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December 05, 2004
Elijah’s Second Coming
Elijah’s Second Coming
Malachi 4: 1-6 / Matthew 3: 1-12
December 5th, 2004
I would guess that more than one person here this morning has thought or said, “If I had it to do over again, I would do it differently.” There are words we wish we had never spoken. There are hasty decisions we made that changed the course of life. If only we had a second chance.
Built into the fabric of God’s work with this world it seems has been a series of pivotal second chances. When the world reached such a depth of depravity that humanity was a disgrace to itself God sent a great flood, wiping out everything. But instead of totally eliminating the human race, God saved one family and from them began again. Humanity got a second chance.
Once upon a time there was a strange man named Yohanan ben Zechariah, whom we know as John the Baptist.
He wasn’t a Baptist, as an old lady in a nursing home once insisted to this Presbyterian pastor, informing him of her more proper Christian roots. John was dubbed “the Baptizer” because he practiced baptism, a new ceremony. John’s baptism was a sacrament of a second chance.
John the Baptist was an innovator. John put people fully under the water as a sign of drowning their old sinful ways, before bringing them up to a new and better life. His ministry was to give people a second chance. It began with a symbolic act reflecting what God did in the days of Noah. They had to drown the old person and start again.
John’s baptism was available to Jews and to non-Jews alike, to pagan Roman soldiers and Jewish Pharisees. This was how God began to open up second-chances to the whole world. John put all people on a level playing field before God.
I wonder what made Pharisees submit to John’s scorching sermons side by side with tax collectors and Roman soldiers. “Brood of vipers,” he said to the spiritual elite of his day, “who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Pharisees, who were the morally superior sect of the Jews, had to swallow John’s harsh words and they did. They stood in the hot sun listening to John’s harsh words, recognizing that for all their care in outward observances, their motives were not pure. They stepped forward with everyone else to say to John the Baptist, “Drown my old self; let me begin anew.”
Who was this man, John? We know nothing of John’s childhood except that he was born to an elderly mother and that his father was a priest. At some point in his young manhood he left home to live in one of the most barren regions on our planet. He wore some sort of garment made of camelhair. It was sturdy but collected grime. John ate grasshoppers and wild honey.
Though you and I think of John the Baptist as the immediate forerunner of Jesus, people in his day couldn’t figure out who he was. John spoke of himself, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.” “What does that mean?” people must have asked their rabbis. Perhaps their rabbis reminded them of the words of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 40.
Isaiah wrote of the time this one would come, “Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low.” When Isaiah spoke these words people no doubt envisioned valleys miraculously rising to meet mountaintops that were sinking down, so that there was a flat plain—like Indiana—where formerly there were hills and dales. But Isaiah referred to what was happening in the hearts of people who came to John the Baptist. Those who thought of themselves as morally outstanding were brought down, and those who thought they were incorrigible sinners were lifted up. John persuaded them that we are all on a level field before God.
But John must have wondered, “Who am I that this happens through me?” We know he was not proud. He said of Jesus, “I’m not worthy to undo his sandal thongs.” He did not use his power for personal advantage.
John was thrown into a dungeon by one of the sons of King Herod the Great to shut him up. When he was in the dungeon he sent some of his disciples to Jesus asking, “Are you he who is to come or shall we look for another?” John preached, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” and seems to have understood when he baptized Jesus who this humble Cousin of his was. But locked in the dank dungeon he became confused. “Are you the one?”
But Jesus had a clear idea of who John was. Jesus said, “If you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come.”
Jesus had in mind the last words of the prophet Malachi who said, four hundred years earlier, “Thus says the Lord of Hosts . . . I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.”
The prophet Elijah was a second Moses. Moses had promised hundreds of years before, “The Lord your God will raise up for a you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren, him you shall heed.” Israel didn’t listen to Moses. The Bible doesn’t blush to tell how Israel bucked Moses’ leadership. But Moses said, when this second Moses comes, you will listen to him. Israel waited to be given this second chance. How would they know when it came?
Then Elijah burst onto the scene many years later in the days of the wicked King Ahab. He was the one Moses pointed to, whom the people would listen to. But when this prophet like Moses came during the reign of King Ahab, the very worst of Israel’s kings, he didn’t wear a sign saying, “I’m the one Moses promised you would listen to.” They did not listen.
