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Choosing the Right Fork by Rev. Gregory Turner December 14, 2003 - Advent TEXT: Luke 3:7-18; Philippians 4:4-7 © 2003 Gregory Turner

The other night Kathy and I shared a meal with eight others of you in our Supper Club gathering - where I sat fascinated listening to stories of French table manners: specifically the etiquette of the haute bourgeoisie as told in the childhood memories of David Barth recalling his dowager grandmother at the family chateau. I learned about dress, about being prompt and about honored woman. I learned who pours and how one pours wine, the silence of children (can you imagine) and - most interesting of all - why one does not pass the cheese tray twice; or, should it be passed, why one never takes cheese a second time. All this in the ears of one whose country doesn't have anything the French would call cheese, much less a whole tray of it. It got to thinking, to remembering really, the attempts we made at learning table manners. I even grew nostalgic and started to recall a story that goes something like this:

It had been a quiet day on campus. Mid-term examinations were coming to the hilltop formed by the waters of the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers. And to the amazement of the faculty, there had been an outbreak of studying. It was so quiet, in fact, that the memory of that day has dimmed considerably. Only a boisterous fellow like John the Baptist, with his threshing floor and winnowing fork, could bring it back. That, and the cheese tray.

Sitting in the formal dining room are about twenty college boys. Oh, they were boys, all right. There are a couple sophomores, but the rest are freshmen (first year college kids), which puts the average age at less than nineteen. All are wearing clean white dress shirts, ties and sport coats with slacks: mostly blue blazers and grey slacks, regulation dress for frat men at Kansas University in the autumn of 1960. Red and blue striped ties, if you want to whole outfit. The rules are clear. College kids, you say? In coats and ties? Well, if it sounds like a long time ago, it was.

To use a word only their parents would have used: they all look very "spiffy" - even the three guys whose feet had managed to slip into their penny loafers without benefit of stockings - which would have been blue argyles, probably. The loafers are black, no question. Brown is still too avant-garde, and avant-garde this bunch is not. Mother Marjorie Malone, the loving but formidable matron of the house in her late sixties, has been down more than one road with undergraduates in her seventeen years at Phi Kappa Psi. Luckily she has not seen this sockless rebellion. The loafered feet are well hidden under the massive dining table. Its fake-linen tablecloth hangs down far enough to block the view of the hawk-eyed housemother. Which means the freshmen plus two were already sitting in their places when she entered the room. So it is all right. The bare-ankled rebels, if inwardly undisciplined, are outwardly undetected.

They have gathered for the third of four etiquette lessons offered without choice in the matter. Today deals with proper table manners. It follows one on proper dress and decorum in public and another on relationships with deans, professors, and other figures of academic authority. Next week the sessions conclude with Mother
Malone's famous lecture on how to treat coeds (female students) with honor. Yes, indeed, this was another era completely.

Through the windows shines a stunning late Friday afternoon in mid October. The boys had studied more than they felt to be healthy; and, therefore, it would be no exaggeration to conclude that these matriculating gentlemen want to be elsewhere at the moment, instructed by females of their own generation in different arts of social engagement. But, alas, they are "the pledge class" at one of the old-line fraternities. The leadership of the state will be drawn from their ranks. To advance this great cause, basic human freedoms had been cheerfully cast aside on pledge day. So here they sit before an assortment of plates, crystal and silverware, diligently learning the purpose and place of each.

Mind you, Mother Malone had promised it would take less than an hour, and things are proceeding well ahead of schedule. But as they come to the fourth and smallest fork to the left of each plate -- used normally, they are informed, for shrimp cocktail -- of the boys loses it and most of the rest follow.

Giggling may be acceptable for ten year olds; for college men it is unbecoming. But there you have it, and that's not all. The nineteen-year-old male imagination cannot stretch itself to imagine
the practical need for such a utensil, and I fear a couple overly creative suggestions slip out regarding alternative uses of the shrimp cocktail fork. It is not a pretty episode. Three forks, perhaps; the fourth is one too many.

Mother Marge hears these suggestions, of course. With a shake of her rightly offended and gravely disap-pointed head, and fighting back tears, she leaves the room without a further word. It won't be the last time, heaven knows, that one of these future leaders would have to stand at her door bringing apologies and seeking forgiveness. John the Baptist would not have been welcome at Phi Kappa Psi, even as a visitor. Not that that would ever have bothered him. If John had been around when college fraternities came along, his table manners would have been the last thing on the brother's minds. For surely John was an Independent. Once he saw what the Greeks (the fraternity fellows) were up to, they'd been too busy fending off his lightning bolts. "Repent, you brood of vipers" would be a great line for a college skit, not to mention an accurate once. But when John said it, he was serious.

It has been my privilege and burden to sit on both sides of a couple dozen search committees. And as I read the gospel lesson for today, I chuckled to think how any pastoral search committee I've ever known might handle the candidacy of John the Baptist. Not that it would have ever been an issue, because John didn't care a whit about being "pastoral." His demeanor was abrupt, to say the least, his appearance surely was alarming, and his preaching style could only characterized as consistent and unapologetic "fire and brimstone." John's mother Elizabeth and Jesus' mother Mary are kinspeople, related somehow. That makes Jesus a cousin of John, several times removed, probably, whose coming, John believes, will judge with wrathful results those are worthy and those who are not.

