Sermon — December 5, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
For my birthday a few weeks ago, Alice and Murray bought me a two-part present that says a lot about the kind of man I am. First, they went to Ace Hardware, and bought me the gift they knew I needed: a brand-new toolkit, with two sets of new screwdrivers and matching adult and child-sized tape measures. And then they walked next door to Whole Foods, where they bought me the gift they knew I’d love: a matching set of lavender body wash, moisturizer, and bubble bath, and three magnificent bath bombs in various flavors: cactus flower, gardenia blossom, strawberry something or other.
And you know what? I’ve loved both my presents.
Now, bath bombs for grown-ups come in all sorts of fragrant and relaxing varieties. But bath bombs for kids are even more fun. For those among us who are especially reluctant to take a bath, there are all sorts of enticing ways to make it more fun. My favorite one is ingenious: the dinosaur-egg bath bomb.
Can you imagine what I mean? Essentially, it’s a little egg made of that chalky bath-bomb stuff. And at its center, there’s a tiny plastic dinosaur. If you toss it into the water while you take a bath, the outside starts to fizz, slowly eating away at the egg until the dinosaur within is revealed. It’s a win-win-win: your boring bath is now a bubble bath, you’ve got a new dinosaur toy, and your parents might have twelve to fifteen seconds of peace.
Remember the dinosaur bath bomb. We’ll come back to that later.
For now, on to more serious, perhaps more somber, things. In this morning’s readings, the traditional Advent themes of judgment and upheaval continue. You may remember last Sunday’s prophecies of fear and foreboding, of the heavens shaking and the Lord God coming in might. Today the cosmic judgment of Advent gets personal. John the Baptist appears in the wilderness, and he wants you to repent. John is an unforgiving prophet—in next week’s gospel he’ll call his audience a “brood of vipers!”—and it’s easy to hear his proclamation of “a baptism of repentance” (Luke 3:3) as a condemnation. “For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap,” Malachi says of the messenger who comes to prepare the way of the Lord— “Who can stand when he appears?” (Mal. 3:2) Not any of you, the prophet’s rhetorical question implies.
Not many of us like John’s message of sin and judgment, of repentance and salvation. It can seem harsh. It can seem as though it’s there to draw lines between us, to separate out the good from the bad, to say that those who repent will be saved and those who don’t will be destroyed with fire.
But that’s not quite what’s going on. “He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap,” says Malachi, “he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” (Mal. 3:2-3)
The process of refining precious metals involves melting them down. You put silver ore or gold ore inside a crucible, and put that in a furnace hot enough to melt stone. The heavy gold or silver sinks down to the bottom, while the lighter impurities float on the top and can be removed. So a “refiner’s fire” isn’t a force of destruction. It doesn’t burn something up. It melts something away, removing everything that obscures the metal’s brilliance, distilling it down to its essence, to liquid silver or gold.
It’s the same with fullers’ soap, an even more obscure metaphor. “Fulling,” if you don’t know, is a part of the process of making wool. The fuller takes the fleeces of sheep who’ve been shorn and, through a vigorous process of pounding and washing, slowly removes all the oils and dirt and grass that have accumulated on the fleece, transforming it slowly from a yellow, shaggy mass into fluffy white wool.
Now, neither of these processes is particularly fun. It takes extremely high heat or harsh chemicals to turn ore into gold or fleece into wool. But it’s not a destructive or even a harmful process. It’s not a punishment. It’s a refinement. It melts away everything that obscures its object’s essence, revealing it for what it really is at its core. Refining and fulling are, in a way, like a much-less-pleasant form of that dinosaur bath bomb, slowly melting away the soap to reveal the dinosaur within.
And this is what John’s baptism of repentance is, too: not a condemnation of those who need to repent and be saved, but an invitation to all of us who are being saved; not a one-time decision to repent or a cleansing of original sin on a day you can’t remember, but the beginning of a slow process of transformation that takes place every day, as all the things that separate us from God, all the things that keep us from loving our neighbor, all the things that obscure the beauty of who we are at our core, are slowly washed away and we become the human beings God always meant for us to be.
But it’s not easy.
It’s not easy, in part, because sometimes the things we need to let go of the most urgently are the ones that we cling to the most desperately: our various addictions or obsessions or defense mechanisms, all the unhealthy patterns of behavior and relationships that weigh us down. Often they start as survival mechanisms, and stop working after a time; like the rock mixed in with gold, or the oil protecting a sheep’s fleece, we cling to them long after they’ve kept us surviving, when they’re just stopping us from thriving. No matter how they began, it’s hard to let go of these parts of ourselves, even when we know we need to, because it’s hard for us human beings in general to do the right thing, even when we want to.
But this process of repentance and refinement is hard for a second reason, as well, and that’s that it’s not always easy to know which things in our lives are good and which are not. Life is not actually like a dinosaur bath bomb, or even so much like a refiner’s fire or fuller’s soap. It’s easy to distinguish between gold and dross, wool and dirt, toy dinosaur and fizzy soap. It’s much harder to apply this discernment to our own lives. Some of us struggle with things so toxic that we know that we need to leave them behind. But all of us struggle with things with which we don’t even know we’re struggling, with broken cycles and habits we don’t even realize are separating us from God and one another because we’ve grown so used to them.
And this is where Paul’s letter to the Philippians comes in: with the practice of discernment. Paul begins, it’s comforting to note, with a confidence that whatever happens, however rocky the path may be through the wilderness, those to whom he writes will find their way: “I am confident,” he says, “that the one who began a good work among you”—which is to say, God—“will bring it to completion.” (Phil. 1:6) He’s confident that they’ll find their way in the end. But he prays for them still. He prays for their “love to overflow more and more with knowledge and insight, to help [them] to determine what is best.” (Phil. 1:9-10) He prays that they may have the wisdom born out of love to help them discern between good and evil, or even just between good and not so great, “so that in the day of Christ [they] may be pure and blameless.” (Phil. 1:10) He prays for them to look at their lives and to be able to distinguish between what is gold and what is dross; what is clean wool and what is oil and dirt. He knows that God is working in them to transform them, and he prays that they will have the wisdom to let themselves be transformed—that we will have the wisdom to let ourselves be transformed.
It will be hard. But that’s okay. Because this process of repentance is not really something we need to do; it’s something God is doing in us and with us and for us. We are the gold, we are the fleece, we are the bath bomb, and God is the refiner, God is the fuller, God is the happy bathing toddler who has been refining and transforming us since before we were born, and who may well be working on us still long after we have died. But I am as confident as St. Paul that “by the day of Jesus Christ,” all that obscures who we are in our essence will be stripped away until we shine like a bars of gold; like soft, white, wool; like tiny plastic brontosauruses.
“And this is my prayer,” I pray with Paul, “that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to discern what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless,having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Amen. (Phil. 1:9-11)