Malachi 4:4-6
Please listen with me to a reading from the fourth chapter of the Prophet Malachi, beginning at the fourth verse. The Lord is speaking:
“Remember the Law of Moses, My servant, which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”
So far our text.
This reading was a portion of the Old Testament lesson two Sundays ago, which I preached on that day. But today I want to focus in on a different section of that text.
Something called the “generation gap” emerged in our society in the 1950s. Before this time, younger people and older people listened to the same music, engaged in the same kinds of recreations, and were basically interested in the same kinds of things.
But in the 1950s, teenagers began to listen to a style of music – Rock and Roll – that their parents and grandparents didn’t listen to. Teenagers began to do other things too, that were unique to their generation, and that differed from what older generations were doing.
A separate teenage subculture came into existence. And ever since the 1950s, the young people in each up-and-coming generation likewise develop their own unique subculture: oriented largely around their preferred style of music, but involving their distinctive attitudes and actions in other areas of life as well.
Social analysts started out describing the unique characteristics of the so-called baby-boomers, as compared to all the generations that came before them. Then these scholars went on to study and describe Generation X, then the Millennial Generation, and now Generation Z.
For America, this is a new phenomenon. In earlier times, all the age-groups that were alive at the same time, basically shared the same culture, and had the same outlook on things.
The generations were more integrated and were not really distinguished from each other in very many ways. Their beliefs and values were basically the same.
As a general rule, before the 1950s, young people tended to imitate their parents’ values, and follow their parents’ lead in how they thought about things, more often than not. But starting in the 1950s, young people in much larger numbers began to rebel against their parents, and against their parents’ beliefs and priorities, and in these areas began to be influenced instead, primarily, by their peers.
In the days of John the Baptist and of Jesus, among the people of Israel, there was also something like a “generation gap” in effect – although this “gap” covered a wider breadth of time.
The generation of Jews who had returned to the Holy Land from their exile in Babylon, was a generation that was serious about serving God, about worshiping him in his temple, and about reestablishing a presence for the Lord’s people in the promised land.
They were devout and spiritually-minded: willing to give up the conveniences they had gotten used to in Babylon; willing to pull up stakes; and willing to start all over again in a different place that had been left in ruins seventy years earlier.
They were filled also with a vigorous Messianic hope, anticipating that before long God would send them a new and special king, a new and special prophet, and a new and special priest, to usher in for them a full restoration of their relationship with their Savior God.
But how did things stand with the Jewish people at the time of John and Jesus? Some of the Jews – the Herodians – had aligned themselves with the attitudes and culture of the Romans, and had been taken over by a spirit of compromise and rationalism. Others were among, or were influenced by, the Pharisees, and had been taken over by a spirit of legalism and self-righteous judgmentalism.
The living Messianic hope that dwelled in the hearts of their ancestors, who had followed Ezra and Nehemiah four centuries earlier in restoring the temple and the nation, was now hard to find. The hearts of the people were oriented toward various things, but not toward the actual Word and promises of God in Holy Scripture.
And so John the Baptist was sent to this nation, at this time in history, to “turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”
John the Baptist was not the same person as the ancient prophet Elijah, in a resurrected state, as some people thought. But he was a prophet who had come in the spirit of Elijah, to preach God’s Word with the same kind of boldness and authority that had characterized the ministry of Elijah – at another time in Israelite history when the hearts of the people had wandered far from the Lord.
The people of Israel would be prepared for the Messiah – who was coming soon – only if they were to become spiritually-minded: with humility before God’s law, and with a living hope in the glad tidings of the Messiah’s imminent appearance and saving work.
They would not be ready if they remained enmeshed in worldviews that tied their hearts to earthly values and priorities; or that deceived them into thinking that they were already in a position of moral superiority as they were, without the need for anything further from the hand of divine grace.
And so, as the forerunner of Christ, John preached a firm and forceful message to this nation, to jar the people from their complacency and their self-satisfaction. And he preached a message of divine forgiveness, and of a new beginning with God under his grace: for all who repented of their sins, and who in faith received the baptism John was sent to offer.
The reality that would soon burst upon them was the coming of Christ. But they were not yet tuned into this reality. So, God’s Word was brought to bear against their unbelief, in the various forms that this unbelief took, so that through God’s Word, God’s Spirit could work in them a true repentance and a true faith.
The “generation gap” that exists in our society, which I have already talked about in its cultural manifestations, also manifests itself in an increasingly noticeable indifference to God, faith, church, and religion, on the part of younger people, in comparison to the older generations.
The baby boomers were the first ones to begin abandoning the church. Each succeeding generation, in ever larger percentages, followed suit – so that now, the number of young people in Generation Z who identify themselves as atheists, or as holding to no religion, is larger than the number who believe in God and practice their faith.
It would seem as if we need another John the Baptist, to call people to repentance and faith, and to “turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” Indeed, we could use another John the Baptist to turn the hearts of everyone to God’s grace in Jesus Christ: the Messiah who has come, and who comes still whenever his gospel is proclaimed.
But just as Jesus comes whenever his preached and sacramental Word comes, so too does the original John the Baptist still speak to us. As we hear in today’s reading from the Gospel of John the apostle, John the Baptist still tells us:
“I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”
On judgment day, when all people from all nations stand before the throne of Christ, those who represent the younger generations of today’s society in our country will not be exempt from the need to give an account of their lives. Their lack of faith in Jesus now, is not going to make Jesus go away.
But today’s young people are also not excluded from the admonition, and the invitation, that is issued to all people by John the Baptist – and by every prophet and apostle who speaks to us, by divine inspiration, from the pages of Holy Scripture. All generations, and people of all ages – from one to one-hundred – who are tired and discouraged in their souls, are invited to the embrace of Christ, who says:
“Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
All generations, and people of all ages, who are blinded by the concerns of this world so that they cannot see what is eternal, are invited to the clarity that is brought about by the Word of Christ, who says:
“I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”
All generations, and people of all ages, who are alarmed and frightened by uncertainty and doubt, are invited to live by faith under the protection of Christ, who says:
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
Christmas is a wonderful time to experience the reunion of parents and children in a shared faith, as the hearts of all men are drawn to the loving and forgiving heart of God. God reveals his heart for humanity in the coming of his only-begotten Son in human flesh.
No young person in our society who has drifted away from God’s Word and from God’s church, is younger than the babe of Bethlehem was on the night of his birth.
If the divine Lord Jesus Christ – even in the manger – was not too young to love you, then you are not too young to receive his love – and to receive the redemption from sin and death that his love procured for you in his eventual death and resurrection.
And if the angels who appeared to the shepherds – who were thousands of years old and immortal – were not too old to rejoice in the birth of humanity’s Savior, how much more is it the case that we who are only a smattering of decades old, and who are able to claim Jesus as that Savior, can rejoice in his grace toward us.
And we can rejoice also in the opportunity we have not only to trust in him for our own salvation, but also in God’s name to invite the young people we know to come home with us: to come home to the stable; to come home to the mansions of heaven; to come home to the church that Jesus is building and preserving on earth, for as long as the earth remains.
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”
Amen.