Luke 3:15-22
As the people were in expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Christ, John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. 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 barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
So with many other exhortations he preached good news to the people. But Herod the tetrarch, who had been reproved by him for Herodias, his brother's wife, and for all the evil things that Herod had done, added this to them all, that he locked up John in prison.
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
Mercy and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus, Christ, amen.
I don't know about you, but I feel like I am constantly overwhelmed with news. Do you ever feel that way? There is always news coming in, especially since my hip seems to be connected to all the news of the world through my phone. Of course,
it seems like there is just a stream of things that well, actually, most of the time they don't really matter.
Lots of the news I get doesn't matter.
Many of the things that I see are variations of this headline. Can you believe what blank politician says about blank I am so outraged.
I don't know what I can do with that. Think it's mostly designed to get me mad at nothing
until I get mad about that thing, a different thing tomorrow.
Just recently, we heard that the Assad regime fell in Syria. And you know how I reacted to that one? I
didn't know they were still fighting.
It's news that really doesn't matter to me.
There's all sorts of news like that, right? You hear about it, you might think, Oh, this is interesting. You might think, Oh, this is shocking. You might even think it's kind of like political, politics or a little bit like football. Find out whether your team is winning, how many points they have scored, but it doesn't actually affect you.
Doesn't change your life. Much at all.
There is news that matters, though. Right now we have a lot of news in California that matters to a lot of people,
even for us, the fires that are going on in LA, I bet they're affecting people you know and love.
They're certainly affecting our sister churches that are being in the path of these terrible fires, or we have members of those sister churches that have lost homes. If you're interested in updates, the Pacific Southwest District sends out an email regularly that lets everybody know who is affected and how
that is the kind of news that matters to us, leads us to prayer, leads us to care for the people that we love.
But even for that kind of news, for the people who live far away, if you live in Maine,
mostly it's just a thing on the news that you go, I should pray for those people.
Other news matters a great deal.
When you get news that I've been hired for a new job that matters a lot.
That means that you are going to do things a little differently. The next day, you'll show up at a different time and a different place,
different duties.
Here's another big one that matters when the wife walks up to her husband and says
it says, pregnant,
that is news that matters, your life is going to change, and you will change with it.
There is news that matters, a news that does not. News that matters is news that we have to react to that will change our lives and make things different.
Our gospel reading today is all about news that matters, news that matters to all of creation.
John the Baptist went to the Jordan River and proclaimed that there was news the Messiah was coming.
He says, I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie, He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
John's message was simple, the Messiah is on his way, the Mighty One, the powerful one, he comes with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
Big news for the people, but
it wasn't just that.
He said His winnowing fork is in His hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into His barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.
There is a sorting going on.
The Messiah comes with a winnowing fork. Do you know what a winnowing fork is? It's like a it's like a rake. It's a big fork. And what you do is you take the wheat and you throw it up into the air, and the wheat berries are heavier than the chaff, and so you toss it up into the air, and the chaff floats off in the wind, and the good stuff stays it falls right down.
Winnowing is sorting between the stuff you don't eat and the stuff you do,
between the good
and the bad. Now, the Messiah didn't come to sort things that you could grind into flour to bake bread and things that you couldn't.
He came to sort and judge the earth between the people who are gathered into eternal life and those who go into unquenchable fire.
He came
to bring judgment and salvation. What
I think is really funny after that message is what Luke says about him. It says so with many other exhortations, he preached good news to the people.
That's not what I would say if I looked at that thing that he just said, right, His winnowing fork is in His hand, and he will clear His threshing floor to gather the wheat into His barn, but the chaff, he will burn with unquenchable fire. Good news.
Fact you take that, he says something very similar as well.
He says the ax is already at the root of the tree, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
Good news,
it really is, though, we get stuck on the burning we get stuck on the cutting down.
But if you're the wheat, this is great.
God is going to gather his people all together into eternal life, and
he's going to do it through Jesus.
Now the people of John's day, when they saw Jesus get baptized and there was the voice, they didn't know what it would mean. They didn't know that Jesus would come and die. They didn't know he would be placed in a tomb and rise from the dead. They had no idea that the salvation of God would be so crazy and amazing,
but they did know
that it required a change,
that the news of the Messiah should lead them to repentance, and
that's why They all came out to the Jordan River, the news of Jesus mattered,
and so they repented, and they asked John, what should we do?
He said,
The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.
When tax collectors came to him, he told them what they should do, don't collect any more than you are required to.
When soldiers came, he said, Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely. Be content with your pay.
Now these don't seem all that radical to us, because we're kind of used to that idea, but they were radical for Jesus's day,
tax collectors. That's just what you did. You took more money than you were supposed to. That's how you got rich. That's why you became a tax collector
Roman soldiers.
They were there because they were the conquerors. They were the mighty ones. They were in charge over those lowly, conquered peoples. Why in the world would you treat them nicely? You were the strong ones. There
was no reason to be good, to treat them fair,
but the news of Jesus Christ mattered.
It changed how they were supposed to live their lives, from the rules of the world to the rules of Christ's kingdom,
following a Savior who would die for them.
We're in a bit of a different position.
We look back at the news of this Messiah, the Son of God, who is baptized in the Jordan River, and we know the whole story in.
We know that Jesus was the one that the father said, This is my beloved son with him, I am well pleased.
We know everything that he did,
that he would live and die and rise to give us eternal life. And we know all of this and have been living together in the Christian faith, many of us for a very long time. In fact, some of you sitting in the pews today have been Christians longer than I've been alive, and have heard this story and heard the message of John the baptism more times than I have.
And you know you are here because you believe in the Savior and want to live this life,
and this winnowing fork that Jesus has is to bring us eternal life,
to sort the world from those who will be destroyed and those who will be who will live forever with Christ,
we trust that he has come to save us.
What that also does
is it drives us to be different from the world,
just as the soldiers who came to the river to repent, the same with the tax collectors, the same with everybody. The news of Jesus, the Messiah, constantly drives us to be different from the world,
not to follow their rules. But the gospel of Jesus Christ,
we who live in Him, we have to ask, What shall we do?
And Jesus provides us. He says to us, we must be different. That is the whole point of Romans chapter six, when it says, We were buried, therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
You see, we are no longer enslaved to sin.
We are no longer like the world. Christ has come and died for us and chose us and made us different,
which means
we must live that way.
We must act as those who repent and turn from the ways of the world.
And that's the hard part. We
are kind. Constantly learning,
constantly growing, constantly striving to follow the image of Christ, our Savior, which means we're sometimes going to learn new things or be challenged. We're sometimes going to forget the things that we have learned
and have to repent again, and
that is one of the hardest things of the Christian life
to always be saying, What must I do? What can I learn? How can I grow? How do I turn from the voices of the world that want me to follow them,
because we have news that matters. Messiah has come. He is here. He has saved us, and he's coming back again. His winnowing fork is in His hand, and
we want to be with the wheat. We
want to follow Him,
REPENT and be with our Savior,
he's coming. It's news that matters
in Jesus. Name Amen.
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