Epiphany 1 C - Sunday, January 13, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC
Epiphany 1 C - Sunday, January 13, 2019
The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

I wonder if God ever gets tired of people speaking for him or pronouncing to their hearers what he’s going to do.  Of course, the enemy is always going to get the worst of his wrath.  We know that He really has it out for them, because our enemies are his enemies after all.  We are his children.

However, what if we’re on the other side?  What if we were Egyptians, Ethiopians, people from Seba and any other nation that is just an exchange for the Israelites?  With the injustice and cruelty going on in our nation now, maybe we deserve to be given away in exchange for those who live for God’s glory.  Oops!  Now there I go, speaking for God!

Even John is telling people what God’s going to do.  However, John may have been more correct about God’s Son than he realized.  Fire contains light, heat and in Scripture often symbolizes God’s presence.

Out of curiosity, I was interested in what threshing looked like.  What I witnessed on YouTube were farmers who laboriously went through various processes to thresh and winnow out wheat from chaff.  This included one focused and determined farmer who insisted travelling the whole journey with wheat from the field to the plate.  It was a messy and imperfect project taking him all day to complete.  However, he approached the effort as a true labor of love, ending with his childlike wonder cooking and eating the pancake, which came from this adventure.

In this Gospel passage, everybody’s expectant of something.  Is John the Messiah?  No, he nips that rumor in the bud immediately and abruptly.  I doubt the innocence and humility of the farmer was what John had in mind, either, when he painted the picture of Jesus with his winnowing fork.  Who knows what Jesus expected?      

Finally, God actually speaks.  Psalm 29 describes this voice as a voice of splendor, upon mighty waters, cracking cedar trees in half, stripping forests bare and making mountains skip like calves and young wild oxes.  

Yet his primary word to one man of thousands who come out to be baptized by John is one of love.  And that love is as passionate as fire, and as gentle as the attention and care of bringing forth wheat from the chaff that shelters and protects it.  Then the relationship between him and his beloved son is sealed and consummated with the Spirit descending on Jesus as the bodily affirmation of Jesus’ identity and the Trinity is seen together as one.

Then, God’s voice unleashes an unquenchable fire of love so fierce and hot that it ignites the passion and fury of Jesus to become the winnowing fork, the threshing floor, the wheat and even the chaff for our own fires of violence and victimization.  By the cross, Jesus exposes to us the evil and lie that we are singled out, separated or excluded and the Other is our enemy and scapegoat.

But God’s voice is also a voice that can split flames of fire, Psalm 29 again says.  It can penetrate through any of our fires that burn themselves out very quickly, and I would also like to think that would include John’s unquenchable fire.  In earth, water and fire, the Spirit tells us who we are, whose we are and who we can be if we only give in to Christ’s passionate fire and careful and intimate attention.  

Imagine experiencing this same acceptance, love and passion at our own Baptism.  Yes, most of us probably were baptized when we were children, but we renew that covenant not only yearly but every time we have a consciousness of God calling us by name, all of us.  

Baptism is not an instant ticket to innocence and faultlessness and therefore exclusion.  It is only a beginning, an initiation into a messy, imperfect, laborious process of being scattered all over a threshing floor and having our heart brought out of the hulls and dirt of defenses, self-righteousness and coldness.  This takes many steps, picking, sifting and more picking and sifting.  Still the chaff is not completely removed nor is it all burned.  However, as the farmer, I witnessed said, he would do it again.  And so does Christ again and again so that we can enter into a new covenant with God and are immersed into God’s fiery desire for his New Creation.  Amen.