Today's Sermon

 

"Seeding"

 

John 12:20-26

20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival (the Jewish Passover) were some Greeks. 21They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ 22Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24Very 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. 25Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour. 

Seeding

            Take a seed some time, put it in a little soil and water it, but do this with a child.  Then watch, not the soil but the child.  Watch as their face lights up when the bud breaks through.  Their eyes are a window into what is miraculous, but we’ve grown accustomed to seeing.  You can see their wheels turning, the wires almost short-circuiting.  “You mean out of this little thing grows this.  Wait, what!?” 

            We are in a sermon series on change.  What an image of change Jesus gives us:  A single grain falls into the earth, dies and then comes up more beautiful and fruitful. Just as we said of sailing weeks ago, planting a seed is an act of faith.  You’ve got to let it go in order for it to rise up. 

            Not all change is good, but if you can identify what is fruitful change, this is a good skill to practice.  I’ve heard Buddhists talking of composting parts of your life so they can nourish something else.  Or, as the Sufi mystic Hafiz puts it, there’s a lot that needs to be shaken from us.  He says, “Love wants to reach out and manhandle us, break all our teacup talk of God….The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.  But when we hear He is in such a ‘playful drunken mood’ most everyone I know quickly packs their bags and hightails it out of town.”  This is not for the faint of heart.

            In this day and age, we should be careful with images of manhandling and drunkenness.  Intoxication is often an image used for divine ecstasy, and manhandling here is the image of the divine power.  What the mystic poet is going for is the unbridled disruptive activity of the spirit. Shake all the nonsense out of us. The spiritual path, as we have said before, is about unlearning as much as it is learning. 

            A few years ago, I was at one of their events at the Green Gulch Zen Center.  One of the rabbis from Kol Shofar was sharing in the teaching.  She told the tale of a rabbi entering a Buddhist zendo, and upon seeing all the statues, and recalling the commandment in the Torah against having idols, asked if the Buddhist priest would smash those statues.  To the rabbi’s surprise, without hesitation, the priest did just that, smashed them all to pieces.  Then the priest turned to the rabbi and said, “And now will you do the same with your beloved Torah.” 

            The rabbi was telling the story on her own tradition.  It would be inappropriate for me, a Christian pastor, to share that it without asking, in turn, and what sacred thing are we willing to smash in search of the “thing behind the thing”?  I’m not talking about parts of the faith that you already want to smash, or have already smashed.  What, that we presume is central, even beloved, are we willing to let go of, in order to find a greater truth behind the truth, an essence that goes beyond the forms we given it.  Are we willing to admit how little we know in search of a greater truth?  Are we willing to let go even of the promise of heavenly reward that we might find true heaven? 

            It could be a fun sermon, to imagine the things we need to relinquish, let go of, be unburdened by, even, in some cases, smash.  I toyed with bringing in old dishes and giving you a chance to write something on them from the faith that has not served you and then smash them with a hammer.  Wouldn’t that feel good?  Of course, sending perfectly good things to a landfill somehow doesn’t seem in the worship of our God.  What’s more, smashing things is not our growing edge.  Hopefully, you’ve already felt permission to do that metaphorically if not literally.  However culturally we’re in a moment where smashing is seemingly all we want to do. Those who have railed against institutions and systems for generations are now getting their wish.  We will see how that goes.  I suspect not as well as they think.  Spiritually, many people have deconstructed their faith—which can be a helpful thing—to the point where all that’s left is a heap of rubble, and little community.  It’s not much to stand on, and doesn’t make for very fertile soil.

            Shedding spiritual baggage is also not the primary message of this passage.  Jesus doesn’t offer an image that amounts to spring cleaning, getting rid of what’s gathering dust.  He’s talking of surrendering to the soil himself.  The image is short on subtlety.  What goes into the earth and then rises to new life?  Christ!  Those who want to follow the Christ fold path are asked to do likewise.  “Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25).  Jesus puts it in dramatic terms.

