I don’t know if you watch a television program that I do from time-to-time: Love It or List It. It is a rather interesting show. If you haven’t watched it, it is basically about people who live in a home, and they are given the option of renovating where they live or moving to a new home. They have parts of their home renovated that they feel are not good. In the meantime they look at new homes to see about that option. You either love it – or you list it! You either love the newly renovated home or you put in a bid on something that is more suitable.
If you listen to the narrator on this program, by the way, you may realize that it is actually one of the mothers of a child in our Choir School! It is a great show. You sit in suspense because you are never quite sure if they are going to stay in the home that they have or move to a new one. In either case, there is a transformation. Regardless of the option they choose, something changes profoundly: either the place where they live or the new home that they are going to move to. Both of them then are acts of transformation, and it is that which makes it a really fascinating program.
Today’s passage from Malachi, and the other one from Mark, are in many ways very similar to this. Although they are written four hundred years apart and Malachi was written at an entirely different nevertheless there is a similarity. Both of them are talking about transformation. Both of them are talking about change. But it is God in both circumstances that is responsible for making the changes. The commonality is transformation, but the similarity is it is God who transforms. In Malachi’s case, it is the transformation of a nation; in Jesus’ case it is the transformation of a human life. In both cases there is the same theme.
What is fascinating is that over the two thousand years of Christian history people have seen the correlation between Malachi and the story in Mark. The reason the Lectionary puts these two together is that there is not only a commonality of purpose, there is a sense in which what Jesus does fulfill what Malachi had hoped for four hundred years before. There is an inextricable link of transformation. I want to look at that this morning, because I think in many ways the transformation both in Malachi and the transformation in Mark helps all of us understand our own reality and our own life better. Bear with me as I look at these two, for you do enter the story a little later on – and it becomes a very powerful story!
Malachi is clearly about the transformation of a nation, the transformation of a people. You can see the need for transformation as you read the whole of the Book of Malachi. The background is fascinating. The people of Israel had lived in exile, and in Malachi’s time had returned home to Jerusalem and to Judea and to Israel. The people of God had lived in Babylon, they had lived in other parts of the world, and now they had come home. They had been home for a while. When they came home, they did as many people do when they celebrate their liberation and their freedom: they erect monuments to memorialize their victory and their return. For the People of Israel, that monument is a temple, a temple to the Lord their God. So, they built this incredible temple in Jerusalem.
The Temple was to be a sign, a memorial, a remembrance, but also a living place of worship for the people in order that they might thank God for what he had done. But there were problems. After a while, the people became complacent and apathetic. They had their monument, they had their great Temple, and they thought that it would always be there and be the same. They seldom thought about the future, or about what might happen tomorrow. They lived purely in the now and their apathy led to a number of major problems.
One of them was men divorcing their wives without reason. What was happening was that some of the men from Israel had met Gentile women when they had lived in Babylon, but also had Jewish wives. In those days, it was very crude and it was very cold, all the man had to do was give his wife a piece of paper – and the marriage was over! Just that simple. No sense of covenant, no sense of relationship, no sense of commitment; just simply dissolving the marriage at a whim and living with their Gentile counterpart. Malachi sees this as a sign of the people coming back, but still having one foot left in Babylonian culture. They have their great Temple, they have all their worship and their praise, but they are treating people with injustice. For those women who were left, were often left in penury and poverty because they had no husband to provide for them, and the community would have to support them – a terrible position to be in! The same thing with widows and orphans, no one there to take care and protect them. They were vulnerable and weak.
Malachi said, “This is an affront to God! You can’t come home and have your glorious Temple if you are not going to treat people with justice!” In Hebrew, the word is mishpat – if you don’t treat people with justice, there is no point having a great and a glorious sanctuary in honour of God. It is the same thing he said about tithing. There is no point saying you are going to have this wonderful Temple if you are not going to give and contribute to and support the work. If you are going to treat the Sabbath as if it is not important and it is just another day in the week, you are not honouring God.
