The caboose, or the beginning, depending on how you look at it

This is the sermon I did for the midweek service on Thursday...that's right a Thursday midweek. It makes sense when you look at the 7 day week, unless of course you put Sunday as the first day in the calendar, weirdos.

Malachi 3:1-4 "See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty. ² But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. ³ He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, ⁴ and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.

I’ve always been intrigued by the image of refining. The process of continually cooking something until it reaches perfection, or at least perceived perfection. The end product, as you know, of refining dirty, nasty gold that you find in the ground is the shiny, glamorous, reflective material that many of us wear on our fingers, or around our necks, maybe on our teeth if we wanted to start a rap career. The process of refining gold, using the image from Malachi, is a tad bit bland for me, however. Gold either is heated, or has electricity run through it until it reaches its pure state. Every batch of gold that comes out essentially looks exactly the same. I imagine that if you worked at a gold refinery, you’d probably be sick of gold by now. I’m sure you’ve heard the devotional story by now that the gold refiner keeps a careful eye on the gold and knows that it’s pure when he can see his reflection in the metal. This of course being a metaphor for how Jesus is carefully grooming us to be more in his image. That’s nice and heart warming, and I like it, but like any image or metaphor we use to describe something, it’s incomplete.

The reason I sway away from this image is because I’m not convinced that we all start from the same place, all get formed by the same process, and all come out looking the same. Have you ever stopped and looked at the people around you. They’re a little bit weird. Some are downright crazy. While we may find some things we have in common, there are still a number of quite distinguishing characteristics about all of us, not just in the way we look or act, but how things affect us. We all react differently to different situations. Think of the reading from Luke. You don’t try to fill a crooked road, and you don’t try to make the rough road low. Each obstacle that presents itself as needing work gets dealt with in a manner appropriate to the situation. And the results are not always the same. Maybe it’s just me, but when you level a mountain, I don’t think you get a straight path.

I’m not convinced that when God has done the sanctification in this world, when Jesus comes again, when all the roads, paths, mountains, and all manner of things are prepared that we all end up like cookie cut-outs, indistinguishable from one another. Maybe it’s my desire to hold on to some of my person that I really like, or maybe it’s my desire to not be like some of the quirky things I see in people like him. But as I look at my past, and hear the stories of others, it seems to me quite obvious that we neither came from the same place, nor are headed in exactly the same direction.

The gold refining process might be a good broad analogy for the ultimate beginning and end. We are all born into new life as part of this body of God. We all die and get shiny new resurrected bodies free from the burdens of death and sin. But what about the in between? What about where we are now? I liken it a little more to a refining process the writer of Malachi was not familiar with in his time. The refining of crude oil.

Crude oil, when found in the ground, is dirty, smelly, nasty, rotten, but technically still functional. You could put it in a car and it would run, but you’d do more damage than good, maybe even blow up your car. Instead the oil gets processed. But the process does not proceed from one end to the other in the same manner, first the oil gets separated into component parts, the parts which will be used for gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, oil, wax, etc. Then once separated, each of these parts goes through its own process, some further separated, some things get added, some taken away. Through this series of labor and energy intensive processes, the oil gets changed into things which more often than not don’t look quite like they used to. The purposes for these many different products are multitudinous. Some were required to get you here tonight, some required to cook the soup we just ate, some to clean the floors your feet are dirtying. All from the same source, with different processes and different results.

You see, I’m not convinced that we’re all gonna end up exactly the same in the end, and just by sitting next to one another now, you can tell, we’re not in the same place currently. But we are all in the midst of this continuing creation. We have been brought out from where we were. Dirty, gross, functional, but barely and certainly not a whole lot else, kind of like mud. And we’re all in the process of being refined, of being formed into what Christ would have us be. So that we can end up as different parts, but parts that function together for the sole purpose of God’s glory.

The beauty in this middle time, between the beginning and the end, and the difference between the gold and the crude oil, is that the refining is specific for you. Not in the plural sense, like the you is the broader congregation, or the church, or the world, but you, the singular. You the quirky, you the broken, you the child of God, you. Part of this process is coming to receive Christ’s blood, and Christ’s body. The body and blood of Christ given for you, for you.

We come to be the Body of Christ by the broader refining, the same process as gold if you will. But to become the individual parts of the body, we grow and change in a process that is designed to help us grow into the person that God intends us to be, to be the individuals that God wants us to be, to make the creation that God intends to make.

From where we sit now, it’s a bit difficult to make out the beginning and the end of what’s happening here. And I would contend that even the best theologians and the best spiritual leaders see that the beginning and end are a mystery. But they realize that we who live here in the middle of the beginning and the end, we are continually being refined, seeing in life both something beyond what was happening day in and day out, and valuing what God’s doing in the world right now. Sometimes that can be comforting, other times it can feel like a burden. But to know that we have a creator with our best interests at heart; active by continually refining gives us hope. So that we can walk through whatever life gives us, be it good or bad, and keep an eye on the horizon for what’s coming in the end.