Malachi starts with love. One should be open to extend the reading.he purpose of divine judgment is not to punish but to prepare the way of the Lord. It is to bring restoration and renewed life. It is to train the people in obedience to the covenant so that they may offer reverent praise.
The event is expected to be so serious that its process alarms the messenger himself. The prophet wonders, “But who can endure?” (verse 2a) The Hebrew verb used here for “endure” (mekalkel) Reduplication often signifies repeated action or sustained state. With the sound effect from the repeated consonants, Malachi invites audiences to imagine the challenge and struggle that will accompany the Lord’s coming. To endure the day, one will need endurance.
Messenger-my angel-could be Malachi or a future one Used to describe the Baptist but also for Jesus wants to clean up the priesthood a la Dead Seas Scrolls community-Will this messenger be heeded any better than others-Is it pointing to Elijah at the end of its scroll?
Alfred Fuller started Fuller Brush in 1906-Fuller’s soap and whitening-Fulling involves two processes: scouring and milling (thickening). Originally, fulling was carried out by the pounding of the woollen cloth with a club, or the fuller's feet or hands. In Scottish Gaelic tradition, this process was accompanied by waulking songs, which women sang to set the pace (peope wlaked on the ool in old days). From the medieval period, however, fulling was often carried out in a water mill, followed by stretching the cloth on great frames known as tenters, to which it is attached by tenterhooks. It is from this process that the phrase being on tenterhooks is derived, as meaning to be held in suspense. The area where the tenters were erected was known as a tenterground.
In Roman times, fulling was conducted by slaves working the cloth while ankle deep in tubs of human urine. Urine was so important to the fulling business that it was taxed.[1] Stale urine, known as wash, was a source of ammonium salts and assisted in cleansing and whitening the cloth. By the medieval period, fuller's earth had been introduced for use in the process. This is a soft clay-like material occurring naturally as an impure hydrous aluminium silicate. More recently, soap has been used.
The second function of fulling was to thicken cloth by matting the fibres together to give it strength and increase waterproofing (felting). This was vital in the case of woollens, made from carded wool, but not for worsted materials made from combed wool. After this stage, water was used to rinse out the foul-smelling liquor used during cleansing. Felting of wool occurs upon hammering or other mechanical agitation because the microscopic scales on the surface of wool fibres hook together, somewhat like hook and loop fixings.
Whitens cleanses alkaline products-often had odor and worked outside town-like in Latin and in Scotland it has a sense of walking on it-white clay, putrid urine, (for salts) and the ashes of certain desert plants (Arabic qali, Biblical "soap"; Mal 3:2).
Spend some time on refining fire-purifies metal by skimming off the dross may take some days (for gold) may have used lye or other material to bind with impurities
This renewal comes through testing and cleansing. It is the refining fire that brings precious metal to light, and it is the washing with strong detergent. The Hebrew term for “soap” (borît) sounds quite similar to the word for “covenant” (berît). Ironically, it is the soap that restores to covenant faithfulness, as the covenant is in some measure a metric of obedience. T
May be related to worship practices
Deals with the questions of wearying god and seeking the god of justice in their time and place, where blessings and rewards and punishments seem to be randomly assorted.
May messenger be related to both the baptist and Jesus?
Our little section relates to the question of justice in 2:17. So, one could choose to work with justice, not charity, but justice. What elements of justice in the new age would you like to see arise. (already happened)
An image of cleansing is another wedge point. In a time when the word toxins and toxic are prevalent, focus on some areas of cleansing. It could be an opportunity to speak of cleansing us from shame, of the sense that we do not measure up, that we are a mistake, more than mistaken, as opposed to guilt as transgressing a boundary, or even survivor’s guilt.
Marshall McLuhan spoke of the medium as the messenger. Who are the heralds, the messengers in our time? One may wish to pay attention to the messages of social media. What new year’s message (advent) does your congregation need to hear?
Some speak of refining as suffering’s purpose, as it burns away the dross of our lives. Do you accept or reject this image? Given the doctrine of total depravity, it there gold in the deepest recesses of the human being?
5) What offerings would be pleasing to the Lord in 2021? How would we need to be purified?
Look at Mary Douglas Purity and Danger-Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo" explores the cultural notion of dirt and its symbolic meanings. She follows Emile Durkheim in defining dirt as that which is out of its place (ketchup in fine in the bottle, but not on my shirt-bathroom tap water). What Douglas does is to tie this distinction to the distinction between the sacred and the profane (a long held interest of structuralist anthropology). Uncleanliness, she holds, is a cultural matter determined by actual and symbolic power structures.
For example, Douglas studies the Jewish Kosher laws, arguing that they separate the easy categorized and thus understood from the threatening undetermined (Douglas later retracted this understanding of Jewish laws, see Douglas's "Purity and Danger" and Power Structures).
Douglas further argues (especially in chapter 2 of the book) is that, unlike previous notions in anthropology, the distinction between the scared and the profane did not disappear in modern times- Douglas also holds that these notions bear an analogous form of the specific social order of a group. What makes for "dirt" is that which is considered anomalous and transgressive of normal bounds. This makes the symbolic meanings of contamination socially dependent and thus relative.
Uncleanness in Leviticus is about protecting the tabernacle from contamination, it is not primarily about mundane things.’ But if Douglas excoriates the interpretations of Leviticus from the late biblical period onward for ‘primitivising’ the book, might not this idea of preserving the absolute purity of a physically demarcated sacred space itself reflect a primitive way of thinking? She anticipates such objections by arguing that the integrity of the sanctuary is crucially important because the sanctuary, with its sharply divided zones, constitutes a model of the sacred cosmos, and that this modelling is represented by Leviticus in intricate detail with extremely subtle literary sophistication.
What enables this whole process is a mode of ordering reality that Douglas characterises as ‘analogical thinking’; it is mentioned briefly here, but more elaborately in Leviticus as Literature. We are accustomed, she proposed in the earlier book, to analytic thinking, but many cultures construct the world through analogical thinking, which is different from our own mental procedures, but by no means more primitive. In analogical thinking, reality is seen as a complex system of correspondences in which given components may throw light on their counterparts or actually symbolise them.
Leviticus, then, in Douglas’s view, is not in its deepest concerns a series of regulations
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