The Impossible Possibility for an Impossible Time, I: Baptism by Fire

On the second Sunday of January, every year the church commemorates the baptism of our Lord. So this is our Gospel Lesson today. Katie and I are beginning a sermon series today called The Impossible Possibility for an Impossible Time. Hear the Word of the Lord:

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He 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.”

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He 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.”

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened,and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

As this wretched pandemic drags on toward the end of a second year, it really is an impossible time, isn’t it? I don’t want to exaggerate or engage in self-pity, because we’ve been through worse before—the Civil War, the Great Depression, the darkest days of World War II.

But signs of frayed nerves are all around, from the Capital Building, to school board meetings, to Whole Foods, to our own family rooms. Claustrophobically cooped up together for months with children in virtual school, married couples are fighting more. They don’t have time to be away from each other and to miss each other and to desire each other.^[1]

In 2021 there were about 5,000 incidents of unruly passengers on airplanes. That’s a high multiple of what it’s ever been before.

Behavior at high school sporting events has never been worse. At a basketball game in Washington State, a mostly white crowd taunted two black sisters with racial epithets and monkey sounds. When their mother complained, someone emailed to tell her that she had failed as a mother because her kids are different, and they should have been prepared for what was happening.

This is not isolated incident. It’s happening everywhere. At a high school soccer match in Vermont one player from the visiting team walked off the field when the home crowd sexually harassed her.  Her coach pulled his entire team from the pitch and they went home.^[2] Journalist Sarah Lyall calls it “a persistent hum of incivility.”^[3]

During the season of Epiphany this year from Christmas to Lent, the Revised Common Lectionary is giving us Gospel stories from the early ministry of Jesus from the visit of the Magi to his Transfiguration on the Holy Mountain, and since in my lengthening lifetime there has never been a time when the Christ-like virtues were more needed, I thought we could see what we could learn from the Lord how to do our own small part to address this “persistent hum of incivility.”

When the crowds ask John the Baptizer if he is the long-promised Messiah, John replies, “I baptize you with water, but one is coming who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to untie. He will baptize you with fire and the Spirit.”

John’s is a baptism by water, but Jesus’ is a baptism by fire. Listen to what John says, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” You understand the metaphor John is playing with in this image, right? A farmer harvests the wheat right along with the chaff, the husks, the waste, the debris, but then at the threshing floor a sifting is necessary to separate the useful and edible from the useless and inedible.

At the threshing floor the farmer would take a pitchfork or a shovel of wheat and chaff and thrust it up into the wind, and the heavier wheat would fall safely to the earth in piles and the weightless chaff would drift away in the wind, then collected later and set afire.

What John’s trying to tell us, I think, is that the lives of those who follow the Christ require some sifting and some sorting. There is that in our lives which is weightless and worthless, that which husks our lives in mediocrity and sloth and incivility.  There is that in us which needs to be burned away, like the chaff from the wheat, like the dross from the gold, like a wound cauterized against infection.

How are you doing with your New Year’s Resolutions? Anybody doing a Dry January? Every January, by a happy coincidence, the Christian Church finds brave John the Baptist astride the threshold of the New Year. Every year on the second Sunday of January, Baptism of the Lord Sunday, the Church hears the bold, angry, eccentric, forthright words of this oddball from the wilderness.

The message of John the Baptist is such grand good news at the beginning of the New Year because it means that we who follow the Christ need no longer be weighed down by the frightful burden of the past. We no longer need be what we have always been; we can be so much better and so much more. We are not trapped inside our own skins and our own histories; we are not perpetually chained to a compelling orbit around the same dying star; we can escape the gravitational pull of the past.

Do you think the world could use a few people who at least try to emulate the Christ during this “persistent hum of incivility?”  The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called Jesus “the impossible possibility.”^[4]

That is to say, Jesus is the God-Man. He is a simple carpenter from Nazareth, but also “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.” We will never be able to reach up to his towering stature or copy his radiant virtues. That is impossible. But everything depends on the attempt. We have to keep trying to mimic The Impossible Possibility. On airplanes, at basketball games, at Whole Foods, in your family room, even at the birthday party with your anti-mask, anti-vax uncle.

None of us are born with native civility or inherent courtesy. Those are life skills that have to be learned and disciplines that need to be cultivated, and too often right now it looks as if in the last two years we have unlearned them. Social engagements are rarer now than once they were. Restaurants and Church are a little scary right now, so many of us stay away. We don’t even go to the grocery store anymore. We order our supplies online and never even see the guy who delivered them, much less the farmer that grew them, or the worker who packaged them.

We are out of practice. We are playing life like the Detroit Lions play football, with spectacular, persistent ineptitude. So let’s do better and work harder and reach up to the impossible possibility, winnow the chaff and burn the dross. A Baptism by Fire.

I think my favorite short story of all time is Flannery O'Connor’s "Revelation." It was published in 1964, the year Ms. O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39. “Revelation is about a self-satisfied woman who considers herself holier than most. She thinks that Jesus loves her because she is good. She doesn't realize that she is good because Jesus loves her.

She keeps thanking God that he made her the way she is—she’s not black, she’s not white trash, and she’s not ugly, and she says to herself, “If it’s one thing I am, it’s grateful.

When I think of who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you Jesus, for making everything the way it is.’”

But at the end of the story, she has a vision of all the saints marching into heaven at judgement day, and she is surprised to learn that those she considers to be the lowest of the earth—like blacks and white trash—are the first to go in and straggling in at the last are all the good, holy people.

And the story says of these saints, "she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away."^[5]

These last few years,

Somehow, we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished

Even as we grieved, we grew
Even as we hurt, we hoped
Even as we tired, we tried

For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it^[6]

^[1] Tara Parker-Pope, Christina Caron, Monica Cordero Sancho, “We Surveyed 1,320 Therapists Across the Nation. They’re Worried About Mental Health in the U.S.,” The New York Times, January 3, 2022.

^[2] Roman Stubbs, “As Fans Return to High School Sports, Officials Say Student Behavior Has Never Been Worse,” The Washington Post, December 18, 2021.

^[3] Sarah Lyall, “A Nation on Hold Wants to Speak with a Manager,” The New York Times, January 1, 2022.

^[4] Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Harper & Brothers, 1935), 109.

^[5] Flannery O'Connor, "Revelation," in The Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor (New York:  Library of America, 1988), p. 654.

^[6] Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb.”