The line that separates the wheat from the chaff does not so much run through humanity, separating us from them as it runs right through each of us.

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1 WHEAT AND CHAFF December 13, 2015, The Third Sunday in Advent Luke 3: 7-18 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: There s wheat and chaff in each of us. As John s hard-edged words prepared the way for Christ long ago, may his words prepare a path for Christ to again enter our hearts, indeed our world, all these ages later. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. I ve a penchant for died-and-went-to-heaven jokes. One of the reasons I like them is that, like most good humor, they subtly and subversively reveal truths about us and about life in general. Enough apologetic set-up. Here s my died-andwent-to-heaven joke. This guy died and went to heaven. When he arrived and passed through the pearly gates, he was told that the first thing he had to do was to go on a celestial orientation tour so that he d know his way around up there. The tour was conducted by none other than St. Peter himself. The guy soon discovered that heaven was even more magnificent than he d imagined. Yes, streets of gold. Yes, endless green Elysian Fields. Yes, stunningly beautiful and carelessly happy heavenly beings, people he d known and loved on earth, transformed. As St. Peter and the new arrival walked down one of heaven s lovely side streets, they approached a pretty little white clapboard church. Even at a distance, they could hear the sound of fiery preaching and old gospel songs pouring from the open windows. St. Peter turned to the guy and put his finger to his lips and whispered, We have to be perfectly quiet when we pass that little church. We don t want them to hear us. Who s in there? the guy asked. Well, St. Peter answered, They re a bunch of hard-shell Baptists. They call themselves The - 1 -

2 Twice-Born Truly-Saved Baptists. They think they re the only ones up here and, well, nobody wants to disappoint them, so we just kinda tip-toe around them. We were graced with another dose of John the Baptist s fiery preaching in the passage from Luke that Margaret just read. As I quipped last Sunday, John s got to be the most un-christmassy guy in the Bible. He starts his sermon by addressing his congregation as a bunch of snakes and then thunders on about wrath, repentance and fire. Following the sermon, Luke s Gospel tells us that the crowds speculated whether John might himself be the Messiah. John answers humbly but forcefully that he s not the One. Another is coming, he says, One greater than he, the thong of whose sandals he s not fit to untie, One who will baptize with fire rather than plain old water, One who will come with a winnowing fork in his hand, One who will separate the wheat from the chaff. The good wheat goes in the granary; the useless chaff, those husks that encase the edible seed, into the fire. I don t know about you, but when I hear that metaphor wheat and chaff my imagination immediately goes in the same direction as those Twice-Born Truly- Saved Baptists in my lame joke. They divided humanity in two: wheat themselves of course, and chaff everybody else. We humans are inveterate line drawers. It s part of our nature. We draw lines between good people and bad people, lines between the saved and the damned. These lines usually place us on the wheat side and them on the chaff side. These lines we draw usually run through humanity, separating some people from other people. But what if we ve got the wheat and chaff image wrong? What if the line separating the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, doesn t so much run through humanity as it runs through each of us individually. What if the line runs through me and through you? Point would be, there s wheat in me and there s chaff in me. And there s wheat in each of you, and there s chaff in each of you. This last Wednesday night I finished one of the most remarkable books I ve read in years. It s entitled Not in God s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. The author is Jonathan Sacks, until recently the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain. The book - 2 -