Elijah told King Ahab there would be neither rain nor dew in Israel for three years. Why? Because Elijah echoed Moses. “If you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God . . . the heavens over your head shall be brass, and the earth under you shall be iron.” No rain meant draught, no food, no water. Nobody saw a connection between the draught and what Elijah had said to King Ahab. God has nothing to do with this.
So Elijah said, in effect, “Let’s be a bit more clear.” He proposed a showdown with the priests and prophets of Baal, the Sidonian deity that Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, had introduced to Israel.
Elijah set the stage for a contest that would clarify once and for all who was the God Israel was to serve. The prophets of Baal sacrificed a bull, laying it on the altar they built. They began formally to utter their prayers. Nothing happened. Soon they screamed to Baal, and fussed, and carried on liturgically. But nothing happened. Elijah taunted them, “Maybe Baal is asleep, or on a trip, and this is why he doesn’t burn up your sacrifice.”
Then Elijah stepped up and laid on the altar the bull he offered to the God of Israel. He had his opponents drench the altar with water once, twice, three times. Then he prayed, “O Lord, God of Israel, let it be known today that thou are God in Israel . . . and that Thou hast turned their hearts back.” Then we read, “The fire of the Lord fell . . . and when the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God’.” They had a second chance.
Mendelssohn, in his oratorio, “Elijah,” splices in the appeal we find in the prophet Joel, but Elijah may well have said it too. “Return to me with all your hearts.” Half-heartedness is the plague of our faith.
Israel did not take its second chance. And the years went by. It wasn’t long before their land was conquered by the cruelest nation in the ancient Near East, Assyria. The people were taken into exile.
But God provided an echo of this appeal down the corridors of time. The last words of the last of the Jewish prophets, Malachi, promised, “I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.” I will give my people another chance. John the Baptist was this second coming of Elijah.
We always remember John the Baptist at this season of the year because he announced the first coming of the Lord Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
But we now live after Jesus came so why do we keep remembering John? Jesus didn’t tell us, “Remember John, Elijah, and Moses at Advent. He said, “Come follow me.” This appeal has echoed in Christians’ ears for nearly two-thousand years. But the standard of following has been reduced as we have rehearsed the words over and over again. Until following Jesus really may look like nothing in particular. I sometimes wonder, “What’s become of intensity of love and gratitude to Jesus?”
Now we are asked to remember that Jesus said, “I am coming again.” But this isn’t really a second-chance kind of second-coming. When Jesus comes again it will not be as a baby born in an obscure village in Judea, but in a much more awesome way. Then will come a great sifting of peoples, to see who has listened and who has not.
The Table of the Lord stands here before us, with bread and wine beneath that white linen cloth. Here we see emblems of the level of devotion to us of the Son of God. God does not ask many of us to die for Him. Instead, He appeals, “Live for me.”
We are accustomed to thinking of a “professional ministry” as the ones with principal responsibility in God’s work. But God looks for ordinary people, sold-out to serving in the name of Jesus Christ to be the mini-Elijah’s and mini-John the Baptists—saying to their friends and neighbors, “You can be reconciled to God.”
When ordinary people accept this role the life of faith surges for them and the church is stirred to life. We are preoccupied with other things. It is because we have lost the main agenda. Fifty years ago the Scottish pastor, James S. Stewart wrote, “To confront a bewildered and disheveled age with the fact of Christ, to thrust upon its confusion the creative word of the Cross and smite its disenchantment with the glory of the Resurrection—this is the urgent, overruling task . . . if the Church can indeed say, ‘It is not I who live, it is Christ who lives in me,’ then the dark demonic forces of the age have met their match.”
What is lacking is intensity of expectation of ourselves. I have come to know in recent weeks a few young folk in whom the fire burns to be useful for God. It is a welcome thing to feel this warmth. I pray God may kindle in our hearts a fire again, that we may not only enjoy the fullness of life in Christ, but may be His agents in our day, to offer to others a second chance at life in Christ, full and rich and free.
Let us pray: O Lord, your ways are mysterious and wonderful. Your love knows no measure. Grant to us to respond indeed to your tug on our hearts, and to be in your hands as your servants Elijah and Moses were, agents of grace in a troubled world. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at December 5, 2004 09:30 AM