The Wheat and the Chaff

December 9, 2001 (Second Sunday of Advent)

by The Very Rev. Dennis J.J. Schmidt, Dean

- Isaiah 11:1-10
- Psalm 72:1-8
- Romans 15:4-13
- Matthew 3:1-12

(From The Lectionary Page)

“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat in the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

There is a rabbinic saying; “To stumble over what is good in pursuit of the useless is a blessing.” What is important and unimportant is like wheat and its chaff. The important things fall at your feet, the less important blows away in the wind. In threshing wheat, grain is tossed into the air; the heavier kernel falls to the ground while the wind blows the chaff away, so that it can be burned. Thus the image of judgment that winnows by wind and fire. The valuable falls to the ground, the useless is blown away. What is good and nourishing is weighty, what is useless and bad is light.

Matthew tells us that Jesus will baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire. The Greek word for spirit also means wind, so that passage could be translated, “He will baptize you with the Holy Wind and fire.” Wind and fire are the two elements in winnowing grain. Matthew sees a connection between baptism and the winnowing. He is telling us that baptism is a winnowing of our lives.

A friend of mine made a wonderful observation about wheat. He said, “The wheat and the chaff were originally one seed. The chaff incases the wheat kernel.” We tend to think of the wheat and the chaff as two separate entities, not as parts of one whole kernel. That is because opposites are so often paired in the Bible. Jesus pairs many opposing images--good and bad trees, houses built on rock and sand, God and mammon, pearls and swine, sheep and goats, wheat and weeds, and here wheat and chaff. We want to separate the good from the bad, the sheep from the goats. We desire to discriminate between the pure and impure, thus protect ourselves from contamination. Let me illustrate. Anne and I decided when Gregory was quite young that we did not want Gregory to watch particularly violent TV. For instance, we strongly object to cartoons that resolve conflict with violent annihilation. So he watched Thomas the Tank Engine and programs of that nature. We keep classic cartoon videos for him to watch as well. Gregory kept asking for a gun, but we held out. So he started to make guns out of sticks in the yard. Then, one day at the table he took a piece of bread and bit it into the shape of a gun and proceeded to shoot us as we ate our pork chops. I gave up. It is not so easy to separate the good from the bad.

Jesus understood that his followers would be a mixed community. Jesus’ parable of the net makes this case boldly. A large dragnet is pulled to shore between two boats. It enclosed what ever was in the area- “fish of ever kind.” Only later is there a sorting out of the fish. So the community of the church is a mixed net of every kind of fish in which right and wrong, good and bad is not so easy to distinguish.

The parabolic statement about wheat and chaff reminds us not only that the community is mixed but also that each of us have our own good and bad elements. There is for each of us chaff that needs to be blown away and burned. There is a separation here of good and bad, useful and useless; but it is not like the difference between apples and oranges. Each of us individually is wheat and chaff.

Winnowing wheat and the chaff is right at the center of understanding baptism, because the grain of wheat is useless so long as it is enclosed in the chaff. What is the chaff that needs to be blown away and burned by the fire of the Holy Spirit? Our baptismal covenant answers this clearly in the renunciations one page 302 of the BCP: plain and simple it is the evil that draw us from the love of God. The baptismal covenant also simply describes the kernel of wheat: trust in Jesus’ grace and love, and making that loving trust the guide for living.

Do not look for the chaff as if it is something other then yourself.

Each of us is enclosed in our own chaff of evil. What is your chaff? Pray for the circumstances that will bring you to Jesus’ winnowing fork. And remember that the winnowing fork is in the hands of the Lord who loves you. Amen.