A sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on March 25, 2012.
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-12, 119:9-16
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
If you’ve looked down at the ground much in the past week you might have seen the phenomenon that Jesus is referring to.
I was sitting out in the sun on Friday working on my sunburn and I looked down to observe that some of the helicopter maple seeds that had fallen to the ground last Autumn were breaking open and out them were emerging a bright green of new life.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
The seed must be broken in order for the life that is within to emerge.
And that new life contained within the maple seed may grow to full stature and supply delicious maple syrup to a future Acworthian.
There is no maple tree possibility. No future if the the seed remains intact, self-contained, protected.
We are a people who are called to faith.
I am not God. But I have been called into relationship with God.
The God of the universe, the God of the billions of stars and galaxies, the God of the billions of microscopic worlds -- the God of the invisible huge and the invisible small and the God of the present, visible world, the author, sustainer, and perfector of all existence...
that God has called to us and we hear God’s voice.
God has spoken to us through the natural world, God has spoken to us through people, and God has spoken to us through the prophetic word.
It is faith, a faith that itself is a gift, it is faith that we are called to in relation to God.
Many people talk about faith as if it is something we need to do. Something we have to create in ourselves, a sort of new identity to furnish and wave around. Hey you! Look at my new faith!
Faith is not something we accomplish, it is not some set of statements that we affirm to be true despite what anyone else says.
Faith is fundamentally a gift of God which is the death of self, the death of pretense, the death of pride and of self-seeking.
Faith is not something we can make happen. Faith is something that is given to us, the new life emerging out of the broken seed of the old.
It is by faith you are saved -- it is by God’s gift of the death of our pretense to power and control and self-righteousness that we are liberated to a new life of living in light of the grace of God.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
We are a people who live in two realities. We have two selves, we see two worlds.
Unless we understand that we live two lives, we will miss what Jesus is teaching when he says, “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
Many perhaps mishear this as a kind of miserable self-loathing, a kind of self-hatred.
But it is not that at all.
St. Augustine writes:
“Surely a profound and strange declaration as to the measure of a man’s love for his own life that leads to its destruction, and of his hatred to it that secures its preservation!”
I think the idea that loving your life is death and hating it is life is just as strange for us 21st century Americans as it was for Augustine, a fifth century African.
But we need to remember that Jesus is speaking this to a people who know that all is not right in the world.
These are people who know that “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” (Prov. 14:12)
These are a people who know that the world has wise and the world has foolish, the world has good and the world has evil, the world has true and the world has false.
And life and death are not just literal realities of hearts beating or not beating. Life and death are present realities of of salvation and condemnation, of liberation and enslavement.
They know what it means to love life but they also know what it means to live under conditions in which life is really a kind of death.
St. Augustine puts it this way:
If in a sinful way thou lovest it, then dost thou really hate it; if in a way accordant with what is good thou hast hated it, then hast thou really loved it. Happy they who have so hated their life while keeping it, that their love shall not cause them to lose it.”
But what could it possibly mean to love life in a sinful way? And how could we possibly hate life in a way which is good?
What is the life that we are called to lose?
It is the life of possession. We are a people who are caught up in trying to control our lives, control the people in our lives, and control the outcome of our actions. We seek to possess and we become hard shells of people who amass for ourselves possessions, who seek for ourselves preservation, who worry and work ourselves to be able to justify ourselves before the world.
The life of possession sees nature and other people as means to our own ends, as ways to satisfy ourselves, to maintain our sense of self, to build up an image for ourselves and others and perhaps even God.
The life of possession is not concerned with truth or lies, but uses either so long as they grant in greater quantity the desires of our eyes and amplify the pride of our hearts.
It is the love of the life of possession that is at the root of our contemporary moral and spiritual sickness just as it was in the first century with Jesus and just as it always has been.
We are a people so often oriented toward ourselves and the seeking of our own advantage.
If we love the life of possession, then we love life in a sinful way and Jesus’ words speak to us truthfully: “Whoever loves his life loses it.”
For most whose hearts have not been completely hardened by the life of possession have experienced its disaster, have experienced its destruction, have experienced its anxiety, have experienced its loss.
The life of possession is no life, it is a reality which is death.
“Whoever loves his life loses it” but “whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
If to love is to actively engage, to hate is to abandon. And Jesus is calling us to abandon the life of possession in order to receive life abundantly, eternally, out of the generosity of God’s grace.
For to abandon the life of possession, is to embrace the reality that all that we are, all that we have, all that we experience is the gift of the God who is good and who is love.
To abandon the life of possession is to give up self-preserving as the highest goal. It’s to abandon pretense for the sake of self-justification. It’s to forsake the prideful asserting that all that one is, all that one has, and all that one experiences is from one’s own doing and creating, and for one’s own enjoyment. It is to give up that reality where the self is king.
And as we give up the life of possession, God’s grace floods in and liberates us to a true enjoyment of those around us, of the gift of the natural world, of the beauty of life. If we abandon self we find the other. If we abandon control we find the care of God. If we abandon self-justification we find the forgiving love of God.
The clouds and noise of self and of pride and restless activity and desire is dissolved and the light of God’s grace shines through. Eternal life, life in relationship with the God who is eternal, beyond time, beyond space. That life, the source of all that is, becomes true and real in us as we are liberated from the tyranny of the life of possession.
“whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
And this hating of life in order to keep it for eternal life is a beautiful reality wherein we become renewed in our understadning and in our desires as we recognize the abundance of God’s grace in creation as good, in the redemption of the good creation from the slavery of human pride.
How do we hate the life of possession in order to keep our life as gift?
Only a gift can end the downward spiral of our life of self-preservation.
How could it make sense to possess something in order to stop possessing?
Rather, faith is a gift, the light intruded into our darkness, which provides us with the realization in heart and mind that all along everything was gift, all along God’s grace and love were shining. But our blindness to it was on account of our bent desires and endless striving, our belief that we are in control and we can maintain ourselves.
Folks the beauty of the Christian faith is this: that we are not God but we are called into relationship with God. And God is distant yet nearer to us than our own breath. And this God, the one who created all things good, the one who speaks continually through the creation, this God communicated a message of love and not rejection, of light and not darkness, of forgiveness and not condemnation.
We cannot take hold of salvation, we cannot possess liberation because it is only by letting go that we can be awakened to life as gift, to salvation from sin as gift, to the grace which shines light into our dark hearts and minds and which calls out to our ceaseless toiling with a good news of rest.
O Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
“unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Christ himself is the model of a faith that trusts God and abandons the pretension to control, the desire to possess, the way of domination.
Instead, in Christ we see God coming to us as one who empties himself.
In the words of one of the earliest Christian hymns:
“though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.”
This second Adam was given the opportunity to live the life of possession and instead lived the life of reception, the life of faith, and humble trust of God. And the darkness of this prideful world could not tolerate the light of such humility. And so Christ, the seed of our new life, was broken and in his resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, the community of disciples has proven true that the broken seed bears fruit and in our present reality we acknowledge and lift up the truth of death and resurrection.
Paul writes “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
We now know the existence of those who’ve emerged out of the seed of an old life, and in Christ’s crucifixion our life of possession was destroyed and in Christ’s resurrection we rise again to eternal life, the life that is a gift of God, the life which lives in the receptivity of faith to the grace of God’s goodness, giving and loving as we have been given and loved.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Amen.
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