Pentcost 10C 2025

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

  Today’s readings give us a smorgasbord of choices that range from my having to say “don’t make any plans before Tuesday” and “Jesus, I really wish you hadn’t said that.” 

Then I remember something I learned in elementary math class. Reduce to the lowest common denominator. Or, for a more adult process, take all the ingredients and distill the mix until you get the pure essence. It could be pleasing, it could be bitter, depending on the mix and the botanicals added from our own experiences. 

At the heart of today’s lessons is something beyond any one of us, something that can be found in the larger mix of us, yet remains outside of us. That something is truth. As we were told a quarter of a century ago, truth is not always pleasing, nor is it always convenient.
But instead of calling it what it is, we deny truth by attacking the messenger, choosing instead to offer self-serving “alternative facts” to serve up something more pleasing to our own ears. Satan never had it so easy. 

Take a look at an event in the life of Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham. One night, while trying to sleep before meeting the brother he deceived many years before, he had a dream. In that dream, he wrestled with a heavenly being, a struggle that went on and on through the night. Finally, that being delivered a blow that caused Jacob’s hip socket to displace, and in pain he gave up. 

He was given a new name after that. Israel. It means “strives with God.” Then he limped his way to his family reunion with Esau, and, despite his fears, survived to tell the tale. After all, once you’ve wrestled with God, what’s a bit of sibling rivalry? 

It’s that name, Israel, that matters more. It carries the same promise grandpa Abe heard. Your descendants will be like the stars. I will be your God, and you will be my people. Not a country, but a people. 

By the time of Isaiah, those people, collectively under leadership they willingly followed, forgot that promise. So, God decided to let them face the consequences of their choices. God’s protection against invading enemies will be removed. Their country, so to speak, will face destruction, the people, the result. 

Just to get back to the inconvenient part, read today’s first lesson again, substituting “United States of America” for Israel and Judah. I really like reading and studying the prophets. I hate having to be one. Doing that might feel like hearing the words “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled” from the one we refer to as The Prince of Peace. 

Fire does many things. It provides warmth, it changes items we cook with it. It purifies, eliminating bacteria, viruses, even minerals in metal production. And, it destroys by reducing many forms of matter to ash.

The prophet Malachi tells of this. God speaks through the prophet to say, “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty.

But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have [a people] who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.

“So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty. [Mal. 3:1-5, NIV]

Jesus is that messenger, the one who comes as a refiner. His life embodies the teaching and will of God, naming the impurities of our time. The Word made Flesh stands as the fire of truth sent to cleanse us from all that separates us from true worship of our Creator. The division he mentions comes when those accepting Truth, capitol T, find themselves opposed by those holding to alternative facts, capitol L for lies. I’ll admit that holding to the Truth is sometimes like Jacob wrestling with God, and can be a pain you know where.

But like those in the roll call that is the eleventh chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, it is in Truth that we find not just life, but the author of life, who finds great delight in sharing that life, everlasting life, with us as a people, not only as individuals. Like those named, the fulness of that life is found together, including with those who come after us.
​
As John’s Gospel tells us, it is in the One who described himself as “the Way, the Truth, the Life” that we find all those things for ourselves and for each other. In holding faithfully, truthfully to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, we might find ourselves needing a bit of purification from time to time. Better now than later.