Quick Summary:

As we mark the Baptism of Our Lord, we recall how God meets us, too, in the waters and we hear God’s voice—as Jesus did—declaring: You are my beloved child; you are precious to me and I love you! Never forget that. God meets us in the waters. But, according to Luke, there’s another place, a prior place, where God in Christ also meets us; a perhaps harder place, and that’s where I’d like to go with you this morning; to the threshing floor.

In the first part of our gospel, John—speaking to the crowds who’ve come for his baptism of repentance—says: “One more powerful than I is coming...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.”

Winnowing, then, is HIS task, and what’s more, it’s something we can trust him to do, because in God’s eyes there is something fundamentally valuable about us! Something worth saving. As the LORD says to his exiled people through the prophet today: YOU ARE PRECIOUS IN MY SIGHT, AND HONORED, AND I LOVE YOU.

Jesus wants to get to heart of that, wants to find that kernel! So once the chaff is gone—what is this kernel that remains?
In his book CHRIST OF THE CELTS, John Philip Newell says the kernel that remains, the true core of our identity, is the image of God in us, that incontrovertible gift planted by God in us in the very beginning; a gift that remains no matter how sullied we human creatures may at times become; a kernel “deeper than all that is wrong.”