(Sermon only) Raging and Refining Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley March 8, 2026

My grandpa Lee liked to collect things.

I remember his kind of magical room full

of old artifacts and of hiking along

trails with him looking for arrow heads

of the beautiful sets of dominoes and

chess pieces in the closet down at the

end of the hall. And one collection he

had

was of foreign coins. Coins from all

around the world.

Brass and silver and copper, round,

hexagonal, square, thick and thin, with

holes in the middle, all with intriguing

images.

My mom Laurel remembers that he would

bring this jar out on Sunday afternoons

for the kids to look at and play with.

But one day, my mom, 9 years old, oldest

of four, she found that jar and decided

it would be nice to have maybe just a

few of those coins for herself.

I can imagine her thinking, "Surely he

won't notice. Just a few are missing."

But of course, the next Sunday afternoon

when the jar came out, he noticed.

And now I'm editorializing, but I I have

to imagine my grandpa Lee felt angry.

This is the natural response to

injustice.

saw ang he felt angry when he saw some

coins had been taken. Angry that they

were taken. Angry that a child he knew

and loved and trusted had betrayed that

trust in some small way. Angry that

something was wrong in the moral fabric

of the relationships.

This is the essence of anger. a visceral

response to the experience that

something is morally off.

And this moral underpinning of anger, it

doesn't necessarily mean the anger

should be acted upon or that any of the

thoughts that surround it are justified,

but the bodily experience of anger,

it's an undeniably important signal.

Now, Grandpa Lee, I don't think he knew

who had taken the coins, but he had a

plan.

He was a lawyer,

so he was prepared for just this kind of

moment.

He decided to have a trial.

He gathered his children in the sitting

room

and he had them testify

that even though my mom had taken the

coins as the oldest sibling, she was a

good enough liar to cast doubt on her

younger brother Tom.

By the end of the trial, it was clear to

Grandpa Lee at least that Tom was the

perpetrator.

And scared and crying, Grandpa Lee took

him into another room to administer some

version of justice.

But then another emotion changed the

course of events. When my mom saw her

little brother about to receive that

unjust punishment, she was overwhelmed

with remorse.

Remorse kin to guilt and shame, but a

more specific, more generative emotion.

Remorse like anger, a signal that

something has run morally a muk. And so

fueled by her remorse, acting in love of

her brother, my mom screwed up her

courage against her fear of the

consequences, walked into the room and

confessed.

Here's the question. If the universe

were organized by a moral order,

what would happen next?

What would justice look like?

What would love look like?

100 years ago, a young British soldier

named John Ronald Rule Tolken wrestled

with how to understand love and justice

and the moral order in the face of

atrocities.

He fought in the battle of Psalm in

1916, one of the most gruesome,

bloodiest battles in human history.

Watched many of his closest friends die

in the mud in northern France

and then came home changed and spent the

rest of his life writing, trying to

write a mythology large enough to hold

what he had seen.

The

industrial machinery of death, the

corruption of power, the complete

exhaustion of people who had given

everything and were being asked to give

more.

And into the center of that mythology,

of course, he put Frodo,

who was trying to live a small and

ordinary life.

overwhelmed by the weight of the moment,

pleading to Gandalf, I wish the ring had

never come to me. I wish none of this

had happened. And Gandalf famously

answers, so do all who live to see such

times.

But that is not for them to decide. All

we have to decide is what to do with the

time given us.

We did not choose these times,

this war, this overwhelm of crisis,

layered upon crisis.

On Monday, a non-commissioned officer in

our armed forces reported that his

commander told the unit in a meeting,

quote, "President Trump has been

anointed by Jesus to light the signal

fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and

mark his return to Earth."

among other statements

justifying our attack on Iran as a holy

war.

There is of course, you know, a long

history of justifying war as a a holy

cleansing fire.

And the biblical prophets, they do offer

visions of that kind of cleansing fire.

The prophet Malachi describes God coming

like a refiner's fire.

God, he said, will sit like as a refiner

and purifier of silver and will purify

the Levites and refine them like gold

and silver.

There are those who try to justify the

violence of empire. this way. From the

Crusades to the last quarter century of

forever war, the so-called war on terror

in the so-called Middle East.

But Malachi's fire is not the bombs of

an impulsive and destructive empire.

Malachi speaks of a very different kind

of fire, a refiner's fire. In his

vision, the fire is not raining down

upon the enemies, but coming for his own

people, for the Levites, who he believes

have lost faith in their own rituals,

who living through a time of crisis and

uncertainty, tried to do all the right

things.

But even once they had been returned

from exile in Babylon and were

inhabiting the rebuilt temple, they were

still living under the imperial

domination of now the Persian Empire.

Exhausted and disillusioned, they got

cynical and numb. They checked out and

and brought second rate offerings to the

temple. Perhaps virtue signaling and

performative politics replaced deep

reflections on their values.

So the prophet promised them a refiner's

fire.

If

the holy shows up to burn away something

that needs to be cleansed,

it is not a vengeance, not an act of

emnity, but an invitation

to transformation.

In another one of those old books in

Daniel, he describes a a furnace that is

that is this this burning fire of

empire. It's Nebuchadnezzar's

imperial fire

burning as a punitive and unjust fire

aimed at people who refused to bow to

him.

You know the story Shadrach and Meshach

and Abeneg Nego.

They refuse to bow.

And so the tyrant orders the furnace

heated seven times hotter. So hot that

it kills the soldiers who are bringing

them in.

But when they are in, the story says

there is a fourth presence.

