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Sermon - March 29th, 2009
Fallen Grain
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: John 12: 20-33
We have been rushing through the season of Lent toward the inevitable—Holy Week. The fifth Sunday in Lent challenges us to look at those old time religious words we 21st century people would rather avoid—confession, suffering, salvation.
Psalm 51 doesn’t let us off the hook at all—not anyone. We are blasted with honest, emphatic words. We are charged with sin, told we are bent out of shape, and accused of intentional wrongdoing toward others. It is a Psalm of traumatic truth and tenacious trust. Do you know what truth has to do with trust? It is the truth that makes trust possible. And it is trust that helps us hear the truth.
And I think the truth is there is a hunger for Jesus in the world. I also think that those of us who grew up in the church don’t realize that. We take Jesus for granted. He is so much a part of us, that we have forgotten how to talk about him with passion and authenticity, the two things that the world needs right now in the church…passion and authenticity… like the Psalmist who confesses so boldly the centrality of sin, the healing power of guilt, and the crying of the old heart for a new heart, a creative heart, a clean heart.
During Lent we have been praying a unison prayer of confession in worship. Today’s prayer was written by the Sunday School class. Confession is telling the truth. This is the way it is, God. This is where we messed up. This is how we have been bad. And as we confess, we yearn for for the Holy Spirit to wipe our slate clean and give us a new start with a clean heart.
I’m sure you know that “heart” in the Bible does not mean the beating muscle in our chest. The biblical heart is the strong spiritual center that integrates our feelings, our knowing, our experiences. It is the place that God knows and can fill. The prophet Jeremiah spoke of a new day when God would write a covenant, God’s law, God’s relationship with humanity, not on tablets of stone, but on our hearts, on the essence of our being, on our souls—God can and will write on our hearts, marking us for life and transforming us into suffering servants.
Now, maybe by now you are tired of the deprivation of the wilderness of Lent. I am, I’m always ready for the good news of Easter. I was going to skip Psalm 51, but Christine asked to put it in for her children’s message. And rightly so, for the truth is that true joy cannot be separated from despair, resurrection comes out of death, spring follows winter. Joy comes out of despair that is truthfully confessed and then transformed by the grace of God. But we need to tell the truth. We need confession in our lives. We yearn for a safe place to tell how it is with our souls, our hearts, our lives. We can not live, truly live and trust without telling the truth to someone who will listen without judgment, without advice…deep listening with an open, loving heart, something I learn from the example of Jesus.
That’s why I love Jesus. It’s not so much about the miracles he performed. It’s not because I want to go to heaven after I die. It’s not because I expect Jesus to make my life easier. It would be nice, I guess. I love Jesus because no matter what, Jesus listens and still loves me. I love Jesus because he told the truth even though it got him killed.
The Gospel Lesson today, contains most of what Jesus had to say about his own death. He said it in Jerusalem during the Passover, the last week of his life. Some Greeks were in town for the party and they asked to see Jesus. These were not local people. They were Gentiles from across the sea who wanted to meet this Jewish holy man.
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Jesus told them and everyone who was in the crowd following him. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
I grew up with wheat fields surrounding me. My father would come in from the fields caked with dirt and dust, he would take off his hat, and you could see his clean, bald head. I’m really not sure how he got clean when he came in from the field but he did, in time for dinner, too. My Mom must have been doing laundry all the time. My father had this intuitive sense about farming. When he spoke I listened because I knew he spoke the truth. I knew I could trust him. He was a dryland wheat farmer. It took two years to grow a crop of wheat. I often saw my dad kneeling down to dig in the dirt with his hands to check how far down in the ground the moisture was. It was a life where we depended on the weather, on the rains coming at the right time. Our whole life was given to the ranch. It came first, for my dad. When it was time to seed, it was time to seed. When it was time to spray or fertilize, it was time to spray or fertilize. When it was time to pull rye, it was time to pull rye. When it was time to harvest, everything stopped for harvest time.
Farming is in my blood. So when Jesus compares his life to a grain of wheat, I understand. It is a statement about sacrifice, hard work, failure, and the redemptive power of suffering, his and ours. His words are not easy to hear and even harder to live. Jesus saying is that if we do everything in our power to keep our lives the same—if we try to avoid change, prevent conflict and pain, then in the end we will find that we have had no life at all. Because life is about change and death and seasons and failure and hard work and sometimes a great harvest. But if we hate all the ways that we cheapen our lives by chasing comfort and safety and security and superiority in this world, and start chasing God instead—then there will be no end to abundant joy in our lives.
