The Adventures of Chester: The Refiner's Fire

This is a bit far from normal topics here at Adventures, but the sermon at church this morning was of such surpassing beauty that I was left in complete wonder.

I want you to consider that the line between good and evil lies not like a thread through society, between good and evil persons, those destined for heaven and those destined for hell. I'd like you to suppose instead that it goes through every single human being. And I'd like you to imagine that there is indeed a fire which burns, not eternally, but until the last day. And that after we die, every word or thought or deed that shrinks from God's grace is burned off by the refiner's fire. And that means that when that process is finished not all of our earthly self gets to heaven. But not none of it, either, even among the worst that humanity has produced. Out of such as remains from the refiner's fire, God makes a heavenly body fit for worship, friendship, and eating with him forever.

For the Mother Teresa and the Francis of Assisi, we can imagine there's very little burnt off, and the refiner's fire is pretty much a painless process. They have accepted the forgiveness of God and been transformed by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. They're pretty much in the clear and in heaven they'll be instantly recognizable. But the Adolf Hitler and the Joseph Stalin are another matter. Almost everything in them, so we imagine, turned away from the grace and transforming love of God in Christ, and forgiveness was something they never sought. But here's the twist. Because God created them, because they emerged from God's creative purpose, we cannot simply say they are evil without giving up on the all-pervasive grace of God. So what we can say is that for people like them the refiner's fire is an agonizing and almost total experience, and that what's left is pretty much unrecognizable. It takes God to the very limits of his grace to make something beautiful and heavenly out of the scant and desolate remains that emerge from the refiner's fire. And what does appear in heaven after God's astonishing work is almost unrecognizable from the earthly person that perpetrated so much that desecrated the name of God.

When the full transcript is available, I'll post a link.

UPDATE: Here is the full text.

Posted by Chester on December 10, 2006 10:37 PM to The Adventures of Chester