Good News in the Fire

 “Good News in the Fire” was preached at First Presbyterian Church of Allentown, PA on November 16, 2025.

You can listen to the podcast of the sermon here.

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Scripture texts:
Psalm 98
Malachi 4:1-3

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Of course, there are some passages in Scripture that are pretty intense, sometimes so much so that it causes us to fidget a little or sit up a little straighter when we hear them. Malachi gives us one of those moments, which is why I think it’s worth reading the passage again. These three verses from Malachi:

1 See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.

I don’t think these words would be the ones stitched on a decorative pillow. I don’t think any of these verses are used in greeting cards. 

“Thinking of you… you shall tread down the wicked.” 

Somehow I don’t think Hallmark is rushing to create that one. Although now that I think about it, I can think of several people who would LOVE to buy that kind of card. 

This passage seems intense because it almost sounds like the kind of fire-and-brimstone message that are found in angry pulpits. The imagery is big and forceful. It feels like wrath. And most of us instinctively brace ourselves, myself included, when we hear scripture that sounds like this. 

But these words were written to give hope – hope – to a community that desperately needed it.

We are now in the very last book of the Older Testament.  Like the other minor prophets, Malachi is a short book spoken to a specific moment in the life of God’s people. If you remember our text from last week, Haggai was prophesying to the people after they returned from exile and gave them the command to rebuild the temple. Fast forward to the next generation in the same community. Roughly sixty to eighty years have passed, which is long enough for the people who rebuilt the second temple to have grown old, and most of the people never knew exile or even the rebuilding of the temple. And this new generation began struggling with corruption among leaders and a widening economic inequality.

Through this short book of 4 chapters, we hear a kind of dialogue between God and the people. God names the places their life together has become corrupt and the people respond with confusion or defensiveness because they do not understand how they drifted from the faithfulness they intended.

The book of Malachi opens with the people questioning God’s love, and in the second chapter, the people ask, “Where is the God of justice?”. Then in chapter 3, when speaking about the corrupt leaders in the community, Malachi describes God as a refiner’s fire like when purifying silver or gold. The fire never destroys the metal but instead heats the metal until the impurities rise to the surface and can be removed so the beauty beneath is revealed. 

By the time we reach the passage we heard today in the fourth chapter, the imagery widens. Instead of focusing on just the leaders, Malachi describes a fire that sweeps across the whole landscape of injustice. The refining flame of chapter 3 becomes the cleansing flame we just read a moment ago.  

For Malachi’s listeners, this carried the meaning of clearing away what harms the community, this time like a field that must be burned to make way for new growth. 

And then right after the image of burning, in the middle of our three verses, we are given an image of a sunrise: “The sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” 

And here’s a special fascinating connection that makes my nerdy Bible heart sing: Malachi, the last book of the Older Testament, Malachi which means “the messenger” ends with the promise of a messenger (Elijah). And then the Gospel of Mark, which most scholars believe was the first of the four Gospels written, opens with a messenger (John the Baptist) saying there is one coming after him who will baptize the people with the Holy Spirit, which is further expanded on in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew saying the one who is to come (Jesus) will baptize the people with the Holy Spirit and fire.  

This is a cleansing fire that will heal the people! 

Last Sunday after our worship services, I went to a lecture hosted at Muhlenberg College, where Dr. Damon Berry spoke about the social patterns that can draw people toward acts of extreme violence or terrorism. He described a “staircase,” five steps that lead a person from ordinary frustration all the way to violent extremism. 

But before he explained the steps, he asked a simple question: “How many of you believe there is injustice in the world right now?”

And by a show of hands right now, how many of you believe there in injustice in the world? 

The entire room like ours raised their hands. And he explained that most people remain at this level: aware that the world is not just. But after moving past steps one and two, the third step is when people begin aligning themselves with groups that share their anger or amplify their grievances. And then the fourth step is leaning into an us-versus-them mentality. That it is the job of the “us” to fix the “them”. The fifth step is the final step: committing the act of extreme violence against the “them”. 

While the staircase Dr. Berry was speaking on is specifically on the steps that lead people to violent extremism, I can see those same steps happening in the everyday life of society. 

Scroll through social media. Listen to political rhetoric. Watch how quickly people sort one another into camps: 

“Those people are the problem.”
“People like them are ruining the world.”
“We’re the righteous ones; they’re the wicked ones.”

People can begin with a longing for justice and slowly find their world narrowing until they come to believe that goodness only exists within their own group. And by doing so, we lose sight of the shared hope that binds communities together. 

But Malachi is prophesying to the entire community. He is inviting the entire community to trust that God’s refining work is directed toward the injustice that wounds people, rather than toward the people themselves. God’s judgment is aimed at removing the harm, not the person, so that what remains is the possibility of restored life for everyone. 

When God brings restoration, God brings it with a generosity that does not mirror our own divisions or our own us-versus-them. The sunrise falls on everyone, and the healing is meant for everyone.

Psalm 98 echoes that same vision. The psalmist describes creation responding to God’s justice with music, as though the rivers and hills can sense when things are finally beginning to be set right. When the psalm ends with saying God “judges the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity,” it is naming that God’s judgment is a promise that God’s justice will be great enough to heal what is broken.

God’s judgement in the world is a source of joy rather than anxiety, not because life is simple or pain is absent, but because God’s judgement is rooted in healing. 

When Malachi describes the joy of calves running free, he is a painting a picture of what healed life can feel like for people who have carried heaviness for a long time. It is joyful! And God says all of this “shall” come. Not might or can. “Shall”. This is God’s unwavering promise.

And the promise continues. The messenger prepares the way. John baptizes in the wilderness. Christ enters the world carrying the fullness of God’s healing. And then Christ baptizes us with the Holy Spirit and fire. 

Each step invites us to believe that God’s healing is part of our journey; our collective journey as the people of God. 

There is injustice in this world. And it is tempting to name a group of others as a “them”. But there is no ‘them.’ There is injustice but there is no ‘them,” not in God’s healing. 

So we pray: Burn away the injustice, O God, and let us – all of us – find healing in you.

In the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen. 

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