Re/ward: John 12:20-33
Fifth Sunday in Lent
20 Some Greeks were
among those who had come up to worship at the festival. 21 They
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and made a request: “Sir, we
want to see Jesus.” 22 Philip told Andrew, and
Andrew and Philip told Jesus.
23 Jesus
replied, “The time has come for the Human One to be glorified. 24 I assure you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the
earth and dies, it can only be a single seed. But if it dies, it bears much
fruit. 25 Those who love
their lives will lose them, and those who hate their lives in this world will
keep them forever. 26 Whoever serves me must
follow me. Wherever I am, there my servant will also be. My Father will honor
whoever serves me.
27 “Now I am
deeply troubled. What should I say? ‘Father, save me from this time’?
No, for this is the reason I have come to this time. 28 Father,
glorify your name!”
Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it,
and I will glorify it again.”
29 The crowd standing
there heard and said, “It’s thunder.” Others said, “An angel spoke to him.”
30 Jesus
replied, “This voice wasn’t for my benefit but for yours. 31 Now
is the time for judgment of this world. Now this world’s ruler will be thrown
out. 32 When I am lifted up from the earth, I
will draw everyone to me.” (33 He said this to show
how he was going to die.) (CEB)
This past week, a friend of mine from
divinity school emailed me to let me know she is withdrawing from the United
Methodist ordination process and may be withdrawing from the denomination
entirely. She was born and raised a
Methodist and we spent many hours together in div school in the Methodist
Student Association, both chasing the many layers of classes and papers
required for ordination in our conferences.
She wanted very much to be able to use the call to ministry she feels to
be able to serve in the UMC, her home.
But she could not navigate the system and keep the integrity of her call
intact.
She is the fourth person in two years
whom I know personally who has left the ordination process; I know of several
others tangentially, and I know plenty of people who were never planning to
become pastors but have left the denomination itself over frustration with what
we have become.
One of the
main reasons many of the people I know have left is the sexuality mess with its
microscope on the ways we Christians can tear each other apart in truly
astounding ways. The conservatives put
in the backstabbing cruelty that guts the Church one papercut at a time and the
progressives snipe at disagreements from the perceived high ground with vengeful
spite and the world watches as we proclaim the name of Jesus and prove over and
over that it only seems to change you for the worse. My friends are tired of this, and rightfully
so.
Don’t worry,
St. Luke’s, we will be talking more about this as time goes on. If you have earnest questions about any of
what’s going on denominationally, feel free to email me or call the office and
we can chat.
But another
reason people are leaving—and several of my friends are leaving ordination—is
that The United Methodist Church’s structure simply does not fit. The offices and expectations that were set
down in the late 1960s, governed by questions from the 1790s, and rooted in
congregational anticipations that often peaked in the 1990s are constricting
and strange to people who feel called to ministries not even dreamt of back
then. The push/pull of every large
organization between tradition and flexibility is playing out in my friends’
vocations as they come to the Church to say this is what we see the Spirit
doing and are told the Spirit doesn’t work like that.
“Now I am deeply troubled.” Same, Jesus, same.
The cheery
little discourse today from the gospel of John may seem to come out of left
field; we have some Greeks who want to see Jesus and instead of a conversation
we get a mini homily on death and life and glorification. But death is on Jesus’ mind. Just before this text, Jesus raised His
friend Lazarus from the dead, an event impactful enough that we get the
shortest and perhaps most human verse from it:
John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”
Jesus looks
back over the day and sees death and life.
He also looks forward and sees death; this encounter with the Greeks
happens in the week before Passover.
It’s the “festival” for which the Greeks are in Jerusalem in the first
place. Professor Alicia Myers points out that, “First-century synagogues
welcomed gentiles, so it is not surprising to find Gentiles in Jerusalem for
Passover as well, even if they were not proselytes or even monotheists. Their
presence recalls the question from ‘the Jews’ (including Pharisees) in John
7:35, when they wondered if Jesus’ upcoming departure meant he was ‘about to go
out and teach the Greeks’ in the diaspora (for example, outside of
Palestine). Rather than going out,
however, Jesus gathers others to himself (John 12:31-32).”[1]
Jesus knows
that Passover in Jerusalem will not end well for Him—we who stand on this fifth
Sunday of Lent and look toward Holy Week next week know it, too. So He hears this desire to speak with Him and
says yes, let Me speak to you; let Me teach you one last time about how this is
going to go, about what it means to die so that a new thing might live, so that
you do not follow Me without knowing the consequences, so that the Father’s
name might be glorified.
“I assure you
that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it can only be a
single seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
It’s a good
agricultural observation, this note of seeds and fruit. A bag full of seeds will only ever remain a
bag full of seeds, but a planted seed will become something else. Change has to happen—being put into something
that looks like death has to happen for the seed to become useful at all. Change and death and growth are all very
uncomfortable ideas—and rather uncomfortable realities, too.
Alan Brehm
writes about it like this: “Not many of
us like change. That’s very likely an understatement. Change means adjusting to
something different, and adjusting is not something we prefer doing. We’d much
rather keep things the way they are. Routine, consistency, predictable
outcomes—these are things we rely on for a sense of safety and stability in our
lives. Even good change is difficult, if for no other reason than what it takes
to get there…We have to take the risk of faith to entrust our lives to the care
of a loving God in order to make the changes the new life calls us to make.
