Luke 3:15 17, 21-22:
15 The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Christ.
16 John answered them all, “I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
17 His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
21 When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened
22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
John’s reputation is something of a wild man. After all, he lived in the desert, ate locusts and honey, and heaped scorn upon Herod, the meanest king east of the Mediterranean. John sure knew how to get people’s attention! He preached repentance. He called for a return to the fullness of the people’s covenant with God and the renewal of their life together as people of God. John spent a great deal of his ministry baptizing people in the Jordan River.
So effective was John in his revivalism that many people wondered whether John was the expected deliverer, the Messiah. They wondered whether John was the Christ who would lead the people to freedom and righteousness and asked him.
John simply replied, I’m not the one. The one you seek is yet to come and will be far more powerful than I. I only baptize you with water. But someone else is coming who will be far more powerful than me. I’m not even fit to untie his shoes. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
What John did was point to Christ, who was greater than he. That’s our job, too. Like John, we in the church should call people to righteousness. Like John, we would do well not to confuse the message with the messenger. In every program and building project and festival and pageant, we should point to Christ, not ourselves.
It is not the church which saves. The church is a means of grace to the world and to its members, but the church is not the source of grace. Our salvation is from God. As the old hymn says, our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Christ and righteousness.
Think for a moment what it means to follow Christ.
- we have discarded our illusion of autonomy and submitted ourselves to one who is greater than we are. Men and women still wrapped up in the world’s system don’t understand how we could do that. “What’s the matter?” they ask us. “Can’t you make it on your own?” If we are honest, we answer, “No,” because we can’t make it without God. We can’t make sense of who we are or why we are without God. We can’t make a good life for our families without God. We can’t face another sunrise unless we know we belong to God: "Because he lives," says the hymn, "I can face tomorrow."
- to be a disciple of Jesus Christ means that we admit to the world that we are sinful people. We are fallen and we can’t get up! That’s not what the world tells us. The world tells us we are good people, but the Scriptures flatly deny this notion. The world tells us that our basic problems stem from low self-esteem, but the Bible cautions us always to esteem others more highly than ourselves. The pop culture tells us, “I’m Okay, You’re Okay,” but it’s not true and we can’t settle for merely being okay, anyway. We are called to a higher way of life and righteousness. “Okay” doesn’t cut it for a Christian person. “Be perfect,” Jesus said, not be okay.
- we who follow Jesus cannot claim any merit in being called out from the world. God does not choose wise people, but foolish ones. God does not choose strong people, but weak ones. When we go with Christ along his way, we are admitting to everyone that we have no wisdom cherished by the world, no strength the world treasures. We are empty of all the things the world desires.
We have no great title to call our own, no grand possessions to boast of. We are watchmen in the night with nothing but a light, but what a light it is! The high and mighty, the proud and boastful cannot intimidate us, for we know and follow one far greater: Jesus called the Christ, the true light of the world.
John said Jesus would separate the wheat from the chaff and throw the chaff into the fire. Does that make us grimace? Is it unpleasant to think of our Savior with a winnowing fork to gather wheat and burn the chaff?
We are much more comfortable thinking of Jesus as one who welcomes little children or as a shepherd bringing little, lost sheep home on his shoulders. We are sort of intuitively repelled by descriptions of a Jesus who would throw something into unquenchable fire.
The prophet Malachi wrote,
“Suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty. “But who can endure the day of his coming? . . . For he will be like a refiner's fire. . .” (Mal 3:1 2).
The Bible also uses fire to describe God’s judgment on the unrepentant and wicked. But fire was the symbol of the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. Fire sometimes destroys, but it also purifies.
The call to repentance is no mere formality. Our response to the gospel of Jesus Christ counts for a great deal. If we of the church are to usher in the coming reign of God, then we have to be clear what it means to decline the call to follow Christ.
We are already under judgment. God’s grace is judgment, and God’s judgment is graceful. The judgment of God is that we repent, be forgiven and turn back to God, a conversion which our baptism signifies and seals. We can try to hide our sin with the appearance of righteousness just as chaff grows with the wheat. But before God nothing is hidden. Before God’s Spirit, the chaff is blown away and the grain remains.
This is a hard teaching. Just as hard are Jesus’ own fierce warnings that there are no abstentions in the decision to follow Christ. Matthew tells us that we either work with Christ or work against him. No one can remain neutral. Personal merit, by human standards, counts for nothing in this judgment. Even if we are model servants, which we are not, Luke tells us we have only done the minimum required.
So the warning is serious. We cannot duck it by appealing to some human idea of a kindly God-father who would never chastise his children. We presume to know too much when we say, “God wouldn’t do that.”
On the other hand, the record of the entire Bible makes it clear that God is a partial judge. If God is completely impartial, we should despair. Thankfully, God is biased. God is biased toward the poor and the helpless. God is biased toward the weak and the unable. God is biased toward the humble and repentant. Most of all, God is biased toward mercy. In Christ God’s character is fully revealed: God’s purpose is not to condemn and destroy but to save and renew. In Christ God has taken the initiative welcome us back where we belong – in the family of God and the reign of God.
There is chaff in our lives right now, all of us, as individuals, families and as a church. We have not loved our neighbor as ourselves and have not heard the cry of the needy. We have not loved God with our whole heart. We have broken God’s law and rebelled against God’s love. Let us pray for God’s judgment on us! Let us pray that God will forgive us and winnow the chaff of sin from our lives. May God free us for joyful obedience through Jesus Christ our Lord and restore in us a clean heart for the love of God in the world.
Jesus came to John to be baptized. This is a curious thing which seems to have caused the gospel writers some embarrassment. Matthew says that John protested and asked Jesus to baptize him, but Jesus insisted on being baptized by John. John had been preaching for people to repent and be baptized, but why would the son of God need to repent?
John had pointed to the Christ. Now the Christ was here. By submitting to baptism, Jesus endorsed and affirmed the ministry and prophecy of John, and confirmed the messianic title John had been announcing about him.
We see in Jesus’ baptism the blessing of God on Jesus and the filling of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Here was something out of the Baptizer’s control. As a pastor, I can pour water on babies, children and adults from now until, well, until kingdom come, but I can’t make the Holy Spirit come down like a dove and rest on anyone. In our worship and ritual, in our liturgy and prayer, our religious experience is ultimately beyond our control. We can have a genuine call for repentance and a genuine commitment to God, but the encounter of God is something we can’t control, like the fire at Pentecost or the free flight of a dove at Jesus’ baptism.
This is good news for the church, especially a heavily institutionalized church like the United Methodist Church. Order, control and proper procedure are the siren songs of institutionalism. These are not bad things in themselves; after all, it is not for nothing that the governing book of United Methodism is called the Discipline. But the spirit of God cannot be compartmentalized and tamed by the church.
The descent of the spirit like a dove tells us of the potential and reality of renewal in God’s care. Luke tells us that the spirit which announced Jesus as son of God is the same spirit which renews the church.
This is God’s son, says the spirit, in whom God is well pleased. Christ is capable of getting the job done. In Christ and by Christ are we saved. In God’s spirit and by God’s spirit we are renewed and made fit for God’s purposes.
