In His Hand

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 43: 1-7 and Luke 3: 15-22, NT page 60 Sermon Title: In His Hand The book that had the greatest effect on my early adolescence was not the Bible, but The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and I’m not the only one. If you ask around a little bit, it seems like this book made an impact on everyone who was ever an 11-year-old boy. From the time the book was published in 1967 to now it’s as though the publisher just sent the book to your house automatically so many people have read it and remember it. The day I got it, I think it came in my Easter basket, and that Easter Sunday I started reading the book in the morning, I thought about it during church, picked it right back up after lunch and had the thing finished before I went to bed that night. It is the only book I’ve ever read in just one day, and it’s all about greasers. The main character goes by Ponyboy, and he lives with his brothers and hangs out with this gang of neighborhood kids, and they get called greasers because they wear their hair long and they use too much pomade. How they look matters. They don’t dress like the kids from the right side of town because they are not from the right side of town. They also carry switchblades and get into fights, but the main story line is watching who Ponyboy becomes. He’s one of those kids with potential, but will he do something about it? Will he grow out of being a teenage greaser who gets into a little bit of trouble from time to time or will he follow so many down this other path of holding up liquor stores and getting locked up in “the cooler” as they call it. There’s this defining moment near the end of the book where Ponyboy is talking with two of his fellow greasers, drinking a Pepsi, when a car load of the Socs drive up. The Socs are the rival group from the right side of town, and as they walk up to Ponyboy and his friends they use some threatening language, act like they’re trying to start a fight, so Ponyboy breaks the bottom off his Pepsi bottle and holds it with the sharp glass right up against this guy’s neck, and he says, “You get back into your car or you’ll get split.” Now why they fight and how they fight – those are two significant issues that the book deals with. Sometimes they fight in self-defense, but more often this gang of greasers fights for something else – honor. Somebody walks through their neighborhood and starts acting like they own the place – then the greasers have to fight to defend what’s theirs. Someone insults them and calls them trash – then the greasers have to fight for respect. And they’re always fighting the Socs – this group of upper-class teenagers who live in houses on the right side of town, have both their parents there waiting on them to come home at night. You read the book and you realize that the author gave this book just the right title, The Outsiders, because the greasers believe they are just that – outsiders – and they have to fight to keep their place in the world. Some will just fight with their fists, so there’s a difference in the book between the ones who fight with their hands and the ones who fight with chains, knives, bats, broken bottles. The ones who fight with weapons, as it seemed that Ponyboy would, they end up moving to greater levels of violence until they’re using “heaters” – the book calls them – guns. In this scene with the Pepsi bottle it seems as though Ponyboy is choosing to go down this road, walking away from his potential to follow all those neighborhood guys who are either dead or in jail because he has to defend, not just his physical self but his emotional self, his dignity, respect, and honor. But, once the Socs drive off, Ponyboy kneels down to pick up the broken glass on the ground because he didn’t want anyone to get a flat tire. What you have in your hand matters. What Ponyboy had in his hand is a sign of how he would chart his future, and that’s true in a lot of cases. He doesn’t have to tell anyone he’s going home to apologize to his wife – if he goes home holding flowers everyone knows exactly what he’s doing. We don’t even have to say that he’s asking for forgiveness – we use this expression that “he came home with his hat in his hand.” When the relatives show up for Christmas they might ring the door bell and say, “I come bearing gifts” because what you have in your hand communicates something, it means something, so when all the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answers them by telling them what the real Messiah will have in his hand. We read in verse 17 what John tells them: “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.” If you thought a kid with a broken bottle in his hand was a disturbing image – think about this one – a winnowing fork. A winnowing fork, as you probably know already, is like one of those wide baskets that so many still use to toss the grain – be it rice or barley, oats or wheat – you use it to toss the grain into the air just enough so that the wind carries the husk onto the floor and only the heavier grain remains in the basket. The winnowing fork – that is what it was used for too – to separate the good from the bad, and the good will go into the granary, but the bad – the bad “he will burn with unquenchable fire.” According to John the Baptist, that’s how we’ll know him – because of what he is holding in his hand, and it’s not a broken bottle that he’s using to defend himself. It’s not his hat that is in his hand, it’s a winnowing fork that he’ll use to clear his threshing floor. It’s a harsh image. It makes you wonder, “Where I’ll end up, in the granary or in the fire.” Am I wheat or am I chaff? This is a fair question when contemplating this lesson from the gospel of Luke because so much of this Scripture lesson is about identity – is John the Messiah or is he not – that’s what the people are asking – who is John? But it’s also trying to tell us who is Jesus as well as clarifying the identity of you and me. Identity. This is a lesson about identity, and you’ve heard me harp on identity