3 is a deep dig into the sectarian conflicts and religiously motivated terrorism endemic to our time. In the early chapters, Rabbi Sacks explores what he names dualism, this human tendency toward line-drawing that I m talking about, the temptation to think in simple terms of all-good people verses all-bad people. He says that, at its best, monotheism, the belief in one God affirmed by Jews and Christians and Muslims, should counter this temptation to make simplistic dichotomies between us and them. Sacks puts it this way, Monotheism internalizes what dualism externalizes. It takes the good and the bad in the human situation, the faith and the fear, the retribution and the forgiving, and locates them within each of us, turning what would be a war on the battlefield into a struggle within the soul. Who is the hero? asked the rabbis, and replied, One who conquers himself. Sacks then points out that every human character in the Bible is a mixture of shade and light. Scripture, he says, wants to teach us that even the best are not perfect and even the worst are not devoid of merits. My hunch is that old John the Baptist knew it s not simple. And Jesus is clearly no good guys verse bad guys dualist. His whole life and ministry, his suffering, his death, his resurrection are not aimed at separating the wheat people from the chaff people. His ministry would redeem and purify each of us admixture of virtue and vice that we are raising up the good in us and transforming the bad in us. Several weeks ago, twenty guys from our Thursday morning Bible study went with their spouses to see an off-broadway play. It was a stage version of C. S. Lewis classic novel, The Great Divorce. We went because we d read the book last fall. Lewis, you ll remember, was a popular theologian, apologist, and novelist. He s often named the most influential Christian writer of the last century. The play adaptation was gripping theater. My wife said she liked it even better than the Carole King musical Beautiful. And she s a huge Carole King fan! You can still see it; it s running at the Pearl Theater on West 42 nd through January 3 rd. Lewis book and the play are a twist on the old died-and-went-to-heaven shtick. Except in this one, it s died-and-went-to-hell. But there s yet another turn. In Lewis bland and boring hell, a place he names Gray Town, you can actually get on a bus and go to heaven any time you want. And you can stay in - 3 -

4 heaven if you choose. But few of the tourists from hell choose to stay. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, as Milton put it in Paradise Lost. Yet toward the end of the play, one tourist from hell does choose to stay. The scene was powerful and deeply enigmatic, a real head-scratcher. Here s the scene. Lewis calls the residents of hell Ghosts with a capital G. In this scene a Ghost, a tourist from hell visiting heaven, appears on the stage with something on his shoulder, a little nattering red lizard. The Ghost is arguing with the lizard perched on his shoulder, telling him repeatedly to shut up. The lizard clearly represents some unnamed failing, some gnawing temptation, some debilitating moral weakness in the Ghost. The Ghost is deeply conflicted. Part of him wants to be rid of the creature that s torturing him; part of him just can t let it go. A heavenly creature, a shining Angel, enters stage right. He speaks to the Ghost from hell and offers to kill the lizard, which would empower the Ghost to remain in heaven. The Angel offers to do this repeatedly. Again and again, he says, May I kill it? The Ghost prevaricates, not wanting a remedy quite so drastic. Whatever the lizard represents, torturing him as it does, the guy just can t let it go. But the Ghost is in real pain. He asks the Angel if ridding himself of the red lizard will kill him also. The angel says no, I never said it wouldn t hurt you. I said it wouldn t kill you. Finally, at long last, the tortured Ghost cries out, God help me, God help me and permits the Angel to slay the lizard. The scene is wrenching. Here s Lewis words: The Burning One (the heavenly angel) closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken-backed, on the turf. But that s not the end of it. The final head-scratcher is yet to come. The Ghost, once free of his crippling lizard, is transformed into a real person, a sort of liberated proto-angel. And at the same time, the lizard comes back to life, but transformed, transformed into a magnificent stallion silvery-white, with a tail of gold. And get this, the former Ghost, now a young man-angel, mounts the stallion and bounds off toward the mountains. He now rides the creature that had ridden him. Some profound and enigmatic symbolism is at work here, deep - 4 -

5 enough that Lewis offers the reader an explanation: Nothing, he writes, not even the best and noblest in each of us can go to the mountain (to God, if you will) as it now is. And even more radically, Lewis adds this, nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. The line that separates the wheat from the chaff does not so much run through humanity, separating us from them, as it runs through each of us. The good news is this: by the grace of God, the wheat the best in us, yet never even close to perfect can be raised up higher. And the even better news is this: even the chaff worst in us, which is never totally without some merit can be transformed into something good, but only if it first dies. The line that separates the wheat from the chaff does not so much run through humanity, separating us from them as it runs right through each of us. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen