I’m not sure who came up with the idea of a dental practice exclusively for children, what big city or sophisticated suburb gave birth to that idea, but I did not grow up in the big city or a sophisticated suburb. Norfolk, Virginia was a military town, a working port shipping coal, and generally a working class sort of place, and I was from a working class family. Nonetheless, children’s dentistry was aspirational, a sign of respectability, when I was a child, and my mom was eager to get my sisters and I in to see Doctor Bernard Einhorn, who had a treasure chest with cheap toys for good little girls and boys. I wasn’t impressed. I had suffered a traumatic dental injury while I was in pre-school, and had no love for people who wanted to stick pointy metal things in my mouth.
Despite my misgivings about dentistry, I had braces as a teen, had my wisdom teeth removed while I was in the Army, have never had a cavity, and generally kept up with all things dental until the lean years, when I went back to school in New York City after 9/11 and couldn’t afford a dentist. Going to the dentist is a lot like going to church, hard to re-start once you’ve lost the habit, and I lost the habit.
Last fall, I attended Credo, a UCC program for pastors of a certain age, designed to give us what we need to make it through the rest of our careers. The program addresses spiritual fitness, financial planning, career advancement, and physical health. Participants are asked to make commitments. One of mine was to go back to the dentist. And so I have.
Still no cavities, but new elaborate routines around tartar control, which brought me to the toothpaste section of Tradewinds on Tuesday afternoon. There, I met a lovely lady, a summer visitor, who asked if the water here had fluoride. I explained that the place she was staying probably had a well, so no fluoride. She asked how to tell if a toothpaste had fluoride, so I grabbed a box off the shelf and pointed it out on the ingredients list. It had never occurred to me that a toothpaste might not have fluoride! She was thankful, got what she needed. I had identified myself as a pastor, always looking for potential church visitors, so she told me a story about her church experience, and moved on. I stood looking at the tube of 3D toothpaste I had grabbed to show her.
Seriously, right there on the label. 3D white. And all I could think about was those poor suckers who tried to eat with two dimensional teeth. And white is a color, so how exactly is it 3D?
3D white toothpaste? Not the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, but pretty close. Marketing, advertising, it is all about messaging, trying to get your attention, trying to convince you of something, and not always something real. The same is true of politicians and religion and the kid with the Unicef box. Sometimes the messenger is a true believer, at other times, they would never touch their own snake oil. Everyone is trying to sell you on something, some product, some idea, children’s dentistry, a plastic toy in exchange for gruesome torture. Be good! There’s a cheap trinket in it for you. Even the prophets are trying to sell something.
Today’s prophet, unnamed and simply called Malachi, which means messenger, is trying to sell something. This is the last book in the Christian ordering of the Hebrew Testament, the last historically situated in the Hebrew canon, for it appears to have been written after Haggai, after the Second Temple was dedicated, about four centuries and a half before the birth of Jesus. Daniel pretends to have been written about a century earlier, during the Babylonian Exile, though it was actually written about two centuries after Malachi.
The promises of the restoration prophets had not come true and people were pretty glum and prickly, not that we would know anything about that. The Temple had been rebuilt, but the Hebrews were still vassals to foreign rulers, still poor and oppressed. Malachi deals with some of the same issues as Haggai and Zechariah. One of those issues, with uncomfortable parallels today in the US and Europe, was the idea that the Hebrews were losing their culture because of intermarriage with foreigners. Malachi also focuses on appropriate worship, and on respect for religious leaders.
The form of Malachi is fairly unique, moving away from the poetic oracles of other prophets to the legal, an interrogation of sorts. The people bring a charge against God, claiming that God has been unfaithful to them. God launches a counter-suit, never a good thing, and in the end, wins, proving that infidelity is not a characteristic of God, but of the Hebrew people. As a legal complaint, it is similar to that found in the fiction of Job, to that found in Jonah, both instances where God plays the God card. And while I think our fictional Job got a raw deal, the Lord wins each of these cases, because, you know, God…
As with so many of the late prophets, Malachi uses the “Day of the Lord†formula, the idea that God would right things in a dramatic event filled with judgment and fire. Many Christians are still hoping for this “Day of the Lord†today, cocky enough to believe that somehow they are going to make the cut. It is not as if human history teaches us that those who seek destruction are always destroyed. Well, except for all of human history.
For two months, we’ve wrestled with the prophets, what we could learn, the parts where we stumble. Malachi’s “Day of the Lord†is a stumbling block. Anytime someone tells you that things will go back to the way they used to be, they are lying, because that isn’t how the world works. You can’t unwind time. Still, there is some truth to be found with this messenger, the call to justice, the promised future.
Malachi makes two of the moves common to the prophets, judgment on the people, and the promise of restoration, a message of hope. The third move, oracles against the nations, dominated the Books of Obadiah and Nahum, though it appears in many prophetic texts, including the three major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Jonah’s entire mission is to another nation, a non-Hebrew nation at that.
So as we wrap up our sermon series on the Minor Prophets, I’d like to spend some time considering these three prophetic moves. We might think of them as inward, outward, and upward.
We have seen again and again that the prophets urge the Hebrew people to be better, to be more faithful, to be more just. Some of this we might discount, the minutia of the ancient Temple cult and pre-Rabbinic Hebrew religion, but much of it rings true today. The Hebrews are told that it matters how you treat people, it matters how you do business and how you pay your workers, none of this faithful on the sabbath and cutthroat in the marketplace. It matters if you lie. It matters how you treat the vulnerable.
