Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Luke 3-15-17, 21-22

I had a plan. The winnowing fork had captured my imagination. I wanted to walk to the pulpit, carrying one. I imagined it would look scary. If you’re going to throw something into unquenchable fire, I figured a preacher with a big fork would communicate final judgment. We’re all steeped in a cultural religion that that turns wheat and chaff into sheep and goats; some gathered in, some forced out, as if our score-keeping, violent, punitive way of being human is also the truth about God. Wheat on the right; chaff on the left. God only knows what’s in the balcony.

Turns out winnowing forks are hard to find. The only options on Amazon were a manure fork or a set of decorative rakes for your remodeled basement wall.

Show slide of two forks, a manure fork and a set of rakes.

It wasn’t long before I was reviewing pages of forks for appetizers. There was a fantastic olive fork that had its middle tine extended in a gesture that wasn’t appropriate for the screen at church.

The work of winnowing I wanted to say was not about burning chaff but about carefully finding and gathering together every grain of wheat. Not one grain would be lost. The only thing the messiah would have a hand in was burning anything that got in the way of that mission to gather everyone, just like Isaiah said, from the ends of the earth. And, oh, the things that Christ would burn. I had my ideas.

And then fire broke out in LA. The images of neighborhoods leveled; the violent wind that kept fires blazing and fire fighters in danger; interviews with people who were little by little remembering all the things that were lost. Almost as painful, were the immediate comments to politicize the fire, to create a narrative of sheep and goats, enemies and friends, even suggesting that immigrants might be the chaff that really needs to get burned.

I wanted that olive fork to hold up in my fisted hand if that’s what we’re going to with this tragedy.

It struck me that for most of the church’s history, we have baptized people in a world that’s burning down. Loss that’s unspeakable. Grief of losing what we knew, what we thought wouldn’t change. Tangible and real fear about what’s coming. Tyrants who embrace fire. “Let’s burn the house down,” has become a political strategy. Of course, every child is baptized into a church that has some form of heart burn and smoking resentment; into families that we pray will be good and abundant, but we know that, in the gracious words of my own therapist: It’s complicated. Or as Pastor Lois once described it: one hot mess.

If you’re still standing in the smoking rubble of a wild fire or your own messy life, you don’t need to hear that God sends fire, or struggles, or death for our own good or as a sign that we did something wrong. We don’t need an image of God, looking over the creation, folding the divine arms to say, “Figure it out or get burned up in unquenchable fire.”

After Hurricane Katrina, there was no shortage of Christian preachers who said that God sent that hurricane as judgment on evil New Orleans, all that sin and permissiveness on Bourbon Street. I’ll never forget a pastor from one of the historic, strong African American churches in Atlanta say, “It wasn’t the storm surge that speaks of God; it’s the waves of volunteers on buses headed toward the coast. If you want to know who the Christian God is, don’t look at the storm, watch what happens after it blows past.” I remember the hands raised in the church to signal assent.

In early Christian representations of Jesus’ baptism, there is often a disembodied hand that appears in the sky. The hand, used because people were hesitant to portray God’s likeness, is typically portrayed in a certain gesture. You can see it here.

Show mosaic of Jesus’ baptism

Two fingers raised, two curled back, thumb extended, a blessing of gesture.

It doesn’t work so well to carry as a symbol of Christ, although clearly some tried.

Picture of hand on a pole in a museum.

You can see why the church chose the shepherd’s crook instead of this. It works better if we just do it ourselves; make the gesture with our own hands. Try it.

The hand of God does not appear like that olive fork in my Amazon basket, but as a sign of blessing and love. Most convincingly it is experienced through the hands of people who don’t look at all like God.

When we carry our children to the waters, we don’t promise them that they will live in a world without hurt, or destruction, or evil, or grief. We don’t turn away from the world as it truly is or make the church into a world away from the world. We bring it to the water, with all its fire and its heated fear right into the center of our assemblies, and we immerse it in love.

Debbie Blue (Consider the Birds) notes that the Greek word for dove is the same as pigeon. Maybe it wasn’t some snow-white dove like you pull out of your sleeve at a magic show, but a mangy, old, scavenging pigeon, that appeared just as it had every day. Perhaps extraordinary that it flew past right then, but not really a miracle. The power of the story is that he heard God’s voice as clearly as he saw the bird, and it called him “Beloved Child,” like the old anointed kings. He would have to go into the wilderness and meet the devil and struggle to understand what this means, but the moment changed him.

Turns out that speaking beloved-ness is like the miracle of water turned into wine. An ordinary thing, like water in a font, or a body alive in a world on fire, is overflowing with belovedness. Even the tiniest presence of love, as insignificant as the weight of a pigeon, overflows and spreads goodness and the glory of God. Love is never finite, as if it can get used up. It overflows any attempt to contain it.

This is what we give our children, or probably increasingly adults who are drawn to this mystery. Not bedrock clarity, or protection from real, complicated, painful life, or even a status that’s different than every other human. We simply speak to them what was spoken to Jesus: You are beloved, by your momma for sure, but more importantly by God. And, holy one, you are alive in a world of beloved-ness. You are clothed just like Christ. You carry fire for sure, but it’s the star light that finds new ways home. God’s blessing is flowing. It’s in every moment; it’s in every situation; it’s in our most painful loss and devastation. Maybe we’ll have a moment like Jesus when we suddenly see it as clearly as the graceful hawk that sat on the steeple yesterday. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll hear God’s voice speaking on the breeze or in a hypocritical and broken church institution. Or maybe not.

In Luke, Jesus sees the dove and hears the voice, not while he’s being baptized but afterwards when he’s praying with the whole group. We need each other, circling up to pray, to trust that even the most difficult reality already has the hand of God in it. Oh, how we would long to see the rest of God, not just a hand. It’s so frustrating that the fullness of God is both so present and so absent at the same time.

Maybe that’s why we bless, why we say the same things that God said to Jesus. If we can channel just enough beloved-ness to let our hands speak, to wash at the font, or to hold up some wine, or to curl them into gestures of blessing instead of curse, the whole world will be rebuilt, or at the very least, raised from death.

Do it again. Raise up your hands in that sign of blessing.

This is our sign, the guiding star, the overflowing wine, the body of Christ. Blessing, indeed. Alleluia!