A meditation on Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Wheat is a grass species with large grains around their seeds. Humans have cultivated wheat for thousands of years. The grain itself has three parts: endosperm (used for white flour), bran, and germ (the part that sprouts). As it grows, though, special leaf-like structures surround the grain. These structures, called chaff, are inedible and must be removed. A major development in agriculture was the cultivation of free-threshing wheat, in which the chaff can be easily removed by beating (threshing) the harvested sheaves. After threshing, the chaff is no longer attached to the grain, but everything is all mixed together. “Winnowing” involves throwing the mixture up in the air with a light wind (possibly provided by a fan). The grain falls while the chaff blows away.
John the Baptist was a firebrand of a preacher. He held nothing back when he was teaching his followers. And yet, he said that worse was to come: “I baptize you with water, but … [the Messiah] 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.” Pretty strong words! Hearing them, I’m not sure I would really look forward to the coming of the Messiah.
What is chaff? One common interpretation of this verse, and many similar verses of judgment, interprets the wheat and chaff as people: righteous people are the wheat, wicked people are the chaff. Yet Solzhenitsyn had a brilliant insight:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nobody is perfect. Nobody is righteous in themselves. Everybody falls short of the glory of God. Everybody can point to ways they have hurt other people.
Yet we often feel compelled to hurt people, by action or inaction, as a way to protect ourselves. We know that we should welcome the stranger and help the poor, but when confronted with an actual poor stranger, our fear prevents us from welcoming and helping them. We know that we should put God first in our lives, but spend most of our time chasing money so that we can have a comfortable life.
Plus, we are all connected to various social structures: our family, community, workplace, church, other organizations, state, and nation. I may be willing to follow God’s call in a certain way, but I have to work within the rules of these social structures. When I have to choose between my urge to do the right thing and my desire to belong to a certain organization or community, I may choose belonging as the easier, more comfortable path.
This is the chaff. These are the things that protect us in this world as we grow into the people God desires, but do not serve us in God’s kin-dom. Our fears, our attachments, our covetous yearnings, our anger, our anxiety—they all separate us from each other and from God, yet they are necessary to function in this broken world.
I am currently on my second reading of Resisting Happiness by Matthew Kelly, on the recommendation of my dear friend Ashley Brooks. (It’s one of the things that led her to become the executive director of the Rolla Mission.) It is written from deep in the Roman Catholic tradition, so there are some things that just don’t apply outside of that context. One valuable part of Roman Catholicism, though, is the ritual of confession. Repentance is a critical part of the Christian tradition, one that we include in Presbyterian worship each Sunday. There are three main parts of confession: self-examination to prayerfully consider the ways in which you have failed to meet God’s standard; the actual confession in which you put words to your sins (either speaking to a priest or, in my tradition, directly to God through prayer) and express contrition; and the joyful response in which you celebrate knowing that God has forgiven you, so you share God’s mercy with others.
There is also a need for restitution. As we confess, God forgives us, but that doesn’t necessarily resolve any pain we caused someone else. I’m reminded of the confession scene in Moonstruck. (I can’t find a better video, sorry.) Loretta, Cher’s character, confesses that “once I slept with the brother of my fiancé.” The priest absolves her, but her life is still a mess. She still has to deal with the disruptions in her relationships, but she can do so with the confidence that God loves her.
In the same way, we each need to reflect on the ways in which we have fallen short of God’s calling—the people we have hurt through action or inaction, the barriers we have erected between ourselves and our neighbors or between ourselves and God. Self-examination and confession are essential, but so is the response: work towards restitution and reconciliation.
Jesus’s message throughout the Gospels was, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!” Then he told people what that meant in their lives. For each person, there was a different answer, but in every case, Jesus told them to set aside anything that was preventing them from fully entering fellowship with God and all of God’s people.
John the Baptist taught a baptism of repentance. All four Gospels report, though, that Jesus was baptized. We believe Jesus was the only human who was sinless. So why was he baptized?
In other passages that describe John’s teachings, he emphasized social issues like generosity and fairness. Jesus was not himself sinful, but he was a part of sinful social structures. That’s unavoidable in this world. If Jesus wanted to worship with his fellow Jews, he had to visit the Temple, which excluded people that he would have included (women, Gentiles, lepers, the disabled). He was able to connect with all of these people individually, but could not overcome the sinful exclusionary practices of the religious establishment. He was part of a sinful economic system governed by an occupying army.
So Jesus was baptized to proclaim his participation in the reconciliation of the world. By himself, Jesus of Nazareth could not change the social, political, and religious structures of Judea, but he could start a movement that would. Through his death and resurrection, and through the action of the Holy Spirit, he could continue to work through people everywhere, in every age, to reconcile us to each other and to God. Even today, he is working through me, through you, through each person who hears his message or feels the Holy Spirit’s nudges to create a more connected, inclusive, just, and righteous world.
Our task, then, is to look at the world, see where there are problems that God is trying to solve, and try to be a part of the solution. There are so many problems, though. It can become overwhelming. In five minutes of doomscrolling, you can read about political struggles in the US and abroad, wars, famine, homelessness, climate disruptions, and more. There is too much for anyone to fix, so it’s easy to lose hope and just quit.
I’m taking the other approach. I can’t fix everything, but I CAN fix something. I can’t change the world, but maybe I can change one person’s world. I will continue to work at the Mission as my small contribution to resolving the issue of homelessness in America. But my true calling is to work for the reconciliation of the Christian church with the LGBTQ+ community.
There are some people who read that and think, Right, gay people need to repent of their sinful desires and become Christians. That’s not what I mean. I mean that the CHURCH needs to repent of its sins. For centuries, LGBTQ+ issues were completely in the closet—ignored, not even castigated, as the church pretended that concepts like sexual orientation and gender identity didn’t exist. Over the past century, Christianity at large has turned its attention on first sexual orientation and now gender identity as problems to be eliminated. Instead, we should be treating LGBTQ+ individuals as people to be loved and welcomed. Not to “pray the gay away,” but to learn from their different perspectives and to show them that life is better in Christian community. To teach them that God loves them, and then to show that we love them, too. A person’s sexual orientation and gender identity are deep within them—wheat, not chaff.
That’s my calling. What’s yours? Where do you see God at work? What is the chaff in your life that needs to be removed so that you can be the person God desires? What are the social structures that are preventing you from doing so, that need to be changed? Blessings as you discern your path through this world as a participant in building God’s eternal kin-dom.