By Dana Cassell

Malachi 3: 1-4 – Third Sunday of Advent

One Saturday in May of 2020, I left my house – which, if you remember, was kind of a big deal during that season – to go volunteer in the newly created community garden at the Parktown Food Hub, a community food pantry and gathering space that my friend and colleague Sharon had just started.

It’s sort of hard to recall what those first months of the pandemic felt like, now, probably because my brain doesn’t WANT to remember it. But if I think hard enough, I can remember how isolated I was. I lived alone, I already worked from home, and hanging out in person with other people had the potential of being FATAL. Do you remember how we didn’t know, yet, what mitigation practices worked? How some people were wiping down packages and leaving them outside to shed virus for days? My pandemic pod was me and my tiny dog, and I had been alone, in my house, on Zoom, for weeks and weeks.

So that Saturday, being in the garden, doing something productive, WITH OTHER PEOPLE felt like a revelation, a resurrection, a welcome and needed respite. I got so overwhelmed that I almost fainted from some combination of interaction and heatstroke, and my friend Sharon brought me a bottle of water and sat down – RIGHT NEXT TO ME to make sure I was okay. It was the most human contact I’d had in a month.

Do you remember those days? Terrifying, isolating, chaotic. I don’t like remembering them, to be honest.

But as I was studying this morning’s scripture from Malachi and reflecting on what it means to be refined or purified, I thought about those days and the gifts that were hidden inside the chaos.

The garden became a refuge for me during those lonely inside months. It was a safe-ish place to go, contribute to the community and be with other people. I volunteered every time I could. That led, eventually, to me being hired onto the staff of the Food Hub as the Garden Minister, where I worked for two years, the bridge job that helped me leave my denominational role that became, in the revealing light of the pandemic, too small. 

More than the job, though, volunteering in the garden – which started as a coping mechanism, a desperate attempt to be less alone – became something I LOVED doing. Even as the pandemic abated, I spent a lot of time in that garden. I learned so much about planting and growing food and nurturing compost and soil from my friend Lisa. When I moved to Roanoke, one of the first things I did was sign up for my own community garden plot about a mile from my new apartment, and that tiny piece of dirt has been one of my favorite things to tend in this last year.

The pandemic took a lot away from us, from me. But in that winnowing, it also opened up new possibilities. It showed us what else might be possible, what other ways of living might be available to us. For me, it was the revelation that I loved gardening almost as much as I liked being inside reading books.

There are other gifts of the pandemic, too. For instance, Deborah, who bakes the BEST sourdough bread I have ever tasted, started baking sourdough, like so many of us, during lockdown as a hobby. These days, she is running a growing business here in Roanoke, baking up a storm in her house and selling her delectable breads at farmer’s markets and other places, like the random neighborhood side street where I trudged out in the 6pm winter darkness this week to pick up the sourdough and focaccia that I’ve had for dinner each night. I’m really grateful for that pandemic gift.

There are more, too. Scientists talk about those early days and weeks of covid lockdowns as an “anthropause.” When we humans took a step back and slowed ourselves down, the rest of the earth took immediate advantage. 

Did you know that in 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4%? 

Or that in China, lockdowns resulted in a 26% decrease in coal consumption? 

Or that the Himalayas became visible for the first time in decades because the huge, immediate drop in pollution triggered a sizable improvement in air quality? 

Zoom opened up so many conversations to so many people, and we are still using it, right this minute. The US had tens of thousands fewer flu deaths in 2021 than any of the five years before.

I bet you can name some more gifts of the pandemic, gifts we might not have imagined possible.

But the pandemic wasn’t all gift and grace, either, which you know well. My grandmother died of Covid, and the circumstances of her death: suiting up in layer after layer of PPE in order to visit her in the hospital, which required special dispensation to do in the first place, arguing for a nursing home to re-admit her with a covid diagnosis when the hospital refused to keep her as a patient since it was clear she was imminently dying – that was traumatic. We don’t talk about it much.

The pandemic wasn’t great. There were real, horrific, ongoing costs that we are still paying today. AND: it also stripped away so much of our extraneous involvements and cares, whittled us down to what is actually essential, opened up new possibilities for how we might live together and on the earth. 

I think that’s what getting “refined” feels like. I think the prophet Malachi might agree.

Malachi was a prophet writing about 100 years after the Jewish people had returned from exile and rebuilt their destroyed temple. Things were not going well. The priests were shirking their duties, men were abandoning their wives and families, the poor were being neglected and people were, in general, living without purpose or integrity.

In Malachi’s writings, God argues with the people. The people are squirrelly and whiny, and God is, well, God. In chapter 3 God gets fed up and all her “DON’T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE!” turns straight into “WATCH OUT, I’M ON MY WAY!” You asked for it, you got it. You wanted me to show up and put things right? Well, here I come.

And in this particular situation, the God who shows up is not going to be exactly a Comforter. This god is, instead, one who arrives like a refiner’s fire or fuller’s soap, burning away all the dross, scrubbing out all the imperfections so that what’s left is just pure, shining, unadulterated GOODNESS.

Do you know how refining fires work? You put the metal – usually silver or gold – in a crucible (yes, really) and heat it to extreme temperatures so that all the impurities rise to the surface and get skimmed off. The metal, meanwhile, gets melted completely down. It’s liquid there in the crucible while it’s being purified. Changed into another state altogether, in the process of being refined.

Advent is a season of waiting, preparing and longing. We are invited, during these weeks, to name what’s wrong in our world, confess whatever our complicity may be in that, and invite, prepare, expect God to arrive and set things right. That’s the message of the prophets, like Malachi: God is on the way, and all this mess is going to get cleaned right up. 

But things don’t get set right without being turned upside down, shaken up, winnowed away, REFINED. And that is – I suspect almost exclusively – a painful process of loss and grief. What impurities are disturbing the goodness of our world?

It’s dangerous to talk like this, because people have misused and abused that idea of “purity” throughout history, weaponizing it to villainize whole swaths of people. I do not think that’s what Malachi – or God – had in mind when he used this image of purifying and refining to describe what God will do. I do not think any person, any precious life is meant to be burned away in the refining fire. 

Purification does not mean discarding people or demeaning life or stratifying society. It means being relieved of the injustice, violence, and selfishness that are keeping us captive. It means being freed to live in the truth of our connectedness, our belovedness, our dependence on one another and on the earth.

But that kind of liberation also means loss, grief, and all the attendant pain. What is it that we have to be relieved of? What irritating impurities are going to get burned out of us so that we can live freely?