. Every time he goes up on the roof he falls, the electricity blows or something else goes wrong.

This movie is special to me is because when one of my children saw the movie, it was decided that we should have the most lights in the neighborhood.  It was the gaudiest mess you’ve ever seen, but I had a happy kid. We watch all the disasters this family faces including visits from unwelcome relatives, overspending on gifts and disappointment when the anticipated Christmas bonus fails to materialize, and finally the loss of his job. His wife, in a very gentle way, tells him to relax. She says it is the love that they have for each other that really is what’s important and the fact that he tried so hard is what really matters to them.

Every Advent most of us whine and complain about how busy we are. I didn’t even want to get out of bed this morning. I will be honest. This has been the busiest week at this church since I’ve been here. How do we get ourselves into this situation every December? Part of me thinks that we like it or we wouldn’t keep doing it. There are a lot of wonderful things going on.  The truth is that we enjoy getting together with our friends and families.  We like all the lights, the gaudier the better. The extravagance of this time of year is unbelievable. It is interesting when we superimpose the spiritual life on that scenario.  Consider Malachi. We don’t know a lot about who he was. We know that he was writing at the time when the children of Israel had returned from exile, the temple had been rebuilt, that there was a relative period of stability for the people of Israel.  Stability didn’t come along very often. One of the characteristics of a biblical faith is that when things are going well, it is the worst time for faith. It is ironic that when people of faith are thrown into crisis, they tend to be better at their faith than when things are going well. The prophet Malachi is pretty hard on the children of Israel. He sees that they have lost a basic tenet of their relationship with God. There is a beautiful illustration from the Malachi text about the refiner’s fire.  It is about a melting away of all that is frivolous so that we can return to what is central to our faith. I’ve been thinking about Quakers all week too. Quakers kept trying to simplify the faith to the point to where it was at its very essence.   I think that is what we need to do in our lives today as we begin to celebrate Christmas.  I admit to you that I’m going to give one of those sermons that you expect from preachers this time of year.  We’ve lost the real meaning of Christmas.  We hear the story of a baby born to peasants two thousand years ago and we get so starry eyed and sentimental that we forget what a profound message the birth of that child really is. Somehow God, the creator of everything, the one who is and will be forever, has come in this world in human form.  God took on human form that we could know the redemptive love of God in our lives today.

Sara gave me a book to read a few weeks ago.  It is a book on sin; nice reading for the month of December.  I have been trying to figure out how to share it with you without really upsetting you. Did you know that every one of us here are sinners? Mainline people are uncomfortable with that word.  We want to avoid it because it’s negative and we want to be positive thinkers. The irony is that we must confront how fragile we are as human beings and admit that none of us are perfect. I was telling someone the other day that we live in an age of celebrity.  Celebrities have become the saints of our culture. In the Middle Ages people would identify saints as people who were perfect so that other people could emulate them and become like them. The mistake of those kinds of saints was that no one is ever perfect. For example, would you be surprised to know that Mother Theresa was not perfect.  She was a sinner too.    Do you know why we are into a celebrity cult?  We admire some people and want to look up to them, and the minute they do something wrong, we are ready to pull them down.   Michael Jordan is one of my greatest heroes.  I saw him six months ago and it was one of the thrills of my life. Michael Jordon made basketball an art form. And he is a good man, but he has struggled with his life.   A couple of years ago there were a couple of nasty things that came out about him. He was gambling and there was a rumor that he had had an affair. Those aren’t things you want to know about your hero, are they? In many ways it humanized Michael Jordon for me.

Malachi reminds us that we are like those children of Israel.  We live in a fairly comfortable time for Christianity. I haven’t seen anyone dragged out of the church because they are Christian. I've yet to see anyone in our country flogged because they stand up for the Christian values that they believe in.  Times of comfort are the times that are the most dangerous for our faith because it is in those moments that we tend to get unfocused and too comfortable. Malachi reminds us that what we need is the refiner’s fire to confront that in us that is sinful. He lists many sins so that we are not mistaken about sin.   He lists adultery, mistreating workers, and failing to care for the ailing among the people of God.  One of the remarkable things about the Biblical faith is its practical application. In many ways the biblical faith is an anti-religion.   It’s not about religion at all. Religion is about looking at the gods and figuring how to manipulate them to get what you want from them. The Biblical faith focuses on what God demands of us and not on how God can be manipulated.  How we can be what God has called us to be and what God has called us to do. See how that is reversed? Sometimes the Advent Christmas season focuses on what we want--what we want in our parties and that we have the right friends, what we want under the tree so that we get a gift that is going to make us happy. As if any material thing is ever going to make us happy.  Malachi reminds us that God needs to refine us in a refiner’s fire and melt away those parts of us that are sinful, leaving us with the essence of a people naked and exposed before our God and aware of how much we need the redemptive love of God that came in such a profound way two thousand years ago. God lives among us and God redeems us, and that is what we celebrate this Christmas season. May God continue to refine each of us and call us to a high moral standard.  May we be the people that God has intended and may Christmas become for us what it really means.

Let us bow our heads for a word of prayer.