‘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.’ Luke 3:17
The
word ‘epiphany’ refers to a revelation, a sense of knowing something from God,
not necessarily out-of-the-blue and not necessarily claiming to know in full;
but, perhaps, an invitation to set out together and see what we might find. In
that sense, epiphanies have beginnings, but no ends. As I turned my attention
to preaching in this season of Epiphany, I had an epiphany of my own: the sense
that God wanted me to focus on just one word each time I spoke, to explore one
word that God would draw my attention to, and see what might come of it. The
word at 8 o’clock this morning was ‘stature’, and the word for this sermon is ‘chaff’.
John
sets the scene for Jesus’ ministry by describing it as being like the work of
winnowing. Winnowing is part of the process of harvesting grain. Ripened wheat
was cut and brought to a flat area of exposed rock. There it was beaten against
the floor, to separate the seed heads from the stalks. The seed heads were
composed of two parts: the edible grain, and its protective outer husk, which
was inedible to humans. So – once enough seed had been set aside to plant next
year’s crop – the next process was threshing. The harvesters would take a
wooden sledge, with wooden teeth and perhaps iron on the underside. They might
sit a young child, too small to be of other help, on top for ballast; and the
sledge would be dragged back and forth across the threshing floor to tear the
husks from the grain. Next came the winnowing. The harvesters would take a
wooden fan, or fork, and throw great scoops of threshed wheat into the air. The
heavier grain would fall back to the ground, while the lighter husks – now
known as chaff – would be blown aside by the breeze. It would not carry far;
just enough to fall to the side, and be sweep away from the harvest. This
throwing action would be repeated again and again until what was left on the
floor was a pile of edible grain, which was then gathered into sacks and stored
away; and a pile of chaff, which could be added to animal feed, or ploughed
back into the soil, or be burnt.
This
agricultural process was well-known to most people in biblical times. The rocky
outcrop David had bought, on which his son Solomon had built the temple, had
been a threshing floor. Within the collected wisdom of their royal courts, the
Psalms and the Proverbs, the winnowing out of chaff came to be used as a metaphor
for enacting justice: the process of removing the wicked; a process which
involved both hard work, and a kind wind; both the responsibility of a human
king, and the intervention of God.
But
to say that the end of chaff can represent the end of the wicked does not mean
that chaff necessarily refers to the wicked, or to wickedness. Even if John’s
expectation was that Jesus would separate-out the wicked from the righteous, or
purify the repentant of all their sins, as Jesus’ ministry unfolds we will see
him give new meaning to existing images, and confound the expectations of even
those who recognised him to be the Messiah.
Consider
this: that Jesus’ ministry might be described as coming to those whose lives
had been crushed; from whom something good, something protective that had
sheltered them and allowed them to grow, had been stripped away; and that he
then takes the time, puts in the effort, to sift those lives in order to bring
out something valuable, something that is good and has purpose, from the threshing.
But
what, then, of the unquenchable fire? Does that not speak of judgement? It
might; but then again, fire also represents God’s presence in our midst.
Consider the Exodus: a handful of people sown into Egypt have become a vast
harvest; they have been crushed by their hosts, the protection they had once
enjoyed torn from them; God brings them out, and manifests himself as pillar of
cloud by day and fire by night. And their time in Egypt, good and ill, from
Joseph saving the nations from famine to Moses confronting Pharaoh, becomes an
everlasting testimony to God’s promises.
Before
Sunderland, our family lived in Southport, in the North West. It was a good
husk, surrounding us. But the process of finding a permanent post beyond curacy
was something of a threshing. By the end of it, we were gathered up and brought
here. But the years we spent there – the gift of friends, of community, of
little village shops, a good school, the sand dunes, a spacious house with a
real fire, a prayer labyrinth in the garden – are fuel to our testimony of who
God is and what he is like, of God with us.
Many
of us have gone through a threshing in the past year, where people and places
and familiar tasks that have given shape and shelter to our lives have been
stripped away from us. Through bereavement. Through job insecurity. Through
leaving all we have known and seeking asylum in a strange land. For some of us,
we knew Jesus before we found ourselves at the threshing floor; for others of
us, we met him for the first time as he came alongside with his winnowing fork,
to gather us into a new community.
And
that is what he does. Gathers us in, with others. And more: whatever has been
torn from us through the circumstances of life is not thrown aside, or trampled
underfoot; but this, too, becomes a lasting reminder that God is with us, has
been with us, and will be with us through all the sowing and reaping that is to
come. And that should be most fittingly so in the place where the threshing
floor becomes the temple, in the place where we – crushed as we are by life –
gather to worship.
We
set aside the second Sunday of the month as an opportunity to come forward,
during the sharing of Communion, for prayer for healing, of body, mind, or
soul. If my reflections on chaff have touched you in a particular way, and in
response you would like someone to pray with you, please do take this
opportunity, which takes place in the Bede Chapel.
An excellent talk - thank you, Andrew (posted by Adrian Johnson)
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