“For some, those changes can take
place quickly, almost overnight. For most of us, it can take a lifetime of
reorienting our lives toward God’s peace and justice and freedom and
compassion. That means we must be intentional about how we live. If the change
that God is bringing about in this world is important to us, then we have to
take definite steps in order to align ourselves with it. We have to find ways of
consciously embracing the repentance and faith that Jesus invites us to
practice. We have to seek out ways of incorporating the directions for living
that are meant to make us more whole, more peaceful, and more joyful into the
way we actually live our daily lives. We must make it our goal in life to
become a person who is open to God’s loving presence and who allows that love
to flow through us to others.
“It can be painful to undergo these
kinds of changes in our lives. In a very real sense, in order to experience the
new life that God offers us all, we have to make ourselves vulnerable.”[2]
Ugh,
vulnerability. How dare Jesus ask for a
thing like that; how dare He tell us about glorifying God’s name only at our
own expense. Not only do I have to be a
grain of wheat that dies, I have to hate my life? And lose it?
But I’ve put so much effort into it!
I have accomplished things; I have finally figured out which bridge over
the Saginaw empties into which part of Bay City. Surely I don’t need to lose my life to follow
Jesus.
Dean Mary Shore explains, “In John,
following Jesus is the path of abundant or eternal life (see also John 10:10
and 10:27f.). Also in John, the word ‘hate’ means ‘reject’; it usually refers
to what the world does to Jesus and by extension, to his disciples (see also
John 7:7; 15:18-19, 23-25). So when Jesus says, ‘Those who hate their life in
this world will keep it for eternal life’ (John 12:25b), he is encouraging
others to follow his lead in hating (or rejecting) this world’s definition of
life as a small and isolated existence.”[3]
Rejecting the
definition of life as a small and isolated existence; embracing the hope that
the fading of one thing can give rise to another. Church, we who have survived a year of
pandemic isolation, who have begun vaccinations in earnest, and who look
forward to a Holy Week that will still not be back to the patterns we knew
before: we are poised beautifully to take a long look at how we are dying and
what new life is coming from it. St.
Luke’s and The United Methodist Church both came into being out of mergers in
the 1960s. The faith of the people who brought
together the pieces allowed the individual entities to die so that the new idea
might live, and it was good. Over the
years, ministries both here and in the denomination have risen and, in the
course of life, died to make way for something else, and it was good.
“The time has
come for the Human One to be glorified,” Jesus begins when He hears the Greeks,
and it’s important to note the language here.
The gospel of John was written in Greek and the writer used “hora” (ὥρα)
as the word for time—it’s the same word used in John 2:4
when Mary tell Jesus to fix the wine problem at the wedding in Cana and Jesus
tells her, “My time (hora) has not yet come.”
The time has come.
The life is fulfilled.
The grain must die.
The fruit will come.
In this Lenten series on words
beginning with “re,” we come today to “reward.”
A reward is “something that is given in return for good or evil done or
received or that is offered or given for some service or attainment.”[4] It’s a surviving Middle English word out of
Anglo-French, actually, so every time you talk about rewards you’re bringing a
little of the 14th century back.
Neat.
Some
folks think about the whole of Christianity as a reward system—live a good
life, get Heaven, and it’s a whole other sermon to tackle that idea—but rewards
are great motivators. They become
problematic when we only want rewards that benefit us. Jesus knows He will die during Passover,
knows that the disciples don’t get why yet and won’t until after the fact,
knows that these Greeks who want to see Him haven’t seen the whole
picture. But He tells of seeds and fruit
anyway because the reward of them eventually understanding, eventually
seeing that what has served its purpose must die to make way for the next thing
is powerful enough to speak, anyway. We
who are called to follow, we who have answered yes, are rewarded not
with everything being the way that we want it right now because
it is always comforting to us but with the promise that the seeds we plant will
become fruit under the Spirit’s careful hands—fruit that we might never
see. Are we willing to accept that as
reward enough, that knowledge that God uses what we give and keeps working for
decades and centuries beyond us?
How
are we seeds holding onto our seed-ness too tightly, refusing to create space
or mentor or listen or encourage the new fruits the Spirit is bringing to us
all the time? Are we who have become
attached to St. Luke’s or to the UMC or to our patterns willing to let what we
know die so that others might come and build a new Church that we never
imagined before? Are we willing to
reject an isolated life in our well-worn patterns so that God can change the
world by changing us?
It
is a question to be asked and re-asked every day, Church. We shall not ask, “Father, save me from this
time” because every time requires newness; every time asks us to let death and
life entwine because resurrection is only a miracle if Lazarus was really dead,
if Jesus was really dead, if we are really willing to say yes, Lord, let Your
name be glorified, even though I do not see what comes next, even though the
only thing I have ever known is being a seed.
May
God grant us the faith to understand that life and life abundant comes with the
death of some things we may hold dear.
May Jesus give us the strength to follow Him on this journey through
Passover to the cross, the grave, and the glorious resurrection. And may the Spirit show us Her joy in the Church
that lives still, one faithful person at a time, doing the good work of
bringing Her wholeness to creation.
Amen.
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