Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Feast of the Baptism of Jesus
January 7, 2007
The Winnowing of our Lives
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 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.”
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
I was both mesmerized and repelled by the accounts of the death of Saddam Hussein a little over a week ago. Tried and found guilty, he was hurried to the gallows in darkness and hung while many cursed him. It left many of me horrified at how people could execute even a bad former leader in such a way. For me, it was a sort of epiphany of just how disfigured our humanity can become.
The story of a beginning in today’s gospel is a dramatic contrast to this story of a terrible end. Unlike the Iraqi leader dragged guilty to the gallows in the dark, Jesus, the innocent and blameless one, freely joins others in the ritual bath and symbolic drowning of baptism. He emerges, is declared as God’s beloved and begins his public ministry.
And what will his work be about? According to John the Baptist, it will be about transformation and renewal through holy wind (that is holy spirit) and holy fire, two chaotic images that have to do with empowerment. But John doesn’t stop with this. He describes the messiah’s work as similar to what a farmer does with a winnowing fork.
Forks are something we normally associate with the devil. But in depictions of the devil, what he is holding is a trident—a three-pronged weapon used in gladiatorial combat. What John the Baptist us referring to is a winnowing fork, an implement used by farmers to separate the wheat from the chaff. They did this by throwing both up into the air. The heavier wheat would fall back down and the wind would blow the chaff away. And so as one commentator says: “The Messiah, according to John, will preserve what is valuable and destroy what is worthless, just as a farmer does.” (Stoffregen quoting someone)
Preserving what is valuable and destroying what is worthless—this is the effect of the Messiah upon the world and upon us. Preserving what is valuable and destroying what is worthless, that is helping us to let go of what no longer serves us as children of God so that what is truly valuable can be available to feed the world.
On New Year’s Eve a group of women gathered in a home on Queen Anne hill with poster board, scissors, glue and magazines. Their task for the evening besides having dinner was for each to create a collage that would contain the images of the positive things they wanted in their lives for the upcoming year. And so each put together a visual representation of what she wanted preserved or created in her life for the upcoming year. You can imagine what some of these images were—images of growth and possibility, new vocational exploration, connection to friends, to community and to specific important causes.
But with each placement of a positive image, of something new to be created or valuable to be preserved, there had to come with it a sense of needing to let something else go, destroying, if you will, something that no longer had worth.
And so our baptismal life is always a winnowing—throwing the wheat and the chaff up into the air and trusting that holy wind will help us understand what is wheat and what is chaff and will burn away what is no longer valuable so that what is valuable will remain to sustain us ad to shape and sustain God’s world.
And the stakes are high, the stakes feel high. For to give ourselves to this process can feel chaotic and can seem threatening to us and to those around us. So we need to know that this process of winnowing is not something that in itself has no boundaries in terms of its effects on ourselves and others. It sits within the context of other dimensions of the Christian life—dimensions like our participation in God’s compassion for us and for others, a thirst for God’s justice, a heart of God’s forgiveness, the making and remaking of God’s peace. These help us to get our bearings in what may seem like an unpredictable winnowing of our lives.
But be winnowed we must, for the stakes are also high for the world that has been given into our care. Make no mistake about it, what we do has an effect. Someone once said about the weather that a butterfly moving its wings on one side of the earth could affect the weather on the other side of the earth. I believe that the energies we set forth, the energies of courage, truth-telling, compassion, justice-making, peace-making, forgiveness have an effect even though we may not be able to see it. To say it very brashly, our ability to forgive or to treat one another with dignity has the power and has had the power to affect the manner in which a country’s leader on the other side of the world would be put to death.
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. He comes with the winnowing fork in his hand.
For me, what makes this awesome and frightening process bearable is coming back over and over again to what God pronounces about Jesus after his baptism and when he is said to be in prayer. “You are my son, my beloved,” Luke records, “with you I am well pleased.” It helps me to hold onto and at times to bask in the sense that love is God’s purpose with me as a part of God’s purpose of love in the world. Or as the thirteenth century anchorite Julian of Norwich said while meditating on the crucifixion, “Would you know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well: Love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love….Thus did I learn that love is our Lord’s meaning.” Another person has called this kind of love “fierce grace.”
And so as we begin this year together, I invite you to reflect on your own winnowing: what is the wheat, the thing of value that God wants you to preserve or create? What is the chaff that holy wind wants to carry away from your life, that holy fire wants to consume? Though these are fearful questions, beloved, hear the words of Isaiah to God’s people Israel overwhelmed and fearful after years of being winnowed in exile.
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you: I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters. I will be with you when you walk through the fire you will not be burned.”
