Sermon Text: Luke 3: 7-18
They came to John seeking good news.
Seeking baptism. Salvation. John the Baptist. In the wilderness, preparing the
way of the Lord.
A people who lived in dark times –
surely we can identify with them. And we come to John as they came to John –
seeking the good news. John speaks of the wrath to come, but we come today
wondering how to flee from the wrath at hand.
John greets them with an insult –
calling them a brood of vipers. He warns them that they are being watched to
see if their trees produce fruit. He gives them the impression that they are
bad people – people who have done many bad things.
So these crowds – the crowds who have
come to see John prepare the way of the Lord – ask the next logical question,
“What then should we do?”
What should we do if what you’re
saying is true? If we are bad people and the children of bad people, what
should we do?
Now, I have to take issue with some
of what John is saying here. First of all, it’s not my personal pastoral style
to call people names. Even though John has effectively scared these people into
listening to what he has to say and even though what he has to say is,
ultimately, good news – I’m not a fan of motivating people with fear. Fear
begets fear.
In spite of John’s name-calling, I
don’t believe God creates bad people. In spite of Friday’s events in
Connecticut, I don’t believe God creates bad people. God creates people who
make choices – many good, many bad, and some incomprehensibly evil. In spite of
the choices we make, and for reasons I don’t fully undrstand, God loves us.
And although John seems to believe
God is watching closely to see if the trees of humanity bear fruit, I don’t
think God is sitting up in heaven somewhere with a sticker chart. God’s love is
unconditional. God has dreams for what our world can be, but even when we fall
way short of the mark, God’s love continues. God does not cut down trees that
fail to produce fruit. God continues to water trees, send fresh sunlight to
those trees, and send kind people to prune the trees. God never loses hope that
all trees can produce delicious fruit, given the right conditions.
So, John and I are not exactly on the
same page here in terms of what we believe to be true about God. You may or may
not be in agreement with him either – and that’s okay. We can still engage with
the text and find good news in it.
What John does next is simple and
brilliant. He talks to the different people who have gathered to be baptized –
average Joes and Janes, tax collectors, soldiers – and gives them concrete
advice on how to live as children of the light in the midst of some very dark
times. He tells those who have two coats that they must share with those who
have none. He tells tax collectors to be honest and fair in their dealings with
money. And he advises the soldiers to use their authority for good, not for
evil.
These answers must have satisfied the
crowds because they were immediately abuzz. People started to wonder aloud if
John might be the Messiah, not just the one who points the way to the Messiah.
But John quickly set them straight, reminding them that he was here to baptize
with water but there was another coming who was greater than he. John goes back
to the agrarian imagery again, stating that the Messiah would be the one who
would go to the threshing floor to separate the good grain from the unusable
grain and that he would burn off the chaff in an unquenchable fire.
Wait – what? Unquenchable fire? That
makes me nervous. I always tend to automatically assume any talk about
unquenchable fire is somehow directly linked to hellfire and brimstone. So
let’s take a second and look at this image of Jesus winnowing the wheat.
John’s metaphor here is that Jesus is
a laborer, preparing the wheat for use. Back before farmers used machinery to
prepare wheat, they did it manually, with the help of animals. They would
gather the wheat on the threshing floor – a large outdoor paved area located
near a barn. They would use livestock to walk on the grain and separate the
grain from the stalks and to begin to loosen the chaff from the wheat berries.
After the grain was separated, the farmer would winnow it to remove the chaff
from the berry entirely. This was why the threshing floors were outside. The
typical method was to use the breeze to help blow the lightweight chaff away
from the useable grain. Sometimes this was as simple as throwing the grain and
chaff into the air by using a winnowing fork or fan to lift the wheat off the
ground. The chaff would blow away and the wheat berries would land back on the
floor. [1] If you had a big bulk of chaff left
around, you would probably burn it just to get rid of it.
Many of us are familiar with this
separating the wheat from the chaff imagery, right? And I think the typical
assumption is that there are good people and bad people and God is going to
somehow separate them from each other and burn off the bad folks.
But that’s not how wheat works. Wheat
is all one thing. Every grain of wheat has a berry that is useful for humans
and animals. And every grain of wheat has an outer skin – a chaff that has to
come off before the grain can be used.
Sounds a little bit like a lot of
people I know. We are all a great mix of bad and good. And we all need help to
allow the best parts of ourselves to shine through.
I’m not saying it’s fun to be
thrashed about – and please notice something in the words of John – Jesus is
not even the one doing the threshing. Instead, Jesus comes along after the
threshing to pick the grain up off the floor and winnow it. Jesus lovingly sets
aside the good parts of the wheat to be used and what happens to the bad stuff?
It disappears – burned up in a fire that is unquenchable, always available –
never to be spoken of again.
“So, with many other exhortations, he
proclaimed the good news to the people.”