This is the inward move, the call to self improvement, to improvement together as a community. The prophet’s honesty requires love, a flaming love, for love is a fire. The ancient Hebrews were trying to understand the realities of life, disease and war and drought and dishonesty, and the prophet told them to look in the mirror. That is hard, and not a popular message. The prophets tell them that showy religion doesn’t impress God. The Holy is concerned first and foremost with what is in your heart, and what you do when you don’t think God is watching. This message runs from one of our first prophets, to Malachi, our last, and on to the teachings of Jesus.
This idea of introspection, of a hunger for self-improvement, of humility and confession of our own faults, would become a cornerstone of Christian belief, elevated even further in the Reform tradition by our belief in our utter dependence on God’s grace. Any faith that does not start with confession of our sin is not Christian, is not Reform, is not Congregationalism or the United Church of Christ. It has no Jesus in it, for Jesus calls us to be reborn, renewed, to look at the plank in our own eye, to think carefully before throwing that first stone. Those who are filled with themselves have little rom for the holy.
The second move of the prophet is outward. For the ancient prophets, this became oracles against the nations, sometimes stand alone books, like the powerful indictments of Assyria and Edom we studied earlier in this series, or long series of oracles, naming nation after nation, Egypt and Moab, the Edomites and the Ammonites, Judahites if it was a prophet in the north and Samaritans if it was a prophet from the South. This was an age when a god belonged to one nation, in which gods manipulated nations, so it would be easy for us to throw these oracles away, deciding they have no use to us, for those nations no longer exist and we know that this Divine Mystery we name as God is not the property of one single nation, though far too many of our own have cooked up a half-baked twisted theology in which God’s special covenant with the ancient Hebrews was somehow, mysteriously, transferred to the United States, the religious crystal meth of Christian Nationalism.
But I’d suggest that we should not throw the oracles against the nations away, for a God that is good and universal may not have one nation, but the outward turn represents engagement in the world for us, just as it meant engagement with the world for the ancient Hebrews.
Jesus was most certainly focused on reforming his own community, for the Hebrew religion of his day had come to be dominated by people who cared more about ritual than they did about conduct, who were petty and judgmental, who bickered and found fault with everything except themselves. But Jesus also engaged non-Hebrews in the diverse context in which he lived, offered them healing, and even held out a non-Hebrew, a Samaritan, as a model of righteousness.
Christianity as we know it would not exist had it not been for the disciples’ engagement with the world, their ability to adapt, Peter and the unclean food, Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch on the road, a man of wealthy and power among Gentiles but not a man, ritually unclean to Jews, defiled. Christianity traveled up Roman roads and attracted the wealthy and the poor. Even when it was co-opted by empire, even at its worst, what we call Christendom, or Christianity as a kingdom, even in the darkest moments, like now, there always were and always will be those who follow Jesus and speak out to the world. The sons of Maine who marched south in the Civil War were not fighting an evil in Maine. They were inspired by Congregationalist ministers who denounced evils that were hundreds of miles away, for those Abolitionists of old were willing to look outward, beyond their own. And if it was important a century and a half ago, how much more so today, when we are so tightly connected, when a Russian hacker can take down our power grid or power up our hate.
The UCC’s Palestinian Information Network faces outward, speaks prophetically to the people of the prophets. Our Global Ministry, a partnership with the Disciples of Christ, faces outward. Local UCC congregations face outward every day when they support missions in other parts of the country, when we speak out for justice.
The prophet’s inward move calls us to our better selves. The prophet’s outward move calls us to make this a better world. These horizontal moves are about the world, our relationship with the world. The prophet’s upward move calls us to look at God, at the wonder and majesty and power, and to believe. The prophet calls us to hope.
This upward move, this vertical connection to the holy, is not about showy religion or an expensive building. Jesus may have been the first to call God “Abba,†or “Papa,†but the groundwork is laid in the prophetic works that speak of God’s willingness to forgive and to restore. The prophets speak of reconciliation and healing, of a time when strife if over and the people live in right relationship with one another and with their Creator, a time of abundance even. The oracles against the nations, sometimes brutal, are words of hope for those who heard them, for these are nations that have oppressed the Hebrews, and the prophets promise that the evil shall pass. The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, to borrow from Longfellow.
Reform yourself and the people of God. Change the world for the better. Hope and believe, for God is good.
The prophets words are sometimes harsh. They are spoken in love, but a flaming love. Malachi speaks of the refiner’s fire, the only way to get silver and gold. The only way to get stained glass, for that matter. Things of beauty often require heat.
Fire is a scary thing. It is a just a heartbeat from controlled burn to raging forest fire. But that fire, consuming all that is dead and rotten, burning off the impure, clears room for what is new and alive, leaves behind what we needed and wanted. The prophet’s fire burns what is dead and rotten and filled with sin in our hearts and in our communities.
It isn’t a popular job, this prophecy thing, this attempt to lead people in new ways, to lead them toward God. Amos gets deported, Elijah threatened with death, Jeremiah thrown down a well. We’ve spent almost two thousand years reciting a creed that blames the Roman governor for the execution of Jesus, but the reforming prophet from Nazareth, source of healing, burning so hot that his light is still seen today, was betrayed by one of his own, a leader in his own community, someone he sat around the table with again and again. For just as the poor will be with us always, just as prophets will arise in every generation, so too will there always be a Judas. But there will also always be an Easter, because love wins.
Look in the mirror, and work to improve yourself and your community, humbly, with plenty of confession. Look at the world, engage it, seek to improve it as you are able. Look to God, and believe that the God who makes a million miracles a day can make a million and one.
Live in faith. The prize is way better than the plastic Army men in Dr. Einhorn’s treasure chest.
Amen.