Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Second Sunday before Advent 2025

'See the Day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all the evildoers will be stubble.' 

The world is on fire; we all see it. The Prophet Malachi speaks into our own day: we burn like an oven. A moment’s glance at the news will tell us that flames scorch our earth. The raging fire of war surges out across our globe: in Ukraine, in Congo and Sudan, in Gaza, and in the waters of the Atlantic, where vessels are bombed into fiery ash and the bodies of the burned committed to the deeps. Who cannot feel the chastening of Almighty God in these fires of war? Even those fought from highest ideals—perhaps especially those—or battles we reluctantly endorse, raise in our hearts the searing conviction that the Day of the Lord, that terrible Day, is unleashed under the banner of war.

The world is on fire, again, as it burns hotter year after year, our environment kindling a furnace that threatens life on our earth. We feel in our bones the dis-ease that spreads even among the most confident and indifferent, a slow flame that licks our conscience. The droughts, the punishing heat waves, the frightful storms, the uncontrolled forest fires, the floods that sweep all away before its irresistible surge: these fall as judgements upon us as well. But perhaps it is not just the headline calamities that weigh so heavily on our conscience. Perhaps we recognize the approaching Day of the Lord—His coming judgement—in the small things, the little happenings, the small absences that marks a world burning quietly, almost out of sight, yet remorselessly, steadily, all around us. The Spring that advances upon us, earlier each year. An early daffodil that once delighted our wintery eyes, but now says: danger! A bird song that we remember fondly in our childhood, now silent. A landscape once green and lush where we enjoyed a stroll, now desiccated or its waters decayed. Sometimes a small brush fire speaks with as loud a voice as a full-scale fire.

Such a burning world sends its children on the move, fleeing war and disaster and hunger and need. We are a globe in movement, peoples leaving homelands, driven out, restless, searching on land, by our waterways, across borders of every kind, pressing from place to place in search of a new homeland, a country where fire is forgotten. But it is not welcome or refuge that immigrants find at the end of their journey, but as in my homeland, and in many countries across the fiery earth, they find instead rejection, an imprisonment, a capture and deportation, a stony heart among the citizens of the Land of Promise. Whatever we hold about national borders, or the duties of citizenship, we must feel haunted, as Christians, by the words of our prophet Malachi: I the LORD will be swift to bear witness against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien. The Day of the Lord, burning like an oven, menaces our eyes as we look out over a world of refugees in our day.

For the truth of the matter is that the fire burning in our world today burns within us, within each of us. The word our Prophet uses in our lection today for the arrogant—those who will be burnt to stubble on the Coming Day—is the same root as a burning fire. We are seething within, an inner fire that cannot be quenched. In a celebrated section of his great treatise, On First Principles, Origen likens sin to a fever, kindling inside the sinner. Sin to be sure is a misdeed, a disobedience or rebellion; an act against a Holy God. Origen certainly agrees with this traditional view. But he sees further. Sin in a fire within, a slow burn that is carried deep within the sinner, simmering and scorching long before any act is taken, any love denied, any kindness refused. We can see it in the eyes, that fevered look any parent knows well in the suffering child. And we can sense it in the touch, the skin too warm for comfort, the sweat just beginning to show at the edge of the clothes, at the back of the nape. This is sin in our lives: our inner world of fire. It’s the resentment we do not voice, the hardness of heart we do not express, the envy, the fear, the despair that gnaws at us. At a distance, after all, the fevered patient looks as healthy as everyone else—no visible scar, no broken bone, cast up in plaster, no wracking cough or frailty. No, the fever is carried within, and we must draw near to see that fire burning the patient up from deep inside. This is our lot; the Prophet tells us. Long before we break out in evil doing, we rage within, and like any run-away fever, it makes our touch clammy and cold. We say, to quote the Prophet earlier in his oracle: ‘it is vain to serve God. What do we profit by keeping his commandment or by going about as mourners before the Lord of hosts? Now we count the arrogant happy; evildoers not only prosper, but when they put God to the test, they escape.’ (3.14-15)

We priests have special reason to fear this fiery Day of the Lord. The Prophet Malachi stands in the line of truth-tellers scholars call the ‘cultic-prophet’—those Seers who not only testify to Israel’s sins before the Holy Covenant God, but also stand before His Altar, serving Him as priests, those who offer sacrifice for the People before the Lord. Like Ezekiel, like Isaiah, like Zechariah, Malachi turns his fiery glance toward the priests of the Lord, the historic Sons of Levi. They offer defiled gifts before the Lord; they do not listen; they do not give glory to the Divine Name; they do not give proper instruction, and cause many to stumble. As a priest I can only hear these terrible words as judgement, a particular verdict from the Holy God on the shepherds that are to tend a flock and time again, show themselves, show ourselves, as mere hirelings—they who flee when the wolf comes.

For who can endure the Day of His coming, and who can stand when He appears? Malachi reserves these solemn words for the broken priests, the fevered ones who must lead and cannot. The Lord will come—in a sudden rush of flame—into His Temple and like a refiner’s fire, He will purify. They will become like gold and silver, purged on that Day from the fire within, the evildoing beyond. And in that way, we shall come to see what Holy Fire is in the hands of the Living God.

Fire does not simply burn; it also purifies; not only consumes but also heals, quickens, joins together. As for the priests, so also and even more so for the People: God will come to His Temple, a Consuming Fire, and will melt down our impurities, scorch to ash our stony hearts, spark into us a heart of flesh, warm us to our tasks, meld us to one another with a bond only the God of Fire can perform. This is the Promise of the Covenant that drives every Prophet, and gives true hope in the midst of true and deep darkness.

We are drawing close now to the Season of Advent, the days of preparation for our Lord’s Coming, not only in frail flesh and to a cold manger, but in the Last Days, in triumph and victory and judgement. We begin in these weeks the proper preparation for standing before this King, this Holy One. John the Baptist tell us that already He stands before us, His winnowing fork in His Hand, ready for the threshing floor, the chaff already singed with unquenchable fire. That Fire, because it comes from the Good and Holy Lord, the Prince of Peace, will burn, root and branch; but burn into order to heal, to purify, to amend, to refine. This world of ours, on fire with evils within and without, will not be left to its own destruction, will not burn out into ash, but will be redeemed, cauterized, saved. This is the astonishing good news of a Holy Lord who is also and always the God whose property it is always to have mercy. We are in the midst of fiery times; we all register the heat. But we face that raging flame with the confidence of the Prophet: the Sun of Righteousness will rise, he promises us, with healing in His Wings. We await that Coming with boldness, and lift up our eyes to the Fire that will burn the stubble to the ground and make the whole earth green. One stone may not be left upon another, nor words of war and rumors of war unable to be stopped, yet we raise our heads before this Coming Day, and proclaim with the Church of every age: Even so, Come Lord Jesus! May we with hearts and eyes open to that Holy Flame, pray such words this day, even this day. Amen.