Monday Devotional: January 6, 2025

Bible Reading: Luke 3:15-17 (NRSVUE)
15 As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, 16 John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 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.”
After a poor introduction to church shopping, I walked into a second church a little wary, uncertain of my reception as a new visitor and a non-Christian. My answer came in minutes as a group of older women surrounded me, smiling and full of questions. By the time the service began, they knew my height, weight, favorite color, and food allergies! For someone who felt like an outsider, that welcome became a life lesson.
The people who braved the wilderness to see John did not get there by accident. Such a trip would take planning and commitment, and these do not come without some anticipation: “The people were filled with expectation.” They had something in mind, some sense of who John was and what he would say.
But the people find themselves surprised. John does not cleanse to set apart folks by greater purity — as a ritual bath might suggest. Rather, being baptized as Jesus was baptized set aside the illusion of being “pure” for the truth of being human. It is for our humanity — the good and the ill of it — that Jesus will die. By accepting the baptism by John, Jesus rejects the simplicity of wheat versus chaff, in order to be with the world full of people who are both wheat and chaff. For someone who came to church believing one had to be “good” to be a Christian, this was good news indeed.
When those women surrounded me, subsequently that congregation and ultimately the church, it was not as chaff or tares at risk of burning. Despite my expectations, they did not lovingly intend to make it “right” but simply to have me grow alongside them.
Prayer
Lord, help me first to see not the differences between myself and others; but as I trust your Spirit is in me, to trust that the same Spirit resides in them. Amen.
By Steven H. Shussett, The Upper Room Disciplines 2013, page 26.