Joan Chittister says it this way, “The cross reminds us daily that God did God’s part: Jesus came and, in him, God showed us the Way. We have, then, all been saved. We have been saved from our delusions about what is really important in this world. We have been saved from the fear of risking. We have been saved from our sense of nothingness in the face of God because God walked the way we all must walk.”
Strangers came to see Jesus and he said let them stick around for awhile and they will see me glorified through the experience of pain, death, humility, and then….resurrection.
Despair and joy, death and resurrection are inter-related. Truth and trust are inter-related. We can’t have trust without the truth. And we have to build trust before we can tell the truth.
There is an old story about an isolated group of people who were afraid of watermelons. One day a stranger came into their village and saw that he could teach these ignorant people who were afraid of watermelons the truth. So he took a watermelon, took a knife, sliced the watermelon and began to eat it. The villagers were so horrified, they ran the stranger out of town, fearing for their own lives. Some time went by and another stranger came to the village. He sat with them, worked side by side with them, cried with them, laughed with them, celebrated birth with them, buried their dead with them. Trust between the stranger and the villagers grew as he learned about them and from them. One day, the stranger began talking with them about the one thing they feared the most—the watermelon. Eventually he showed them that there was nothing to fear from the watermelon. Soon after that, he shared with them the fruit of the watermelon that could be enjoyed by all and their fear was gone.
Truth, trust, relationship…….Jesus walked on this earth to build relationships. Jesus came to win our hearts. He didn’t come to scare us into changing. He didn’t come to force us to change. He didn’t come to punish us for all the wrongs we have done. Jesus came to live and laugh and cry with us. Jesus has grown up with us. Jesus learned from us and we learned from him. Jesus built trust and told the truth. He told the truth and built trust.
We have all messed up sometime in our lives. None of us are perfect. That’s what makes us interesting. What is it, though, that gets us through those times? For me, it is knowing that someone who knows me better than I know myself, has never given up on me. Because a lot of people have given up on me. But Jesus never does. Sometimes I catch myself wondering, as I’m fumble my way through life and relationships, what was God thinking, calling me into the ministry. There are so many people I know who are more articulate about their faith. They are deep thinkers. They are scholars. They can preach without notes. They can build churches. They are so smart. What was God thinking, calling an ordinary country girl like me, who would rather be riding a horse than reading the Bible?
And then I let myself remember those days when I sat in the back pew, with a preacher telling me, just me, I’m sure, not anyone else, that it doesn’t matter how bad you feel, how small and insignificant you think you are, how worthless you feel, you are important to God, you are somebody to God, you are worth saving. It was the message I heard every time I went to that church and I’m sure the preacher was not preaching the same sermon every Sunday. No one else knew me in that church and that’s the way I wanted it, for awhile. And the preacher just kept saying just what I needed to hear. To this day, I don’t know how that happened. I hadn’t been to church for years. I went back because I was suffering and my Mom thought it would help. The surprising thing was, it did help. It didn’t take the pain away, it made it more bearable. It didn’t change my life much, but it planted a lot of seeds.
The miracle was that it was that old-time religious message that saved me, the message that Jesus died for me, Jesus died to save me. Jesus suffered for me. Jesus loved me. I had never known that kind of love. The love that would save my life, my pathetic life that was going no where and everywhere. Truth, trust, love, life. I had a very hard shell that needed to be cracked open and it was the love of Jesus who was able to do it.
That was my hunger and my salvation. And you know something? God isn’t finished with me yet. I still tend to withdraw and close up when the going get rough. I did that in my marriage. I can still do that. Somethings take a lifetime to learn I guess. But I catch myself. Or, someone else catches me. It’s Jesus I think, really, saving me from myself again, loving me no matter what, telling me that I have a story to tell, a story that is saving my life, and if I tell it, maybe someone else’s life will be saved, too.
I believe you have a story to tell, too. A story about what is saving your life these days. I believe it’s in all of us, or we would not be here. And when you find that story that is yours and tell it, you, too, maybe saving someone else’s life. Amen.