Excerpts from: "Choices" Since we've committed 2006 to history, and are a week into this New Year, how's it goin' for you? Pretty much the same as you left last year? What lies ahead for us this year? Change certainly, some planned and some of it unexpected I'm sure. To be sure, throughout the year we will be faced with choices. As we begin a new year, I thought it would be fitting to look at the beginning of Jesus' ministry. Last Sunday we looked at traveling Jesus as a boy in the temple-let's look at the inauguration or the beginning of the last three years of his life. Luke 3:15-22 There are a number of familiar stories in the Bible that many of us can retell from memory. We know the story of Jesus' birth, which we have just celebrated at Christmas. We know the story of his death and resurrection. We can tell some of Jesus' stories and parables, like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan. One of the stories we know is the beginning of Jesus' ministry. It's the story of Jesus' baptism. We may not recall every detail, but the basic story line is that John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness and people were coming to him to be baptized as a sign of repentance. John said that one who was greater than him was coming, and then Jesus himself came to John to be baptized. John baptizes him in the Jordan River , and as he rises from the water there is a voice from heaven saying, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." That's the story, and it's fairly familiar. I didn't expect anything different this time around, but as I read this story in Luke last week, something I had not paid much attention to before caught my eye. Isn't that the great thing about the Bible? It is alive; living and breathing. The Holy Spirit makes it fresh and relevant to us if we will read it with understanding. (remember your baptism?) People are wondering if perhaps John is the Messiah, and John says, "No, one greater than me is coming; I'm not even worthy to untie his sandals. I am baptizing you with water, but he will baptize you with the fire of the Holy Spirit." And then he says, "His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." I know these verses have always been there, but I've never paid them much attention, and I suspect most of you haven't either. A part of the reason we haven't noticed them is that Jesus' baptism is such a powerful event that it overshadows these earlier verses - they are like the warm-up band that plays before the main attraction, and nobody pays much attention. And then, baptism is such a positive and wonderful thing, we don't want to mess it up with talk of judgment and something like "unquenchable fire." John seems to be using a fire-and-brimstone methodology to get a response from his audience, and we are really not into that sort of thing. Well, first we need to ask just what is John talking about. A winnowing fork? Most of us wouldn't know a winnowing fork from a salad fork. Growing up, I remember that my grandfather Bailey had a fantastic little farm in Kentucky. He had a few cattle and some sheep, chickens and roosters pecking about and green tobacco fields as far as I could see. I remember him pitching hay from the loft in the barn with a winnowing or what we call a pitch fork. I would guess, today that even those who farm don't do a lot of winnowing. Here's the way it worked: before grain was ground for flour, it needed to be as clean as possible. After harvesting and threshing, it contained a lot of chaff - pieces of stalk, the outer husks of the grain, and other material that was not kernels of grain - stuff you did not want in your bread. You would take the winnowing fork and throw the grain into the air, allowing the chaff to be blown away. The winnowing forks from first century Palestine -were handheld tools about the size of a catcher's mitt, with several tines. These might be used to winnow a small amount of grain, which would then be ground in a mortar and pestle for one family's daily use. Winnowing forks in the Middle East being used today are quite similar to the ancient one but has a long handle attached, it looks something like a pitchfork with more and smaller tines. It is interesting to me that Jesus is pictured by John with a winnowing fork - something like a pitchfork. Did you know that the devil is never described in the Bible as having a pitchfork, but Jesus is? All these years, we've seen those cans of Underwood Deviled Ham, with the little red devil and a pitchfork, it turns out they were wrong all along. The devil doesn't have a pitchfork, but Jesus does! The question, of course, is what John meant by this image of Jesus with a winnowing fork. Clearly it is an image of judgment, of separating the wheat from the chaff. It is similar to other images - of separating the wheat and the tares, of separating the sheep and the goats, all images of judgment. John says that the chaff will be burned in an unquenchable fire, and I do know enough about farm life to know that grain dust can be very explosive. So it sounds as though John is telling of the coming Messiah, saying that when the Messiah comes he will separate the good from the bad, and the bad will have a price to pay. But this isn't the way Jesus characterizes his own ministry. How does he describe it? It's in the very next chapter in Luke. Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he says,
Jesus himself did not seem to fit the pattern described by John. He was not about separating people, but bringing people together. He was not about excluding people, but including people. He did not treat people as chaff to be discarded, but seemed to have a special concern for those who were looked upon as outcasts, as misfits-those who might have been thought of as "mere chaff" by others. Despite Jesus' own life and example, we like to often used vivid images of hell drawn from such verses like these, to frighten people into compliance. There are Christians and churches that literally try to scare the hell out of you. In reflection on these verses, I wonder if perhaps we have misunderstood John here-if we have misplaced the emphasis of John's words. You see, the story in Luke goes on to tell how Herod the ruler was offended by John's rebuke and John was imprisoned. Perhaps John's offense lay in insisting that the coming of Jesus represented a need for people to decide to make a choice. That was not what Herod wanted to hear, and it's not necessarily what we want to hear either. I believe in essence what John said, few dare to hear. Life matters. How we take each day matters, our behaviors draw us close to God or not, and, while not all in life will be wonderful, all can be filled with the wonder of God. The choices we make matter. This is something we seriously need to hear, because while we live in a culture that seems to be all about choice, we often live as though we really don't have any choice. We clamor for our personal right to decide, and then we all decide the same thing - we decide to buy the same clothes and cars and coffee that everybody else does. We have a strong conviction about the right of the individual, but for some reason we individuals act pretty much the same, making decisions with the same eye to how this will look to others, wanting things to be different but not wanting to rock the boat, wanting to be closer to God but not wanting to carry our cross. We can easily go with the flow and move through life trying to avoid making tough decisions. But real life doesn't work out that way-at some point, eventually, we are confronted with hard choices. And whether we realize it or not, real choices are there for us, everyday. I read about a family who made a very different decision. Concerned about the rampant consumerism and its effect on our culture - and on their families - during 2006 they decided to buy nothing new for a year. They made a few exceptions - food, of course, and underwear, and things like toothpaste and personal hygiene items. But basically, they didn't buy anything new for a year. They found it easier than they would have thought, and freeing in a way. They found stuff at garage sales, flea markets and Goodwill. They learned to repair things and found that stuff lasts longer than they would have thought. They found touches of grace when a friend would give them a bicycle after theirs had broken down or a microwave when theirs had conked out. They became more willing to share with others. They paid down their credit cards and gave more money to charity and had less stress over finances. For Christmas, they made gifts or made a donation to a worthy cause in the name of a friend or relative. And it worked so well that they plan to do it again this year. I found this story very interesting, and an example of people who understood that they really did have a choice. The choices set before us are not all so encompassing or dramatic. But they are real. In the face of offense, we can turn a blind eye or we can speak up. When a friend is in need, we can offer to help or we can justify our inaction by telling ourselves we are too busy and too extended. Life will force decisions upon you. In whatever relationship for example, we can choose whether the person is grain or chaff. We can choose to be kind or impatient, whether to pull together or not. Our choices aren't always about right and wrong, but about what is best. A decision may be right in the moment, but not good in the long run. Choose wisely every day, for you are the sum of all your choices. Just as John envisioned Jesus separating wheat and chaff with a winnowing fork, we have choices to make about good and evil, good and bad. Wheat and chaff, we have to decide. And this deciding is not a once-and-for all matter as much as it is a constantly renewing cycle, a daily calling. Living as a follower of Jesus means deciding how to faithfully respond to what is before us today. It means making faithful choices. John called for such decisions, and it was an offense to Herod. John was put in prison, and in the end it cost John his life. But Jesus himself understood that we have a choice to make, and he chose to come to the waters of baptism. He chose to identify with John's movement, to this outsider community and more than that, he chose to identify with all of the people who came to John - people with needs, people with struggles, people wanting to repent and turn their lives around. God was calling his people to forgiveness 'a letting go', a time of preparation that they may make ready for God's kingdom was at hand. Jesus called people to make choices, and he himself made such a choice, because God's kingdom was to break in on this world through him. It would do you well to prepare your heart for God's kingdom work this new year, to be about your Father's business as it were. While Jesus didn't look at anyone as chaff, and while he seemed non-judgmental in most situations, he did have words of judgment for one group of people: the self-righteous. The religious experts, said Jesus, spurned John's call to baptismal repentance, and in so doing "rejected God's purpose for themselves" (Luke 7:30 ). He had no patience for those who looked down on others and criticized others while ignoring the sin in their own lives. He spoke of those who saw a speck in their neighbor's eye but could not see the plank in their own. He had harsh words for those who used God for their own personal gain and who looked righteous on the outside but were full of deceit and hypocrisy on the inside - whitewashed tombs, he called them. In effect , the people to whom Jesus spoke words of judgment were those who refused to make choices about their own lives. They felt that their own status and goodness and outward appearance insulated them from having to make moral choices. Jesus made a choice himself. In humility, he submitted to John's baptism. Luke reports very little of the actual baptism and does not even mention John by name, but he reports that after the baptism, there is a voice from heaven saying, "You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." For Jesus, his baptism was an experience of affirmation of his identity and calling. It says to us that Jesus could not have done what he did apart from God's grace and power and love. For us, our baptism represents the choice we have made to follow Christ. It represents our repentance and dying to the flesh. It is trusting God in faith and is an experience of His grace. In our baptism, God says to us, "You are my beloved children." As Christians, we are called to live out our baptism by following in Jesus' ways, by continuing his ministry on this earth. We don't think of ourselves as needing a winnowing fork to live the Christian life, but maybe that's not a bad image. In this New Year, we will consider various ideas, prayerfully throw stuff out there and allow the wind of the Spirit to decide what's good and what's not, what builds up and what doesn't. It's not just obvious choices between good and bad; we have to separate the important from the merely urgent, the good from the best. We have to learn to separate those things that are attractive but fleeting from that which is solid and lasting. We have to learn to separate those core beliefs and values and commitments that matter most from those more peripheral matters that are not so important and on which we sometimes need to just agree to disagree. A winnowing fork just might come in handy in 07. |