Key:  When I finally let go of the need to be happy, I discover joy.

Malachi 3:6-18

November 22, 2009

A different gratitude

On this Thanksgiving week, most of us will gather around our tables and give thanks for our blessings. In many cases we will name those blessings - our homes, our food, our health, our families. I wonder how many of us will include among God’s blessings our “shattered dreams.”

 Next Sunday we will receive eight wonderful new members into Corinth Reformed Church family. One of the couples is David and Michelle Impagliazzo. I visited in their home this past Monday. With their permission and help, I share part of their story with you today.

When David wrote about his faith on the membership form we ask each of our new members to fill out, he included this statement: “The trials of the last eight years have shown me that I am not in control. God is.”

David and Michelle met in 1990, where they both worked for the Westin Hotel in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He was the Chef and Michelle was in Sales. They moved back to Hickory to run the Vintage House Restaurant and then opened Liazzo’s Catering & Carry Out in 1995.  Their first child, Christian, was born in 2001.  All their dreams were coming true.

But what do you do when your dreams shatter? When David talks about “the last eight years,” here’s a small summary. The 2001 recession put severe strains on their business. Their second child, Savanna Grace, was born with congestive heart failure and Downs Syndrome in April 2003. She spent the first seven months of her life in Baptist hospital, meaning that the family often had to be apart.

They were blessed with their third child, Zoe, in December 2004. Michelle was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes in 2005.

But no other shattered dream can compare with January 2006, when Savanna died after a long and courageous battle to overcome heart complications and multiple heart surgeries since her birth. Michelle wrote, “In the precious little time she spent here on earth, Savanna inspired, encouraged and challenged us all to push beyond the seemingly impossible situations. Her sweet spirit and unconditional love spilled out in her twinkling eyes.“

David and Michelle’s priorities were changing and the time was right when the opportunity came to sell Liazzo’s. Michelle’s grandmother died from an infection in September 2007 at the age of 92. Two years ago, David’s Dad moved here from New York to be near David’s family. A healthy 72- year old, he was hit head-on, Mother’s Day weekend 2008 while on his way to meet David and the kids to go fishing. He broke his neck and back. David and Michelle spent the next 8 months caring for him, and he succumbed to his injuries and died in January 2009. David decided to go back to school to pursue a degree in Automotive & Diesel Technology. Michelle joined her mother and brother in real estate sales - just in time to watch the housing market tank last year.

 As I listened to David and Michelle tell me about their losses - the loss of a child, a grandmother, and a father, along with health concerns and financial setbacks that will take years to recover from, they shared another angle to their story that took me by surprise. They spoke with genuine warmth of growing in faith during these years of difficulty, of getting involved in Bible study, of becoming more personal in their relationship with Christ, of connecting with a local church where the pastor and his wife had reached out to them. Their trials, they said, have only brought them closer to each other and to God.

Shattered dreams can have that effect. But it doesn’t always happen. They often push us away from him. God wants our shattered dreams to give way to unexpected joy and hope. And thanksgiving.

That’s what the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi is all about.

Strong language

Malachi is the final stop in our twelve-week survey of the minor prophets. Here’s a little background on Malachi.  In 586 B.C., the Babylonians entered Jerusalem after a long siege – killing, looting, and burning the city before disassembling the rock structures of the temple and wall.  Fifty years later, the Persian kings allowed the Jews to return home and rebuild the temple under the leadership of Zerubbabel their governor.  Haggai and Zechariah were the prophets who motivated and encouraged the people.  It took twenty years, but the temple was finished in 516 B.C., seventy years after its destruction.

It would be about seventy more years before Ezra and Nehemiah would return to inspire spiritual renewal and lead the rebuilding of the wall.  Somewhere between the temple rebuilding and the wall rebuilding, Malachi showed up on the scene.  His name means “My Messenger,” and that is his role – to bring a word from God.

