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"Refiner's Fire and Fuller's Soap"
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
December 6, 2009
The Rev. Elizabeth Molitors
“For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers'
soap…” -- Malachi 3:2b
Sometime in late October or early November, I pull out my
Handel’s Messiah CDs – Sir Neville Mariner conducting
the Academy of St. Martin-in-the Fields – and these two
disks rarely leave my car’s CD player until late springtime,
long after Easter has come and gone. As my daughter can attest,
I don’t just listen to this music – I sing along
with it, with all the parts, even the tenor and bass lines which
are well below my voice’s range. These songs are so familiar
to me that when I’m reading the bible, and come across
the various scripture passages on which this oratorio is based,
I not only see the words on the page, but I automatically hear
Handel’s tunes in my head.
There are a number of songs from The Messiah that are based
on our scripture readings today: the Isaiah quote in Luke’s
gospel, that speaks of crooked paths being made straight and
smooth, valleys and mountains made level. And those few short
verses from Malachi – those form the basis of at least
three songs that I can think of right off the bat – about
being refined and purified by the messenger who will act like
a refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap.
One drawback of being so familiar with these works by Handel
is that I tend to skip right over the meaning of the words,
and get lost in the beautiful music. But this week I took the
opportunity to really think about fire and soap.
I learned about the fuller, the person whose profession it
was to whiten and soften the wool that went into making cloth
garments, using a soap – fuller’s soap – made
of a kind of clayey, mineral-y dirt. One source described the
process as involving the fuller stamping or treading on the
fiber with his feet, in large vats of water and caustic soap.
To find out about refining, and refining fire, I turned to
my sister – who works as a jeweler and metalsmith. Here
is a little of what she told me; she said that “Most metals
are not found pure... not just sitting around as chunks of 100%
pure substances. They are usually mixed with other minerals
and substances when mined…or found out there in the world.
The refining process involves high heat [and in modern times,
the use of chemicals] to help encourage breaking down and separating
the metals into their purer forms. A byproduct of this refining
process is – in her words – a dirty, glassy, foamy,
gritty, nasty waste substance called slag which must be removed
and thrown out.
In case it hasn’t occurred to you yet, Malachi’s
message is intended for you and me: we are the ones meant to
be subject to the sting of the fuller’s soap and the heat
of the refining fire. And though both the soap and fire have
the same end in mind – removing what gets in the way of
a substance being its very best, its most pure self –
still, these don’t sound like gentle and comfortable ways
to get at whatever is pure and good inside me.
Sometimes I think that we prefer to hang onto our dirt and
our slag. Maybe it’s just familiarity; maybe it’s
fear of what God’s soap and fire will feel like; or maybe
it’s because we find it hard to believe that there is,
at our core, anything but dirt and slag, and if that were burned
or washed away, we’d be left with….nothing.
In a movie that came out about 10 years ago, called “As
Good As It Gets,” Jack Nicholson plays Melvin Udall –
a best-selling author of romance novels who is also a really
awful person: rude and mean and self-absorbed. He is a racist,
a homophobe, a misogynist, and an anti-Semite. Melvin despises
everyone, and the few people he does tolerate in his life exist
merely to serve his needs: his editor, for instance, and the
waitress at the restaurant that he frequents daily. Your distaste
for him is tempered somewhat by sympathy for his mental illness
- he suffers from severe obsessive compulsive symptoms –
constantly washing his hands, ritually locking and unlocking
his door, and when he ventures out of the house each day to
eat the same food at the same table at the same restaurant,
he carefully wends his way down the sidewalk, stepping over
every crack and avoiding any physical contact with passersby.
Though he tries very hard to keep his life well-ordered, his
sense of control collapses when circumstances force him to get
involved with the people around him – people who have
problems of their own. Feeling frantic about this loss of control,
Melvin rushes to his therapist’s office one day and poses
a question to his doctor: What if this is as good as it gets?
It’s a desperate, hit-bottom, hopeless kind of question
that asks, What if intolerance is as good as it gets? What if
self-absorption is all I have to look forward to? What if there’s
nothing inside of me besides meanness, cruelty and condescension?
At this point in the movie, Melvin, you see, believes only in
slag and dirt.
As Christians, though, we are called to believe in more than
that, to hope beyond that: called to believe in the white wool
under layers of grime, and the vein of silver obscured by slag.
We are called to listen to the next part of Handel’s Messiah,
which tells us, “Behold! A virgin shall conceive and bear
a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, God-with-us.”
To engage, especially in this Advent season, in the stories
of God-made-man, to remind ourselves that Jesus dwelt not only
with us, but lives in us – we, who were created in the
very image of God.
We are called to radical hope – a hope that runs counter
to the easy cynicism of the world – a hope that proclaims
the truth that purity and perfection lay beyond the slag and
dirt, if only we can allow ourselves to be transformed by the
fuller’s soap and God’s refining fire. We are called,
as it says in the ordination collect read yesterday morning,
to “let the whole world see and know that things which
were being cast down are being raised up, and things which had
grown old are being made new, and that all things are being
brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were
made, God’s Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” May it be
so.
Amen.
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