That’s the end of this passage. Most
commentators I read this week were shocked by this ending to the passage. Good
news? This is good news? Hellfire and brimstone and Jesus coming to separate
the goats from the sheep? Well, no. Not exactly. That’s not really what this
passage is about.
What this passage is about is John
empowering everyone present – even those who were not typically thought of as
“religious types” – to thresh themselves out and make themselves useful. And if
that ain’t good news, friends, I don’t know what is.
To be told that we are all of us able
to slough off our flaky parts and find meaning in our lives and work? To be
told that we, everyday Janes and Joes, can bring about the reign of God by
sharing? To be told that we, despised wealthy ones, can live into the Way of
Christ by dealing fairly and honestly with our money? To be told that we,
strong and powerful ones with authority, can show God’s love to the world by
using our authority for good and not for wrong?
And, after a week like this one, in
the face of senseless violence when we feel so helpless, to be led into the
possibility of collectively redeeming the world by simply allowing our rough
parts to be blown away on the wind of the Spirit?
That’ll preach, John. That. Will.
Preach.
If this was the only thing we could
take away from this passage it would be enough. To know that in the mist of
heavy times, we are empowered to do good and that the gentle arms of Christ
will lead us? That’s enough. But there is more.
Because John is not only inviting us
to see the ways we can bring out the good in ourselves, John is also inviting
us to baptism. In many cultures, baptism or a ritual washing, is a final step
in a long process of becoming a part of a group. To be baptized is to join a
family and to say, “These are my people. I belong to this family.”
Traditionally, Christians think of
themselves as joining the family of all Christians when they are baptized, and
this is true. But I also think baptism calls us back to remember that we are,
first and foremost, a part of the human family. All of it – not just the
Christians parts of it.
We are all a part of the human
family, but sometimes we forget to live that way. God knows, we in this nation
are guilty of this. We rush about from place to place, our heads stuck in our
screens, sometimes scarcely noticing the humanity around us – let alone
actually making the effort to enhance our connection to others. And then we
wonder why we have an epidemic of gun violence. We live in a place and time
where it is countercultural to remember our connections to each other.
We forget that we are all related. We
divide ourselves off into nuclear families. We cling so tightly to our
socioeconomic status, our race, our gender, our political views, our hobbies,
our religion, our whatever that we forget we are really all related. But Dr.
King said it best when he said “we are all caught in an inescapable network or
mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.”[2]
And that’s part of what John is
inviting us to remember. When he talks to the people he tells them to treat
those they encounter as if they were a part of the same family. He says to
them, “Just give them your coat. Don’t expect it back. You wouldn’t expect your
sister to return your coat to you, right?” I think John would have been
standing up and cheering to see the IU students who gathered outside our church
at 5:30am during finals week this past Tuesday to distribute coats and gloves
and scarves to our guests at the interfaith winter shelter.
John tells us to remember that we’re
all a part of the human family. Those of us who have authority are supposed to
use it for good, not evil. In the midst of all the bad news in the media, did
you hear about Officer Lawrence DePrimo of the NYPD? A few weeks ago, he was
out walking his beat and used $75 of his own money to buy a pair of sturdy
boots for a man experiencing homelessness.[3]
DePrimo didn’t know he was going to be photographed and that the picture of him
bending down to put the boots on the man’s cold feet would go viral on the
internet. He wasn’t doing it to get credit. He did it because he remembered
that we’re all a part of the human family. He did it because he knew that, to
care for another person is to slough off a bit of your own chaff. He did it
because he knew that it feels good to be useful. It feels good to remember your
connection to another human being.
And in the midst of these dark days,
on this third Sunday of Advent, we light the pink candle. The candle of Joy. It
seems almost laughable to speak of joy right now, but as my dear friend and
colleague the Rev. Jennifer Mills-Knutsen is saying from her church’s pulpit
this morning, “How dare any preacher or prophet
let us think for one moment that God’s promised joy risks being snuffed out by
any evil this world could ever display.”
The people came to John seeking a
word of salvation just as we come to this place seeking a healing balm. We are
all of us wilderness wanderers and we come to John for the good news.
He does not disappoint. John’s good
news for us this day is this: In the face of
the great evil, there is not a one of us who is useless. When the news of the
day makes us notice our own chaff - when we feel consumed by feelings of fear,
anger, grief. When we wonder how we can ever make ourselves useful in this
broken, broken world, Jesus the Good Farmer comes to us with his winnowing
fork.
After we have been threshed about by
the violence of this world, the Christ lifts us off the cold, hard ground and
winnows us gently. Let the winds of God’s healing breath blow on all of us and
let us be useful in the world.
[1] With thanks
to http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2009/03/separating-wheat-from-chaff.html
and Wikipedia articles on “threshing floor” and “winnowing.”
[2] http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/BlackHistoryMonth/MLK/CommAddress.html
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/nyregion/photo-of-officer-giving-boots-to-barefoot-man-warms-hearts-online.html?_r=0
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