DESTINATION – NEW LIFE: WHEN GOOD THINGS COME TO AN END

JEREMIAH 31:31-34; JOHN 12:20-33

APRIL 9, 2000 – LENT FIVE

THOMAS H. YORTY, WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

 

Poet Kathleen Norris was teaching fifth graders to write poetry. One little boy, a poor student, wrote a poem entitled, "My Very First Dad." "I remember him/like God in my heart," the poem goes. "I remember him/like clouds overhead and strawberry ice cream and bananas/when I was a little kid. But the most I remember/is his love, as big as Texas when I was born." The boy’s teacher said, "He’s never done anything like that before." Then told Norris the boy was from Texas but never knew his father because the old man skipped town the day the boy was born.

 

Iin today’s story from Jeremiah, the people of God are in exile. Most of them could not remember God. Their temple was destroyed, the signs and symbols of their former lives non-existent. They were homesick, spiritually lonely. Then comes Jeremiah, like that little boy, making poetry about how God would put a new covenant in their hearts. The material objects of faith, temples and tablets of stone won’t matter, says Jeremiah. Everything you need to be a child of God, will be in your heart – a covenant of love as big as Texas, sweet as a banana split. 

We’ve been talking this Lent about the journey to new life. If the Hebrew scripture today starts with the promise that God’s love will live in your heart, the gospel continues by describing how that process works. Farmer/theologian Clarence Jordan used to claim Jesus was more farmer than carpenter so numerous are his references to seeds, plants and growing things. Today is a case in point. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, says Jesus, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Contrary to the gospel of health, wealth and happiness John’s mini-parable says being a follower of Jesus is about dying. "Those who love their life lose it," says Jesus, "and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, where I am, there will my servant be also."

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies…. Talking about death and dying – particularly in a culture that abhors death – is tricky business, especially if death and dying are considered essential to the mystery of life as they are in today’s story. But for John, death is a process not an isolated event. For John, Jesus’ dying and being glorified are part and parcel of each other. Jesus’ reign of glory as Prince of Heaven begins with his death on the cross. Such talk goes against our society’s idolizing youth and invincibility. A recent New Yorker cartoon pictures two senior citizens sitting on a park bench, requisite pigeons warbling in the foreground. "In my day," says one to the other, "people died."

The cartoon is a not so subtle reference to the fact that in our day people do not die. In our day, people are kept alive on machines and with chemicals when no life is left. In our day, our fear of death speaks volumes about the spiritual bankruptcy of our time. Ask any anthropologist. Not all societies abhor death. There are some signs we are learning. The mission and ministry of the hospice movement, for example. The volunteers and workers of that remarkable movement and the families served by them can tell you death and dying bring their own gifts and riches. The people of hospice understand death and dying are a process, not the final word. That is the core of the gospel message for us today. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it remains a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit. Jesus’ mission is incomplete without his death. So too is the mission of anyone who chooses to follow him incomplete unless they suffer and die like he did.

Some Christian pulpits preach success and happiness, even this one from time to time, but today’s gospel preaches death and failure. I ask you to hang in there with me while we probe a little further. The gospel of death and failure. Sixth century saint Benedict – who has a huge following today – understood Jesus’ metaphor. Benedict said to his followers, "keep death daily before your eyes." You see, Benedict knew daily life – liturgy and prayers, care of tools, the amount and type of food and drink and clothing are spiritual concerns. God claims every part of our lives. Not a few communal ventures, begun with good intentions, failed over the question of who takes out the garbage. Benedict invited his followers to be attentive to these things, the details of life that require attention and care, humility and sacrifice.

 

In marriage and family life, in church life, in business life it is easy to ignore such things. Easy to allow tension to build until it gets resolved with an explosion that does more harm than good. Persevere, says Benedict, bear each other’s burdens, be patient with one another’s infirmities of body or behavior. Forgive one another. Accept forgiveness. You are not the center of the universe.

 

Keep death daily before your eyes.Keeping death daily before our eyes – is a way of living to which we must be called. Walter Brueggeman reflecting on the relevance of the prophets says living in such a way as to subordinate the self to anything is an outrageous concept. Being called to a life that not only subordinates but sacrifices the self is nonsense in our age. Yet, this is precisely the kind of suffering and sacrifice Jesus calls us to choose. The great scandal of our time is that much of what drives the economic and political agenda of our nation is the fiction that we can live an "uncalled life." A life lived to the autonomous self with no purpose beyond the self. Former teacher Aidan Kavanaugh laments that the icon of our time is not the image of community but of a lone jogger running through suburbia, in order, we are told, to feel good about himself.

