Christmas Complaints
Malachi 2:17 – 3:2 17You have wearied the LORD with your words. "How have we wearied him?" you ask. By saying, "All who do evil are good in the eyes of the LORD, and he is pleased with them" or "Where is the God of justice?" 1"See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap.
Luke 1:68 "Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. "
Whoever said, “Tis the season to be jolly” has obviously never shopped for Christmas, never realized that Santa does have to live on a budget. It’s a season when we complain about being busy, about the commercialism of Christmas. And perhaps the most prevalent complaint, though usually uttered silently, is the feeling that the reality of Christmas does not live up to all the glitter and the hype. If we are slow to admit we are complainers, many of us would at least admit to having been disappointed in God. If we have ever truly trusted in God and depended on God, we have also probably been disappointed in God. Maybe we have tried to turn over a new leaf and start back to church and thought our life would get better, but it only seemed to get worse. Maybe we have asked God to heal someone and they died. Maybe we have asked God for some small help and it seemed like all we got was the silent treatment. Or maybe we have tried to lead a good life and feel it has gotten us nowhere. We know that God is not at our beck and call to do what we demand, but still we wonder, and maybe we do complain.
The negative side of complaining about God is that complaining tends to focus our attention “out there” on what God is or is not doing to others, or the way He is failing to deal with our fallen world. Focus on the failure of others numbs us to the self-righteousness in us so that we do not recognize the secret delight we take in complaining. Let’s face it, it feels good to complain, to be innocent when others are guilty, to be right when others are wrong. It feels so good and makes us so miserable. A kind of self-righteous rot sets into our soul. A spirit of dissatisfaction begins to taint even some of the best things that happen to us. But if we are going to complain, God is probably the best one to take our complaints to. God may grow weary with our complaining but He does not dismiss the complainer.
Malachi’s message is this: You complain that God is not just. You will discover that God is just in the way he deals with you. Your complaints will be answered, not in the way God deals with others, but in the way God deals with you. In Jesus, God came to deal with us. He came, not as a force to be feared, but as a baby who was revered. He came to offer us His life. He came not asking “do you agree with me”, but “will you discover the truth by serving me.”
Jesus did not come simply to comfort us, but to confront us. And people who find themselves confronted by Jesus say again and again that they were confronted not only by judgment but by mercy as well. And in my own experience, I remember thinking during the early days of my addiction “God is going to punish me for this.” But never in my wildest dreams did I think God would punish me by sending me to a treatment center. Is that justice? In effect, Malachi says “You will learn about the justice of God in the way God deals with you. Behold, I am sending a messenger. I am sending a Lord.”
When we are confronted by Jesus, we become fed up with pettiness. We are repulsed by our self-centeredness. We are intolerant of phoniness. Though God’s love will not let us down, neither does it let us off. In Jesus, the love of God has a caring and a confrontive quality. We take our complaints to the Source and the Source deals with the real source of complaint in us. Telling God our complaints enables us to be done with the idolatry of our hurts and our frustrations, our gripes, and our grief.
Behold, I send my messenger. Maybe that is all we can say to one another and do for one another. We can be a messenger to help one another know that in the frustrations and annoyances of our life, in the unanswerable injustices that we see, God is there. And more importantly, God is here. He is dealing with us. He is opening the eyes of our soul so we discover the truth we celebrate at Christmas. He is Emmanuel, God with us.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell
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