This time of the year is a special time of the year in an orchard or vineyard. Back in Lowell, where we had 80 fruit trees and 50 grapevines, this was a fun time of the year, for this is the time of the year when we would prune our trees and vines. This point of the year, the trees and vines are dormant, asleep from the cold, the insects and fungus are asleep, and so this is the best time of the year to prune fruit trees and vines.
Pruning is relaxing work. You go out into the vineyard and begin cutting away all of the year-old growth of the vine. You’ll remove about 90 percent of the vine, leaving only a tough vertical stalk and several short horizontal sections. All of the extra material will grow back next year, and the vine will be stronger for it.
Why do we prune?
The biggest problem with grapevines around here is the tendency for rotting fungus to appear on the grapes. And the main reason the fungus grows is because the morning dew stays on the grapes too long. And so when we cut out the extra weak vines, we reduce the amount of leaves and twigs and other wood that blocks the air from moving around. When the air moves better, the grapes’ skins dry quicker in the morning, and there is less fungus. Plus, contrary to what you’d think, new vines simply put out more and bigger grapes than vines that have been allowed to accumulate old vines for several years. And so we cut away the old vines, many of which have been covered with fungus spores from the summer before, and then we take those worthless cuttings full of rotting fungus and we burn them.
In the apple orchard, we do much the same thing. By cutting off about a quarter of the wood each year, we open up the tree to light and air, which gives us more and larger fruit, and once again prevents fungus from growing on the fruit as badly. And once again, we take the twigs and limbs that carry disease and rot out of the orchard and burn those twigs and limbs, removing the rot permanently from the orchard.
And then, we take the ashes from the fires and we spread those ashes over the garden, which takes all the good nutrients which have remained behind from the fire, and puts them back into the soil.
Farmers have been doing this annual ritual of pruning and burning for thousands of years. Traditional wheat farmers do much the same – they harvest the wheat, stalks and grainheads, then let them dry a couple of days. The farmers then beat the wheat or walk back and forth over the wheat, and toss the wheat into the air on a windy day. The stalks and the covering over the wheat grains are much lighter than the grain, so this chaff – the useless part – flies away while the grain simply falls to the threshing floor. The grain is gathered up and the chaff, which often has fungus and rot growing on it, is gathered together to be burned, the ashes spread on the fields.
The farmers of ancient Israel knew about the need to remove rot and fungus from their fields to get a good crop. They understood that if you simply tried to bury the chaff or to leave the rotten wood on the trees or vines, the crops would suffer in the long term as the rot returned, stronger than ever. And so they understood that fire was just as essential for a good crop as water was.
Water provided life – but fire killed rot.
And there were other uses of both water and fire.
Water could be used to clean tools and people. Water – in abundance – made things clean and pure. But if you really wanted to clean something, fire was the best way.
You see, there are few things that can stand up to a powerful fire. Fire can kill – but fire also can remove contamination. The fire destroys the rot – and fire can also remove contamination, even from metal, allowing you to begin with fresh, new materials, uncontaminated and pure. Burn off the old rotten wooden handles from your metal tools and start with fresh, good wood.
But both water and fire were frightening. In the steep hills and valleys of Israel, too much water in a sudden rainstorm means a flash flood, and flash floods can kill. The power of water to clean is wonderful, but when a wall of water 10 feet high comes down the hollow, it can also clean the valley floor of rocks, of trees, of homes, and of people. Too much water can kill, so people have always been afraid of too much water, whether in a raging flood – or even in a nice, quiet pond.
And fire is equally frightening. We all know of the dangers of a house fire, or of a forest fire, and both of these could happen during the dry season in Israel. But they also had another danger we don’t encounter here, and it was the danger of a fiery pit or volcano opening up and spewing forth lava or fire, for you see, the land of Israel was split by the great Jordan valley, and surrounding it were hot springs and sulfur pits and small volcanoes.
And so, when Isaiah spoke of water and fire, the people listened. And what did God say through Isaiah?
2 When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
3 For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;
But what waters and what fire was God speaking about?
It took a long time to understand that God was talking about much more than just wading a river or running through some burning grass.
A man who became known as John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness near the Jordan River. John was the son of a Temple priest named Zachariah, and his mother was a cousin of Mary, the mother of Jesus. John began to preach in the wilderness to anyone who would listen. John’s message was a message calling people back to following God’s law in the heart.
Over the centuries, you see, people had turned God’s laws into swords and hammers to beat their neighbors with. They had forgotten that following a moral law means first paying attention to it yourself – and that one of the key points was that all people were created in the image of God – not just “good” people – and so to follow God’s law properly meant that with few exceptions, ordinary people should mind their own business and not use God’s law as a weapon against other images of God. And this was what John was talking about – following God’s law in your heart, not just in some dry, sterile legal sense, and not using the law to harm other people, to control them, to push them around – which is what was happening.
And John asked people to be cleansed of their sins by baptism, by the cleansing power of water. And many people were baptized – John’s message was hitting home, he was popular, he might have been offered a contract with Trinity Broadcasting Network, perhaps even a contract on Fox News or CNN, he was so popular. The people of Israel wondered if John might be the promised Savior of Israel, the man who prophecy had declared would set people free from their captors, the man who would lead the nation to greatness once again, the Messiah.
The Gospel writer Luke tells us:
15 The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. 16 John answered them all, “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. “
John, you see, understood that he might be popular, but he was far below the lowest slave compared to the coming Messiah.
