What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord. Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?
Do y’all remember when I explained the different seasons of the church year and I said, the season after Pentecost is mostly about discipleship? Yeah…. About that….Jesus and today’s scriptures are demanding.
Today’s readings are pretty clear about some things. They are uncomfortable to read, to hear, and to reflect on. But, we don’t come to church just to feel good; we are here to learn as our gathering prayer says, about Jesus’ redeeming work and follow DAILY in the steps of his most holy life…
For whatever reason, I was really drawn this week to Jeremiah’s question about wheat. “What has straw in common with wheat? Is not my word like fire, says the Lord and like a hammer that breaks a rock into pieces?
Let me first refresh your memory, that I am a city girl, born and raised in Brooklyn. Now, some of my cousins lived on Long Island which seemed like a world away. I remember going to their house in the summer for a week or so for several summers. Those trips were the highlight of my year. Anyway, they had a lovely farm where they kept horses and ponies. The first summer I was there I learned a few things: I learned that ponies weren’t baby horses, I learned how to muck a stall, and I learned that there was a HUGE difference between straw and hay. Hay, which always smells so good, has nutrients in it; it is eaten by horses so that their digestive system works well. And, they eat a lot of it. Straw on the other hand is hollow. It’s useful for bedding and mulch but there are no nutrients to speak of. Straw can come from different grains. It is what’s left of the grain after a harvest. So in our passage from Jeremiah, wheat is not hollow, but is used to feed people. Straw is hollow and while it might looks nice on the outside, there’s nothing of substance there.
It’s like so many things in our world isn’t it. We window dress all kinds of things so that they look good on the outside while on the inside things are hollow at best and rotten at worst. Sometimes our discipleship looks that way too. It’s easy for us sometimes anyway to write checks to try to make a problem go away. There’s nothing wrong with writing checks when it comes down to it. And the disasters that we’ve had recently here in Texas with flooding and with other natural disasters often money is the first thing that is requested from those on the ground. But sometimes we write checks in order to hide. It’s easier to write a check than it is to go work on a soup kitchen line or to engage in conversation with our brothers and sisters who are in desperate need. One of the things that I used to talk to churches about when I was the area of missioner was the need for our ministries to become less transactional and more transformative. That’s what’s hard. Even when we do work in the soup kitchen do we stay in the kitchen or do we go sit with the people who are there. I would ask that question to many churches and when I ask them about what would transform that ministry sometimes they had a hard time realizing that the deepest desire of human beings is to be in relationship with God and with each other. I always asked the question, what did Jesus DO in the scriptures that we read? And then I would have them shout out the adjectives that answered that question. Perhaps one of the most important was that Jesus noticed. He noticed our brothers and sisters beyond the city Gates and on the margins of society. He noticed those that no one else even looked at. He noticed them, he spoke to them, he healed them, he fed them, he let them know that they were loved by God. In the actions that Jesus took he gave people dignity. Now don’t get me wrong I understand that we need, we must, do the kinds of things that are life-giving in physical ways, physical shelter, food, clothing, all of those things but Jesus went beyond that to be in a relationship with the person who was in front of him. He might be the only person who had touched them or who had spoken to them all day if not longer. In our baptismal covenant one of the promises that we make is to restore the dignity of every human being. And that means taking up the same ministries that Jesus had and having those verbs that apply to him apply to us. He even gave us his holy spirit so that we might notice, feed, clothe, visit, give dignity to another. We may not have been baptized with literal fire but we have been baptized with the fire of the Holy spirit that burns deep and burns away all of the chaff all of the straw so that the only thing that’s left is that soil ready to grow another crop. Our life is a series of baptisms by fire a series of having our hearts of Stone broken by God’s hammer to give us hearts of flesh. And that’s what’s so difficult about it. If we don’t have to face another person’s heartache or another person’s distress we can get about our day relatively unscathed. But once we take that step and look at another person in the eyes perhaps touch them with a gentle hug or a handshake, once we ask them their name and tell them ours, once we sit at supper and listen to them, we can no longer pretend that their lives don’t affect ours. Every single human being on this Earth has been created by a god of love and that makes them our siblings in Christ. When we look at them we should see your reflection of Jesus shining back to us be it the crucified Jesus, the healing Jesus or the risen Jesus. Something about that person will show us something Jesus if we let it.
There is so much in this world that is straw. So much that looks pretty but is not nourishing to our souls and to our relationships with others. May we allow our baptism by fire to burn away the straw and chaff in our lives so that we might be spiritual fields or God’s holy spirit can grow in and move us to act in life-giving ways to those that God puts in front of us. May our hearts be broken in order that we may be given to the service of Christ in the world that he loved so much he was willing to die for it.