The temple represents first priorities – worship, sacrifice, obedience.  The wall represents the next step for a community – security.  The temple looked good during Malachi’s time, but there were still piles of rock where the city’s wall had once stood.  Furthermore, since the temple had been rebuilt, the “first priorities” had been neglected.

When it comes to our dreams, most of us know we can’t have everything all at once.  But we do expect a steady climb toward dream fulfillment.  Every day will get a little bit better, every year a little closer.  In Malachi’s time, nothing positive was happening and, in fact, they were going backward.

Temple worship had become a mundane burden (1:13).  Sacrifices?  They were a joke, an insult to God.  Instead of bringing their best animals, the priests were offering injured and diseased animals (1:8).  Speaking of the priests, they were apparently in charge, but they were corrupt and partial (2:9).  Marriages were falling apart as middle-aged men divorced their wives in favor of trophy wives who didn’t even believe (2:14-15), threatening the long-term integrity of the faith community because the next generation would not be raised in the faith.  There wasn’t any sense of keeping promises – to God or to spouse.  The people were stingy with their tithes and offerings (3:8).

On top of all that, there had been an economic downturn – with pests destroying crops (3:11).  When the people prayed, God was silent (2:13).  Every day they got up and looked outside the window to see piles of rock where the wall once stood – a symbol of despair and shame (Nehemiah 1:3).  The dream was dying.

What was their reaction?  They had problems with God – it was his fault their dreams had been shattered.

Malachi employs a wonderful literary device.  We could call it dialogue, but it’s more like a dramatic argument.  He either quotes from the people or, in some cases, just writes what he thinks they are thinking.  And God responds.  Or the other way around.

In 3:13, Malachi quotes Yahweh.  “You have said harsh things against me.”  The word “harsh” is often used of physical strength.  “You’re using strong language when you talk about me,” God says.

The people’s response is one of feigned innocence.  “What have we said against you?”

Silly people.  God knows our thoughts and words whether or not they are public.  What they had been saying is in 3:14-15.  “It is futile to serve God.”  OK, that is rather harsh.  The Hebrew word “futile” can mean “nothing,” but it can also mean “falsehood.”  Serving God has no integrity; it doesn’t mean anything.

Why do they think that?  Let me read 4:14-15 in The Message:  “It doesn’t pay to serve God. What do we ever get out of it? When we did what he said and went around with long faces, serious about God-of-the-Angel-Armies, what difference did it make? Those who take life into their own hands are the lucky ones. They break all the rules and get ahead anyway. They push God to the limit and get by with it.”

Strong language about shattered dreams.  Often the problem isn’t just that bad things happen to us, but that good things happen to others.  What, then, is the use of prayer, of worship, of faith, of trying to do the right thing if not only my life stinks but my philandering, lying, cheating neighbor or co-worker who never goes to church or gives a thought to God has all his dreams come true?

Their problems with God don’t sound dissimilar to ours.

Shattered dreams

The author of Shattered Dreams is a counselor.  As such, he deals with people’s feelings.  There are a number of wonderful insights in his book, but I’ll just mention a couple.

Crabb says our problems with God begin with a misunderstanding of God.  We falsely assume that God’s number one priority as a heavenly Father is to make our dreams come true.

Most of our dreams are not wrong.  The really selfish dreams we recognize as childish, but what’s wrong with wanting your marriage to be happy, or your children to be healthy, or your bills to be paid?

Crabb says those aren’t really our dreams.  They lie on the surface.  What we really want is to feel good.  “We long to feel alive, to sense passion and romance and freedom.  We want the good time of enjoying godly kids, of making a difference in people’s lives, of involvement with close friends, of experiencing God’s peace” (31).  He calls it “soul-pleasure.”  We’re even OK with setbacks and trials if God will only help us feel good about them.

What’s wrong with that?  This is what he says: “As long as our purpose is to have a good time, to have soul-pleasure exceed soul-pain, God becomes merely a means to an end, an object to be used, never a subject rightfully demanding a response, never a lover to be enjoyed.  Worship becomes utilitarian, part of a cunning strategy to get what we want rather than a passionate abandonment to someone more worthy than we” (32).