 

I am not saying stop exercising. I am saying find something bigger than yourself worthy to die for. It is what being made in the image of God is about. What our hearts are equipped to do. For a child of God to settle for anything less would be like keeping a Ferrari under 50mph on an open stretch of country road. Consider Jesus. One preacher says, he could have toned down his message or stopped being so public. Gone underground. Found a more tasteful way to preach and teach. Stopped hanging out with riff raff and prostitutes. Showed more respect for the brass. He could have done all that but only if decelerated his message, put the brakes on his vision. Or Jesus could choose to keep on doing and saying what he was doing and saying before his fame spread. Before people started coming from foreign lands asking for him like those Greeks do at the start of today’s story. The choice to keep living the way he was, was to choose his message over his life. That was his goal. Suffering was not his goal. There are many kinds of suffering. Some redeem. Some do not. Jesus’ suffering was a consequence of remaining faithful to his goal. His message mattered more to him than his life.

If Jesus had saved his life, gone on a speaking tour, written some books, there is no telling how long his movement might have lasted. Maybe a hundred years. But because he was willing to lose his life showing people what his message meant rather than just writing or talking about it his seed bore much fruit more than if he toned things down and backed off.That’s what the bible means when it says Jesus died for our sins. It means after all he suffered from priests and princes, he chose finally, in the end, to let their malice kill him. His death was for us in the sense that the integrity of what he preached and lived was preserved. Not just for the people of his day. For you and me as well. Dying for what he preached and lived was the means to this end: that his generation and every generation could receive that message. The message was not the object of his love. We are. That’s how and why he died for us. Even when our treatment of him and each other released him from any ethical obligation to do anything at all for us.

 

But that is only part of the story. I said earlier today’s gospel describes the process by which God’s love lives in our hearts – big as Texas, sweet as a banana-split. The other word for what Jesus does, dying for us on the cross, is love. One preacher says, "of all the powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent….To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth." Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies…. Jesus is the grain. Your heart is the ground into which that grain falls, is planted, cracks open in death, bursts forth in life. Then, by consent, you become the grain and the process of dying the same way Jesus did starts all over again. That’s Jeremiah’s new covenant. God’s love in a human heart.

The Case Library adult class has been talking about a new book, The Meaning of Jesus.

One of the authors, says this, he says, "it is not enough to analyze the causes of oppression and suffering in the world and to encourage people to stand up to them. Darker powers, unseen forces are involved in these struggles." Witness the slaughter going on now in Checknya or the frenzied mobs in Miami foaming over the custody of a six year old boy. Without being rooted in Jesus’ death the church’s effort to work for justice will appear merely as the "religious" version of the latest political cause. But if we root our struggle for justice in Jesus’ death we will reveal the ultimate impotence and defeat of the principalities and powers.Some will object to focussing on Jesus’ death as morbid. They always do.

 

Others may say it encourages passivity in the face of evil. Sometimes it does. But the fact is Jesus’ death does draw children, women and men to God’s love. Holds and sustains them in as they live daily and wrestle with the powers of evil. The old hymn says, "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." The witness of those who suffered for Jesus’ sake – their deaths symbolized in the weapons of their execution painted onto our chancel arch – their lives, the lives of the martyrs and the lives of all who suffer and die like Jesus ultimately announce the victory of the cross; that day when the fruit of justice will be harvested.

 

What would it mean for Westminster to fall like a grain into the earth and die? I suspect it has something to do with "keeping death daily before our eyes." At home and work and school to be sure but also here at church. To learn to let go like Jesus of what he held onto as most precious. Anything we cling to in fear is a candidate for letting go of in trust. Any sacred cow of worship or program or image.

 

The fifth Sunday of Lent is not a bad time to be preaching the gospel as death and failure. It is mud season in Western New York. The earth has thawed from its winter freeze. It is wet and damp and pliable. Good for planting grain. Seeds take time to gestate. Jesus falling like a grain into the earth and dying. That’s my sermon today. My hope is you’ll preach the sequel. Not only in how you choose to live. But especially in how you choose to suffer and die.

 

Amen.