17 th November: Proper 28

SPF 42: BURN WITH ME

Red emergency lighting glows in a room of pipes, vents, and steam. An old-fashioned police box materialises and, a moment later, a man steps out: “Whoa, now that is hot!” ¹

His companion gasps, “Oh, it’s like a sauna in here!”

Moments later, they talk with the ship’s crew, the door behind them closed against the building heat in the venting room. The Doctor and Martha – you’d guessed who it was – hear a tale of woe: power shut down; auxiliary engines inaccessible; “the ship’s gone mad!”; 42 minutes before ship and crew plunge into a blazing sun, the heat of which is already overwhelming their shields. To make matters worse, a mysterious force is starting to possess the crew one by one; those it does not possess get incinerated, reduced to charred patches on walls. The Doctor speaks and everyone is spurred into action but, even as they struggle to save themselves, another crewmember turns to a colleague with the terrible invitation, ‘Burn with me’.

As events unfold, the Doctor discovers that energy has been scooped from this star – this sun – to fuel the spaceship. No one scanned for life signs beforehand, but the star is alive and wants its heart back. As the ship gets closer, the sun’s influence grows, until even the Doctor’s voice joins the chorus: ‘Burn with me’. The sun has a just case; those who do not accept that will not burn with the sun, but be burned by it.

Far-fetched, you may think, as befits Doctor Who, but in some ways not unlike the passage we heard from Malachi, prophet of ancient Judah, warning against lacklustre devotion that steals from God. Malachi, whose name simply means ‘my messenger’, spoke to a nation redeemed from exile in Babylon, brought home to Jerusalem, and who had rebuilt the temple destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Knowing God’s faithfulness to their parents, grandparents, ancestors, how could Malachi’s generation be half-hearted and superficial in serving God? Yet it had happened. Malachi presents God’s case, a catalogue of shoddy offerings, poor teaching, unfaithfulness, and moral laxity, leaving only a few uncorrupted.

At mention of a righteous few, the prophet’s tone changes from accusation, to promise of salvation. Having begun by declaring God’s love, Malachi is able to close by reaffirming that love, the assurance that God wants to come not with a curse, but with a blessing. Before that, however, there must be cleansing, thorough removal of all that contaminates the people’s hearts and lives.

Malachi had mentioned earlier a coming day of purification, when priests and Levites would undergo refiner’s fine. ² Now, the whole people will experience the burning of an oven, heat so intense that everything sinful is reduced to ash. An oven may not sound too scary – the Hebrew means a clay pot used for baking over an open fire, hardly a furnace to inspire dread. Ovens can cause significant damage, however, as when a baker’s oven was left smouldering in Pudding Lane in 1666. Or the oven at Farleigh Hungerford Castle in the sixteenth century, in which Agnes Cotell disposed of her first husband in order to marry the lord of the castle.

While the arrogant and evildoers get crisped, there comes a big surprise – not that the righteous will be spared and blessed, but that this will come as a sun of righteousness. The Hebrew Bible only once speaks explicitly of God as a sun, in Psalm 84, where ‘the LORD God is sun and shield’ is clearly metaphorical. ³ In the first account of creation, and elsewhere, the Bible makes it clear that God is creator and ruler of the sun. ⁴ God’s righteous king is likened to, ‘the sun rising on a cloudless morning’, and it is hoped that he may, ‘live while the sun endures’, but he is neither descended from, nor a personification of, the sun. ⁵ In Israelite religion, Yhwh had always to be understood as beyond or outside of creation, God’s role as creator distinguishing the divine from anything visible.

It was common in the ancient Near East to regard the sun, moon, and stars as divine beings, and many a temple was built in the sun’s honour. In the 14^th century BCE, Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) tried to abolish the many gods and goddesses worshipped in Egypt, establishing a new religion of the sun god, to whom he wrote a hymn very like Psalm 104. Akhenaten’s reforms did not prosper, and the old deities were reinstated after his death, but the attempt alone shows the power of the sun in the human imagination. Many friezes from the ruins of Assyrian and Babylonian palaces show a sun disc, representing one or other deity shining in blessing over the king, the rays of the sun gathered together at each side like wings. It is therefore astonishing for Malachi to speak of any aspect of Yhwh God rising like a sun, since in doing so he risks being taken to imply that the one God of Israel could spoken of in the same way as one of the gods of Israel’s neighbours. Putting this particular rising sun alongside the prophet’s earlier commendation of worship, ‘from the rising of the sun to its setting’ beyond Israel’s borders, supports a very broad understanding of the kind of religion that is acceptable to God. Such religion seems more concerned with integrity and righteous behaviour than with correct belief or scrupulous liturgy.

Most, if not all, of our English translations express Malachi’s reference to the appearance of divine justice and vindication in verse 2a as THE sun of righteousness. To understand the text this way is a tradition hallowed by almost two millennia, in some Jewish as well as most Christian readings. The Hebrew text, however, leaves it to the reader to decide, since it presents us with two separate nouns, ‘sun’ and ‘righteousness’, the nature of the Hebrew word shemesh, ‘sun’, making it impossible to tell if ‘the’ and ‘of’ are required in the English version. Malachi could have meant, ‘a sun of righteousness, healing in its wings’, or ‘a sun, righteousness and healing in its wings’. For Christians, from as early as the fourth century, the translation of choice has unquestionably been ‘The Sun of Righteousness’, figuring Christ as bringer of God’s judgement and justice, light of abundant life, healing all woes whether physical or societal. ⁶

At this point the Lectionary teases worship leaders who long for their congregations to slow down between mid-November and January, just enough to smuggle in a little Advent before Christmas overwhelms everything in its path, sacred or secular. Barely a moment before the end of the old church year, before even the feast of Christ the King, a verse from Malachi throws us forward six weeks, 40 or so days, into memories of last year’s carol service, rousing Wesley’s herald angels from their eleven-month sleep. ⁷

It is good to be reminded, as the mid-winter-fest preparations accelerate, that the king whose reign we celebrate in this Kingdom Season does not twinkle like a little star. The Son of God, ascending the throne of our hearts, comes with the heat of a burning oven, consuming the dross of careless worship and slothful discipleship. The sun of righteousness rises, bringing healing and fullness of life, as we greet Christ, inviting him to burn within us, in fervent love for God and all God’s creatures. Here, now, Jesus looks each one of us in the eye, his invitation: ‘Burn with me!”’