Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth;

This is a sermon about December preparations.

Which means that you might think that you know exactly where I’m going and what I’m going to say because we’ve been down this road before. You know that I love hearing and telling the stories of how different people, different families and different Christian traditions get ready for Christmas.

And many of you have put up with years of me telling the legends and myths surrounding my family preparations. There are stories of falling-down trees and simple and holy, and sometimes tacky, ornaments given by folks who are no longer here, and deaths and car crashes and all of the raw ingediants of life that are fuller, deeper and richer each December.

And as you will see in two weeks when we hope you will join us after worship for our annual open house with all of the delicious cookies that I have been baking, I love getting ready for Christmas.

I love the short term, evolutionary process of putting up some stuff early in the season and some later and I love the long term evolutionary process of tracking all of our Christmases through the focus of ornaments and decorations and where and who they came from and now passing along ornaments and decorations to go into the homes of our children.

But that’s not the kind of preparations that this sermon is about.

It’s not where Luke takes us today.

No this sermon is about how God prepares for Christmas, not us.

If we have any hope of understanding this season we need to realize that before anything else can happen, we must become the objects of the preparations, not the subjects, we need to let the season shape us, rather than the shapers of the season. In other words, the question of the day is how does God prepare you and me and us together.

What kind of people does he use to speak to us?

What technique and process does he use to shape us?

Let’s start with the people that God uses.

The prophet Malachi, whose name means literally “messenger” promises us a messenger: See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me.

But it is a funny thing about God’s messengers, they don’t always get recognized and so when Luke tells us about the messenger sent to fulfill Malachi’s prophecy, well, he’s a strange one.

John the Baptist, with his take-no-prisoners message “you brood of vipers!”, nothing cuddly about John, he is one of the oddest and least-personable characters in scripture, yet his job is to prepare the people for the coming of Jesus.

And who has prepared us for the presence of Christ in our lives? Picture those people whom you learned of God’s love from – parents, grandparents, neighbors, teachers, coaches, friends - weren’t they all, aren’t they all, a little odd in their own ways? And isn’t that what made them stand out in our lives? They showed us and told us something of God that we had never seen or heard before

And each of them have prepared us for this Advent and this Christmas, so that God will come to us.

No one learns about God in a vacuum and the Bible has no knowledge of a faith that is not formed in and sustained by a community. Solitary Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

So who did God send to form your faith community? Who has prepared you for God’s arrival in your life, today and in this season, go through your memory banks, spot those people whose fingerprints are all over you and if, like so many of mine, they are no longer with us, give thanks to God for who they were and if, like so many others of mine, they are alive give thanks to God for who they are and give a hug to them when you get the chance.

These people, strange as they may be, have been our Malachis and our John the Baptists, they have pointed out our strengths and our weaknesses, they have challenged us and loved us into being who we are and they have gotten us ready for God to enter our hearts today. They are the ones whom God has used to smooth things out for us, to lower the intimidating mountains so that we can climb, to raise the dark and shadowy valleys so that we can walk without fear.

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and his shall be made love, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth;

And how does God do it?

Again Malachi helps us to understand.

He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.

I read a story some years ago, and I know I’ve told it before, but that’s OK it’s a good story, about a group of women who were studying the book of Malachi and they came to this verse, He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.

The verse puzzled the women. They wondered what they could learn from it about the character and nature of God. One of the women offered to find our about the process of refining silver and report back to the group.

She phoned a silversmith and made an appointment to watch him work. She didn’t mention anything about the reason for her interest other than her curiosity about the process of refining silver. As she watched, the silversmith held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up. He explained that he needed to hold the silver in the middle of the fire, where the flames are hottest, in order to burn away all the impurities.

Let me stop the story there for a moment.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Haven’t we often, in our most desperate times, in the heat of the flames of life when we faced unbearable sorrows or devastating disappointments or overwhelming guilt or the crushing betrayal of friends haven’t we felt all of the unnecessary things of our lives slide off and away from us? Haven’t we known the purifying sense of who we really are – without title or wealth or status – and who and what are most important to us? Haven’t we known that freedom from the impurities of life: the pettiness and greed and egotism that seem to drive us in the good and easy times?

No one who has been through the fires of life is anxious to repeat the experience, yet everyone I have ever known who has been through the fires of life and who allowed God to walk with them and to carry them has emerged stronger and purer. This is the heart of Luke’s gospel, as I said last week, God is with us.

In the joys and celebrations? Yes, and quite frankly, we could be better at seeing him in those joys and celebrations, we get too busy with the particular joy of the moment, the birth or the graduation or the wedding or the accomplishment of a dream, and so we don’t take the time that is necessary to trace God’s love, comparing and recognizing the common elements of shepherds or co-workers; angels singing or Choirs singing; Mary and Joseph or our own occasionally embarrassingly scandalous families; and obscure little towns like Bethlehem and Clover Hill.

God is with us, just as he was with all of them.

But God is with us in the pains and losses as well.

When all that we dreamt of lies shattered, when marriages dissolve, when jobs are lost, when children disappoint, when parents are thoughtless, when loved ones die on us, when the fires of life in this world are all around us, God is with us.

He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.

Back to the story about the woman who went to visit the silversmith.

The woman thought about God holding us where the flames are hottest. She remembered that the verse says God “sits” as a refiner and purifier of silver, so she asked the silversmith it it’s true that he has to sit by the fire the whole time the silver is being refined.

The man answered that, yes, he not only has to sit there holding the silver, but he must keep his eyes on it the entire time because if it is left even a moment too long in the flames, it will be destroyed.

Think about that for a moment.

No, tuck it away and think about it when you are in the flames of life.

Think about it when “chemotherapy” becomes a part of your conversations.

Think about it when your job disappears and you are feeling overwhelmed by the unfairness of life.

Think about it when you want to scream, “I can’t handle this”.

Think about it when all of your memories seem poisoned with regret and bitterness and all of your dreams seem hopeless and empty and all of your days seem meaningless and lost, God is with us, watching us closely and not allowing us to be destroyed, not allowing us to be in the flames longer than we can stand.

Back to the story, because it gets even better.

The woman asked: “How do you know when the silver is fully refined?”

He smiled and said, “Oh, that’s easy, when I can see my image in it.”

That’s what December does, for each of us and for us together, it works on us until the image of God can be seen in us. It pounds at us in so many different ways and with so many different symbols and images and memories and stories and songs until, until the image of God can be seen in us.

We’ve all got valleys to travel through, but God will fill them and make the journey with us, we’ve all got mountains to climb, God will lower them and make the way straight for us.

So before you worry about your own preparations, let God prepare you and when you do that, you will find that you and your preparations are being used by God to prepare others.

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth;