For those of you who don’t know yet, my name is Ben Cooke and I’m a priest of the Episcopal Church. It's a great joy to join you today for the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, and I’m deeply appreciative of the shortness of our readings this morning! They may be short but they are powerful. We are just outside the stable doors of the Christmas season, out past the nativity and the gifts of the magi to the infant Jesus. We are at the start of our new liturgical year's journey with the adult Jesus. Each year on Sundays we read from one of the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. With a little sprinkling of John. Each of the synoptics has its own flavor, this year we are in Year C, which means we are going to be journeying with Luke. Luke tells us of how Jesus comes alongside the poor, with a radical, spicy gospel of social justice. Jesus blazes a trail of change for the oppressed and it is this striving for the poor that puts Jesus at odds with the temple authorities and eventually leads to his death.

It is from Luke that we get some of our most memorable and disturbing parables. The good Samaritan, only in Luke. The prodigal son, only in Luke. The Pharisee and the tax collector, the persistent widow, and many more, they are from Luke. Luke interjects memorable, subversive stories into his narrative of Jesus' ministry and they are some of the best-known parts of the bible today. They all point to the radical change that is coming about as a result of Jesus' teaching, through his healing power, even through his very presence. In Jesus, God is reconciling the world from the bottom up.

Today our gospel reading tells of the Baptism of Jesus. John had been in the wilderness, preaching repentance and baptizing for the forgiveness of sins. People started to wonder, if he brought freedom from sin for individuals couldn’t John bring freedom for the nation? Judea, where John and Jesus lived, had been subjugated by the Roman Empire. Its wealth was being stripped, it’s culture and traditions were being diluted by foreign incomers, and folks were getting fed up with feeling lost, impoverished, and repressed. But through all of the sorrow they had faith, they expected a change from God. They had been craving a divinely appointed leader who was not part of the corrupt political establishment. Well, I don’t know. A nation that’s worried deeply about foreigners, where poverty and oppression are slowly drowning everyone, and where folks dream of a change from the political establishment, does that sound familiar? Well, it should because Jesus' ministry starts in a world very like our own.

The type of leader people wanted was a Messiah, a strong man anointed King. One who would make individuals feel righteous in their prejudice against the Romans and solve the inflation problem. The Jesus Luke tells us about, claims the title of Messiah and what's more is proclaimed as the Son of God, but Jesus totally undermines everyone's expectation of what a King should be. Where they wanted strength, Jesus brought vulnerability. Where they wanted worldly wealth, Jesus uplifted the value of poverty. Where they wanted easy answers, Jesus asked hard questions. Jesus doesn’t just come for the forgiveness of the sins of individuals but to root out the world's sin and heal it. Jesus comes with “His winnowing fork 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 likes to use images people are familiar with, like the parables. But this one, threshing and winnowing misses the mark with us. I don’t expect any of us have a threshing floor or a winnowing fork. But they were a familiar part of life for those John spoke to. A threshing floor is the place where you gather the wheat after the harvest and beat it, repeatedly, with a big stick. This beats the inedible husks called chaff off the grain. You then take the winnowing fork and throw the whole mess in the wind, the chaff blows off and the good grain falls back to the ground. It was labor-intensive work and the majority of John's listeners who were farmers would have been involved in threshing and winnowing. It might be helpful for us to have an up-to-date image.

Jesus is like that auntie who comes to open up the family camp with you each year. While you are busy getting the dock in with the cousins, she goes through the kitchen and clears out everything you didn’t deal with in the fall. Her cleaning cloth is in her hand and all this is not good, all that is filthy, all that was broken but was never dealt with is dragged out into the fire pit and burned. Your auntie cleaning up the mess you were too irresponsible to deal with last year is scary. But if you are willing to join her, she is a force for our good. This is what the holy spirit at Baptism is like. A force that will change everything, a joy to those who want a good summer, a good life, and a fear to those who are not willing to own their mistakes.

When the spirit comes upon Jesus and God affirms that he, Jesus is God’s own beloved son, power starts to spread out into the world. Jesus will go on to do miracles, healing the sick and bringing hope to the poor and lost. Yet he will also bring the uncomfortable truths of the parables. The truth that we, his disciples, have failed to live up to the good standards of God. That our lives, like wheat on the threshing floor or a camp in the spring, need cleaning out. We need the chaff and trash cleared away so the good grain of our life can be found. Every year, at the feast of the Baptism of the Lord we are encouraged by both Episcopalian and Lutheran traditions to look at our own baptism. In fact Martin Luther went one better and encouraged all Christians to review their baptismal commitment daily, so there you go Episcopalians. To affirm and renew the promises we made at baptism, is a spring cleaning, a blowing away of the chaff at the start of each new year.

We began our service today with the affirmation of our baptismal promises. We have committed ourselves to the work of God's justice in this world, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and respecting the dignity of everyone. We are committed to proclaiming the love of God by word and deed. We have turned from our own selfish wants, renounced sin, the world, and the devil, calling on the Spirit of God to nourish us as individuals and as a church family. That we might persevere in all that we are called to do through baptism. However, all these promises are too much for us to do. This baptism into the priesthood of all believers is more than we can live up to. But what is impossible for us is possible for God. We will find our freedom in service, our lives in Christ's death, and ourselves resurrected by the Spirit into the company of the saints. This is our joy and challenge, to be baptized into Christ’s baptism and filled with God’s very Spirit. Lord let us be renewed today, so that we might seek and serve you always. Amen.