Sermon preached at Liverpool Parish Church on 28 Jan 2024
'Refiner's Fire, Launderer's Soap'
Readings: Malachi 3:1-5 and Luke 2:22-40
Let me start by taking us back to those two very arresting images in our first reading from Malachi - that the coming Messiah will be like refiner’s fire and like fuller’s, or launderer’s, soap. The book of Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament as we have received it, written perhaps 400 or 500 years before the birth of Jesus. It’s a short book, just 2-3 pages of our Bibles, and it has a unique structure. Malachi takes the form of six short arguments between God and the people. In each of its six sections, a statement is made, which is immediately questioned, and then a brief argument develops the theme.
We need to go back to the final verses of chapter 2 for the set up to today’s first reading. ‘You have tired God out with your talk,’ says the prophet. ‘But you ask, ‘how have we tired him?’ By saying ‘The Lord Almighty thinks all evildoers are good; in fact, he likes them?’ Or by asking, ‘Where is the God who is supposed to be just?’
They’re eternal questions of the human condition, aren’t they. Just last week at Open Table I was asked by a fairly new Christian how it was possible to sustain faith in God when every time you turn on the TV we see horror and destruction and cruelty on a scale its hard for us to comprehend. ‘Where is the God who is supposed to be just?’ indeed. These are the age-old questions of why bad things happen to good people; and conversely, why bad people too often seem to have a great life.
Doesn’t God care about justice? That’s the nub of it. And Malachi’s argument, with the typical dramatic overstatement of the prophetic genre, is - be careful what you wish for. God will indeed come in judgement, God cares passionately and deeply about justice – but this isn’t about some of us watching on smugly while the politicians and punters that we are furious with get their comeuppance. The imagery of refining fire, of strong laundry soap, invite us to deeply examine what within us, within our own hearts and within our own most cherished structures and families and institutions, is part of the problem. God cares wildly, passionately about justice – like fire. God cares deeply, humbly and doggedly about justice – like someone scrubbing stains out of the washing.
We have a lot of hymns developing the imagery of God as the refiner’s fire. It’s clearly an attractive, if violent, image – God’s justice burning through all that is wrong in the world, once and for all. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a hymn or poem reflecting on the other image Malachi gives us for God’s judgement – a launderer doggedly scrubbing away. Maybe that sounds a bit too much like hard work. It doesn’t have the glamour or the drama of fire. But it certainly rings a lot more true to my experience of trying to work for justice in the church.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt drew a distinction between two different types of work in the human experience – what she called ‘work’ and ‘labour’. What we tend to think of as ‘work’ is productive. You spend time at work and you have something to show for it at the end of the day. Maybe you’ve made a beautiful piece of pottery, written 500 words of your novel, or made 300 widgets on your production line. This sort of productive workt is what so many of our modern ideas of economic worth are based on.
What Arendt calls ‘labour’, on the other hand, is much harder to measure. You work just as hard, but there’s rarely anything to show for it, or not for long. Doing the washing is a good example. You get clean sheets and smalls at the end of the day, but they instantly go back into the cycle of being worn and dirtied again. Labour needs doing again and again – cooking a meal, washing up, weeding the garden, maintaining relationships. We might add much of what it takes to be church into this category. In a moment we’re going to be licensing Jenny as your Assistant Priest – and Jenny is someone who knows well both from her day job managing social work and from her ministry here, that the work of accomplishing justice, of building the kingdom, is slow, often behind the scenes, and very hard to measure success in.
I love the fact that Malachi uses a pair of images which cover both sides of this for God’s redeeming work of judgement. A refiner’s fire, a burning furnace; we can imagine a master craftsman looking with satisfaction at the end of the day at the piece of beautiful precious metal that the day’s work has produced. And a launderer’s soap; we can imagine a washerwoman standing up at the end of a long day putting a red, soap-roughened hand to her creaking back, and hanging out the washing – pleased that it is clean ready for another day’s use, but knowing it will all need doing again next washday.
Its something of this dogged determination that we see in both Simeon and Anna in today’s gospel. There’s such a dramatic symbolism in the meeting of the very old and the very young. Picture the tiny, plump hand of the 40 day old baby, an exact miniature down to its almost impossibly minute fingernails, held in the gnarled, wrinkled hand, with paper-thin skin, of an 84 year old. It’s an arresting visual image of the meeting of the old and the new, the passing on of the baton from one generation to the next. These faithful old people have given a lifetime of service to God. Simeon has heard God’s spirit send him to the Temple that day, while Anna dwells in the Temple night and day. And here, in the Temple, they meet with what we will come to know, later on, as the new temple that is the body of Christ.
It's such a beautiful image of the holding together of continuity and change - on a natural, human, generational level, an encounter between a young couple and their baby with two old people who pass on their blessing to the new generation.
It’s important to resist the generations of Christian rhetoric that speak too glibly of the passing on of the baton from Jewish temple religion to the new covenant in Christ. This story of Jesus’ presentation gives us a much more nuanced picture. Mary, Joseph, Simeon and Anna present us with a sample of what it was like to be a first century observant Jew; loving the temple, finding joy and fulfilment in living out the practices and traditions of the law, a law and set of beliefs and practices which form them together as a community and remind them of their part in God’s covenant of grace. Jesus’s life and teaching grows naturally from this soil and these roots, as he grows. When the gospels later tell us of Jesus’s often sharp critiques of injustice, of practices neglected or misdirected, he is speaking, like Malachi, from within and to a tradition that he is part of. Simeon and Anna recognise and bless Jesus from within their long lives of faithful, dogged commitment to God. They anticipate that with him, the story and the work will go on.
Malachi’s sharp questions don’t simply go away because of what we now know Jesus has done for us. The work of the gospel, the good news of the scriptures, isn’t a quick fix – its not something we can count, and measure, and sit back satisfied that justice has now been done, salvation achieved – tick. Just rarely, just occasionally, will we have the satisfaction of a job completed, a task finished, in this life of faith. I think that’s why Simeon’s song has echoed down the ages as one of the church’s favourite texts to sing – that sense of completion, of satisfaction, of a life’s work well done is something that strikes a chord deep within us.
We long for that sort of job satisfaction. But even when one lifetime closes, others begin. Even when one person’s work is done, others take up the baton. The work of building the kingdom of God is not factory work, or even artisan work – its much more like domestic labour. Do justice today – knowing it will need doing all over again tomorrow. Like the wrinkled hand of a great-grandparent cradling their great-grandchild, like a washerwoman doing the laundry – the work of the world lies ahead of us.
So may all of us, whatever our age, stage or life circumstances - be blessed with the patience, the perseverance, and the dogged determination of Simeon and Anna, as you do your part in the work of God’s kingdom– today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.
Amen.