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	1st Reading
	Psalm
	2nd Reading
	Gospel
	Written Transcript of Homily
	Footnotes

I’m getting over a little bug.

I have laryngitis, so you’re very lucky that this will probably be a short sermon.

Well... short by my standards.

‘Cause this gospel has some of my favorite ideas in it, I could go on for hours, as you know.

But before I launch into things, I wanted to introduce Deacon Mark Zakenfeld(??)

Who is the Diocese of Luxenton, right?    Nashville, one of those Southern....South from where Chick comes from.

Diocese of Nashville, he’s preparing for priesthood ordination. He will be visiting us to...well, prepare for priesthood!

But you can begin to pray for him now.

When will you be ordain, God willing?

 -response-

May 30th, so he’s ...

-claps-

God bless you, amen.

When I heard a deacon wanted to come and practice here, I thought “Oh boy, I can retire some day.”

But he’s in Nashville, so...

So, I guess I can’t retire yet.

On secondly, a little bit more serious news, Rita Highland(??)passed away.

Just a few days ago...I think the longtime parishioners will remember Rita quite well.

Rita and I think Joe is her husband, right?

-response-

What?

-response-

Oh, Ed! Sorry. Ed.

Rita and Ed Highland.

Ed I think is still with us.

But they moved out of the parish a while ago.

But Rita passed away, she was very, very active, so keep them in your prayers.

And because they live far away, there are right now no funeral arrangements, when there are, we’ll let you know what kind of memorial mass we’re gonna do for Rita.

-coughing- excuse me.

I looked on the web and I’m not contagious anymore, so at least they’ve promised us.

So.

So, I will stand up here and suffer for you and make you suffer.

I suppose it’s the weather, but I’m getting over something, I have a thoroughly miserable sermon for you, so...well, I’ll launch into it.

In the gospel today we read about....John the Baptist says, referring to the Messiah, “I am baptizing you with water for repentance. But the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear His threshing floor and gather His wheat into His barn. But the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire.”

I believe that John...the Baptist, who was from a priestly family, is talking about the temple, oddly enough.

You all know that I am an old charismatic , and I would call myself an old Pentecost ? ? ?

It is current to talk about the baptism and the holy spirit, and this is the text to which that refers.

But most people who are involved with those movements think of the so-called “Baptism of the Holy spirit” as a pleasant kind of experience.

Well...

Yes and no.

lets look at this reading a little closely.

You all remember that the word spirit really means “breath” or “wind”.

This involves...this passage involves “crushing” and “burning” and “separation”.

Now I doubt many people...

Not many people last night we had one farmer here, but I dunno if anyone who grew up on a wheat farm is here.

Nobody grew up on a wheat farm?

Or something..

Wheat farm in Poland, right?

So you know about old fashioned threshing, don’t you?

I will never forget...

Ask somebody afterwards if I’m telling the truth or not.

Threshing is quite a business the old way

It involves horses and oxen, doesn’t it?

Yeah, it’s kind of a messing perseger

You’re probably not gonna want to eat bread for a while.

We do it differently now.

I’ll never forget, we were traveling in Spain years ago, I was... that was when it was cheap to go to Spain, it’s not anymore.
 

And we were traveling in the back roads and we’re way up in the high country, and this is a hilltop that we were driving by, a rocky hilltop, and there were a bunch of guys who were sitting on, what looked to be a giant sled.

It was being pulled around in circles...by oxen!

And I thought, “My God, they’re threshing!”

And I jammed on the breaks, terrifying my passengers, and jumped out of the car, and I started taking pictures.

These guys looked at us and said, “What are you doing? We’re getting a machine next year.”

They were not proud of this old fashioned threshing.

But what you do, you see wheat, or really any cereal grain.

Has a hard outer  shell, and you have to break that shell, that chaff.

And get rid of it, it’s useless.

It’s no  nutrition, no use at all.

So what you do, you get oxen to pull this sled over your crop of wheat.

And the oxen with their hooves..

