One of my favorite science experiments when I was younger was the combining of
water with pure sodium. It was like watching a fireworks show. You never knew
water had such potential to produce heat and sparks and explosions.
Let’s take a look at some video of some folks putting sodium into some water and
see what happens. Video.
If you put the sodium into a smaller amount of water, then the water turns into
a caustic substance called sodium hydroxide, or lye. But when you put the sodium
into a large quantity of water, there’s so little sodium hydroxide in comparison
to the rest of the water that it looks like the river overpowers the sodium.
Now please don’t try this on the Fox River or any river or lake. This kind of
experiment produces, as I said, a caustic substance that kills aquatic wildlife.
But the image of water that produces fire is one I want you to keep in mind as
you think about the passage we read for today.
This passage is set at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, before he really
started preaching. His ministry of preaching and teaching and healing was
preceded by the ministry of another preacher name John the Baptist.
Now most of you have heard of John. In Luke he is described as a relative of
Jesus, born around the same time as Jesus. John is called by God to prepare the
world for Jesus’ ministry by telling everyone to get ready. John told people
that God was going to come to them in a new and world changing way.
He stood out in the desert and taught people how to go about changing the
direction of their lives and how to leave sinful habits behind. He wasn’t just
talking about making New Year’s resolutions here. He was challenging people to
make real, significant changes to their lifestyles based on their belief that
everyone must answer to God for their choices in life.
Now in the past weeks we’ve already talked about John’s preaching. But the focus
this week is on how John sees himself in relationship to Jesus. You see, at that
time there was a sense that God had stopped sending people to speak on God’s
behalf.
Hundreds of years before that, the people believed that God had sent a series of
prophets to speak a word of God to people, especially to kings and queens of
Israel. But it had been many years since one of those prophets had appeared on
the scene. So people thought the era of prophecy was over.
So when John showed up and began preaching, people really believed God was doing
a new thing in Israel. As you might expect, they tried to figure out just what
God was doing through John. Some people wondered if he was the Messiah, someone
anointed by God to liberate Israel and give the nation its independence again.
John knew about these rumors, and he wanted to clarify his role for people. John
was not there to point to himself as God’s anointed leader. He was there to
point to someone else. John used such strong language to speak about this person
who was coming that it sounded like God was coming in person.
John describes the difference between himself and the person who was coming by
giving us very stark contrasts. Slide. Let’s take a look at how John
differentiates himself from the person he was pointing to.
John compares his place in society to the place this next person will have in
society. John says that he is not worthy to untie the sandals of the person who
is coming. In that society, if you were wealthy or powerful or respected, you
were too high and mighty to even be bothered with removing your own sandals.
You had a slave take them off for you, and sometimes that slave would wash the
dirt off your feet for you. It was the humblest of jobs, a complete humiliation
for the slave.
But John says this next person is so great that John wouldn’t even rate high
enough to untie his sandals. John would be lower than a slave to this person.
This sounds like God’s own self is coming to earth, because no one could imagine
someone so great.
John was also well known for teaching people to baptize themselves in water. It
was their way of symbolizing the cleansing of sin from their lives. But John
said, “Hey, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The one who’s coming after me will
baptize you with fire.”
Now I’m trying to imagine what it would look like to immerse someone in fire,
and the image isn’t pretty. Human bodies were not meant to be baptized in fire.
We can barely handle being baptized in sunlight without sunscreen.
He also says the one who’s coming will baptize with the Holy Spirit. John
envisions this next individual immersing people with God’s own spirit. Now it’s
not clear just what he means by this imagery. But it seems that John’s talking
about getting rid of the worthless, bad things in people’s lives and leaving the
good stuff.
Because John also uses another image to talk about what this next person is
going to do. John compares him to a grain farmer who separates the kernels of
wheat from the part of the stalk called the chaff. The kernels were good for
grinding into flour so that you could make bread.
But the chaff is inedible, so the farmer used a particular tool to separate the
grain from the chaff. He said this coming person would separate the grain from
the chaff and burn the chaff off.
That process is symbolic of people learning to get rid of the chaff in their
lives and hold on to the parts that are actually useful and healthy. John was
telling people to get ready for this event by getting rid of the chaff before
this next person comes.
The ironic thing is, even though John talks this next person up like he’s,
pardon the pun, the second coming of Christ, in the gospel of Luke John has no
idea who Jesus is. John is completely unaware when the very person he’s
preaching about comes and listens to him preach, and then also baptizes himself.
