Saturday, January 9, 2010

Great Expectations

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The Baptism of the Lord C, January 9/10, 2010.
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 “Great Expectations”

You all know the story of the Cat in the Hat? It’s a terrible story, really, about these latch-key kids and an strange intruder with all sorts of strange ideas. The Cat’s idea of play gets wilder and wilder until the house is trashed, a mess, a horrible scene. The only sane voice is the fish – and when the fish talks to you – you know you are in trouble.

The fish reminds us that there will be a judgment, a reckoning , a taking stock of what we have been entrusted with. The children were trusted to be home alone – and now, now, Mother is coming – you can see her shoe through the window.

That was the terrible tension in the story, always for me. I always worried that the children would be caught and in trouble. Even when I knew how it ended.

It ends with Grace, because the Cat himself becomes the instrument of putting things back together.

I thought about this story, because we hear about ‘expectations’ in the Gospel lesson – we hear about the expectations that God is going to come – the Messiah is going to appear, much like Mother almost appears at the end of the Cat in the Hat.

Great Expectations – That’s what struck me when I read this story from the Gospel – the people had great expectations about John the Baptist and the coming actions of God. In their hearts they were questioning whether John was the Messiah. Interesting, they were convinced that the Messiah was coming – just not who the Messiah was or how it would happen.

So John, with all his strange behavior – living as a hermit in the wilderness, and for all his strange and harsh preaching about the judgment to come – John was in the running to be the Messiah.

That’s a great expectation, for sure. Could you be following the One, could repenting for your sins and getting baptized by John protect you from the coming wrath? John was pretty strong stuff, after all. But John the Baptizer had another role, another understanding of what he was there to do.

“I can baptize you with water – to mark your repentance – but someone else is coming, someone more powerful than I, with intentions to harvest the best – to test with fire and Spirit. “

Strong stuff. Winnowing and sifting, separating the chaff from the good grain. My husband, the old farm-boy – did you know that he grew up pushing cows around on an old-fashioned dairy farm? Ask him sometime about the old way of farming.

My husband commented that few people today would understand what winnowing was about. My research shows that winnowing the grain actually takes place inside the combine now – it is a hidden part of the process when that grain is taken into the machine and shaken.

In Jesus’ time it was a clear and obvious step in the process of getting good, clean grain. It was a necessary step, to move from the natural state of the wheat or barley – with its dried threads and covering – to first beat it – threshing or thrashing it, on a special threshing ground (the threshing floor), then throwing it up in the air for the lighter and looser waste to be blown away. It was hard, dusty and dirty – but necessary to get the good out.

That’s what John is promising – a process that will be dramatic in its rigor. Notice John is not saying this about himself – he is saying it about the One who is to come. He is saying it about the messiah of God. That one will be involved in a powerful movement with fire and wind and Holy Spirit.

It’s like the Mother coming back in the Cat in the Hat, you see – except I don’t think the Cat will magically correct everything that got messed up. The Mother will come, and that can make us anxious. John is about pointing the way to Jesus, and his vision is a difficult one.

So what is being winnowed and sifted and blow away?
Is it only the people of Israel – the people who are listening to John at the River Jordan?
Is it people in a group – some of whom will be cast out on the wind, and some who will be kept?
Or could it be that each one who comes to the water will face this process? Each one of us, could face this time of threshing, sifting, winnowing and removal of chaff?

If the Baptism of the Messiah – the one who is to come, is not just a moment in the life of a child – long ago for most of us - . If the baptism of the Messiah is really the start of our relationship with the Holy Spirit of God – then we should expect our lives to show it. Our expectations may not be about the end of the world – but we should have expectations that something will be different – in us.

John talks about a winnowing fork – a object that picks up the grain and tosses it high in the air, so that the lighter waste may blow away, and the good grain, which is heavy and meaty, falls to the ground.

Now some of you had had moments, even in the years I’ve been here, and certainly in the times before I came to work with you – when you’ve been tossed around by life. Maybe those are the times of threshing and winnowing by this Holy Spirit, the Spirit of honest love that comes to us in Baptism.

There have been times of stress and trial, times of doubt and grief, times of anxiety and times of repentance. There have been moments of hard decisions – of words that expressed our disappointments and struggles with each other – our families, loved ones, even the church.

There have also been, I’m sure, moments of joy and celebration – times when you felt you could commit to the best things in your life – to right relationships and honest work and excellent goals.

Are these the times when our chaff is blown away? Is this what John was telling us to expect?

Maybe these times, these hard times, these times of decisions, the times of celebration – are moments when the Holy Spirit – the spirit of fire and wind, the spirit of Jesus in love and in judgment – works most concretely in our lives.

I know, sometimes only when looking backwards, that the rough times, when I had the deepest struggles with other people, with myself and my dreams – is when the Holy Spirit was working in me to truly convict me of my sins, to point me in a new direction, to urge me to repair my relationship with God, and to start with a new attitude. And, in a lot of ways – that process never ends.

If the baptism of the Messiah is really the start of our relationship with the Holy Spirit of God – then we should expect our lives to show it. We are God’s children because he is our Father, and beloved of him – but like the children in the Cat in the Hat – we ought to be aware that he is also coming to ‘check us out’ – yes, to judge – and to make us more like him.

Great Expectations, indeed.
Great expectations of the Messiah – and of those who will follow that Messiah.

John’s words about the ‘One who is more powerful’ are frightening on the surface, but they are ultimately comforting, words of promise to those who trust and believe that Baptism is powerful event, an event extends to our whole lifetimes – birth and death and everything in between.

Welcome to water, fire and Spirit, says John, welcome to life, welcome to the power of the Holy Spirit in your life.

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