Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:1-6
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
December 5, 2021
“It makes it sound like we’re supposed to be perfect,” Norma said with a look of distaste on her face. Then she shivered and pulled her coat closer. We were sitting outside in the not-very-warm sun and the gusty wind, six of us gathered in a circle for the Monday noontime prayer service. I had just read the Malachi text aloud and invited their responses, hoping the group would give me inspiration for today’s sermon. I was not disappointed.
Picking up on Norma’s opening comment, we talked about the things we didn’t like about this reading. We all agreed with Norma: the language about purity implied that, in order to come before God, we needed to become perfect. “So much for coming as you are,” Janet said with a slightly snide tone.
I named my discomfort with the fire imagery, since it is so often connected with visions of the end times—the fires of judgment or even the eternal fires of hell. I also named how unhelpful it can be, when we are going through a painful time and a well-meaning friend suggests that God is causing us to suffer to make us better people. Even when the intent is to give comfort by framing pain in the context of a larger purpose, it so often feels like a dis-counting of our experience.
Once we got our critiques out in the open, we were free to explore how this text might speak to us today. Fire, someone commented, can be destructive; it can also bring much-needed warmth and light. In a forest, it clears out the deadwood. It creates the conditions for new life to flourish. We compared that to the refiner’s fire, hot enough to melt the metals and bring the impurities—the dross—to the surface so they can be skimmed off. Fire itself is neither good nor bad; it is simply part of nature.
We talked about the ways these last twenty months of pandemic living have felt like a refiner’s fire. Amidst the heat of change, uncertainty and loss, we have been forced to examine our lives, claim what matters most, awaken to the power of simple acts of caring, discover our creative gifts and the depth of our connection.
That’s the story I like to tell about the pandemic—how we have seized this opportunity to be made finer, like gold and silver heated by a refiner’s fire. I fear the story we will end up telling, as a society or as a human community, is how we had this opportunity to grow and change, but instead it brought out the worst in us.
I shared my thoughts with the group. I named a few examples of how this fiery time has highlighted our human brokenness: our deep distrust of each other, our capacity to be fooled by lies or to choose lies we find convenient, our disregard for the common good. I pointed to the epidemic of loneliness and despair, the intensifying of already gross inequality. “It feels like this refiner’s fire,” I said, “has just brought to the surface all our ugliness.” So much for my pastoral role as the holder of hope.
Fortunately, someone else picked up the mantle. I don’t remember who said it, but their words stuck with me. “Isn’t that what the refiner’s fire is supposed to do? It brings the impurities—the dross—to the surface. That means the gold and silver is being refined.”
A picture took shape in my mind—a giant vat of our human nature, bubbling away atop a pandemic fire, with an ugly coating forming on the surface, thick enough that it hides the gold or silver underneath. Ahh, I thought, that is what I am seeing and experiencing: our human potential for ugliness rising to the surface, visible in a way it isn’t always, thick enough that it is easy to think that is all there is.
My prayer circle friends reminded me that there is more than what I am seeing. They invited me to look beneath the surface, or may simply to trust that there is more to us as a human race than the brokenness we see so clearly now.
I looked down at my paper and re-read the scripture. I saw something I hadn’t seen before. The starting point for this image of the refiner’s fire is the assumption that we are already like gold and silver. We—human beings—are precious.
I said something like that. One of the members of the group looked at me, “Thank you for saying that. I needed to hear that.” As she spoke, I realized how much I also needed to hear that. Over the last few years I have been awed by the goodness of individuals I know—members of this church whose generosity and caring and courage inspire me, family and friends and colleagues who have discovered new gifts. At the same time, I have increasingly struggled to claim the basic goodness of humankind as a species. I struggle not to despair about our capacity to make the choices we need to make to save our planet, to repair centuries of racism and inequality, to govern ourselves with justice and mercy. I struggle with my anger that we can’t do better. With such a thick layer of dross, of ugliness, brokenness, fear and greed and small-mindedness, that has risen to the surface, I struggle to trust there is something precious underneath.
Malachi’s starting point is that we are like gold and silver, able to be re-fined because we are already fine. That is God’s starting point. God looks at us, sees the whole of who we are, and still claims that we are more precious than gold or silver. God sees our imperfections, our brokenness, our pain and our sin; God sees through them to our goodness, our creativity, our capacity for love.
The refiner’s fire is a human image. Gold and silver in nature—as God’s creation—are generally found as alloys, with other metals mixed in. It is human beings who think we need to separate them out from those other metals we define as less valuable. God loves alloyed gold and silver just as it is. The refiner’s fire of our time does not skim off all our human shortcomings to leave us somehow more perfect. Instead, it brings them to the surface so we can recognize them as part of who we are. It wakes us up to name our brokenness so we can make choices—as individuals and as a society—to ensure that our goodness also is brought to the surface.
Our Monday conversation in the noontime sun and piercing wind leads me to hear John the Baptist’s message in a new way. John begins with a call to repent. The Hebrew word for repent, teshuva, means “to turn around.” Repentance is not just about saying we are sorry; it’s about making a change. This understanding of repentance speaks to our lives and our world today, for we need to turn around and change. This is the meaning of “repent” I generally preach about, for I am drawn to its call to action.
John the Baptist probably spoke Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew. His words were recorded by the gospel writers, who wrote in Greek. Our English word “repent” in the Bible is a translation of the Greek word metanoia—to have a new mind. As much as I need to hear John’s call to turn around, I also need to hear his call to have a new mind, a new or renewed perception of myself and humankind. For me, this year, or at least this week, John’s call to repent is a call to see humankind as God sees us—imperfect and precious, more valuable than the finest silver or gold.
These last years have been like a refiner’s fire, bringing to the surface our pain, vulnerability, distrust, injustice and fear. It is so important that we see all these things for what they are—that we face our human capacity for hate and greed and abuse of power, that we keep searching for ways to transform or contain or manage those realities. It is even more important that we see beneath those painful realities to our value, our belovedness, our potential, our capacity for generosity and courage and love. When we offer Active Bystander Training for students and administration at Framingham High School, when we gather with friends from many spiritual traditions to share inspiration to fight climate change, when we speak out against anti-Semitism and racism, we are naming the realities of our human brokenness and choosing to trust in our human potential.
On Friday morning, I woke up to a UCC Daily Devotional in my email. Rev. Dr. Mary Luti, retired pastor and professor, wrote about how we make sense of Jesus’ birth. She acknowledged a powerful strain of Christian thought that says Jesus came to save us from our sinful natures. She suggests another approach:
There are other venerable traditions, and one of them imagines that the Savior came to divinize us, to give us God’s own glory.
In this version, God empties out to take humanity in. God stoops down to raise us up. God accepts limits to dissolve the limits that made it seem as if God and humans were opposites. The great wonder of the Incarnation is that we’re not.
If you believe this, then what you’re waiting for in Advent is not someone to fix us but someone to reveal us to ourselves. The gift on the horizon is not a moral course correction but a bright mirror, a gaze, a joyous shock of mutual recognition—look, there, the eternal resemblance, the beauty, the dignity, the nearness, the ever-shining love. –Mary Luti
The ever-shining love. In this season of Advent, let us prepare the way for Jesus to be born anew in our lives, to reveal the love ever-shining in us. Let us repent—turning around, looking deeper than the surface, having a new mind to see ourselves as God sees us. We are so incredibly imperfect. And we are so incredibly precious. We are beloved, God’s love ever-shining within us and through us. Amen.