There were even more problems that arose over sacrifices in the Temple. They were supposed to be pure. There was a certain law about what those sacrifices would be. But the priests would say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter – just whatever you want to bring is a sacrifice.” Malachi is saying, “No, no, no! If the people of God are going to come back and live in the land, they have to change their ways. They have to be faithful to God.” Then he suggests God is going to do something about it. God is going to send a messenger, and the messenger will be like a refining fire, and I love that phrase in this particular version – “the fuller’s soap- the launderer’s soap.” He is going to wash it all clean and put it all right, and put it back together again and make it clean. Who will be able to stand before God when God acts? Malachi says, “Nobody!” for God will do something great among us, and will refine us like silver and gold, and re-purify us. It is a glorious vision of a people being transformed and turned around by God. Malachi says, “God will do this in God’s time.”
Bring us forward four hundred years to the story of Jesus. Enter the transformer! It is no coincidence where Jesus arrives on the scene. He arrives on the scene in Capernaum, the home of Andrew and Simon Peter, James and John, as we looked at last week. He comes on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s Day. He comes in the area of Galilee, where he himself had been known and brought up. But then, most especially, he comes into the Synagogue. To quote another television program on houses, it is all about location, location, location! Jesus comes in the place with the greatest impact to make the greatest point that he could ever make. On the Sabbath, in Galilee, in Capernaum, in a synagogue, he does something amazing. This is what Malachi hopes for. But what he does is not to transform the nation in one fell swoop, but rather he changes a life, and the life is a poor demented soul. The poor demented soul has what the Bible calls “an unclean spirit.”
You see, there was in biblical days this belief that there is a correlation between our spiritual being, our spiritual self, and our health and welfare. They didn’t divide human life into body and mind and spirit and carve it all up into categories, but rather they saw the person as a whole. If it was a spiritual problem, then it could manifest itself in a physical problem, and vice versa. They also believed – and there was a dark side to this – that if you were physically ill, it was possibly due to the fact that there was something wrong with you spiritually, that you weren’t holy and pure. That is why lepers weren’t allowed into the Temple. That is why beggars were forced to sit outside its. It was because they were infirm. People who were mentally ill were treated as pariahs, and were left on the outside of society. That is why women who didn’t meet all the cleanliness rules of The Old Testament weren’t allowed into the inner sanctum, and on and on it went. There were all these restrictions, because they believed that they must be spiritually based. In other words, there must be something wrong with you if you are not well – and all the guilt that goes with it! Jesus has to deal with this over and over and over again! All these people couldn’t go into the Temple and couldn’t go into the Holy of Holies, because they were ritually unclean, because they were spiritually impure.
Jesus saw this as an affront to God. He challenged the very foundation of it. But, you know, the remnants of that kind of guilt thinking still exist today. There are still people who really do look on others when they suffer and when they have a problem and believe that there must be something wrong with them or they must have done something wrong. If we don’t look at others that way, often, let’s be honest with ourselves, have there not been moments in your life when you said, “what have I done wrong to deserve this?” Well, that is the same mentality as at the time of Jesus. But Jesus is right on another sign, mainly that there is a correlation between our spiritual selves and our overall health. We are not divided up; we are spiritual beings. We are not just flesh and bones. We are not just minds. We are also spirit. We have a soul.
It is not just about the mechanics of our being, as if we are autonomous creatures who have arrived on earth as an accident of science. We are a living soul with a living spirit. That is why Jesus says, “Those who worship God must worship God in spirit and in truth, because God is spirit.” The spiritual part of our lives is important. This man that Jesus encounters has an unclean spirit. He recognizes Jesus for who he is: the Holy One of God. But he does so in a demented and in a derogatory way. Jesus changes that spirit within him. Jesus challenges that unclean spirit within him in order that he might be restored to see Jesus for who he is. Not only that, but as we see in all the subsequent stories in Mark’s Gospel, whether it is the lame beggar or the blind man or the leper, all of them are the same, all of them are transformed and restored like a fuller’s soap, like a cleansing and refining fire. They are put right with God. Jesus’ ministry was profoundly and powerfully spiritual.
