January 13, 2022

“His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

(Luke 3:17)

If your mind works anything like mine, when you hear these words from John the Baptist about Jesus, the Messiah, from last Sunday’s gospel reading (Luke 3:15-17, 21-22), the first things you think about are:
“Wow, that sounds really harsh and scary for the chaff.”
“I wonder if I am wheat or if I am chaff? I hope I’m wheat.”
“This image of Jesus is fierce, and unquenchable fire sounds like Hell.”

And then I hear the words of our first reading, Isaiah 43:2-3, “When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.” God is with us, guarding us in the flames because God has called us by name and God loves us. When the fire rises, God keeps it from consuming us.

So let’s return to the chaff and the unquenchable fire, letting scripture interpret scripture and with an openness to the idea that maybe we misunderstood the fire John speaks of. 

Perhaps instead of considering two groups of people: the good wheat, and the bad chaff, we ought to do away with the binary. After all Jesus always seems to offer a third way beyond our dualism and the gospel is more both/and than either/or.

So maybe, just maybe, I am both wheat and chaff. I am both saint and sinner (simul justus et pecatur as Luther put it). What if Jesus is coming to the threshing floor and finds my life full of goodness and not-so-goodness? What if Jesus comes by water and the Holy Spirit to my life and finds the fruit of the Spirit growing alongside the weeds of selfishness, sin, scarcity, and fear?

Then Jesus clears away the chaff that is choking out the wheat.
Jesus burns away what is in the way.
Jesus puts my self-centered, self-indulgent, hate, disdain, apathy, certainty that I know the right way, my seeking to justify myself into the unquenchable fires. The same fires where God comes alongside and refines and delivers me so that I might be what God has made me – beloved.

Friends, may we know that as the flames of discord and suffering and anxiety and fear threaten to burn us, God is with us and will not less us be consumed. May we emerge again from the waters of baptism and the fire of the Holy Spirit with our belovedness on full display to ourselves, our neighbor, and the whole world so that we might join God in coming alongside others in the midst of their fires and floods helping them know their belovedness and showing them God who loves them and delivers them and calls them by name, too.
 

Grace & Peace,
Pastor Drew