John continued to speak to the people. And this time he spoke in a way that was unsettling, a way that was disturbing, a way that was both exciting and bothered you at the same time. John said of the coming Messiah:
“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 barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
According to John, the time of cleaning with just water was coming to an end. Now, God was going to clean away the rotten stuff, God was going to use fire to purify things, God’s Holy Breath – remember that the same word that we write as Spirit also equally meant Breath or Wind – God’s Holy Wind was coming to the threshing floor filled with people and God’s Holy Breath would blow away the chaff of sin and let the good grain be harvested as it fell to the floor, and then God’s Messiah would burn up the evil, the contamination, the rotten chaff with unquenchable fire. The Messiah was from God, let no one mistake that fact, and the Messiah was going to clean house, he was going to remove the rot from the farm, He was going to separate the good from the bad so get ready, be ready, stand ready. He will be here any day now!
And people were baptized by water, for they wanted to be ready. They confessed their sins before God to get ready, they apologized to God ti stand ready before God, they asked for forgiveness to be ready. And they were baptized and made clean, as clean as water could make them. And so we focus today upon that water baptism, with our hymns and our songs and even our movies focusing upon the water washing away our sins. It is the water baptism that draws our attention, our imagination, our focus.
But there is more. A carpenter from Nazareth had come to hear his cousin preach by the Jordan River.
21 When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
And so we have this announcement directly from God that the Messiah has arrived. For the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breath of God, the Holy Wind from God descends upon Jesus and the voice of God, the voice that shook mountains, the voice that breaks trees, the voice that strikes with flashes of lightning rumbles forth: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” And the world would never be the same.
Jesus began His ministry that day. His first disciples joined him with John’s blessing. Jesus began to work miracles and a movement began, with dozens and hundreds and thousands of people following Him. And over the next three years, the Gospels, which record every important event of Jesus’ life on earth, these Gospel writers never record a single instance of Jesus baptizing anyone before He died on the cross. Jesus baptized no one with water.
But the day that Jesus comes back alive, Jesus walks into a room and says to His disciples: “Receive the Holy Spirit”, and He breathes upon them. God on the earth breathes upon people – God’s breath, God’s wind, God’s holy Spirit enters them.
And then, 40 days later, on the morning of Pentecost, there is a great noise, a great rumbling, it is the voice of God like a great wind – the Holy Wind of God, God’s Holy Breath, the Holy Spirit is back and tongues of fire settle on the heads of all the people gathered together that day and the Holy Spirit fills them all and they begin to praise God in dozens of languages, languages they didn’t know, languages they had never heard, but languages that the people around them knew, and it became clear to everyone that God was working miracles, and the Messiah had baptized these people with fire and the Holy Spirit and the power of God was now working through the followers of Jesus.
And to drive the point home, that it is the Holy Spirit of God that is critical here, when the followers of Christ had to leave Jerusalem because of Saul’s persecution, some went to Samaria, the land between Jerusalem and Galilee in northern Israel, where people who were not quite Jews lived, and they told of Jesus’ teachings, death, and resurrection, and baptized the people with water, but that wasn’t enough, so the Apostles Peter and John visited Samaria, and laid their hands upon the new believers who had been baptized in water, and the Holy Spirit came upon these new believers, and the movement began to grow because these people now had the power of God within them now, the Spirit was passed onto people whom they told about Jesus, and the rest, as they say, is history.
People usually come to a belief in the power of Jesus Christ to save them first. And when they accept that power of Christ, and choose to follow Christ, God justifies them, declaring them to no longer to be rebels in God’s eyes, but adopted sons and daughters, loyal family members of God. You are now saved from God’s wrath, but perhaps you aren’t saved from your own foolishness?
We baptize people for several reasons.
First, we baptize people because this is how people join the church, the great, universal church that is the Body of Christ.
We baptize people with water to clean people of their sins. The consecrated water, which is blessed, is a symbol of that cleansing, that power of God to clean us from the rot that infects our souls.
And after the water baptism, the part that everyone sees and remembers and writes about – after the water, we lay hands upon you and pray for you to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
And the Holy Spirit comes into you and begins to change things in your heart. The Holy Spirit redecorates your soul, sweeps out the dirt, wipes the grit off your windshield, and begins to help you navigate your life away from evil and toward holiness. Whether or not you will become holy and saved from yourself now depends largely upon how much you listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and listen to and read the Word of God, Christ speaking through the Holy Bible, which itself was written by the influence of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breath of God.
And where is the fire?
There are three types of fire in our lives.
There is the first fire, the fire of the Holy Spirit arriving. Some people, myself included, have reported feeling warm when the Holy Spirit comes into them. John Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed” when he finally accepted that God loved him and that his faith in Christ was sufficient for God to save him.
There is the second fire. Almost without exception, when people make a strong, definite commitment to follow Jesus - no matter what - they are then tested in their commitment. It is like walking through a fire – a series of fires – And those fires are not pleasant, they are not fun, but you can go through the fire with God walking beside you – as God promised in Isaiah,
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
For the Lord is like a refiner’s fire. This testing fire removes the impurities and rot, leaving you pure.
And then, there is the final fire...
The Bible speaks of a final fire, into which the devil and his servants are thrown at the end of the age. Followers of Christ do not ever feel this fire. By the time we reach this point, our impurities are gone, nothing which is holy can be touched by this fire.
And so I say to you…
Who will be baptized? Who will begin the process and receive the cleansing, the fire of the Holy Spirit, and be filled with new life. Who wants to wash away and burn up the rot in their life? Who would live eternally with Jesus Christ? Who will come forward today and be baptized on this day, the day we celebrate the baptism of the Lord?
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