Water-Born and Touched With Fire

We’ve been here before with John the Baptist. Right before Christmas, you’ll remember, we were listening to the opening verses of the same gospel passage we have for today. People were coming out into the desert. John was baptizing them in the Jordan River, challenging them to change their behavior so that they could be ready for God’s new thing. And when the people started to wonder if John was maybe more than a prophet, maybe more than a forerunner, maybe a Messiah, John confronted them.

“I baptize you with water, but someone more powerful than I is on the way. I’m not even worthy to untie his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

John’s day was passing. The next thing we hear about him is that King Herod had locked him away in prison because John had rebuked Herod over taking his brother’s wife as his own. Soon Herod would have his head. But Jesus’ day was coming.

John baptized with water for the forgiveness of sins. “Jesus,” he said, “will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Those images don’t mean much to most of us – winnowing forks, threshing floors, chaff – but they would have been very familiar to the people John was talking to. They would even have been familiar to most Americans growing up in the 19^th century.

The Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton has a recreated American farm from the early 1800s and the barn there has large forks that were used for gathering wheat and a big floor with doors at both ends that can be opened to allow the wind to come through. It’s a threshing floor that would have been recognizable even to farmers in Jesus’ day. Threshing involves separating the edible grain from the inedible husk surrounding it – the chaff. In the 19^th century this often meant letting cattle tromp on it or beating it with a flail. Then the winnowing fork would be used to toss the grain and chaff into the air. If there was a good wind blowing through the grain would fall back to the ground, but the chaff would be blown away.

So it’s kind of a violent image that John is using. There’s beating and burning going on. But notice that it’s not like there’s good grain that’s being kept and bad grain that’s being burned. All the grain is going through this process so that what is good and essential is kept and what is not helpful or useful is gotten rid of.

This is what being baptized by the Holy Spirit and fire is about. It is about more than just forgiveness – it is about transformation and change. It is about giving ourselves over to God’s threshing so that what is good and essential about us can be separated out from the things that are not helpful or useful – the sin that clings to us.

To use Wesleyan terms, it is the difference between justifying grace – the grace that brings us into relationship with Christ and joins us to the salvation that Jesus has won for us through the cross – and sanctifying grace that helps us to grow in holiness – throwing off the habits and paths that turn us away from God and taking on the new practices that transform us into the likeness of Christ. That is a process that is a whole lot like going through the fire because we are very attached to our chaff. Sometimes it looks like grain to us.

C.S. Lewis has a dramatic image of this in his book, The Great Divorce. In the book he is imagining a bus journey taken by a number of people who live in a grey town that is meant to be hell or a kind of purgatory to heaven. Once they arrive there they are each given the opportunity to change so that they can be suited for this new environment – this new place which seems so much more solid and real to them than the place they have come from. More solid even than they are themselves.

One of the bus riders coming up to hill country outside heaven is a ghost of a man with a red lizard on his shoulder. He knows that the lizard is killing him. It sits there and whispers all kinds of destructive things in his ear. A flaming spirit comes to the man and volunteers to remove the lizard which is somehow fused to his shoulder.

The lizard resists. It says to the man – “It will kill us both. This spirit is really trying to harm you. You won’t be able to get along without me. You need me.”

The man asks if maybe the spirit can silence it without killing it and the angel says that the lizard must die. Finally the man gives his consent and the angel pulls the lizard off his shoulder, crushes it and throws it to the ground. It is apparently dead but then it rises up and becomes transformed into a glorious white stallion that the man, who is now no longer a ghost, mounts and rides off into the high country that is heaven.[i]

How many of us live with the idea that the things that our red lizards tell us are essential and can’t be done without? Laura T. Elliot, who is a writer, calls these voices “the Bluetooth monster,” because they sit there in our ears like a Bluetooth headset for a cell phone and they tell us we can’t be what God made us to be. For her, as she struggles to be a writer, the Bluetooth monster says things like:

