A
Sermon preached in Christ
Church, Grosse Pointe, Michigan
by The Reverend Vicki Hesse, Associate
by The Reverend Vicki Hesse, Associate
Tuesday
of Holy Week, April 11, 2017
May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable to you O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
A few years ago, my partner and I attended
the Wild Goose Festival. It’s a 4-day
gathering of church geeks and “spiritual but not religious” seekers to engage
in spirituality, music, art and social justice – in a variety of venues: small
group conversations and main stage performances. Most of the attendees that I met were looking
for connections or experiences to fuel their faith and inspire action. People came not just to “check out” the
festival, they wanted an experience.
It sounds like the Greeks were those kinds
of attendees, seeking an experience, not just information. They didn’t just
wander into the Passover festival to stroll around the dusty grounds. Could be
that Jesus may have been the whole reason for their trip. They first meet Philip. “Sir, we wish to see
Jesus.” So Philip, who himself was there to see Jesus, turns to his Andrew who
then joins him to tell Jesus about these people who want to see him. It’s not
an unusual request, really. It’s possible that most of us have asked this or
thought it. I wonder if the Greeks knew
what they were really asking?
Do we really know what we are asking?
I don’t know what Philip and Andrew
expected, but likely they did not expect to hear about death. Hearing about death is not the answer we
expect when we ask about Jesus. But it’s the answer he gave, “Unless a grain of when falls into the earth
and dies, it remains just a single grain. If it dies, it bears much fruit.
Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world
will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am,
there will my servant be also.”
Here, we learn how death and seeing Jesus
are interwoven. To see Jesus means more than just looking at him, more than
watching him on the festival stage, more than just believing his prepared
speeches and watching him perform. To see Jesus, to follow him, means being
participants and not spectators at a festival. If we want to see Jesus, we have
to learn to die. To the degree we avoid
and deny death, we refuse to see Jesus.
Professor Alyce McKenzie explains that, “…
in Jewish thought, the death of a martyr was regarded as bearing much
fruit. It benefited the others and the
nation as a whole.”[1] And in
the Gospel of John, this kind of “fruit” is Jesus’ metaphor for the life of
the community of faith.[2]
So Jesus is using this parable to show that the heart of his saving power is in
the community that gathers as a result of his death.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasizes the gift of
community when he writes in Life Together how, “…The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian in exile sees in [this]
companionship a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God. Visitor and visited in loneliness recognize
in each other the Christ who is present in the body…[receiving] each other’s
benedictions …and the fellowship of [the community] is a gift of grace, nothing
but grace, [allowing us] to live in community with other Christians.”[3]
Seeing Jesus in community means dying to
all the parts of our life that blind us to love each other; fear of the other,
the need to be “right”, anger or resentment of each other, even idealization or
demonization of another. There are myriad ways that we separate ourselves from
one another. Ultimately, seeing Jesus
means dying to our own self-sufficiency. We let go of our life in order to
receive God’s life.
This is the work of Holy Week: learning how
to die and looking through the window of death to see Jesus. This is the work
of Holy Week: looking beyond the window of death to our transformation, to who
we are becoming. This is the difficult
and painful work of Holy Week: dying to ourselves. It is soul-troubling, as
Jesus quotes of Psalm 42.
Do you want to see Jesus? Where are the
places in your life that are protected, guarded, insulated, sure. These are the
places of blindness. These places of
pain and resentment
are exactly the places of transformation.
These are the places where there is a single grain of wheat containing much
fruit. These are the places where we can lose our life and live the life of
Jesus. These are the places where
serving Jesus clears up our vision, frees us from what holds us back, and opens
us to new possibilities. And this is the way of the cross: dying to an old way
of being and being born into a new way of living.
That is where Jesus asks to see us.
If the Greeks at that festival listened and
really absorbed what Jesus taught, they saw their path to becoming his
followers. They heard a grain of wheat
fall on that dusty ground. They saw the rich harvest come from that grain. They
saw a cross being lifted to the sky – in small group conversations and in main
stage performances. They saw a vision of all people drawn to that cross. They
saw a light shine through that experience that beckoned them to walk in the
light as children of the light.
May we, today, see Jesus in the
transforming power of his dying.
And may we be seen by Jesus in our new way
of living.
Amen
[1] Alyce M. McKenzie,
Eavesdropping Discipleship: Reflections |”Sometimes getting within earshot of
Jesus is transformative enough” as cited here on April 10, 2017.
[2] New Interpreter’s Bible, John
12:20-26 Commentary, page 711
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of
Faith in Community (Harper, San Francisco, 1954) p.6-7
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