..it sounds really messy, but I’m sure they clean the grain somehow.

Tell me they clean it somehow, right?

Yeah...she’s nodding.

They clean it somehow.

But the oxen are walking on the grain!

And this sled, this heavy sled, which may have some stones on it to weigh it down, is following around.

This has to be on a hard surface, a flat, rocky cropping.
And then you get this mess with crushed heads to grain.

And then, what you do, is you take a winnowing fan, which looks like one of those old pizza shovels.

You ever gone to one of those really good pizza places? They have these big kind of...they look like snow shovels.

And what they do is they take the grain and throw it up in the air.

Now this has gotta be on a high promontory where there’s a good steady wind.

And what happens because the chaff is lighter than the wheat, the chaff gets blown downwind.

And so you got two piles.

You gotta little pile of grain

and you gotta big pile of chaff, which is useless, you know. You can’t even throw it out on the fields, you gotta burn it.

And that’s winnowing, that’s how you make, that’s how you get grain.

It involves crushing the head of grain.

Then it involves separation, using the wind.

And then it involves burning.

This is important.

Now.

Let me look at my watch, I promised short.

The temple in Jerusalem was an amazing building.

It was a square structure built by Salomon, the platform on top of Mount Mariya.

It was the mountain that Jews believed, believed til today, that Abraham had taken his son Isaac to sacrifice him.

Mountain Peek was a very special mountain, because it had been, at the time of David.

When David had taken over the city of Jerusalem to build his capitol it had been a threshing floor.

It was the highest promontory, and in the middle of this little hill, this out cropping is a big flat solid rock.

It’s called the foundation stone.

And it is the threshing floor for Jerusalem, it was owned by a guy named ? ? ? ?

And because of David’s disobedience plague had struken...struken, is that a word in English?

A plague struck Jerusalem.

And David repented of his sin.

And he had a vision of an angel standing on this threshing floor, withholding the plague, and the plague stopped.

So David decided he would build a temple, in which to hide the ark of the covenant, where God met his people.

And so he bought this threshing floor.

And Salomon had build the temple, and the threshing floor was made the foundation of the Holy of Holies.

Now the temple was a series of consequent squares.

And rectangles.

The outer most anybody could go in.

The next one - - - only Jews.

The next one - - - only Jewish men.

The next one - - - only priests.

The innermost.... the innermost... square....

The Holy of.... 

The Holy of Holies which was built on this rock, this threshing floor of ????

Only the high priests went in once a year.

And said three times, I believe three times, pronounced the unpronounceable name of God, on
youngcompone, the day of Atonement.

It was where the ark of the covenant was kept.

Until it was lost 400 years before Christ in the Babylonian wars and then it was just an empty room, which was believed to contain the presence of God.

It was where God met His people.

And once a year the High priest had access to It for a few minutes. That was it.

But you know what?

That holy of holies had no flooring.

The floor of the holy of holies was the bedrock of the threshing floor of ? ? ? ?

What the heck is this about?

I’ll get there, I always do.

Or I usually do.

It was this bedrock.

But you wouldn’t know that, only the High priest went into this dark room once a year.

It had been covered in all this magnificence

  But at it’s core was this place where wheat had originally be crushed, and separated and burned

That was the threshing floor.

 That was the foundation stall for the holy of holies.

 Where God met his people.

For a brief time, when the Babylonians destroyed the temple, people could again see the bedrock of the holy of holies.

But after exile, they built it back.

And then Herod came along.

Herod the Great, who was not Jewish. He was an Arab.

His family converted to Judaism.

And Herod the Great, the one who killed the babies after Christmas, he needed to prove he was Jewish.

So he rebuilt the temple which was ascensional the most amazing and beautiful building in the ancient world.

He extended that the original platform that Salomon and David had built.

He extended it out so it was, get this, I believe, twenty six football fields.

That’s large.

This platform is still there.

When you go to Jerusalem it’s there, it’s huge.

The retaining, one of the retaining walls is that wailing wall that you see in pictures.

It’s huge.

