The offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord
as in ancient days and in former years.
5 I will draw near to you for judgment.
I will be quick to testify against the sorcerers,
the adulterers, those swearing falsely,
against those who cheat the day laborers out of their wages
as well as oppress the widow and the orphan,
and against those who brush aside the foreigner and do not revere me,
says the Lord of heavenly forces.
6 I am the Lord, and I do not change;
and you, children of Jacob, have not perished.
Return to the Lord
7 Ever since the time of your ancestors,
you have deviated from my laws
and have not kept them.
Return to me and I will return to you,
says the Lord of heavenly forces.
But you say,
“How should we return?”
8 Should a person deceive God?
Yet you deceive me.
But you say,
“How have we deceived you?”
With your tenth-part gifts and offerings.
9 You are being cursed with a curse,
and you, the entire nation, are robbing me.
10 Bring the whole tenth-part to the storage house so there might be food in my house.
Please test me in this,
says the Lord of heavenly forces.
See whether I do not open all the windows of the heavens for you
and empty out a blessing until there is enough.[a]
11 I will threaten the one who wants to devour you
so that it doesn’t spoil the fruit of your fertile land,
and so that the vine doesn’t abort its fruit in your field,
says the Lord of heavenly forces.
12 All the nations will consider you fortunate,
for you will be a desirable land,
says the Lord of heavenly forces.
13 You have spoken harshly about me,
says the Lord;
but you say,
“What have we spoken about you?”
14 You said,
“Serving God is useless.
What do we gain by keeping his obligation
or by walking around as mourners
before the Lord of heavenly forces?
15 So now we consider the arrogant fortunate.
Moreover, those doing evil are built up;
they test God and escape.” (Common English Bible)
“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Thirteen
After almost a year here as your minister, the making of my church office by our parlor has resulted in a space that is an eclectic mixture of both myself and Valley. Some of my personal effects hang on the walls, like a stained glass window portrait given to me by my parents, and some of Valley’s own effects are displayed prominently, like the banner proclaiming its 1951 founding. It is a space I enjoy.
And on the wall opposite me hang three different frames, each with a different diploma, the most prominent being my degree from Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry. I was in its only second-ever cohort of Doctor of Ministry students after the school launched that degree program in 2014, and I was excited to be a part of something new, even if it also meant being something of a guinea pig to experiment on as the school continued to fine-tune their latest degree program, which I successfully completed and graduated from in 2018.
Fast forward two years, to 2020, and the university, without any public warning or any involvement of its denominational partners like the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) voted to permanently close its seminary and immediately cease the recruitment and enrollment of new students. The degree that hangs in my office will be one of maybe a couple dozen in the world now. And I never wanted it to be that way. I always hoped and believed generations would benefit as I had.
One of the hardest experiences for me in my career as a minister is when a moment that was always meant to be joyous becomes, in a matter of months or years, a bittersweet memory at best due to actions, events, and choices made since that moment of celebration. My graduation from SU became one of those moments after how the university voted my school out of existence.
From breaking up with a significant other to quitting a job, the way in which we end things matters a great deal. Everything ends, but the way in which the ending happens is often deeply meaningful to us. When all that is left is the end, the way a story or a relationship is ended matters tremendously. Which is why I give thanks for a book like Malachi’s, which ends the Tanakh (Old Testament) and, in the Jewish faith, the prophetic tradition as a whole.
This is the final installment of a sermon series that we began three months ago, on the last day of May, and it has really scratched an almost decade-long itch I’ve had to preach on the “minor” prophets. After all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series has helped me get back in the rhythm of preaching to a sanctuary of people and not a computer screen of faces!
Each Sunday this summer, we have heard from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so I hope that you have not felt like you are behind if you have missed a sermon or three. And I hope by now, we have discovered a newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them much closer to major status in our faith.
To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed with Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma, Daphne (again, just seeing if you are paying attention). Today, end with the prophet Malachi.
Malachi, like the two prophets preceding him in Scripture, Haggai and Zechariah, is what is known as a postexilic prophet—a prophet whose career comes after the exile in Babylon and return to ancient Israel under the Persian king Cyrus the Great. And that is the last burst of prophecy in that tradition. While there were almost certainly subsequent edits and redactions made by the compilers of the Tanakh, as Ehud Ben Zvi puts it in his commentary on Haggai, “Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are the last prophets; after them, prophecy ceased.”
As with so many matters of Biblical interpretation, there is another side to this coin, which is that Malachi may represent something even more by nature of his very name. In ancient Hebrew, Malachi means “the messenger,” which some Bible scholars argued might have been a pseudonym, a practice for which there are many other examples in the Bible. Jacob is given the name Israel, which is a combination of the ancient Hebrew term to wrestle with or struggle with, and “El,” which is a shortened version of Elohim, one of the ancient Hebrew names for God. Israel means one who has struggled with God, and it would go on to be applied to an entire nation, not just one man, and you might well identify with the epithet yourself if your own faith has included such struggle.
In the New Testament, Barabbas, the man freed by Pilate instead of Jesus, is another example. Bar means “son of,” and “Abbas” means “father,” and so Barabbas’s name could mean “the son of a father,” which would be sort of the ancient equivalent of simply calling yourself anonymous, or “the son of *the* Father,” which would imply that he claimed the mantle of divinity that belonged to Christ. Either way, the name Barabbas was very likely a pseudonym. Yet we all consider ourselves children of God, and Jesus Himself preached in the Beatitudes of Matthew that those who are peacemakers shall be called children of God. In this way, we all can be children of God.
So, back to Malachi. With his name meaning “the messenger,” his name could also have very well been a nom de plume that cloaked the real Malachi in anonymity, but it also unlocks the possibility that there are still more messengers, that the prophetic tradition continues onward, something that both Christianity and Islam, the other two chief Abrahamic faiths, teach. We can all be messengers.
To me, that was an entrancing enough possibility that I even wrote about it my second book, devoting an entire section of one chapter to the possibility that prophecy did not end with Malachi. But as with so many matters in faith, I cannot say for sure. I have to be humble enough to recognize that I do not know what God knows. And there is a faith tradition that says the prophets stop here.
So lets posit that they do, that Malachi is the last of this great and rich tradition we have spent the past three months exploring. How does that tradition go out, how does it choose to end? With some incredibly vivid prophecy. Malachi crams a whole lot into his four chapters, and his penultimate chapter, chapter 3, in particular covers vast swaths of theological ground about not only how we are to act (or not act) towards each other, but the ways in which we are to be held accountable when we do take advantage of each other or treat each other unfairly. To Malachi, such sins represent a violation of the covenant between God and the people, and so is interwoven into these parting verses on the nature of God’s relationship with the people.
If how we end something, anything, matters a great deal, then Malachi has served us well in closing out the Tanakh.
This is something that is on my mind as we consider today especially the many ministries of our seniors. You might call it legacy, or planned giving, but I think the sentiment is the same: the way you end things matters. Which isn’t me saying “You’re all going to die,” because, well, we all are. The race is not for the swift or battle for the strong, but time and chance happens to us all, says Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes.
Time happens to us all. So with what time, what space we do have, what is there for us to do? Malachi gives us a blueprint: do not stand for injustice or unfairness, keep the relationship we—not only you individually, but we collectively—have with God, and to keep the strong sense of humbleness that Micah calls us to, lest we become what Malachi terms one of the “arrogant fortunate” who tries to test God and escape.
I think of ways in which we as individuals and as organizations try to end something badly—again, a relationship, or a job, or an election, etc.—and I think of such behavior as our endeavoring to be the arrogantly fortunate who think they do not have to pay either an immediate or an eternal price for their shenanigans.
That is not at all what Malachi is here for. You may read divine anger in Malachi’s words here, but I hear God telling us that those who commit injustice do not escape punishment forever. They might at first, they even might for a while longer. But to try to test God and escape is like teaching yourself keytar or finishing a 72-ounce steak. No matter how much you may want to pull it off, you won’t.
So if we set that sinful aspiration aside, what we are left with is how Malachi tells us to live well, and, by dint of his place in the canon, how to end well. And then, to have faith that a life lived well, in faithfulness to God, in devotion to God’s justice, is enough to speak for us when the time comes.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
August 29, 2021