Sermon — January 12, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There are three questions that always come up when we get to this particular Gospel reading, as we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus on this Sunday after the Epiphany. First: Why does Jesus, of all people, need to be baptized? Second: What on earth is John talking about with this baptism of fire, and why does it sound so scary? And third, for the particularly regular worshipers: Didn’t we just read this? (Like, a month ago?)
And indeed we did! There is a Venn diagram in which the Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Advent overlaps with the Gospel reading for this morning. In December, we read a few extra verses at the beginning, where John calls people a “brood of vipers” and tells them that “the ax is lying at the root of the trees.” This morning, we read the verses at the end, in which Jesus is baptized. And in the middle, the two Sundays overlap with the winnowing fork and the threshing floor, with the Holy Spirit and the unquenchable fire.
And Michael preached a great sermon on that overlapping part back then. (He’s away for a few weeks at seminary, by the way; I didn’t fire him.) He pointed out that this winnowing process isn’t about dividing between people, saying you are wheat but you are chaff—you will be gathered in, but you will burn in unquenchable fire. It’s about something within each person.
You can compare the image to some others that we get. Jesus talks about a fishnet catching all kinds of fish, and the good fish being picked out, and the rotten thrown away. (Matthew 14:47-51) And he talks about dividing the sheep from the goats, on the basis of how they treated people who were hungry, or foreign, or sick. (Matt. 25:31-46)
You can be a good fish, or a bad one. You can be a sheep or a goat. These are separate categories, and you can sort one from the other. But there’s no such thing as a grain of wheat, without chaff. The chaff is just the husk, the protective outer layer around the kernel inside. And the wheat and the chaff are always both there at first. Even the heartiest whole-wheat flour throws away the chaff; but without the chaff, that grain of wheat could never survive. And so you need to thresh the harvested wheat, to loosen the grain from the straw. And you need to winnow it, tossing it up into the air with the fork, letting the heavier grains of wheat fall back to the ground while the lighter husk, the chaff, floats off.
Wheat and chaff aren’t like good fish and bad, sheep and goats, two separate categories into which you, as a person, might fall. We all have both wheat and chaff. They are two parts of each one of us, one that has served its purpose and can be released, and the other that needs to emerge for you to become who you were meant to be.
This makes some sense, I think. I wouldn’t be the first to observe that many of our worst tendencies—or at least the medium-bad ones that matter for most of us day to day—originate as defense mechanisms. Our annoying or difficult or toxic personality traits start out as the ways we protect ourselves against one another, or our parents, or the world—they are our chaff, our own protective husks. But eventually, they’re no longer helping us, they’re hurting, and it’s time to let them go.
So much for John, for now. We’ll come back to him. But what’s up with Jesus? Why is he being baptized today? (Well, Ethan’s being baptized today. Why was Jesus being baptized back then?) Christian give lots of theological explanations of what baptism is and what it means. And for most of those explanations, the Baptism of Jesus is a confusing event. Is baptism about the washing away of our inherited original sin? The who are most adamant that that’s what baptism does would also tell you that Jesus doesn’t inherit original sin. Is baptism way that we symbolize and embody coming to believe in Jesus and accepting him as our Savior? Jesus’ own baptism seems redundant, then. (It’s a sign that he believes in himself?) Is baptism a way of bringing someone new into the Church, making them a part of the Body of Christ in some mystical but also real way? Again, it seems odd—surely Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan isn’t what makes him part of the Body of Christ; his body, when it goes down into the water, is by definition, the Body of Christ.
These are all reasons that we might be baptized, now. But why was Jesus baptized, then?
I don’t know “why,” of course, but I do know “what.” In other words—I don’t know why it is that God chose to act this way, but I do know what happens, according to Luke: the heavens open, and the Holy Spirit descends, and a voice says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (3:22)
Have you ever needed to hear that voice? Have you ever needed God to say, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased?” Have you ever just needed to hear someone say that, for someone to tell you that you are worthy, and you are loved, and they are pleased with you?
Everyone who has ever been baptized, or ever will be, is baptized into the Body of Christ. In some mysterious way, we join with him in that one baptism. We go down into the water with Jesus, and with him, we stand back up. And indeed, God says to each one of us, on that day, and every day, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t any chaff in your life, if you want to bring it back to John. It doesn’t mean God likes everything you do or say. It means that God loves you, like the best parent you can imagine would love you. It means that God wants you to be the best and most true version of yourself. It means that God wants you to try to be faithful to God’s promises of love, and to be faithful to God’s commandment to love as you have been loved. And sometimes a life lived in love feels a lot like being threshed—at least how I imagine being threshed would feel, if I were wheat. Sometimes life turns you inside out, and upside down. It whacks you with a big old flail and it picks you up with a winnowing fork and throws you in the air. Sometimes you find yourself on the floor, thinking, “What on earth was that?” And sometimes, on the other side of all of that, you come out looking a little more like wheat, with a few bits of that chaff in your life blown away.
But God isn’t only waiting for you on the other side of all that tumult, ready to love you once you’re perfect. God is already here, now, loving you where you are, and as you are. And the message that Isaiah delivered to the ancient Israelites is the same message that God has for you: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you…You are precious in my sight,” God says to you today, “and honored, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43:1–2, 4)
And everything else—every article of faith, every choice we make in life, every hymn that we sing, each of our baptismal vows—is nothing but our attempt to respond to God in love; to be the beloved children God already knows we are, in the sure and certain hope that we will one day stand before God, and God will wipe off that remaining bit of chaff, and God will say again to each one of us, more clearly than ever before, “You are my Beloved Child; with you I am well pleased.”