before. Every Sunday I end the worship service charging all of you to remember always who you are. My friend Billy Frierson listens to the service on the radio, and without fail, when he calls to talk to me he’ll end our conversation telling me that “he’ll remember who he is,” making fun of me just a little bit because he knows already and doesn’t need to be told again. Maybe you don’t’ need to be told again either, and I hope you don’t, but I feel like I need to tell you this all the time because there are times when you’ll be prone to forget. Identity – who are you? Where are you going? That’s what Ponyboy was figuring out, but Jesus – Jesus always knew. Regardless of what the world said, Jesus always knew and that’s how he’s different from us. He knew and didn’t listen so much to what the world kept telling him about being from the wrong town, speaking with the wrong accent, and not having enough to garner any respect. Did you know that at the time of Jesus, Nazareth, where Jesus grew up after being born in Bethlehem, was a community of between 200 and 400 people? That’s it. And Nazareth was in the region of Galilee, but to go to someplace big and speak with a Galilean accent – we’ll that was the kind of label that was hard to live down. Going into one of the places where there would have been some carpentry to do, among the Romans or landed aristocracy, Jesus and his father were something like my friend Will Shelburne from Kingsport, Tennessee. I went to college with him, and he left Kingsport one summer to go up to New York City for a conference or something and the first thing they asked him when they found out where he was from was whether or not they wore shoes back home. We so often and far too often are in the position of having to prove ourselves, and the world knows this about us and so the world comes up with all this stuff – clothes that do more than keep you warm, cars that do more than get you from one place to another, neighborhoods that are more than just a place to live – and money is made, all kinds of money is made, because people like you and me want to make sure that our identity is secure. We have to fight to maintain a strong sense of who we are, and maybe we don’t ever hold a broken bottle up to anyone’s neck, but there’s more than one way to defend your sense of self-worth. Do you remember playing basketball? I was on this team and I made one shot all year for three years in a row, so at some point I realized that I just wasn’t good enough to keep playing and to preserve my pride or something I just quit, but I remember too that the first year that I played I didn’t care whether or not I was any good, I just played because it was fun. Before I let the world or the voice in my head care about so much I played just because it was fun. We have to be careful, because when our station in the world is based on how many points we score or how much money we make or what kind of relationship we’re in, defending our sense of self can take up a whole lot of time. So much time, that you might start hoping that there’s an alternative, and I believe that there is. A pastor came to visit me this week in my office. He’s a retired Lutheran pastor – he’s a really great guy and I could tell that he wished he were preaching today because he wanted to tell me all his best baptism stories. They were all powerful, and of course they were, we pastors get to witness all kinds of miracles, and he’s telling me this one story. He was taking a group of high school students to Hell’s Kitchen in New York City back in the 80’s. They stop at a McDonalds, and some of the students, at this point they are getting pretty comfortable with the neighborhood, they strike up a conversation with a homeless man sitting nearby. This pastor friend of mine goes to sit down with him too, and after a while, after all the students have wandered back to the church van, this homeless man says that he wants to show my friend something. Out from his pocket he pulls an old yellowed sheet of paper. He’s kept it in his wallet where your driver’s license would go. He unfolds it and he says to my friend, “This is who I am.” My friend reads the man’s paper, which turned out to be his certificate of baptism. Remember who you are. I tell you that every Sunday at the end of the service. I say, “I charge you now to remember always who you are,” and even though my friend Billy Frierson makes fun of me for it – I tell you this Sunday after Sunday anyway because in this world you need to remember – you need to remember your baptism because it is by the water of baptism that we really learn about identity. On the other hand, the world will look at you and judge your entire identity based on the clothes on your back, the car that you drive, the neighborhood that you live in. They’ll look you in the eye or pretend that you don’t exist based on nothing more than your appearance. Then they’ll count the money in your pocket and tell you you’re worth as much as you have or as much as you’re willing to spend. That’s why you have to remember who you are based on who God says you are. Jesus came with this winnowing fork in his hand – and with it he clears his threshing floor saving the wheat and burning the chaff and we always wonder whether we’re wheat or chaff, greaser or Socs, respectable or not, but that’s not what this is about. You see – the chaff – the chaff is the house, the car, the clothes, and everything else that you use to stand up to the Socs the way Ponyboy did with that bottle – all of that burns up to nothing sooner or later - and when it burns up, there’s only grain, or better yet, when it burns up there’s only water and when you come up from the water there are these words: “You are mine, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” You spent all this time working for it, fighting for it – but you see, the Lord has been trying to give you for free all along. Here these words again from the Prophet Isaiah: But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, he who formed you, Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. Amen.