The book of Malachi is essentially a fitness report for priests and he does not bother with faint praise.  He goes straight for the damn.  It is a scathing criticism of them as both professionals and people.  If the priests had been responsible for putting together the canon of the Old Testament they would have certainly thrown this one away.

As you know there were three institutions in Israel – much like the three parts of government we have today.  There was the King, the Priests and the Prophets.  None of them liked each other much and they were always at odds.  Sometimes it was in a healthy way of checks and balances and at other times it was fatal for one or the other.  There was no end of scheming, accusations, lobbying, name calling and pandering.  It was a soap opera.

Part of the responsibility of the prophet was to pass along God’s opinions about how things were going and more than once it was the messenger who was killed.  It was a heavy responsibility to speak to priests and deliver the indictments in person and in public.  While hard for the priests and kings to understand at the moment, the intention was always to bring them to repentance and not simply accuse them or pick them apart.  The prophets were not bomb throwers but were actually committed to the priests, the kings and the people.  However, they were responsible to tell the truth as they had received it.  Not all of them did, of course.  Malachi does.

Read Malachi 1:1 – 2:2

There is a special kind of coldness and exclusivity that comes from professional ministry.  You are detached and aloof.  Your concerns are with who is advancing and who is being left behind.  The daily tempests in a teacup take your attention away from being a shepherd.  You may have an ornamental staff but it has been a long time since you took care of sheep.  You read books about sheep demographics, marketing to sheep and the latest trends in sheep management but your loyalties are to fellow priests and, above all, to the institution.  We have seen that in recent years in the way pedophiles and sex offenders in both Catholic and Protestant churches have been protected and shielded from being exposed.  They are moved around but until recently not prosecuted.  Time after time we have heard that is to ultimately protect the institution of the Church itself from a scandal.  It is exactly that kind of priest and pastor Malachi is addressing.  They have lost their love for God and for people.  Their interests are in the perpetuation of the institution itself.

God’s discipline always begins with “I have loved you” and the depth of the problem is made clear by their response.  “How have you loved us?”  How could a priest, the one closest to God in the eyes of the people, the representative of the people before God, ask such a question?  If the priests themselves no longer believed in the love of God or if the love of God was not to their liking then what would be the effect on the people in time?

There are many in religious work who are in similar situations.  The ministry has become a profession and not a genuine calling.  Cold hearts, anger, resentment, boredom with the routine.  Graham Greene’s nameless “whisky priest” in The Power and The Glory” is a good example, “How often the priest had heard the same confession–Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization–it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”  They are torn between cynicism and hope.

Then there are those, like Mother Theresa, who appear to be beacons of hope on the outside but inside they are dying.  In her journals discovered after her death you can read of a woman who for decades believed God had deserted her.  In the 1950’s she wrote: “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love — and now become as the most hated one — the one You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. Alone . . . I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

But the worst sort are like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” who have such disdain for the people they claim to serve. They believe their role is to protect people from the uncertainty of freedom and give them bread and circuses to keep them distracted and enslaved.  “That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious.”

It is all too easy to become tired of the burden of ministry.  Inside the cover of my Bible I have taped a quote.  “He who has learned in order to teach others, while his own soul loathes instruction and wisdom, will find that his lessons will be but mists of empty wind, and showers of dust and earth upon the ground.”  I don’t know who said it but it is true.

They are tired of God’s expectations of shepherds – to protect the sheep, serve the sheep, feed the sheep, care for the health of the sheep, lead the sheep to still waters and, if necessary, lay down their lives for the sheep.

They want a better clientele and people who appreciate the finer things.  The work has become dry and meaningless.  It is the worst kind of burden because they have become professionals at pretending.  Yet, the benefits of the work are too good to quit.  They are trapped.  In the end they become shepherds who shear the sheep and sell the sheep.  They “sniff contemptuously” at those they are called to serve.

It is not unlike the testimony of Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, who said last week, “We wrote the bill in a tortured way in order to take advantage of the stupidity of the American voter.”  I met with a group of media executives recently and they described the science they use to determine the programming they offer.  The basic premise is the public are sheep who will do anything for entertainment and happiness.  Give them that in large doses and they are yours.

The priests are so hardened to God’s complaint that they respond to his accusations, “How have we despised your name?  How have we defiled you?”

And God answers they have despised Him by not demanding the best from their people.  They have been satisfied with second rate offerings and damaged goods or whatever was left over.  They have been careless with God’s standards in order to keep things going. No one wanted to see their best go up in smoke so they brought their injured, crippled and diseased animals. They had become accustomed to low expectations, shortcuts, cheating and hypocrisy. No one wanted to make a stir or cause trouble for anyone.  It reminds us of the priest Eli who raised Samuel.  His sons who were priests “made themselves contemptible, and he failed to constrain them.”

But God has no hesitation in asking for our best.  Why?  Is God greedy?  Is God selfish?  Why should he want only our best and deprive us of the use of it?

Have you ever been in a situation where only your best was accepted?  It may have been a teacher who kept returning papers or assigned the most difficult work.  It may have been a project that was virtually impossible.  It may have been an organization where the leader demanded extraordinary performance and was not satisfied with anything other than that.  It may have been being part of a team that called on everything you had and more.

What was the effect on you and others?  How do you remember it?

What is it like to work in an environment of low expectations with distracted and undemanding leadership?  How do we remember the times we did the minimum to get by and it was applauded?

