top of page

Sermon 5.12.25 Baptism of Fire: Love is a Burning Thing

standrewcin

Sermon Begins at 14:28

Love is a burnin’ thing, and it makes a fiery ring, bound by wild desire, I fell into a ring of fire.


I’m moved to preach to you about the Baptism of Fire, separating wheat from chaff.

Of all the motival images from the Bible, Wheat and Chaff and Fire have to be high up on my list of favorite metaphors.

Part of that is because they are so evocative.  They show up here in Luke 3. It also shows up in Matthew chapter 3.

It shows up in the Psalms several times, Psalm 1, 35, and 83.

It shows up in the Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea.

I have no texts that I can think of off the top of my head, but I am sure that it shows up in non-biblical sources as well.

It is a powerful image of destruction and salvation.

And I would wager that most people have one or two closely related ideas about what it means;

Without getting too technical, symbolic images like the metaphors of wheat and chaff, get their meaning, because there is a difference between what they are and what they symbolize.

A good idea of this symbolic switcheroo is a rose. It’s just a flower, right?

Until Valentine’s day…

Then that flower starts to carry other meanings that all of the advertisers have spent centuries subtly implanting into our ideas about roses.

A rose is love, it is thoughtfulness, it is singular, or it is a dozen-fold and extra-ordinary. It comes to represent western European ideas about femininity; soft, elegant, sometimes thorny.

In short, it comes to mean more than simply the thing that grows up from the ground and trellises well.

In the study of symbolism, which is called semiotics, the thing itself (like the rose) is called the signifier, and all of its connotations (the love, the thorniness) are called the signified.

But, the thing about metaphorical language and symbolism is that the meaning given to the signifier is not set in stone.

While the image stays the same, what is signified is highly malleable and moldable, and can change over time, take on new meanings, drop old meanings; they might mean very different things in different cultures, or different times. It may be absent altogether in places, where roses do not grow.

Wheat and Chaff and Fire are like this. A symbolic, motival image that recurs often in the Bible.

Now, I think if you were to put this up as a clue on Family Feud Bible edition, most of us would probably associate it with only one signified thing; the wheat are good people, and the chaff are bad people.

And, in fact, you stand on steady ground, if you think of it this way.

Certainly, the psalms use the metaphor in that way, as does Isaiah.

And so, we think of this as the “biblical image” for Wheat and Chaff; good people will be spared and collected up by God, but bad people will burn like chaff.

There are only two problems with looking at John the Baptist’s words like this.

The first is that the main image in Matthew and Luke is that of Baptism.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been to a baptism, where half the people were rejected.

Rather, one of the many things that we say during a baptism is, “Now sanctify this water, we pray you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that those who here are cleansed from sin and born again may continue for ever in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior.”

So, we have this idea of baptism, the Greek word for, (and I paraphrase) “hey you kids, go take a bath;”

As a type of cleansing.

So, I have to ask, does it make sense to you that John’s baptism of fire would have nothing to do with cleansing and only be a metaphor to describe God as a deity who throws people away?

The truth is that the Bible does use the metaphor of Wheat and Chaff and Fire in this way, BUT not always.

Like all metaphors, Wheat and Chaff and Fire are open to interpretation, even within the Bible.

Jeremiah uses the idea of the wind blowing chaff to describe the exile of all of the people in Jeremiah 13.

Hosea uses the image of chaff to describe how easily the people of Israel abandoned God for idols in the Wilderness after they left Egypt.

Neither of these really seems to fit with the idea of baptism either, though.

But, there is another biblical image that comes to mind, if we focus on Baptism as a type of fire, before coming back to the Wheat and Chaff.

Malachi compares the day of Judgement to a type of fire, but instead of fire burning up half of the people, he calls it a “refiner’s fire.”

Meaning that the fire’s job is to get rid of imperfections.

And, this image recurs as many if not more times than the image of evil people being burned up.

1 Peter talks about the refiner’s fire, Revelation does as well, Psalm 12, Psalm 66 (which says, “we went through fire and through water, and you brought us into a place of abundance.”)

Isaiah 48, Zechariah, Jeremiah.

In all of these, the refiner’s fire cleanses things from imperfections.

Now, It still doesn’t sound all that pleasant, but doesn’t it sound more like baptism?

 

So, why is all of this important?

What is clear - whether we think of Wheat, Chaff, and Fire as a metaphor for evil people vs. good people, or a refiner’s fire taking away our imperfections – is that John’s message is about the end of days.

As a prophet in the Hebrew tradition, he is trying to prepare people for the end of their life and the end of the age.

He is trying to get people to think beyond their everyday existence, and think about eternal things and the end.

The question at the heart of the matter is this; How will you show up before God, when your life is over?

C.S. Lewis wrote a book about this question, actually, called The Great Divorce.

Following in the long line of writers who speculate about what the afterlife will be like (from the 4000 year old cuneiform Epic of Gilgamesh, to Plato’s Myth of Er, Dante’s Inferno, Paradise Lost by Milton, Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan).

Unlike many other books of this genre, Lewis’ idea is like that of the refiner’s fire, of the separation of Wheat and Chaff as stand-in for the idea that there are things from this life that we need to leave behind, before we will be prepared to enter heaven.

In all, Lewis shows us a dozen or so people, who are all struggling to get to heaven after they have passed.

Everyone begins the journey at a bus stop, which is to take them to the plains of heaven.

Some people in the line, can’t stand the thought of waiting, or of being with this particular group of people, so they leave the line.

They never start the journey.

Some people get to the plains of heaven and see the mountain that they need to climb and decide to turn back.

Some can’t let go of things from the life that they lived on earth; their traumas, their judgement of others, or things they loved more than heaven.

All of them are given a guide and a choice; Do the hard work of leaving behind everything except the desire for heaven, or stay entrapped by the things that you put in God’s place during your life.

For Lewis, the choice is yours.

What is remarkable about Lewis’ book is that he conceives of salvation as open to all, but he also recognizes that separating from our egos and from our earthly bodies, like the separation of wheat and chaff and the refiner’s fire would bring a certain degree of pain or discomfort.

Like all good stories about what the afterlife might be like, The Great Divorce and John the Baptist’s declaration about the Baptism of Fire asks us to consider what the end will be like.

But, in as much as they are focused on what God will do, they also cause us to reflect on what we will do before the end.

You know last week, we talked about becoming a subject, meeting God and one another as an I to an I, rather than an eye for an eye.

The question that Lewis wants us to find out is what the answer to the question, when I strip all of the non-essential things away, what am I?

Who am I, at my core, in God’s eyes?

And then, what progress can I make in separating myself from my chaff during my lives, so that I can face the refiner’s fire without fear.

Because I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not perfect in the eyes of God yet.

And so, I ask you this week, during the season of Epiphany, where we look for revelations of how God is showing us the Way and as we approach the season of Lent;

What are things inside of yourself that you need to let go of?

Where is God leading you and what is holding you back?

What is the chaff that you can cast aside right now, rather than waiting until the end?

Losing those things, or ridding yourself of those things, it won’t be easy.

Let’s not pretend that it will be.

It may even feel as Johnny Cash sang like falling into a burning ring of fire.

But after that, after being released from your burdens, your self justifications and excuses, your addictions, or your cynicism and judgements… what will it feel like to be free… to be refined…?

In the end, we can make John the Baptist’s message about good people vs. bad people (of course we ALL know that we’re the good people, right?);

Or we can take them as a word of challenge, a word directed at all of us to examine ourselves and to let God reveal to us a way forward, so that we can have a Holy Epiphany. Amen

16 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page