That one quote is worth the price of the book.  Subconsciously if not deliberately, we believe that our primary purpose is happiness.  And we believe our Father wants that for us as well.  And if he wants it, he should make it happen.

Let me test something.  Complete the following sentences as you would expect yourself or people you know to complete them.  Parent to child: “Honey, I don’t care if you’re a doctor or a garbage collector, I just want you to ….”  Husband after three hours in the paint store: “We can paint the living room seashell or cosmic latte, but when we’re done, I just want you to ….”  Be happy, of course. 

A Japanese singer-songwriter with the stage name Bonnie Pink sings to her lover,

I just want you to be happy
I might not be the one to make you though
It hurts so much to see you down
I just want you to feel better.

So here’s the problem with God.  I want the people I love to feel better, and would do anything in my power to take away their soul-pain.  God can do anything he wants to do.  His power is unlimited.  Why doesn’t he either fix what’s wrong in my life or somehow make me feel better?

Maybe our shattered dreams have a purpose that we haven’t yet understood.

Larry Crabb says, “Happy people do not love well.”  God is more about our learning to love than he is about our happiness.  We don’t love each other well when all our dreams are being fulfilled.  And we certainly don’t love God.  Let me just ask you – is your love for God, faithfulness to him, need for God, attention to his desires for you intensified more during times of happiness or shattered dreams?  That is what David and Michelle discovered. 

But does God want us to be miserable?  Absolutely not.  He just wants us to come to the place where our joy is in God, not in what God does – or doesn’t do – to make us happy.  When I finally let go of the need to be happy discover joy.  When I no longer need what money buys to make me happy, I discover contentment.  When I no longer need my spouse to make me happy, I discover intimacy.  When I no longer need health or longevity to make me happy, I discover peace.  When I no longer need answered prayers for God to be vindicated, I discover trust.

Private property

Malachi is my favorite prophet.  Really.  I always thought it was because he was so articulate about the sanctity of marriage and the importance of tithing.  But you know what?  Infidelity and stinginess are only symptoms.  Misdirected sexual passion and financial greed are simply manifestations of a search for happiness in all the wrong places.

If you read Malachi as a whole, you know that’s true.  Those are side issues to the heart issue.  Malachi’s my favorite minor prophet because he knows what we really need is not prosperity or health or long life or even happiness.  We need God.  And we need to know he wants us.

In 3:16, Malachi records the people’s response to his complaint that they had said harsh things about their God.  “Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other and the LORD listened and heard.”

The people – or at least some of them – got together and had a conversation.  I wish Malachi had told us more about that meeting.  But as this group – small or large, we don’t know – got together, they decided to write their names on a “scroll of remembrance” to witness that they had decided to fear and honor the Lord as their highest priority.  If even a few people at Corinth did that on their own I response to this sermon, I would be thrilled.

Don’t miss God’s response to the people’s renewal in 3:17.  “’They will be mine,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘in the day when I make up my treasured possession.’”  He completes the complaint in v. 18, “You will see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who don’t.” That day is coming.  It’s not here yet.  You will be happy then because you will see the whole picture and everything will be made right.  But not yet – that’s what awaits us in heaven.

The phrase “treasured possession” translates one Hebrew word that means “private property.”  That’s how God thinks of you.  You belong to him.  Being his – knowing him, loving him, obeying him, serving him – is more important than any dream being fulfilled or shattered.  Any dream.  Thank you, David and Michelle, for living that.

One final word.  As I said earlier, with Malachi, we end the Old Testament.  Today we also end the church year.  Next Sunday begins the season of Advent.

I don’t know about you, but when Malachi finishes, he just makes me thirsty for more.  Read the last few verses of his book.  He’s setting the stage for what’s next.

It’s also true of what it means to live as God’s “private property.”  Malachi doesn’t flesh that out for us.  What does that mean?  How do we attain and live out such an intimacy with the Almighty?

Those are the right questions.  And they lead us to Advent.   Amen.