Saturday 11th December - The messenger to come

Malachi 3:1

“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.

So to the last of the Old Testament book and the last of the Old Testament prophets: Malachi, who writes in the 500’s BC and looks forward across a gap of half a millennium to another messenger (which is what Malachi means in Hebrew). Did he know that during those 500 years there was no voice, nor any that answered, until John the Baptist broke the silence?

There is a common, if gruesome, theory that a frog may be boiled in a pan of water and will not jump out – as long as the temperature is raised slowly enough. Worryingly, the theory is also applied to our own complacency in the face of issues facing Christians today.

The application I have in mind now, though, is different but equally worrying. Sometimes the church services I attend – no, be honest, lead – are very willing to settle for an echo of the Voice, and it requires an alarm call indeed to make the frogs jump out of the water and desire something more.

It’s a risky strategy, and one for God to prompt not for us to plot; but when it happens the sense of Presence is potent. We started a regular Healing Service at our Cathedral recently, and standing at the altar while a beautiful Taize chant was being sung, I found myself carried away into ad hoc counterpoint and vocalization – and a little bit of heaven.

The point of the story for now is that is whetted my appetite again for God’s presence, and I hope it might whet yours. If the Lord is to come into his Temple, our desire is part of the plan. While the voice of the Lord was silent, also silent were the ‘Quiet in the Land’, like Simeon righteous and devout and ‘waiting for the consolation of Israel’ (Luke 2). Their day will come.

So the end of the week and the onslaught of the prophets brings us the great Advent theme of expectation: not taking the waiting out of wanting or the wanting out of waiting, but waiting with sometimes painful wanting, for the Birth, for the Advent, for the Lord who is to come.

In expectation of answered prayer, in un-quiet response, spend today’s prayer time repeating the prayer walk you did last week. Give thanks to God for any change you see, for answered prayer, and where prayers have seemingly gone unanswered, continue to pray in fervent un-quietness.

This entry was posted on 10/12/2010 at 10:16 am and is filed under advent2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.