Chaff
Psalm 1; Proverbs 31:10-31; Mark 9:30-37

September 24, 2006


Chaff has meaning out on the farm. It means that flaky stuff that falls off the grain when it is being harvested. Chaff, therefore, is material that is of no substance, hardly to be thought about. When the term chaff is applied to people it gets nasty and personal. Is any person considered that inconsequential that they are deemed to lack any worthwhile substance? Yes, many are so considered. But it is usually not the wicked who are treated like the chaff on earth. The Psalmist never suggests that we should be treating anyone like chaff; God will deal with the wicked on God’s own terms.

And maybe that’s how the conversation got started among the disciples. Jesus had run through the whole Messiah consequences list again, calling himself this time the Son of Man. He was going to be betrayed and then killed, but after being killed, rise again. It was, one has to acknowledge, a heady if not surreal trip. They are passing through their home land, yet Jesus is trying to go incognito. Some way to run a public ministry when you want nobody to know you’re there. Did the disciples get it? They didn’t seem to comprehend his talk at all, and they knew it was a lot better not to ask. Perhaps they got into talking about how Jesus’ predictions just don’t make sense according to the Bible they knew. God punishes the wicked, not the good. The wicked are blown away like the chaff, not someone like Jesus was meant to be betrayed, executed, blown away. As for rising again, the resurrection in plain language, they never could figure that out. They just couldn’t see it. That’s all right, neither can we.

I still occasionally see that angry-toned bumper sticker, “Start Seeing Motorcycles!” Many accidents between cars and trucks and motorcycles have resulted from the car driver saying that he/she just didn’t “see” the motorcycle. Obviously, a motorcycle is a different kind of vehicle and doesn’t squeeze into our traditional peripheral vision on the highway. It is necessary for safety and even life that we begin training our eyes and brains to see something we have not really been able to see before.

Jesus was trying to train his disciples to “see” the resurrection, but so far they could only see their own agendas and their own self-interests. As the walk on the road to somewhere lengthened, the conversation between the disciples became more animated.

Jesus could feel what they were talking about, but he waited until they arrived at their host’s home in Capernaum before inquiring, “What were you talking about?” There are silences that are without sound and there are silences that speak louder than any shout. The disciples knew what they were talking about and they kept painfully silent. They had been discussing who was the greatest among them. That could be pretty interesting: a lot of people still favour seniority in service; others defer to age; still others to public speaking ability. Today it might be students comparing test scores, political parties and candidates who have collected the most number of votes and supporters. It could even be between ministers regarding whose church has the bigger budget, has more outreach ministries, or gets a higher average Sunday attendance.

It has been pointed out that as Jesus gathered everyone together for a chat he never chastised them for aspiring to greatness or excellence. That is not the problem. It’s all that pomposity and stepping on and over others in a PR campaign to appear the best. When you simply want to be the best, that doesn’t always mean you have achieved excellence. The disciples were debating and arguing who was the first, who was the best, and apparently didn’t have a clue about how to be excellent.

Jesus ironically starts by saying, “Whoever wants to be first must be last and a servant of all.” He brings into the circle a little child, perhaps the child of the host, and puts his arms around her or him. No one had seen her/him. Children are seldom noticed in the Bible. That society did not see children as very valuable - they couldn’t really work, but they could eat and take up other resources. You had to be an adult to be a real person, even though every real person once upon a time had to have been an unreal person, a non-person, a piece of chaff of no worthwhile substance.

“Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me.” This previously unseen child, and almost surely one or more of the disciples were muttering under their breath - “How did this kid get in here?” - has become the stand-in for Jesus, and even more so a stand-in for God. A child of God, a child for God.

For once, you and I don’t get the point of Jesus’ Gospel, but for an entirely different reason. Our society has a certain cult of children and certainly a lot of time, money, energy and television programming are spent on the perceived needs and desires of children. There is not a church in Christendom that does not declare, desperately at times, that children are the future of the church. So what’s the fuss with Jesus here? What was the problem with those self-centered old fogies of disciples (realizing that probably none of them were as old as 40)?

Their problem was that they couldn’t see. They couldn’t see a child having any real worth until it could support itself and others. They couldn’t really see the blind and the lame and the lepers and the AIDS victims because they were so obviously sinful and worthless, probably wicked too. They couldn’t see the poor, because then they would have to help them. They couldn’t see the Gentile and the stranger and the foreigner of a different racial makeup because they don’t count, they are not part of our friendly little community here. They don’t even believe in the same God or the same economic system as us. They couldn’t see them because they are chaff, and who bothers with paying attention to chaff which burns up in a flash.

You have to listen to how Mark says it in this passage. Jesus is not saying here, “You must act like a child, be child-like to enter the kingdom of heaven.” That’s not it; Jesus is saying that when you treat a child as a somebody, that she has something of real worth in this life, then you are treating Jesus as a somebody of real worth. Is there anybody here who does not believe that Jesus was not a somebody of real worth? I think for a while there some of the disciples only saw Jesus as their star to be hitched to, and eventually they wouldn’t need him. If they can treat Jesus like that, is there anybody here who has not felt at one time that you have been treated like a nobody, that you have been despised just because of who you are, that you have been consigned to the chaff bin ready to be burned off into thin air?

The wicked are like the chaff which the wind drives away, but the Gospel is not about making sure the wicked and the chaff and the ungodly get their comeuppins. So much energy is expended to make sure that life is deadly, that some people are the best and the others don’t matter, that most people are simply not seen - they might as well be dead. The Gospel is the Good News that there is resurrection in the air. Instead of only seeing death and decay and outsiders and foreigners, you see a child who defeats death with every breath, and sitting down to listen to that child’s story of life, you listen to Jesus.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan