Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today's readings have as their main theme the coming of the forerunner, the coming of John the Baptist, who prepared for our Lord's coming and His ministry, so it's an appropriate theme for the next two last days of Advent when we prepare for Christ's coming at Christmas.
A secondary theme that we see in the first reading is the idea of purification. That's when the Messiah comes. One of His main missions will be to purify God's people, beginning with the religious leaders identified as the sons of Levi in Malachi 3:3. The Levites were the clerical tribe in Israel. They were entrusted with all the matters related to worship and religious instruction, and they have become negligent and sinful. Just as politics is downstream from culture, so too the spiritual state of God's people is usually downstream from His priests. If the priests, who are God's mediators, His go-betweens between Him and the people, if God's priests are sinful, sacrilegious, self-centered, worldly, unbalanced spiritually, we shouldn't expect much better from the flock. The priests are responsible for the religious decline of the people, so purification has to start with them. So the Lord promises in the first reading that the Messiah will purify His priests, and then through them He will also purify His people.
Why does God purify them? Why does He purify us? He says in Malachi 3:3, so that the priests, and we can add the faithful as well, can bring offerings to the Lord in righteousness. The offering in righteousness that God's priests bring to Him in this period of the Church is the Holy Eucharist. The offering of righteousness of the people is their life offered in union with the Holy Eucharist. So why does God purify us? So that our worship will be perfected. The worship of God is not only what gives meaning to life, but in the next life it will be our unending joy and our glory too. So if Sunday is not a day of worship for you, if Sunday is just like every other day in the week, then none of the days of the week really have meaning, actually. Because life itself becomes meaningless if the author of life is not given His due.
Conversion is a process of purification. The Lord works to purify us, first of all, from all mortal sin, from all serious sin. That includes removing occasions of sin from us, also teaching us to avoid occasions of sin, so persons, places, things that easily lead to serious sin. Then the Lord works to purify us of all deliberate, venial sin, all those small sins that we willfully choose to do. It's like the Lord first cuts down all the big weeds, and then we say, "Wow, there's no more weeds. You know, look at this. This is wonderful." But, you know, the roots are still there. Seven vices, so pride, anger, sloth, envy, lust, gluttony, greed, covetousness. Those vices go dormant for a while after we've had a big conversion and have begun to live a faithful Catholic life. But later on, they usually return because the roots weren't gone. The roots were still there. They return, and that's when the Lord lets us know that He wants to literally get to the root of the problem. He wants to go deeper, have a deeper purification of our souls.  As He takes away our consolations and our good feelings about doing spiritual things, the Lord helps us to better see those roots that still needed to be weeded out. So as our sense of enjoyment and our pleasure in serving God or in praying to Him actually goes away, we're given a greater self-knowledge, a deeper knowledge of our own misery and of our need for God and of His grace, a more keen knowledge of our need for further purification. Also, the depriving us of consolations and good feelings is meant to help us not trust too much in ourselves because we can see many of our miseries that are still within us. It's meant to purify our love. It's meant to teach us humility and detachment, so detachment from control and comforts, detachment from our own wills. It forces us to either turn to the Lord and cling to Him for help and a spirit of faith or we end up turning away from Him and giving up spiritually, or just maybe throwing ourselves back into worldly comforts and distractions.
St. Thérèse wrote the following to her sister, Céline. She said, "What a grace it is when in the morning we feel no courage, no strength to practice virtue. That is the moment to put the ax to the root of the tree. And what a profit at the end of the day in one act of love, even unfelt love, all is repaired," she says. And Fr. Mark Foley in his book On the Dark Night comments on that and he says that it's quote, "precisely at those moments that we are devoid of consolation and feel desolate and disinclined to practice virtue that we are presented with the greatest opportunity to grow in virtue. This is because our love arises from the will alone, devoid of affective support, what St. Thérèse calls unfelt love," he says. So it's a love that's rooted in action and in faith and in truth, not rooted in our feelings. Feelings come and go; we can't always live by them, make our choices by them, not a wise thing to do.
What do we hear in the first reading? We hear that quote, "the Lord of hosts is like a refiner's fire or like a fuller's lye. He will sit refining and purifying silver. He will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or like silver that they may offer due sacrifice to the Lord." Malachi 3:2-3. Or as St. Paul would say, he says, "I'm confident that the one who begun the good work in you, meaning your sanctification, your purification, he says, I'm confident that He will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ," Philippians 1:6.
So we need to stay faithful and prayerful, especially when we don't feel like doing that. It's especially when we need to stay faithful and prayerful and vigilant and be careful about what we do, what we say, how we act, how we react.
Lastly, what's the attitude that we need to have during these times of purification? It's an attitude, again, of trusting abandonment to the will of God, total surrender. As the antiphon in the Office of Readings on Tuesday, week two says, it says, "Surrender to God, and He will do everything for you. Surrender to Go,d and He will do everything for you."  Let's ask Our Lady then for the grace to allow the Lord to purify us so that we can become more like her and more like our Lord, so that we can welcome them with more of a free and a loving heart during this Christmas season that's just around the corner.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.