The Refining Fire of Graduate School

“The Refining Fire of Graduate School”
Malachi 3: 1-4
December 1, 2009 – Second week of Advent
Christian Theological Seminary, Sweeney Chapel – Sermon by Caela Simmons Wood

The date was Monday, August 27, 2007 and I was in the common room here at CTS.

Some of you in this room were there with me. I sat in the company of strangers who were about to become fellow travelers along this wild and crazy road called seminary.

I’m a conscientious little student, so I paid a lot of attention at orientation that day. I was eager to soak up tidbits of information that would help me acclimate to my new environment.

I gazed out the windows above the fireplace at the big green leaves. It seemed as if I was miles away from my former life in a full-time job I didn’t enjoy. No deadlines, no stresses, new friends – a welcoming environment complete with a green canopy overhead.

Life was good.

And then Dr. Wheeler got up to speak. Now, I’m not saying that he shattered my sense of excitement about beginning my studies at CTS. It’s just that he shattered my little illusion that everything in my new adventure would be invigorating and life-giving.

After welcoming us to CTS and talking about how wonderful things would be here for us, he paused, looked right into my soul and said these words: “Now, I don’t want you to think this is all going to be easy. This is not Sunday School. It’s graduate school.”

Graduate school. Ah, graduate school….

Wait. GRADUATE SCHOOL?!?

Oh, dear God. What have I gotten myself into? GRADUATE SCHOOL?!?

The trees gently swaying in the August breeze above the common room faded away. In fact, I think large rain clouds may have opened up and turned the sky black.

My sense of tranquility was shattered as I realized exactly what I had gotten myself into: graduate school.

Late nights reading, papers that don’t want to be written, deadlines, deadlines, DEAD-LINES.

I sighed and resigned myself to the work ahead.

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Sometimes, my little sense of paradise gets shattered a bit.

That’s pretty much what happened when I looked up the text in Malachi today.

Here we are, moving from November into December. Last week, we paused to give thanks with family and friends. This week, our minds shift to Advent – the joy of anticipating the Christ child, Christmas carols humming around in our heads, dreams and plans about symbols of our love and affection wrapped neatly under the tree.

And right in the middle of my little candy-cane coated fantasy, the words of Malachi reach out and grab me.

And they turn the sky black.

There are deadlines in this text, all right. But they aren’t the kind that come on a syllabus.

Instead, the prophet writes to his community with a stern warning about the ultimate deadline: God is coming and when the Holy arrives, no one will be able to stand in the midst of that overwhelming presence.

The Holy One is like a refiner’s fire, Malachi says, and like a launderer’s soap.

God is coming to purify the people into silver and gold and to scrub them clean on a big washboard.

This does not sound like a pleasant process. In fact, it sounds even worse than graduate school.

But I think I may have made a slight mistake in calling this a warning.

It may be unpleasant, but it doesn’t seem to be something Malachi’s original hearers were dreading. Instead, God’s judgment is welcomed. In fact, just before this passage begins, the people have been griping and complaining that God hasn’t judged the people faithfully. They see a lot of crazy stuff going on in their world and they are inviting YHWH to come and bring some refining fire and laundry soap.

The prophecy that a messenger will come to refine the people, then, isn’t as much a warning as a promise. A promise that God is faithful and will do what has always been promised: send a messenger to transform the people.

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But who is this messenger? In the context of Malachi, it is explicit: the messenger is Elijah – the great prophet who is no longer with the people but who is prepared, at any moment, to come again. In Christian interpretation, this passage was tied – early on – to John the Baptizer. We can see that clearly in our reading from Luke today. John is portrayed as the one who goes before the Lord to prepare the way.

The messenger is one who is coming. One that God sends to be the representative of the Holy One among the people. By identifying this messenger with Elijah, Malachi creates an air of expectation. What will this messenger look like when he comes – will we know it is Elijah? Or perhaps God will come to us in a different form this time – where should we turn our gaze?

I think there are probably a million answers to that question. Our gaze should be constantly roving, seeking new places and faces where we can encounter the Holy One of Israel. The simple truth is, we can’t predict what God’s messengers will look like – and so we have to be constantly on the alert, seeking God in each new generation.

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In my own life, I have seen God most clearly not only in individuals, but also in communities.

Communities of faith, communities of family, communities of healing, communities of laughing, playing, singing, learning, crying, striving…..these have all been places I have encountered the Sacred.

And as I stand here at the end of my seminary career, I am aware that this place – Christian Theological Seminary – has been such a place for me. These hallways, these classrooms, this chapel, these grounds, and – most of all – these people….they have all been messengers of God in my life.

