How Christianity relates to open-pit mining. No, seriously.
John 20:19-31; 1 Peter 1:3-9; Psalm 16; Acts 2:14a,22-32
Here in Utah, we have the honor of the having the deepest open-pit mine in the world, the Bingham Canyon Mine (better known as the Kennecott Copper Mine). If you haven’t been there, it’s quite a sight. Calling it a massive hole in the ground is actually an understatement. It’s 2 3/4 miles wide, and 3/4 mile deep.
Now mining is a bit of an interesting endeavor. The first thing anyone has to do to mine is find a deposit of ore. Surprisingly, that’s not really the hard part. The hard part is getting it out. That’s where the high explosives come into play. They’ll drill a hole around a foot wide, and then jam in lots of things that go boom. Once it all goes boom, you’re left with a pile of all different kinds of rock. At the Kennecott mine, on any given day they create 500,000 tons of these chunks of rock, each of which can be as big as a car. This is all hauled away in trucks as big as your house, and taken to a rock crusher, which gets the chunks of rock into basketball sized rocks, which then go to a grinder leaving us with a whole lot of rock-dust.
Just when you thought the rock’s day couldn’t get any worse, the rock-dust gets to take a chemical bath in order to separate the valuable rocks from the useless rocks. The rock-dust-water is then pumped through a huge drier which turns it into slightly more concentrated rock-dust again. Once the rock-dust gets to this point, the really bad part of its day starts, because it then gets cooked. Several times. At very hot temperatures. All that is done to separate what once was rock into the various metals we’re trying to get out of it — iron, copper, whatever. The more it is heated, melted, and separated, the more pure the metal gets.
Once it gets to a certain level of purity, no amount of heating and cooling will really help, so, at least in the case of copper, they make it into a sheet, throw it in a vat special liquids, and run electricity through it. This makes the copper move through the liquid and get to some stainless steel plates, resulting in nearly pure copper. Long story short, getting from a pile of exploded rock chunks to pure copper is a really bad day for the exploded rock chunks.
Now with this sort of description, you should be a little nervous about all the metaphors for the Christian life being like refining precious metals. Especially since refining involves explosives, crushers, grinders, chemicals, fire, and electricity. In our reading from 1 Peter, this is kind of what Peter is talking about. Especially in verses 6 and 7 he writes, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith–of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined my fire–may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
The kinds of trials the early Christians Peter is writing to were not the nice kind of trials we face today, either. They came face to face with death — their own and that of their friends–and not very pretty ways of death either. Peter himself was crucified; others were thrown to lions; many were stoned; others, still, were beheaded or forced to fight gladiators. If they couldn’t face that down, they only other option was to sacrifice to Caesar, and then face criticism and ostracizing by the Christians who refused.
And yet, Peter says that those trials are God refining his people. The trials they faced were nothing compared to the new life they had through Christ’s resurrection, and so they faced them with joy. Christians would sing hymns while burning at the stake. They would preach the gospel while awaiting death in the arena — because they knew what was to come.
Our trials are nowhere near as severe as those of the Early Church, but we still experience them. We face criticism when we express what we believe to those around us. We’re mocked when we say that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father. We’re called hateful because of the actions of a few radicals. But what do a few trials compare to eternal life in Christ? What do we have to fear when we know that no matter what happens to us, we are “receiving the goal of [our] faith, the salvation of [our] souls.”