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 and many more.  Each metaphor reflects a different aspect of how the early Christian community experienced Jesus and what he meant to them.  Today we see another one of these metaphors that reveals something about Jesus and what he can mean for us.

John the Baptist parades across our stage dressed in his rummage sale cloths, living on a subsistence diet, strongly resembling the ancient prophet Elijah who was expected to return as the forerunner of the Jewish 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.  It’s the Jesus who comes with fire, and uses fire, and sets things on fire!  Jesus the Arsonist – perhaps?  Well, maybe not!  So what do we do with this metaphor?   Do we ignore it or embrace it or what do we do?  The meaning of the word metaphor is “more than literal.” Like all metaphors we need to play with it and look behind it and let our imaginations run with it and see what it points to in order to grasp some of its meaning. 

So, let's talk 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 almost 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 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 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 that I look to, invest in and trust will bring me the kind of fulfillment I so desperately long for?  Is my life so totally wrapped up in this stuff, that by losing it, I also somehow lose part of myself with it?"   These were merely a few of the 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 replace the past, to replace everything that was lost! 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.

            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, to focus upon creating a new future, not trying to merely recreate and 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 all my stuff for the sham it really was.  The fire exposed my idolatry, that I had elevated my stuff to a sacred place, that my stuff owned and controlled me.  The fire challenged me to a transformed future.  I call it rebuilding transformationally.

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 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 religious whose belief system caused them to separate themselves off from the 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 for their own purposes; how they leveraged their religion to gain political advantage for themselves and separate themselves off from the common people; how they were enmeshed in the old.  John called upon them to repent - to reconsider their attitude in light 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 a little bit sideways.  It was the same way with our house fire.  Hidden in the midst of the house-fire that we experienced, there was grace – good news!  I gained a much clearer picture of what controls me; 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 discernment; a discernment I am called into anew every day!  

Buried away in this passage from Matthew is a daily challenge and call: a daily call to repent. You have heard me say this before and you will hear me say it again; “to repent” means "to adopt a new mindset." That's what the Latin root word for “repent” means – "to adopt a new mindset."  Advent is about a process that leads to a new mindset a new mindset that creates the possibility of the transformation of the heart and mind.      

John said the one coming would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire!  In the Bible the word “spirit” also means “breath” and “wind.”  I love to play with words, so for me I see that this passage declares that Jesus is a kind of breath of fresh air that can sweep across my life like a mighty wind – who brings the fresh air a new mind-set.

This passage has sometimes been grotesquely misused by some 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 life, 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, and it 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 breath of 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.

The mention of the winnowing fan in Matthew's story is no accident.  One could argue that it’s a symbolic reference appearing early in Matthew’s gospel to the cross of Jesus that comes later in the gospel. 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) God uses 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; dying to an old way of being and being raised into a new way of being; dying to an old mind-set and being raised in the mind-set of Jesus.  The early Christian movement saw and experienced the cross and resurrection as a path and way of transformation. 

This passage points to a process of transformation that lies at the very heart of the Christian experience; an invitation into the process of dying and rising with Christ; being raised to newness of life; being transformed by the fire of Spirit; being open to the fresh air of a new mindset.  

"He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand…”

It's ultimately a message of Good News!  In a dramatic and poignant way it's speaks of a Lord who leads us into a process of transformation, dying to old ways of thinking and living, doing and being and being raised to new ways of thinking and living, doing and being - the way of Jesus.