JESUS THE ARSONIST?

‘I baptize you with^* water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptize you with^* the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹²His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’ (Matthew 3:11-12)

It sounds a little scary to me – baptize with fire!   One of the most familiar biblical metaphors for Jesus, especially for us here at Shepherd of the Hills is Jesus the Shepherd. It’s a comforting and assuring image of Jesus; the one who cares for the sheep and willing to risk everything to go looking for the one who wanders off and gets lost, even to the point of dying to rescue the one lost sheep.

But this morning John the Baptist comes haranguing, dressed in his rummage sale cloths and living on a subsistence diet, strongly resembling the ancient prophet Elijah who was expected to return as the forerunner of the messiah.  John offers a rather daunting image of Jesus using the metaphor of fire.  It’s a radically different picture than Jesus the Shepherd; more like "Jesus the Arsonist," who comes with fire, uses fire, and sets things on fire!  

I can say some things about fire from first hand experience. In the late 1970’s our house burned, and we came very close to losing almost everything we owned!  I'll never forget the feelings I had 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 financial and emotional investment laying there burned, black, water-logged, stinky and thrown to the side as if it were so much worthless debris!  I can remember the ensuing days of clean-up and salvage; going through our stuff, item by item with each item needing a value placed upon it for insurance reasons.

Needless to say that fire was a life-changing experience in that it forced us into a revaluing process. We were forced to ask some serious questions, "What is it that I look to, invest in and trust will bring us the kind of fulfillment we so desperately look for?  Is my life so totally wrapped up in this stuff, that by losing it, I also somehow lose myself with it?  How emotionally linked am I to my stuff?"

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

The first way is to try to replace the past, to replace what was lost!  With this kind of rebuilding comes a fear! This fear causes me to rebuild with an even tighter grip on my stuff that 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 defensively, clinging to my stuff tighter than ever; looking with suspicion upon anything or anybody who seemed to be a threat to take it away!

But there is another to rebuild and that is to transform the future, to focus creating a new future, not trying to merely restore the past. This way of re-building has the courage 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 all my stuff for the sham it really was.  Much of it was good stuff, but nevertheless just stuff. It was stuff that I had been clinging to, stuff that I had elevated to a sacred position in my life. The fire exposed my idolatry; that my stuff owned me and controlled me.

Matthew tells us, “In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness proclaiming, ”Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near… and the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him… But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming… he said to them, “You brood of vipers… bear fruit worthy of repentance.” 

It was not a very nice thing to say to decent religious people, and the Pharisees and Sadducees were decent religious people.   Even so, John picks them out of the crowd and admonishes them over everybody else. Why?  To put it in a nutshell, the Pharisees and Sadducees were still enmeshed with the old regime of power, privilege, prestige and oppression. 

The Pharisees were the super self-righteous religious whose belief system caused them to separate themselves off from the everyday and ordinary folks; and 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 to intentionally not champion justice for the poor, but leveraged their religion to gain political advantage for themselves and separate themselves off from the common people.  John called upon them to repent of the chaff of their duplicity because John trusted the messiah was coming who would burn away the chaff as he ushered in a new regime in which all who were oppressed in any way by the power elite would be lifted up out of oppression in a new age of justice and peace.  As Isaiah declared in our first lesson today the expected one who “with righteousness would judge for the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”  

And so, John portrays the coming messiah as having a winnowing fork which was a great flat wooden shovel, and with it the grain was tossed into the air. The heavy valued grain fell to the ground, but the chaff was blown away or gathered into a separate pile and burned!

Daunting as it comes off, this story contains Good News, but you have to look at it a little bit sideways.  Hidden in the midst of the tragic house-fire that we experienced, there was grace!   I gained a much clearer picture of what controls me; what kind of defensive, selfish, worrying, ungrateful person I can become when I let "so many things" take me over.  I now know 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 a moment of decision; a decision I need to make anew every day!  Buried away in this scripture is a daily challenge and call: a daily call to repent; to turn away from the chaff and turn toward the one who comes with the unquenchable fire.   

Dear friends, it is Advent and that means it's getting late.  There is one who is coming, and if John is right, coming with fire!  And there is a message of judgment here, and the judgment is that, nobody avoids the fire.  We are powerless to escape it! The coming one won't tolerate our self-righteousness... self-indulgence... thirst for control... prejudice... hedonism... indifference to the poor and oppressed… exploitation of creation… when we leverage our faith against others;  whatever chaff it is in which we've placed our trust. The coming one promises to burn it away with an unquenchable fire.

But we need not despair or be terrified for there is also a message of grace. The one who comes doesn't come to destroy us, but comes to remake us and transform us.  John expected the messiah to come with an unquenchable fire – and he does, but it is the unquenchable fire of forgiveness that flows from the blood of his cross.  That’s how the chaff is burned away; he takes our chaff into himself and burns it away with his forgiveness.  The winnowing fork is the cross; the unquenchable fire is the unquenchable fire of forgiveness.

By the blood of the cross God wishes to rebuild us authentically from the inside out with love as our core motive, not fear of divine reprisal; rebuild us as persons who invest in knowing him first, before anyone else, and in so knowing him receive the love and courage we need to relate to everyone else from our spouses, to our friends, to our neighbors, to even, yes, our enemies!

Jesus wishes to rebuild us as persons who invest in sharing our stuff, even giving it away, and in so giving will no longer be tyrannized and dehumanized by it!

Jesus wishes to rebuild us as persons who invest in using our power, authority and influence to help correct injustice, to work for reconciliation, to become peacemakers -- and in so doing continue the process of the transforming world's future as God would have it!

"He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, and gather his wheat into the granary; the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

It's ultimately a message of Good News!  In a dramatic and poignant way it's speaks of a Lord who comes to shape us and rebuild us into so much more than we can ever be on our own.