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December 5, 2010   Advent 2
Matthew 3:1-12 

FIRE OF TRANSFORMATION!

The New Testament offers many metaphors for Jesus:  Jesus the Shepherd; Jesus the Vine; Jesus Bread of Life, Jesus the Living Water, the Light of the World and many more.  Each metaphor reflects a different aspect of how the early Christian communities experienced Jesus, and what he meant to them.  Today’s gospel offers another one of these metaphors that reveals something about Jesus, about their experience of him, and what he can mean for us.

Every Advent John the Baptist parades across our stage dressed in his rummage-sale-clothes and subsistence diet, strongly resembling the ancient prophet Elijah who the Jews expected to return as the forerunner of the their messiah.  John offers a rather daunting image of Jesus using the metaphor of fire.  It’s a radically different picture than Jesus the Shepherd, or Jesus the Vine, or Bread of Life or Light of the World.  It’s the Jesus who comes with fire and is like fire.  But what do we do with this metaphor?  I remind you that the meaning of the word metaphor is “more than literal.”  Like all metaphors, we need to look at it in a more than literal way, which is to look deeper into it and see what it points to in order to grasp its meaning for us. 

So, let's think about the metaphor of fire.  I can say some things about fire from first-hand experience.  In 1978 our house burned, and we came very close to losing  everything we owned!   I'll never forget my feelings as I sifted through the charred remains of our precious home and our sacred stuff.  I saw all of the stuff in which I had so much investment, financial and emotional, laying there burned, black, water-logged, stinky and thrown to the side as if it were so much worthless rubbish.   I can remember the ensuing days of clean-up and salvage; sorting through our stuff, item by item with each item needing a value placed upon it for insurance purposes.

Needless to say that fire was life-transforming in that a revaluing process was imposed upon us. I found myself asking some serious questions like, "What is it really that I invest in and trust will bring me the  fulfillment I long for?  How wrapped up am I in this stuff?  Am I wrapped up in it to the point, that by losing it I also somehow lose a part of myself?"   These were the kinds of questions I found myself asking. 

I also discovered something else; that there are two ways to rebuild.

            The first way is to rebuild attempting to reclaim the past, to replace everything that was lost and even more! With this kind of rebuilding comes a fear!  This fear causes me to rebuild with an even tighter grip on my stuff than I had before; an even deeper emotional investment in my stuff working very hard devising ways to insure that this kind of thing would never happen again. This way of rebuilding is to rebuild clinging to my stuff tighter than ever.  I call it rebuilding defensively and protectively.

            But there is another way to rebuild, and that is to rebuild in a way that transforms the future and reorders my values and my attitudes.  It is to focus upon creating a new future not trying to reclaim the past. This way of re-building has the discernment to see that the things in which I had invested so much of my emotional self were never very life-producing in the first place. This way of rebuilding can see that what the fire had really done was expose my stuff for the sham it really was to a great extent.  In other words, the fire exposed my idolatry.  In the end, the fire challenged me to a transformed future.  The question was would I pick up the challenge.  It is to move into the future in a transformational manner. 

Matthew tells us that when John saw the Pharisees and Sadducees coming… he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers… bear fruit worthy of repentance.’” 

It seems a rather harsh thing to say to religious people, and the Pharisees and Sadducees were  religious people.   Even so, John picks them out of the crowd and admonishes them over everybody else. Why?  Well, first of all I think John was a rather harsh person.  I really do!  I don’t think he was a very fun person to be around.  Secondly, he had an agenda, and he was always pushing it.   John was a confrontational sort and he confronted the Pharisees.  Why?  To put it in a nutshell, the Pharisees and Sadducees were enmeshed with the regime of power, privilege, prestige and oppression. 

The Pharisees were the super religious whose belief system caused them to separate themselves off from the ordinary folks.  The Sadducees were an aristocratic priestly class who had close political ties with the Roman political and military machine that occupied the nation.  As John looked over these hyper-religious constituents in the crowd, he saw the chaff of their untransformed lives; how they used religion for their own purposes; how they leveraged their religion to gain political advantage for themselves and separate themselves off from those they considered beneath them; how they were enmeshed in the regime of power and privilege.  John called upon them to repent – that is, to reconsider their attitude in light of the agenda of the expected messiah.  

Daunting as this story appears on the surface, it is filled with Good News, but you have to look at it in a more than literal way.  Like with our house fire, hidden in the ashes there was grace and good news!   I gained a much clearer picture of what I invest in for fulfillment; what kind of defensive, selfish, worrying person I can become when I let "so many things" take me over.  I know more clearly what happens to me when I place my trust in so much stuff; whether it is position, prestige, power, authority, material stuff, money, or using my faith to leverage against others. The fire forced me into a process of discernment; a discernment I am called into anew every day!  

Buried away in this story from Matthew is a daily challenge and call: a daily call to repent. The Latin root word for repent means "to adopt a new mindset."  Advent is about a process that leads to a new mindset that creates the possibility of the transformation of the heart and mind – living our lives not according to a self-serving agenda-but according to the agenda of Jesus that ultimately is a self-giving agenda.      

John said the one coming would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire!  In the Bible the word “spirit” also means “breath” and “wind.”  We could say that Jesus brings a breath of fresh air of a new and transformed mind-set. 

This passage has sometimes been grotesquely misused to simplistically divide the world up into the good and the bad; the grain representing the good people and the chaff representing the bad people. This one-dimensional viewpoint is an idea often put forth, of course, by those who count themselves among the good and who claim to have perfect insight into the identity of “the good and the bad.”  

I look at it in an entirely different way.  For me, the grain and chaff do not represent different people, but represent the complexity and ambiguity of every individual life.  When I look inside of my own being I see that grain and chaff are both present - existing side by side; tangled up and intertwined.  So, the separation process referred to in the passage is a process that occurs within me that begins right now, not sometime in the future, and that’s what ultimately makes this passage hopeful and filled with good news.  I need that breath and wind and fire of the Spirit to come together and work for transformation in my life; to empower me to discern; to sort things out; to burn away the chaff; and to claim the grain of a new mindset-the mindset of Jesus.

John portrays Jesus with a winnowing fork or fan which was simply a great wooden shovel that was used to throw the mixture of chaff and grain into the air and the lighter chaff would be blown away by the wind and the good grain would fall back to down in a pile to be used.  The winnowing fan was the tool and the wind (remember, a word which also means “spirit”) empowered the process.  The fresh air of wind carried the chaff away where it was then picked up and burned, but the good grain was stored and used.  It was a familiar agricultural image of Jesus’ time.

The mention of the winnowing fan in Matthew's story is also metaphorical.  One could say it’s a symbolic reference appearing early in Matthew’s gospel to the cross of Jesus.. The winnowing fan was the tool used in the process of separation along with the wind.  The cross of Jesus, we could say, is a tool (a process) used in our transformation along with the Spirit-wind.

The gospels have Jesus speaking much about the process of death and resurrection, dying and rising as the way to personal transformation.  In John’s gospel, chapter 12, speaking of his own crucifixion Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.”

The apostle Paul writing to the Galatians said, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives within me.” (2:20)

Along with this story for today, these are invitations into a process of transformation; dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity; letting go of old priorities and embracing new priorities; putting away away an old mind-set and being filled with the fresh air of the mind-set of Jesus.  The early Christian movement experienced the cross and resurrection as a path and way of transformation.