Everything seems to be getting worse, which I mean in neither an existential way nor a literal one; still, I stand by it, as even here on WordPress I find that I can no longer format wrapped text the way I like and cannot find an option to do so. (It’s probably still there, and if you know how to do it, feel free to tell me, but I’ll look it up later.) I scroll through maybe half a dozen AI and sponsored results when I Google something, looking for the still-relatively-authoritative Wikipedia or Mayo Clinic or New York Times source for whatever question I have. I’ve left Twitter entirely and post on Bluesky with only moderate enthusiasm, wondering how long it will be until that platform, in the name of “free speech,” enables the very worst bullies, grifters, and conspiracy theorists to suck all the oxygen out of the place as they’ve done elsewhere. I have to sift through sometimes dozens of posts on Instagram or Facebook to find friends’ vacation photos or funny memes, or content from artists or musicians or writers I’ve actually deliberately chosen to follow. (Pinterest is still fine.) And I sit with all this a week before Donald Trump is again inaugurated as President, a specter for which I have even less enthusiasm than I do for social media; an event that will undoubtedly provide the spark for the tinder of racism, nativism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, end-stage capitalism, anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment, oligarchy, and kakistocracy (did I miss anything?) to consume the hearts and lives of many, and it won’t even lower our egg prices, I’m sorry to say. Sitting with this dread has cost me entire days, that plus a New Year’s round of COVID, so I cannot say I was in my finest humor when I showed up to church this morning.

The Gospel today was from Luke 3, in which Jesus is baptized by his cousin, prophet, and co-minister John. The baptism Jesus has come to offer, John notes, is that of the Holy Spirit and fire. “His winnowing fork is in his hand,” John declares, “to clear his threshing floor and to gather
the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:17). Baptism is necessarily a destructive force as well as a restorative one—and baptism begins to act as restorative, as a winnowing fork, in us when we defy the forces of destruction.

Defiance is made holy when we defy, among other things, the polluted waters in which our physical and digital selves live. The folks we call saints and heroes are those who mastered that holy defiance, who knew when to draw lines and stand behind them in perfect love and service. In those people the chaff has burned—not merely that of hate, wrath, greed, and the like, but the chaff of despair, the chaff I personally need God to burn in my heart like yesterday. The restoration for which God hopes and continues to hope in us was embodied by Jesus in the way he lived, in the complete absence of chaff.

“In God’s company, we can do hard things,” notes Rev. M. Jade Kaiser, and everything feels hard right now—and the chaff must be burned because it will choke the wheat in the field and overwhelm it in the harvest. I can’t afford for my temporal and technological despair to become existential; I don’t think any of us can. But in baptism, God promised us company, and promised to partner with us in the destruction of the destructive. I think that’s a promise anyone can embrace. I think pretty much everyone has to do so, if we have any chance of surviving, and helping our neighbors survive, the fires that are coming—the literal fires as well as the metaphorical ones. In that, God can be well pleased.