Now before we get all cheesy and misty-eyed, let’s remind ourselves of what Malachi’s messenger looks like.

Yes, the messenger is welcomed by the community. Yes, the messenger is proof that God is faithful and has not forgotten the promise to judge righteously. But this is not all candy-canes and Christmas carols.

This is not Sunday School, folks. And it’s not even graduate school. It’s something more painful than that.

Now, I know a lot of graduate students. I’m married to a man who was in college and graduate school longer than he was in elementary and high school. I live and work in Bloomington. Many of the people I encounter on a daily basis are graduate students. And I’m pretty sure all of them would tell you that graduate school does, indeed, feel a lot like being thrown into a refining fire and scrubbed raw with soap.

The hours of reading, studying, pondering….outlining papers, padding papers, throwing away papers and starting from scratch.

It’s a refining experience, to say the least. In one side goes a student who shows promise. And after years of toil in the flames of day-to-day worries and big-project deadlines comes something new – a scholar.

Those of us who are preparing to complete our final deadlines can see the flames starting to die down. We are at the point where we have become just about as refined as we’re going to get in this particular place.

But what has been produced here at CTS is not just a group of scholars, but a group of new beings. We are not the same people we were when we gazed up at the trees on orientation day.

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Our seminary experience has thrown us into the fire more times that we’d like to admit.

I wailed and moaned my way through systematic theology. Those of you who had the pleasure of knowing me that semester deserve a special shout out if you are still my friend after listening to that much complaining. I griped about the reading. And, in the end, I griped my way through writing my own statement of faith. And then I put it away…because I figured, hey, I’m done with that. Let’s move on.

But a funny thing happened on the way to ordination – it turns out that I didn’t put that paper away after all.

Those words, the ones that I had painstakingly groped towards during systematic theology – they were still there inside me. They came jumping out of my typing fingers and onto my screen as I was preparing my papers for my ordination examination.

My theology – my own theology! – is something that actually exists and can sometimes even be clearly articulated. What a gift! What a pleasant surprise at the end of a semester in the refiner’s fire.

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Many of you can also identify with another refining moment of the seminarian’s career. It is the depths of a seminary student’s own private hell. The place that many of us fear more than any other. It’s an acronym with just three little letters and they are some of the scariest in the English language. Say it with me, friends, if you know where I’m headed: C….P….E.

That’s right. Clinical Pastoral Education. It is, in my mind, the ultimate example of the refining fire of the seminary experience. We go into it for no other purpose than to be refined. We know up front that it’s going to be painful…and, yet, we pay good money to take the course. Why do we do this?!?

Well, aside from the fact that many of us are required to do it by our ordination committees, we do it because we know we need what it has to offer.

We know that there are parts of us that need to be burned off. There are things that we think, feel, say, and do that are harmful to ourselves and to others. They need to be carefully examined. They need to be scrubbed on a washboard until they fall off. They need to be tossed into the flames for a while before they start to fade.

Anyone who has had a positive CPE experience will tell you it was worth it in the end. The anxiety, the tears of frustration, the sleepless nights and the too-long naps on the couch at the end of the day….all of them served to make us into new beings.

God came into our lives in the person of a CPE supervisor, in the community of a CPE group, in the place of a hospital or other CPE setting…and we were forever changed.

We are not yet perfect people – perhaps we can’t even really claim to be silver or gold – but we are transformed because God was faithful to us. God sent us messengers that have made us into new beings. We survived the fire and the scrub-brush…and we emerged transformed.

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Some of us are here at the end of our time in this particular refining community. Others have yet a little while to go. And still others have the privilege of staying in this place indefinitely. All of us, though, have to grapple with what Malachi has to say to us today.

I believe that Malachi calls us to take stock of the transformative communities that have shaped our own lives….and to take it a step further.
Through the words of Malachi, I hear this as the good news today: God calls each of us continually refine ourselves and to help create communities where others can seek transformation.

Those of us that are leaving CTS in just a few weeks can’t stay out of the refiner’s fire too long. We must seek new places and experiences to continue our journeys of transformation.

And all of us must ask – what is our role in creating transformative communities in the world?

Where is God calling us to travel?

How can we encourage the creation and growth of places that are able to bring God’s transforming presence to the world?

This is not an easy task. It’s probably more like graduate school than Sunday School.

But, I have to admit – a little graduate school didn’t ruin my life. In fact, it made me into a new being. And, for that, I give thanks to God.

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