Bad leadership always robs people of the joy of sacrifice and accomplishment.  Leaders who want people to be happy and satisfied and secure are bad leaders.  They are leaders who, truthfully, despise their people.

Demanding the best of people IS a weight.  It IS a burden.  It IS a heavy responsibility and it would be far easier to give in and be contemptuous of them while praising their work.  The pressure to be average and “good enough” is enormous in every field and the resistance to excellence is normal – until people experience the rewards of giving the best they have.

The church often robs them of that by low expectations.  We say “give what you can” or “try to make it if you are not busy with something else” or “we are just happy you are here so relax”.  If you have studied the rules for attracting volunteers you will read that whatever we ask of people has to include lots of recognition for even the smallest contribution; short term and well-defined; and must have clear benefits for the volunteer.  That is, in the end, robbing people by low expectations.

God says we would be better off to shut the doors.  But we should also ask ourselves how we have encouraged our leaders to have such low expectations of us.  What we see in Malachi is God’s expectations for his priests.  How are we helping them live up to that?  How are we hindering them?  What are we demanding of them and allowing them to demand of us?

And then God says “My name will be great among the nations” and it will no longer be just the nation of Israel who are his treasured possession.  He will fulfill his promise to Abraham that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore.  God will move outside Israel.

It’s interesting to watch that now in the field of missions for our churches.  There is considerable resistance to the traditional methods of sending Americans overseas to set up schools and churches while living in separate compounds and being funded by Americans.  Instead, what is clearly a tragedy is providing hundreds of thousands of missionaries around the world in the form of refugees.  As Christians are displaced from their homes in Iraq, Syria and many African countries due to persecution, they are being displaced all over the world.

“Since 2007, more than 30,000 of these Christian refugees from Iraq have entered Michigan seeking citizenship, said Martin Manna, president of the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce in Southfield. Recent immigrants have been forced from their homeland by the Iraq war, the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS, the militant Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and continuing with ISIS, more than two-thirds (800,000) of Iraq’s Christian population has fled due to religious persecution and is displaced as refugees all over the world.

“Iraq is losing most of its Christians, such as Chaldeans, Assyrians … and many come to this country,” said May Seikaly, an associate professor of modern social history of the Middle East at Wayne State University.”

As well, according to Philip Jenkins at Baylor, we are still witnessing a striking upsurge of Christian numbers in some of the most unlikely settings, almost entirely as a result of immigration. “Look at Saudi Arabia, a land of 28 million people where Islam is the only permitted religion. Consequently, official sources list the country as 100 percent Muslim.

In reality, Saudi Arabia is only one of many Middle Eastern countries that have imported millions of poor foreigners to perform menial jobs over the years. Many of those immigrants are African and Asian Christians, including many Filipinos. As they do not officially exist as Christians, they have zero right to practice their faith, even in private. But exist they do. By some estimates, Saudi Arabia’s Christian population is about 5 percent of the whole, perhaps 1.5 million people.

Other Gulf nations are more honest about just how religiously diverse they have become. Christians—mainly guest workers—probably make up 7 percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates, and 10 percent of Bahrain or Kuwait. Those are nations where Christianity scarcely existed 100 years ago.”

In spite of persecution, repression, opposition, lack of money, facilities and very little professional training, high demands, risks and few, if any, rewards the church is growing.

I have heard any number of stories of people coming to Christ through their house servants and not missionaries.  It is servants and refugees who are the newest and most rapidly growing form of missions to closed countries.  An organization named “Empty Tomb” has studied giving in churches of decades and they have determined that 98% of a church budget is dedicated to the maintenance and programs of the church itself.  We should not blame the ministers and staff.  We should take a hard look at what we are demanding in services and programs.  There is a haunting phrase in Malachi 2:2.  “I will curse your blessings.”  What could that mean and how do we avoid it?

Finally, God says the day is coming when, as Zechariah says, “HOLY TO THE LORD” will be inscribed on the bells of horses, and the cooking pots in the Lord’s house will be like sacred bowels in front of the altar.  Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the Lord Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them.”

In other words, what is holy to us will be common – like streets of gold – and what is common to us – like cooking pots – will be holy.  It is the common that we now overlook and sometimes despise that will turn out to be holy.  It is the things we fail to see because we are so caught up in what and who is important and that are hidden from us that will be most valued

Scripture makes it clear that there are two kingdoms.  The kingdom in which we now live and the kingdom that is coming.  The kingdom now is the kingdom of humility and Jesus as described in Philippians 2 but we want to live in the kingdom that is coming.  The kingdom of triumph – the day of great things that Zechariah describes.  We want the power and accolades instead of humility.  The early church turned the world upside down by paying attention to the least – not by becoming the greatest or the best and the brightest.  The preparation for ruling is serving and it is the common people and things that now serve who will be holy “in that day”.  In that day the ordinary, invisible and undervalued will be glorious and the rest will be discarded.

As Annie Dillard says,

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”

So, let’s not be like the priests who were contemptuous of the common.  Who became cynical and dried up.  Who robbed God and their people with low expectations and, instead, demanded more and more for their own satisfaction.

Instead, let’s be like a friend of mine, Steven Garber, who asks, “Is it possible to know the world and still love the world?”  Can we, like God, be critical and still say, “I have loved you” and know that one day, in that day, our eyes will be opened to all that was hidden that was holy and all that was petty, self-serving, self-seeking and contemptible will be burned away.