I love this story and it is well known, and sometimes told in other areas. It is about a man called Lindsey Clegg. He was a British businessman and property developer. You notice my theme this morning? As a property developer he would sell some of that property. He would take all his properties, often run-down properties, restore them and then sell them. But he didn’t always restore them. It wasn’t like Love It or List It. It was not as if he did renovations. Sometimes, as a businessman, he would buy up a section and then he would sell it on to somebody else. One day, there was a man and he came and saw a factory that had been basically abandoned. It was near the Thames and was in terrible condition. Lindsey Clegg took this man and a woman, who belonged to the same company, to have a look around. They had a look at it. There was graffiti on the walls, the windows were all smashed, the foundation was cracking, the roof was leaking. It was a great, horrible, terrible building!
It was so terrible, but the person who was going to buy it didn’t seem to care one iota. Lindsey kept saying, “Well, you know, it is bad.” He was being honest and e honourable.
The buyer says, “Look, I have no desire to buy it to restore it. All I really want is the site.” He didn’t want a patchwork quilt. He didn’t want to put it all back together and make it patchy and maybe make something out of it, as the old saying goes of ‘making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’ No, no, no!” It was the site the developer wanted.
Jesus comes into the lives of people and he doesn’t say to them patch your life up with a little bit of moral thing here, and a little bit of justice there, and a little bit of self-justification there. He doesn’t play the patchwork quilt with people at all. He comes in and he wants to put that unclean spirit away. He wants to transform them, change them. He wants to put them in a right relationship with God, just like Malachi wanted for the people of Israel – just put it right God! Don’t play around just put it right!
I think sometimes this has a profound effect on us today. It is amazing that for all our supposed rationalism that we pride ourselves on, and the ability to think through all the problems of life, and our reasonableness, there is still sometimes deep down within our core as a society and a people that sort of love of myth and legend and good and evil and spiritual powers. For example, this week I read a notable Toronto newspaper that, by the way, I don’t read every day, and one of the headlines was that a Witch had agreed to cast a spell on the Maple Leafs to take away their losing record. Well, a page was dedicated to this! Now, that was really interesting, because the next game they played was against The Devils – and they lost! The fact that some people are enthralled and a newspaper devoted a page on this stuff tells you this kind of sense of the spiritual and the mystical is still there. You see it for example, in the awful story of a minister practicing exorcisms, but he is also an exploiter of people. Even when you look at movies, so many of them – especially the sci-fi ones – are about the struggle of good and evil: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the obsession right now that movies have with zombies. It is all kind of weird and spiritual and conflict between good and evil. There is this kind of latent spirituality within our culture that likes the stuff, but it is all so silly. It is not authentic.
The authentic we find lives and is grounded in something much deeper and more profound. We see it in the ministry of Jesus. What has sustained the Christian faith for two thousand years is that we have seen, and people still to this day see the power of God’s spirit alive and at work in the life and the ministry of Jesus. His ability to transform and change people’s lives is not just something that is then; it is something that is now. To really appreciate the power of that we have to understand that we are spiritual people ourselves, that we are not just here as an accident, and that we just didn’t appear from nowhere, and that we have, as Jesus was suggesting in Mark’s Gospel, something much more about us. We have a spiritual life. That spiritual life that worships God is not about the edification of a temple; it is not about the glorification of a nation; it is not about even the elevation of the laws: it is about the living relationship with the God who made us.
There is not one of us who has not been made by the hand of the Creator. There is not one of us who does not have a soul and a spiritual life. There are very dark times when human life is really cheap, and the culture of death prevails. As some of you know, I have always been a lover of Dostoyevsky, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote this: “Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea and there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other higher ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.”
In other words, our spiritual life matters. We are not just a fabric of time. We are not just appearing in a culture for an age. We are much more than that. When Jesus saw that man with the unclean spirit in the Temple on that fateful day and restored him and transformed him, he was saying something that humanity should listen to for time immemorial. For Jesus was the real deal. He was the one Malachi had waited for. He was the transformer. He is the one who can take our spirit no matter how wobbly or how insecure or how vulnerable it may be, no matter how proud or arrogant it may be, no matter how fearful it may be, no matter how joyful it may be, and turn it inextricably to God who made us. Amen.