This sermon was preached for the third Sunday in Advent, Sunday, December 15, 2024. The texts for this sermon were: Zephaniah 3:14-20, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18, and Canticle 9.
Back in 2022, as COVID was finally beginning to wind down and restrictions were lifting, I reached back out to the group of teen and youth ministers I had convened before the world shut down. We began to meet again, picking up the pieces ecumenical and interfaith collaboration we had had such hopes for in 2019. My colleague at the UCC church, who was much wiser and had many more decades of experience in youth ministry than I, had a powerful suggestion for how we might restart our efforts. What if our first event could be a collective moment of mourning what had been lost during the pandemic? It’d give teens a chance to name what they had had to give up in isolation and the particular traumas borne by high schoolers specifically - the education they missed out on, the rites of passages forgone, proms and sports seasons cancelled, friendships deflated.
In the end, about sixty high schoolers gathered in our church parking lot around a blazing firepit. We gave each kid a slip of paper and a pencil and asked them to write down something they wanted to leave behind. One by one they stepped forward and placed the paper in the fire. Some spoke their answers - “Loneliness,” they said. “Anxiety. Masks. Zoom class.” - but others kept their responses to themselves. My colleague had procured this special sort of paper that made it so that when the slips touched flame, they magically twisted into the air and disappeared. The ritual was a sorely needed moment of catharsis. Watching the faces of the students who had endured such a weird, unprecedented interruption in their young lives, I felt at once painful sorrow and a deep, wild joy. I wished in that moment that the fire would work - that everything cast into it would really, truly be gone.
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| Gathering around the firepit a year after COVID restrictions, March 20, 2022. |
John the Baptist’s words were powerful and compelling to the people who heard them. They drew many people in - all sorts of people. The poor. The wealthy. The tax collectors and military enforcers of imperial occupation. And as they streamed to the River Jordan to be baptized, they couldn’t help but wonder if this man was the Messiah they had been waiting for. “John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
Then the text says, “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” Good news. An axe lying at the root, a winnowing fork and unquenchable fire - it’s all supposed to be Good News. It doesn’t sound like that to me, at least at first. It sounds like a threat. It sounds like imminent punishment.
Professor of New Testament the Rev. Dr. Matt Skinner observed that American Christians are conditioned to think of the wheat and the chaff as individuals. You are either wheat or chaff, saved or damned. All across America, drivers are bombarded with billboards of hellfire coming for souls, little stick figures being thrown into flames.
In my work, in my theological delving, I have come to believe that people aren’t either good or evil, wheat or chaff. I love how Barbara Brown Taylor paraphrases Russian Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in her book Holy Envy. She’s reflecting on Jesus dividing the sheep and the goats in a parable from the Gospel of Matthew when she writes: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The truth is that every human heart is mired in sin - mired in it but not made of it, or for it. In our baptismal vows, we promise to turn from the three levels of sinfulness: cosmic evil, societal evils, and the internal temptations of the heart. Then in our baptismal covenant we acknowledge that screwing up is a when not an if. “Whenever you fall into sin, will you repent and return to the Lord?” It’s “fall into sin” because in the Episcopal imagination, sin is not a laundry list of bad deeds - with badness determined by church authorities - but rather a condition. The condition of stuckness in a limited, broken world. In its simplest sense, sin is whatever gets in the way of you loving God, loving your neighbor, and loving yourself. What would it be like to be finally free of all that holds us back from love?
“What’s some of the chaff people can’t wait to see gotten rid of?” Professor Skinner asks. “Not who but what?”
This truly is Good News: Jesus is coming to winnow not a whole bunch of “who”s but a whole bunch of “what”s. Not individuals, but rather the structures of sin that entangle us - internal and external. You and I, we may have different answers as to what we hope the chaff that will be burned will be. Different things we’d write on those magic slips of paper. Addiction. Poverty. Racism. Fascism. Depression. Loan sharks. Medical debt. PFAS. Cancer. Loneliness. What would the world be like without all that?
“What could this world be like without all that?” is such a different question with such different implications than the question “What could this world, this country, this family, this church, be like without them?”. Or even that question born of so much pain, “what would this world be like without me?” When we locate brokenness not in who we are, but in our context, not in our essence, which is the image of God, but in our choices, I do believe the focus of our actions shift. The solutions we reach for are different.
John the Baptist is asked not once, but three times: “What then should we do?” If all this is true, what does it mean for our lives right now?
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Several other translations, New International Version, English Standard Version, and New American Standard Bible, render this as “produce fruit in keeping with repentance” or “consistent with repentance.” This is perhaps a bit clearer than all the baggage attached to the word, “worthy.” He’s essentially saying, live your lives in a way that shows you have turned toward love. Live like you believe, in the words of Ana Herandez, “another world is not only possible, she is already on her way.” And you know what John’s answers tell us? Those choices look different for each person, depending on their position in society. Isn’t that fascinating? Someone who works for an exploitative industry, like a tax collector, they’re supposed to stop abusing their position and profiting from another’s vulnerability. Someone who has power over others, like a soldier, they’re supposed to stop bullying people. And anyone who has more than one coat, they’re to turn to someone without one, and give it away.
These acts are not what make you worthy. They don’t save you. They show, they are a sign, they are in keeping with your conviction that this world was meant to be for love. That the human heart was created for compassion. How we live our lives, the countercultural choices we make, they are meant to flow from your trust that the wheat of you, the goodness inside you, all that draws you to love of God, neighbor, and self, all that is destined for more. And so is the wheat inside everyone else. They flow, too, from your determination that you will be able to leave all the rest behind.
This is how fire becomes Good News. It is the fire of liberation. The fire of letting go.
One last observation from other scriptural imagery: the Book of Malachi, in last week’s reading, speaks of God’s fire as a refining fire. A fire that does not destroy, but rather purifies and transforms. Then there’s the burning bush, when God, the great I-AM, appears to Moses as a fire that blazes but does not consume.
This divine, unquenchable fire - does it mark us for destruction or transformation?
“I will remove disaster from you…I will deal with all your oppressors,” God promises through the Prophet Zephaniah, “And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise.”
In God’s hands, nothing is wasted. And so, likewise, in God’s hands, destruction is creation. Fire is freedom.
We will be set free. All of us. One day. Amen.
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