            I’m not sure I could imagine a more countercultural message for us today than what Jesus said almost 2,000 years ago.  We are spoon fed lovingour life from the time we are born here. It’s about looking out for one’s life. Success is measured, in our system, by definition, over and against the other – that’s at the center of our economics. Individual achievement of a certain sort is what reigns supreme.  Then, when you get to a certain age, the algorithms all gather the game is to sell you stuff to hold onto your life, to look younger than you are, to deny death, to preserve preserve preserve at all costs.  I’m not against health, but we are swimming in a pool of self-life loving pop theology that is anything but healthy.  Live your best life.  Others should figure out how to do the same.  Never mind the advantages some have.  It infects the church too.  The prosperity gospel is built upon the premise of what you can build for yourself if you believe a set of, well I’ll call it what Hafiz calls it, “nonsense.” 

            Jesus says, you want to find life, the true life, one measured by entirely different measures and pleasures, let it go.  Give it away.  Caution is warranted here because there are always people who are disproportionately asked to deny themselves and often these are the ones who take the message of “hating” your life too literally, while those who could stand to ease their grip on their own climb plod on unaware, unaware in every sense of the term.

            Nevertheless, Jesus’ teaching is his teaching.  The surest way to lose your life is to hold onto it tight. Let go.  (As I say around my house, “Let go and let Rob.”). 

            At this point, you might be thinking you might want to check out. I just came here because my friend or partner comes here.  I came here to hear some beautiful music, to pray.  I just parked here to walk my dog and I realized they had free “coffee.”  Jesus is asking a lot, everything really.  If you are in search of a moderate teacher, you’ve stumbled upon the wrong one.  By that, I don’t mean me; I mean Jesus.  In truth, I’m far too moderate for Jesus:  “…unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (v. 24).  Elsewhere, we’re asked if we want to be wheat or chaff thrown into the fire.

            If you are tempted to check out, nothing’s stopping you, but there’s something that might give you second thought.  Whether or not you choose to let go of your life and let it die so you can be reborn to something more fruitful, something more eternal in nature, time will take it from you anyway.  Do you know how many people I’ve watched retire from high-powered positions of esteem and sense of self is totally undone?  The world moves on.  People don’t care.  This goes for my profession too.  I’ve watched pastors retire, and one would think if they really understood the spiritual path, they’d be fine.  Instead some are lost because they’re caught up in the robe but not the golden thread that knits the universe together.  I’m not this (robe).  There’s nothing wrong with having a position of power or prestige.  Thinking it’s youis just an illusion.  If you don’t believe me, wait, and you’ll find out.

            We have to let go what we often think is us, release it into the ground of God, to taste and offer a truer fruit.  If we want.  We don’t have to.  The faith will move on if we’re not interested.  Others use different language that may be helpful to you.  A Richard Rohr would tell us to die to our false selves that we can be born into our true selves. Maybe that’s more helpful. The Bible talks of being born again, and again and again, if you ask me, for this is a process we see throughout life. This is what I was pointing to last week in the children’s time when I offered that we should have rites of passages throughout our life that are positive, spiraling up, not the bell-curve model that fuels the beauty product body modification industry. 

            There are teachers all around who show us how to do this.  Look at the faith of the tree that releases her leaves each year, only to be born again in the spring.  Look at how the grasses here dare to go brown about this time every year trusting in the green to show up when the rains return.  They are modeling Christ for us right now (!) only to return to green when the rains come.  The rains, the imagery is right there for us, the baptism of the rains. 

            As Jesus teaches, the one who lets go of their own quest for glory will find true glory.  In Hafiz’s terms, we are what’s left when we’ve been held upside and had everything shaken from our pockets.  If you want to have faith, you might need to let it go, it being everything, it being you. You can remain a single grain forever, or you can let go and be the seed that brings the look of having witnessed a miracle to the child’s eyes.

            Amen.