Some holy mystery that even amidst the

atrocity of the worst injustice

accompanies those who are cast into the

fire.

God is not in the fire. God is with

those who burn.

If the universe were well organized by a

moral order,

what would happen next? What would

justice look like? What would love look

like? In the Daniel story, the three who

refuse to bow are protected from the

fire. But we know people are dying every

day needlessly in the hot fires of the

violence of empire.

And so

grief must be expressed as outrage.

We're going to talk a lot more about

this in a couple weeks, but you know how

in the 80s

the government turned a blind eye to

those dying of AIDS and the activists of

ACT UP had to find a way to let the love

that was bursting forth as righteous

anger have its rightful place in the

public square.

And this week, Reverend Katherine was

describing to me her gentle bird

watching colleague from college

preparatory school, David Robinson,

taking the ashes of his lover to the

White House,

throwing them on the lawn.

No,

the holy God does not protect against

the violence of empire. But I do imagine

that presence there alongside David.

That presence there in the ashes

holding love and justice together

creates a friction. And from this

friction we get concepts like tough love

and and ideas of rehabilitative

punishment, ideas like hell and prisons.

And out of this friction emerges also

amends and repair.

The possibility that hurt and harm

become source materials for strength and

beauty.

Become something that can be refined.

love that it is refined in the heat of

justice. It's the kind of love that the

feminist theologian Beverly Harrison

coming out of that moment of liberation

of women's liberation in the 70s,

Beverly Harrison becomes one of the

prominent feminist theologians of her

era. And in a brilliant essay from 1981,

she writes about the power of anger

in the work of love.

She says, "The command of love is not

now and never was in order to feel a

certain way.

Nor does the command to love create the

power to feel love. It was never

intended to do so. Action does that.

Feelings deserve our respect for what

they are. There are no right or wrong

feelings.

Moral quality is a property of acts, not

feelings.

And our feelings arise in action. The

moral question she asks is not what do I

feel, but rather what do I do with what

I feel?

What do we do with what we feel?

In that first year after International

Women's Day was coming to be, the

Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire killed

146 people in New York City. Most of

them women, most of them immigrants.

As they tried to flee the burning

building, they were trapped by the doors

locked to keep workers from stealing

fabric

or from taking unauthorized breaks.

There's no holy cleansing in their

death, no redemption in their suffering.

But the people who witnessed and loved

them

used that fire to refine a vision of

what would be fair in our workplaces and

what would be a just society.

400,000

people

stood up and marched in the wake of that

fire.

A righteous rage took hold and people

organized. Harrison says anger is not

the opposite of love. It is better

understood as a feeling signal that all

is not well in our relation to other

persons or groups or the world around

us. Anger is a mode of connectedness to

others and is always a vivid form of

caring.

To put the point another way, anger is,

she says, and it always is, a sign of

some resistance in ourselves to the

moral quality of the social relations in

which we are immersed.

Anger royals through our country and our

world because there is some resistance

in our souls to the moral quality of the

social relations in which we are

immersed. Anger royals in us as we fail

to act quickly and effectively to stop a

warming climate. Anger royals in us at

unjust war and imposed famine. Anger

royals in us at the power amassed by

billionaires. And anger royals at the

cowardice of politicians.

People of all political sensibilities

are angry that there is something

fundamentally wrong about the structure

of our society.

Harrison again she says where anger

rises there the energy to act is present

in anger one's body self is engaged and

the signal comes that something is a

myth in relation

to be sure anger no more than any other

set of feelings does not lead

automatically to wise or humane action

it is part of the deeper work of ethics

to help us move through all our feelings

to adequate strategies of moral action

But we must never lose touch with the

fact that all serious moral activity,

especially action for social change,

takes its bearing from the rising power

of human anger.

Such anger is a signal that change is

called for that transformation in

relation is required.

And neuroscience is is is telling us

this now quite literally that

biologically the energy of aggression

rising to protect our nervous systems

from shutting down in downregulating

responses like shame or like freezing or

like collapsing.

Between

1600 and 18800 degrees is how hot the

furnace has to be to refine silver.

Into this 800 degree crucible

we put our souls.

David Schnarch, the psychologist, uses

that crucible as the image for the

inevitable moments in our relationships

when in order to stay true to oneself

and intimately connected with another,

we must grow.

Malachi speaks of how God showing up in

the refiner's fire

pulls us into the crucible again and

again. Asks us to make sense of a

reality that feels more and more

unbelievable. Asks us to deepen our

commitments to justice even when we

thought we'd given it all through a

first Trump administration and a

pandemic.

asked to show up again with real and

true offerings

without any proof any of it will work

with no with all the evidence pointing

to the likelihood that the bombs will

just keep dropping.

And yet we are called to show up in the

fire again,

to feel the anger, to feel the outrage,

to let it move us to act once more.

Anger, your anger is a signal that

something sacred has been violated, a

signal to renew, a boundary, to get

fierce and clear.

and then

to place it in the refiner's fire

because your boundaries will never be

sustained by anger alone. Left in too

long, the heat can damage the silver.

The way the old story is told, the

refiner knows the work is done because

she can see her own face in the metal.

To be refined by what is holy is to know

that beauty,

the beauty that is worth making it

through the crucible for.

The end of the story is that when my mom

burst into the room and told her dad

that she was the one who had taken the

coins, he told her simply,

"What you did was wrong,

but what you are doing now is right.

what is required of you,

but to act justly

and love mercy and walk humbly with your

God. May it be so. And amen.

>> Amen.