Water and Fire

Stir up the wills of your faithful people, Lord God, and open our ears to the preaching of John, that, rejoicing in your salvation, we may bring forth the fruits of repentance; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Zephaniah 3:14-20

Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! The LORD has taken away the judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival. I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it. I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all at the earth. At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you; for I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth, when I restore your fortunes before your eyes, says the LORD.

Isaiah 12:2-6

Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the LORD God is my strength and my might, and has become my salvation. With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day: give thanks to the LORD, call on God’s name; make known the deeds of the LORD among the nations; proclaim that this name is exalted. Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth. Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

Philippians 4:4-7

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Luke 3:7-18

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor;’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food bust do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats of false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.” As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, 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.” So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.

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I’ve been reading a bit about coffee lately. Working at Starbucks will do that, I guess. Mostly, I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of information, the diversity of plant types, the intensely complicated process of finding a place to plant and then waiting for a tree to come to fruit and then harvesting, milling, processing, shipping, roasting, grinding, brewing, serving… it’s mind-boggling. And there are people out there who are very, very well skilled at tasting the particularities of one crop over another, just like there are folks who can pull out all the flavors or even the year’s soil quality, from a single taste of wine. 

One of my friends in seminary, funnily enough his name is Luke, used to roast his own coffee. Now, what I’ve learned in the last month or so is that the coffee bean as it gets to wholesale is less than half the mass of the original bean from the plant, because of stripping the flesh of the fruit from the seed and washing or drying off the pulp. So much work goes into these trees, and more than half of the bean, from the outset, gets washed off and thrown out. Luke uses a stovetop popcorn popper, with a wooden handle to turn the stirring mechanism, and he heats those raw green coffee beans and stirs them until there’s a cracking sound, like rice crisps or television static, and they go quiet a moment before the second round of cracking sounds, at which point Luke takes the popcorn popper full of roasted coffee beans off the stovetop and grabs his two mesh wire colanders to sift them outside off the back porch, so the smoke won’t set off fire alarms. He tells me the smoke is better than Febreeze at getting odd smells out of a house, but I just take his word for it, because I can not get the smell of coffee out of my Starbucks shirts.

Since I knew Luke in seminary, of course I took careful mental pictures of this process, knowing that it would probably be my only personal encounter with copious amounts of chaff, and I would need that image for a sermon on any text dealing with sifting and sorting chaff. It’s like leftover bits of tissue paper, just floating away on the wind, or the annoying pieces of popcorn that get stuck between your teeth when you make it from scratch on the stovetop. Chaff is not very useful except, I guess, it might serve to sort of protect the seed inside as it grows, but that’s as far as it goes. Not even really digestible except for livestock, and more or less serves as roughage plowed into the soil.

We’re sort of entering the holiday of chaff, aren’t we? In a way, I mean, that image of Christmas morning with the kids when all of the presents have been opened and the wrapping paper is everywhere, and the boxes and instruction manuals we don’t bother to read, the tape and old envelopes and sticky tinsel from the tree that keeps attaching itself to ugly sweaters… like it or not, Christmas has, in a lot of ways, become a holiday surrounded in chaff.

But we like chaff. We cling to so much of it, for looks or comfort or another attempt at belonging and seeming more important than we feel. Whether it’s another handbag we don’t need, or another holiday desert we eat just for the nostalgia, or another gun to make ourselves feel more secure, we constantly grab for more, either to stand on or hide behind, and John the Baptizer has a good word for us this morning: the chaff will be burned with unquenchable fire!

And what a good word that is! John is telling the people about a coming day when the Lord will come with the Holy Spirit, and it will feel like dying, or maybe like those dreams where we can fly, but it will be a doozy. The image is so frightening to the people that even tax collectors and soldiers ask him how they can avoid it. John tells them “The chainsaw is set at the trunk of the tree, and every tree that does not perform some worthwhile function is gonna be eeeeeeeerrrrrrr chopped down, thrown into the fire, burned up, Halleluia!” (from CottonPatch Gospel) So of course they desperately want to avoid being trimmed off or chopped down, wouldn’t we all? Being told we aren’t useful is one of the most shameful things we in America can think of! It’s one of the reasons we hoard so much chaff, as proof that we’ve earned our way and can be worthwhile. You’ve gotta be “useful” to the community, and we sure think we can define what useful means and who it’s gotta be in relation to.

So you want to avoid being cut down as a useless tree? Give your extra coat, John says, to somebody who doesn’t have one. Be content with your paycheck. Don't cheat your neighbor. Completely contrary to the American dream, for sure, where everybody’s beating each other up for the latest big discount on the greatest new television or more impressive wardrobe or something. John tells the people “stop being a useless collector of stuff you don’t need when other people actually need it!” and that message somehow gets people thinking he might be the next Messiah.

We have a lot of Messiahs, then, if John is the anointed one. Lots of people telling us how to live better Christian lives, telling us how to vote, how to think, how to react, how to give, how to forgive, how to behave, how to fall in love, how to be x, y, or z.

But better than John is coming. Better than all of the self-help books on decluttering our lives. Fire is coming, the fire of the Lord, the fire of the Holy Spirit, the unquenchable fire that will stop at nothing to burn away all that gets between us and the God who rejoices over us with singing. That fire is a love that is a passion unequaled by anything poets or songwriters ever could imagine, stronger and more blood and guts deep than any Hallmark or Precious Moments or Thomas Kinkaid painting of warm window lights in a cottage surrounded by snow.

Better than John is coming, fire is coming, to draw out from us the shame that brings fire to our faces, and to burn it away so it can no longer tell us lies about ourselves. Fire is coming, to melt frozen hearts that have closed up in self-defense after one too many hurts. Fire to give us a fresh start, again and again.

Better than John is coming. The harvest will be gathered, the chaff burned away, and the wheat become bread for the feeding of the nations. Then the useless tree will once again bear fruit, the tree of death will become a tool for bringing life to all the world, and God will bring us home.