“’You’re no good…You can’t do this. Who are you to swim in the same current with people like them?’ His forked tongue flicks against my earlobe, like a pointing finger, and before me are the ghosts of so many people I admire. I’ve lopped the head off of this monster before but like the Hydra, there’s always more to replace it. At moments like this, I find myself retreating—from people, from life, from writing.”[ii]

If we have been water born and touched with fire than we can’t retreat from life. We have to embrace it, engage it, believe that there is something more at stake in this world than just our standing in it. We have to go through the winnowing process that takes away the stuff that stands in the way of our living out the gospel. And then we are free to be radical people, setting the world on fire so that everyone can see – whatever their situation, whatever their Bluetooth monsters – that there is a different way to live in this world. There is another way. There is the Way. That’s what Christians were called in the early days – followers of the Way.

The Christian activist Shane Claiborne tells the great story about his grandfather who lived in East Tennessee and about the time he got himself a new truck and trailer. It was hay-baling time so he got his brother and the two of them went out and loaded up the trailer with as much hay as they possible could – just to test out how much load this new trailer could handle.

They were riding down the road feeling very proud of what this new vehicle could handle when something bad happened. Some of the hay was rubbing up against a tire and it caught fire. Then that hay bale caught another bale on fire and pretty soon they had a conflagration in the trailer. It looked like a comet, Shane says.

But the two men in the front didn’t notice. Grandpa and his brother were just talking away. People were waving hysterically at them from the side of the road and they were just smiling and waving back the way that you do in rural places.

Then finally, Grandpa looked in his rearview mirror and there was the back of his new truck all ablaze. He pulled over to the side of the road, but that caused a new problem – with the truck stopped the flames came forward and were burning up the actual truck. His brother started clearing out the truck, thinking it was going to be a total loss, but Grandpa said, “Hop back in. I got an idea.”

So they got back in and Grandpa took off at 90 miles an hour, tearing down the road and as he did he started swerving left and right so that the flaming hay bales would start falling off the side of the trailer. It worked in getting rid of the problem, but it caused another problem. Grandpa was starting fires in people’s fields all along the way. Fire trucks started following them putting out fires all down the road and finally putting out the truck. When Grandpa got out of jail he said, “Shane, we set half of East Tennessee on fire.”

Claiborne uses that story to ask, “What if the kingdom of God looks like that?” “Christians blaze through this dark world and set it on fire with their love. We are people who shine, who burn up the darkness of this old world with the Light that dwells within us. Maybe when we’re dead and gone, people will look around and ask, ‘What in the world passed through here?’”[iii]

What if the kingdom of God looks like that? What if our baptisms are an entry into a life that is all about changing the world? Taking sinners and offering them new life. Isn’t that what happened to us? Is still happening to us? Making sure that every child has a home and a place where they are loved. Challenging the death-dealing ways of a society that glorifies cynicism and that says the greatest thing we can aspire to be is consumers. Confronting powers that believe that torture is an acceptable way to be human. Confronting ideologies and corrupted religions that believe that strapping on a bomb or taking explosives on a plane and dealing out death is a way of bringing God glory.

Who can do that? Who must do that? Every Christian who has followed Jesus into the waters of baptism and who has claimed for herself or himself the freedom and power to be what God made her or him to be. Who must do that? You must do that. Because you are more than a slave to the Bluetooth monster whispering in your ear. You are a child of God. And the words spoken over Jesus as he emerged from the water of his baptism were spoken over you as well. “You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Thanks be to God.

Luke 3:15-22 [NRSV]

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.

But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother's wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

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[i] C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, excerpt located in http://www.onthewing.org/user/CSL_Little%20Red%20Lizard%20-%20CS%20Lewis.pdf.

[ii] L.T. Elliot, “The Bluetooth Monster,” from the blog “Dreams of Quill and Ink,” 18 Dec 2009, http://lexiconluvr.blogspot.com/2009/12/bluetooth-monster.html.

[iii] Shane Claiborne & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals, [Downers Grove, IL:IVP Books, 2008], p. 116.