And on top of that is the place of the temple.

And Herod built that up so it was about a hundred and seventy feet tall.

That’s fifteen stories.

And it was a mountain of white-limestone and marble and gold.

The front of the temple, the front of the central shrine was plated in gold in such a way that ? ? ? the historian said, “You couldn’t look at it in the sunrise because it hurt your eyes, it was so brilliant.”

It was an amazing building.

But at the heart of it was still this threshing floor.

Now.

I’ve told you all that to make a point that at the center of worship, at the center of worship in the old covenant and the old covenant is crushing and separating and burning

The threshing of the grain for wheat is at the heart of our worship.

In a few minutes, if I ever shut up, you will receive a small piece of what looks like bread, that we believe, that tradition and the scripture tell us, is the flesh and blood of the son of God.

Not a symbol, not a ? ? ? ?, but the real presence of God in the world.

What was the holy of holies?

It was the place where God was present in the world.

What is the Eucharist?

that little box on the alter? That is the place where God is present in the world.

It involves crushing and separating and burning.

People think the baptism in the Holy Spirit is this nice and fun experience.

If you are baptized in the spirit God will separate you in those things in your life that are very useless to Him.

They may be very useful to you, but to His plan , they are useless.

He will crush, have you ever felt crushed? And separated?

Catholicism is a tough religion.

You understand that?
In our day and our age people like to leave Church where they’re feeling good.

You can’t always count on that in the Catholic church, especially when I’m preaching.

Have you felt crushed ever? Have you felt separated?

Christmas is a good time to feel crushed and separated, isn’t it?

We’re separated from things and even people whom we love.

The weight of responsibility, of work.

Even of our sinfulness, it crushes us down.

We think these are bad things, but in God’s plan, they are not always so bad.

You see God, why are
you letting this happen?

Have you ever prayed, “God, help me get out of this mess?”

God goes, “Well, why should I? I’m the one who helped you get into this mess.”

God wants to make you into His very self.

He wants you to be his son, he wants you to be His daughter.

We talk about ? ? ? ? in the Church.

Well, it is not just bread and wine that are changed into the son of God.

You and I are supposed to changed into the very son or daughter of God.

And this will involve crushing...and separating and burning.

The presence of God in your life, the Holy Spirit, the Devine wind will separate you from certain things. You can count on it.

And if you authentically Catholic you will submit to it.

And say “Yes Lord, I trust you.”

What about the burning?

I can part with my sins, providing they are still on the shelf incase I need them.

Oh noo...

I’m always fascinated by ? ? ? the ? ? ? Of Mexico.

He is not a very popular figure, historically at the moment, and whether you like him or loath him, ? ? ? went into Mexico with about four or five hundred guys and said, “Lets concur the greatest empire and largest city in the world, or one of the greatest empires”

Hundreds and thousands of blood thirsty ? ? ? warriors “we can do this.”

His men looked around and he said, “I’m not so sure we can.” and you know what ? ? ? did?

He burned the boats on the shore so nobody could go back to Cuba.

He said, “It’s death or victory. Let’s go.”

Well God burns the chaff in your life.

I’m really okay with parting with some of my sins...if I know they’re still there incase I need them.

Ha.
God burns the chaff.

At the heart of our worship is the piece of bread that becomes the flesh and blood of Christ.

This is not just a coincidence, it is the same symbol that was at the heart of the temple.

You may cover it up with gold, and glitter, and ornament.

But at the heart of our faith is a threshing floor.

Where grain is threshed out, and crushed, to become what God would have it be.

And you will be, if you are an authentic Catholic, crushed and separated and even burned.

In order to become with God would have you be.

Because the Lord your God, as ? ? ? ? says, is a jealous God.

He will have you for Himself.

Because He loves you that passionately.

Now I would like to join a religion that was a little easier, but unfortunately, I can’t.

Because I believe that this Catholic faith, which is centered around in Eucharist, and gathered around the alter is the faith that Jesus established.

So - - - there are nicer religions....

But, there is none better.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.