You'd have to say that no day along that stretch of the Jordan River was a quiet day when the baptizer was around. In his "Biblical Who's Who," Frederick Buechner describes the famous forerunner:

The Kingdom was coming all right, [John] said, but if you thought it was going to be [tea time], you'd better think again. If you don't shape up, God would give you the axe like an elm with the blight.... He said being a Jew (like him) wouldn't get you any more points that being a Hottentot, and one of his favorite ways of addressing his congregation was as a snake pit. Your only hope, he said, was to clean up your life as if your life depended on it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had. Some people thought he was Elijah...and some others thought he was the Messiah, but John would have none of either: "I'm the one yelling myself blue in the face [out here] in the wilderness..." "I'm the one trying to knock some sense into your heads."*

If our seminaries offered a course in pastoral style and the effective handling of parishioners, John would have flunked it. No, he wouldn't have enrolled! He wouldn't come to dinner, unless you were serving sautéed locusts. Even then, right quick you'd notice that the aroma from his water-logged lion skin cloak provided a startling contrast with a frat house dining room full of English Leather, blue blazer and grey slacks.

As for those four forks beside the plate, who cares? Sticky fingers dripping with wild honey are a whole lot easier to eat those squirmy locusts. The fork John cared about was the winnowing fork he thought an angry messiah would use on us all when he finally arrived and saw the mess we'd made of God's world. And you don't use a winnowing fork for the seafood appetizer. You'd better believe it's for the main course -- life's only course. When he saw Jesus coming, John was certain this was just the fellow to winnow and winnow some more.

What is a winnowing fork? I would have had to check the dictionary had I not grown up in The Wheat State. About an hour by car west of Lawrence, the Kansas landscape flattens out and stays that way until The Rockies. Out there the farmers, even back in '48 when we moved from Michigan, used huge combines to harvest the wheat from their fields covering miles and miles of perfectly level ... miles. "The rough places have become plain," at least in Kansas. But around Lawrence with its rolling hills, the wheat fields are smaller and scattered among acres of corn, soy beans, Christmas trees and shopping centers. A kid growing up back then would have a good chance of knowing a small farmer, who might also teach creative writing, and who
didn't need John Deere's Green Giant Harvesting Combine for her two acres of grain. Back then you might see the winnowing fork she used to toss the newly threshed wheat in such a way that the prairie wind would carry the dried stalks away from the floor. The chaff would blow out much further, allowing the grain to drop at her feet and be gathered in baskets. That's a Winnowing Fork.

It hadn't changed a lot from the grain farmers John observed working in his native Galilean countryside. But like everything else with John, he over dramatized what he saw. Using a winnowing fork is not a violent experience. It is done skillfully, carefully if the farmer is smart, even gracefully. The farmer does not want to toss the wheat stalks willy nilly. For they too must be gathered as fuel and for weaving, insulating and a number of other uses. And as for the chaff John sees as worthless, the farmer is likely to wield his large fork in a way that allows this combination of grain husks, stubble bits and pollen dust either to blow back across a garden or field or be mixed with manure. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is left behind, nothing is left behind...I repeat, nothing is Left Behind. John asked us nothing more than to be taken seriously, and we do. The time is always urgently at hand to clean up our acts. And like the teamster who started each day by whacking his lead mule with a wooden board, John would have said, "First, you have to get their attention." Well, John got everyone's attention. But what he was most concerned we take most seriously is the person he precedes and to whom he points.

The trouble for John, and he noticed it right off, was that Jesus seems to be preaching a different message. As Matthew tells the story, in their very first encounter, when John thought Jesus should have taken over, Jesus refuses -- gently -- and insists that according to scripture and custom John should baptize him. Such a deliberate act of contrition and humility must have been a blow to John's expectations.

But it was only the beginning. While John raised the specter of a winnowing fork separating the morally pure from the immoral majority, Jesus was more subtle. He showed us a fork in the road and said, "Follow me." John shouted that the folks had better save themselves fast. Jesus showed it is God's grace that saves and that it wasn't too late, even for a prodigal son who spent his college years on beer instead books and engaged in sexual escapades rather than Socratic dialogues. John would associate only with the baptismally washed. You had to be spiffy on the inside. Jesus went out of his way to embrace the great unwashed, folks who never owned a white dress shirt or striped tie. Folks the spiffy people avoided. John railed that you will be cursed if you don't repent. Jesus told us that the humble, the peaceful and the persecuted are blessed already. No matter how lousy we feel inside, how unacceptable we've been taught to think we are, John's cousin shows us that taking the fork less traveled can yet make this a new day.

Buechner sees the contrast sharply: "Where John preached grim justice and pictured God as a steely-eyed thresher of grain, Jesus preached forgiving love and pictured God as the host at a marvelous party, as a woman who will search for those others think are worthless, or a father who can't bring himself to throw his children out even when they spit in his eye." And indeed each new Advent is also a beginning for us. How we use our faith to engage our world is the question here. Shall we choose the fork of judgmental fear and impatient anger, where you are part God's chosen while 99.99% of God's humanity is not? Or shall we decide instead to choose Christ's fork of sacrificial service and joyful grace. For your life and mine, that choice will make all the difference. Amen.
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*Peculiar Treasures, published in 1979 by Harper and Row. References used in this sermon are found on pages 69 and 70.