In the gospel of John, John the Baptist knows exactly who Jesus is when he sees
him. He says, “There he is. That’s the one I’ve been telling you about. I’m
closing up shop. Go follow him now.”
But not in Luke. In Luke Jesus is completely unknown to John the Baptist. No one
seems to be aware of the fact that after Jesus is done baptized, as he’s
praying, a voice comes from heaven, and God’s Spirit descends on him in the body
of a dove, confirming that Jesus really is the one who was to come.
Now we preachers have preached this passage to death because it’s so famous and
well known. There are a lot of things we could focus on here. In the past I’ve
focused on the meaning of Jesus’ baptism. But today I want to focus on this
whole idea of Jesus separating the wheat from the chaff.
John was actually not saying something new or unknown to people. He was using
images people may have already known about. There are a number of passages in
the Old Testament which talk about God refining people with fire.
But in the years just prior to John’s own preaching, some Jewish groups were
combining the images of water, refining fire, and God’s holy spirit. Not far
from where John was preaching there was a community of Jewish monks who lived in
the desert and practiced what they considered to be pure godliness.
These people were the Qumran community, the folks who were responsible for
leaving us the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of their books was called “The Manual of
Discipline”, which outlined the rules for living in their community. Let me just
show you a verse from this document. Slide.
They also talked about a coming time when, at the end of the age, God would come
and refine (like by fire ) the community, removing evil spirits and sprinkle the
community with truth like cleansing water. We’ll actually have a chance to look
at these documents and see just how they relate to the beginnings of
Christianity in Sunday School today.
I want you to reflect for a moment on what it means to separate the wheat from
the chaff in your own life. If God were to refine your life with fire and burn
off all the junk and all the garbage, leaving behind only that which is good for
you, what would your life look like?
What do you think would end up being burned off? What is it in your life that
has to go? What would remain in your life? What are the bedrock, godly
foundations of your life on which you can build a life of goodness, purity, and
excellence?
During the Christmas break it came to my attention that a piece of our computer
equipment had died and was in need of replacement. We ordered a new one and I
tried to install it, but I couldn’t get it working.
So I called a guy from Hope Center (CCWC) who had helped us before. He came in
and got the equipment working. While he was there I mentioned that my office
computer was working really slowly, and I asked if he knew what I could do to
make it more efficient.
He began running a program that he had with him which looks on your computer for
files that are unnecessary. As the program ran, the computer showed me all kinds
of files that were just junk files.
You often get these files when you got to a website because someone wants to
figure out where you go on the internet so they can try to sell you something.
And many times our computers come to us with a bunch of files that we don’t
need. Almost everyone has these files on their computer.
I was astounded when I saw the entire list of junk files on my computer. No
wonder it was running so slowly. When I was looking for a sermon or an e-mail,
my computer had to plow through all this junk to look for the information I
wanted. When I got rid of the junk files on my hard drive my computer suddenly
started running a lot faster.
Isn’t that what our lives are like? Let’s be honest, if nothing else, our
memories are full of junk files, old images and messages which cloud our
thinking and impair our ability to see life as it really is.
Our childhoods and youth are full of painful, destructive experiences and
images, hurtful words we’ve heard and spoken, injustices we’ve experienced, and
damaging messages we’ve received about who we are and what people think of us
and what God thinks of us.
I want you to consider the connection between those wounds and hurts, and the
things you do now, things that you know better than to do. Those old pains and
wounds very often lead people into destructive behaviors like addictions. They
prevent us from acting the way we should towards the people we love.
They lead us to form prejudices and preconceptions about other people and breed
mistrust among folks who realistically should have nothing to fear from each
other. They cause us to minimize ourselves and each other, to trivialize just
how important each one of us is to God and to this world.
What would your life be like if, one day, those junk files were deleted, or at
least quarantined? What would it be like if you no longer had to wade through a
pile of mental garbage to be able to think clearly about your life?
Let me be clear, I don’t believe we can just delete all the bad stuff from our
lives. They will always form part of our consciousness. One well known
theologian accurately described people in the Christian faith who help others as
“wounded healers”.
We’re all wounded in some way, and we honestly could not understand the hurts of
others if we didn’t have hurts of our own. So I don’t think the goal here is to
just try to remove all the garbage from our lives. That would be nice, but the
stains are probably always going to be with us.
I think the goal is to allow God to refine us and make us better and stronger
and healthier and godlier, rather than folks carrying around a huge bag of guilt
and pain and hurt that determines where they will go and what they will do and
who they will be.
That refining fire can be experienced here, in the community of people who still
hear those same words every week: “You are my son, my daughter. In you I am very
pleased.”