Preached on Sunday, March 25, 2012 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. The lectionary readings that this sermon is based on can be found here.
Spring is here, the calendar tells us. We seem to be getting a foretaste of our April Showers today, don’t we? But the pear trees on 69th Street are in bloom, and there’s a sense of hope of promise. Lent is drawing to a close and soon we will celebrate the mysteries of Holy Week which culminate in the joy of Easter.
In our Old Testament reading this morning, the prophet Jeremiah tells us of a time to come, a time of hope, a time of a new covenant. This new covenant will not be a covenant that is written in stone tablets on Mt. Sinai as was the last one. It will not be a covenant of laws recorded on scrolls and policed by priests. This will be a covenant that is written on our very hearts. Imagine that for a moment. Written on our hearts, so that God’s law, God’s will for us pulsed within us with every beat of our hearts. Jeremiah’s new covenant in our hearts will mean that no longer will we have to admonish one another to “know the Lord,” because we will already know him. With his law written on our hearts we will know him and his will for us from the inside out.
We find something, or rather someone, new in our gospel reading this morning as well. Philip and Andrew come to Jesus with a message, a request. The conjunction of Philip and Andrew and Jesus is worth noting in itself. Philip and Andrew were among the first disciples called by Jesus and more significantly; they brought others to Jesus to become disciples. Andrew brought his brother Simon Peter, and Philip brought Nathanial. We might think of Philip and Andrew as disciple head-hunters; they bring in likely candidates for ministry, and that’s what they’re up to in our reading from John today.
In today’s gospel, Philip and Andrew bring two Greeks to Jesus. These foreigners, likely visitors to Jerusalem for the Passover, want to see Jesus, to meet him, to find out what he’s all about. The Greeks want to know the Lord. An important event for the Greeks, I’m sure. But far from the most portentous event in John’s Gospel. It’s just a sentence or two in our reading. A seemingly innocuous event, a small, perhaps insignificant moment really. Just Philip and Andrew saying, “Hey, Jesus. Couple guys here from out of town who want to see you.”
But somehow this occurrence kicks something into gear. The Greeks arrive seeking to know Jesus, and then Jesus declares, “The hour has come!” Just like that.
And true to form, the first knowledge Jesus imparts to the Greeks comes in the form of a parable. He recounts the parable of the single grain of wheat. A parable that evokes an all too common concern in the agrarian society of the Roman Empire, where crop failure and famine were not unknown. Wheat was a vitally important staple, ground into flour to make bread, the staff of life, as it, of course, still is today. A grain of wheat isn’t much wheat, it’s a small, perhaps insignificant thing. But it has such potential. It encapsulates so much hope.
For as everyone would have known, a single grain of wheat is also a seed. And unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single, solitary grain. But if it dies, then it will come to bear much fruit, so Jesus says. A seed sown in the soil does not literally die but it does germinate; it becomes something more than just a single seed. A new plant begins to take form, and to burst forth from the buried seed. The seed ceases to be a seed; it ceases to be one thing in order to bear fruit as a new thing. This is death and resurrection, this is redemption, and new life.
Jesus goes on speaking to the newcomers. And he tells them that those who love their life will lose it, but those who hate their life will gain eternal life. This one statement of Jesus is one of his best-attested statements, it appears throughout every gospel in one form or another. We heard the Markan version of this saying just three weeks ago, on the second Sunday in Lent. It is a central truth. And the Greek word translated “life” here is psyche which also has overtones of “soul” or “self” so that the saying is not so much about physical life and death as it is about the vital energy of personhood being diminished by self-centeredness but then expanded by self-offering.
So, in order to grow, in order to live, we must reject our self-centered selves, and find a new way of being that encompasses so much more than we have known.
But where lies that new way? In which direction are we to go? Do we travel from Greece to Jerusalem? Will we find it there? What is God’s will for us? How do we find it?
Years ago, I once had a nun as a neighbor. Arlene was a Roman Catholic Dominican religious, and she lived down the hall from us in Jersey City. Now, you don’t find most Roman Catholic religious living down the hall from you. Typically, they are gathered in convents and monasteries, to live in community, such is there vocation. But Arlene had a particular job in her order. She was head of the collected Dominican communities’ advocacy efforts for peace and justice. She played a very public role, and traveled extensively, to war-torn places of the world to witness the suffering of God’s people and then to place like Geneva to give testimony to that suffering. All that coming and going would have been very disruptive to a convent, so Arlene lived in the world, so she could come and go as she needed to.
Arlene loved our dog Molly and often dog-sat for us, and sometimes, just had Molly over for an afternoon’s visit when she wasn’t traveling. She stopped to talk with me once when Molly and I were out for a walk. She asked how my discernment for the priesthood was going. She caught me just at that point when the process itself had barely begun, but when all the steps that lie ahead of me had been carefully enunciated. Approval by as discernment committee, psychological testing, approval by the canon for ministry, meetings with committee members, approval by the commission for ministry, meeting with the bishop, approval from the bishop, seminary, classes and grades and approval by the faculty. More psychological testing. more approval by the commission and the canon and the bishop…
I confessed to Arlene as she petted Molly, “I don’t know how I’m going to handle it all. What if I don’t’ make it? What if I trip over one of these gates? Now that I have admitted that I feel called to the priesthood, and now that I know in my heart that I want so badly to be a priest.”
Arlene stopped petting Molly and stood up and looked me in the eye. She said to me, “Pay attention to what you want, Mark. That desire that you feel so strongly in your heart, that is God’s will for you. You’ll make it through, if you stay in that desire.”
Just as Jeremiah said, God’s law, God’s will for us is written there in our hearts. It can bring us from Greece all the way to the Jerusalem in search of greater knowledge of the Lord. More than that, an even more arduous journey, it can get you through seminary.
This morning’s beginning is really the proper conclusion to my sermon, so if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to pray again the words of our collect for this Fifth Sunday in Lent.
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found… +Amen.
(c) The Rev. Mark R. Collins
No comments:
Post a Comment