Texts:
What are we going to do with Jesus and his words? Here they were, ready to evangelize to those Greeks, the people for whom the cross might be considered foolishness, who are asking to see Jesus. The opportunity lands right in their laps. Philip tells Andrew, and they both go together to tell Jesus. Jesus, who has already raised a man from the dead, responds with some sort of bizarre mention of a seed dying in the earth and bearing fruit and then says, if you love your life, you will lose it, and if you hate your life, you’ll keep it eternally. These are not the words we want to use to evangelize. Who is going to want to proclaim that message?
Wanting to tell a story of power, of victory, of how we are better, faster, stronger, and better, we find instead a story that looks a lot like defeat. One of my dad’s favorite stories to tell about me - he’s coming in June, so I have to beat him to the punch a little bit - is when I was in 2nd grade and participated in the long jump at a school track meet. I was very small as a child, shorter and scrawnier than most of my classmates. My dad had watched me compete and was waiting for me when I arrived home from school. I came home with my little red ribbon and was clearly unhappy. My dad asked me what was wrong. I stomped into the dining room and threw down the red ribbon I had received. My dad asked me what I was angry about; 2nd place was really good. I looked at him as only an 8-year-old could and said, “Daddy, everybody knows 2nd place is just first loser.” Telling, huh?
From an early age, we determine our measuring sticks for understanding whether or not we have achieved, whether or not we will be accepted, whether we are good enough, smart enough, tall enough, pretty enough, rich enough… and we subscribe the church to these same marks. Wanting to win, wanting to overpower our enemies, we find it hard to be recipents of grace: “The way of recipiency is a difficult way for those who are born achievers—and that means all of us. Not only are we born such, but particularly in our society are we conditioned to think, value, and practice achievement. In our society it is the high achievers who succeed, the high earners who are respected, the haves (not the have-nots) who are our heroes. Our society will always choose competition over cooperation, property rights over personal rights, concentration over distribution, and accumulation over purpose. Our educational systems no longer have as their objective education for citizenship but rather education for competitive production in the marketplace. To accumulate more is the basic value lesson our young people are being taught in our society, and as one magazine headline put it recently, "More is Never Enough!"[1]
And more is never enough, if we believe that the future of St. Peter, the future of the church, and the future of faith is something that we can bring about of our own accord. Instead, the future is something that is received.[2] We cannot do enough or be enough or work hard enough to guarantee the life of the church. What we have, right now, is an opportunity to be a community, knit together by Christ, pointing to his truth and his reality. Pointing to Christ, we win even if we fail. Pointing to God’s kingdom, we proclaim that, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. Jesus doesn’t say the words about the grain of wheat or loving and hating our lives as a way to illustrate what will happen if we do or don’t do this or that; Jesus speaks in these words a description of what the truth is. The seed that falls into the earth becomes a plant that bears more seed. One for the sake of many, one for the sake of all who will follow thereafter.
We read about the seed falling into the earth and dying, and risk falling into the ditch of apathy, in which we simply passively receive forgiveness and forget that it is part of our call to share the message with others, to evangelize, or we fall into the ditch of DIY spirituality, in which we run around trying to earn our salvation in the name of Jesus, refusing the free gift that comes to us in what has to be one of the most confusing ways. By dying, much fruit is borne. But what sort of death does this mean?
It begs the question: what is St. Peter willing to live for? What is St. Peter willing to die for? At least, we think these are the questions that the text asks of us today, because, honestly, we want to make it about us. We want to point to ourselves and our ministries as reasons why we should exist, reasons why we should be here, reasons why death is not a word we should use in church. I will never forget the day when one of my professors said to a group of students, “Don’t ever say the church is dying; death and church do not belong in the same sentence.” We make a big mistake if we think the church is dying when its membership dwindles; likewise, if we think it is dying when its doors close, we are missing the point. Dying and church do not belong in the same sentence because to proclaim so implies that the church’s life and action are dependent upon itself and not upon Christ. This is where the life of faith hits the ground running; are we going to point to ourselves and what we do as justification for our lives and for our existence, or are we going to point to Christ and what he has done (that is, conquering and abolishing death) as our sole justification? Pointing to what we do for Christ, we are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal; pointing to what Christ does for us, we come to understand what it is to have a savior and what it is to have a God.
Perhaps the point of Jesus’ words in John 12:24 isn’t to point us to ourselves, but to point us once again to the cross (funny, how the Bible tends to do that). What if the point is not living or dying, but in and by whom we live and die? Somehow, it’s much easier to understand Christ as the one in whom we live; it is harder to understand in whom we die. “Those who love your lives will lose them, and those who hate your lives will keep them for eternal life.” This verse makes me think more favorably about Mark 8:35, which we heard a few weeks ago: “35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” It seems we find it easier to understand what it is to lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel, but John refuses us that luxury. Trying to define life by its quality, trying to pin down how to do it just right so that we may justify our existence, John refuses to allow us to point to our lives and to ourselves as central. Continually pointing us back to Christ, we find that our lives take on an entirely different shape and character. Whether we love our hate our lives is immaterial, for they exist in Christ. Christ is the vine, we are the branches. Christ is the seed, we are the fruit. Christ is the one who refuses to remain a single seed, though to bear fruit implies Christ will be dealing with an unwieldy group of followers, of people who follow him but still can’t get it right, of people who only understand what the Gospel means in hindsight, of people who come to the altar each week proclaiming that in wheat and in wine we find the mystery of our salvation.
Our Lenten walks are a time of asking hard questions, a time of looking at our achievements, looking at our propensity to value the past and future over the present, admitting and confessing that this often prevents us from seeing Christ right in front of us. Christ is in front of you - in your neighbor, in bread and wine, in the cross hung above our altar. We confess that we miss the forest for the trees, that we become so focused on our own desires, on our own well-being, on our own notions of safety and security, that we forget to live into the call Christ has given us. Christ has bid you to come and die with him. He bids you not to this because there is no hope, but because there is. In dying in the earth, the seed of Christ has borne much fruit. You are the fruit of Christ. You are the branches of the vine. You are the tendrils of faith, reaching out to a creation who so desperately needs to hear this Word, this Word made flesh, has come and is for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment