A sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent at Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio: John 12:20-33
What happens if you hold your breath? In order to breathe freely, in order to live, we have to let it go. If we want a seed to grow, we must entrust it to the grave of the earth, allow it to disintegrate, decompose, in order that it might be remade into a new and abundant growth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and theologian, wrote that when Christ calls someone, “he bids [them] come and die. … death in Jesus Christ [is] the death of the old man at his call.”[i] Or, to put it another way, the call to live with Christ is the call to die to our old selves. Bonhoeffer put his life where his preaching led. He could have remained safely out of Germany when war broke out in 1939, but he chose to return. He deplored the rise of the Nazi state as an idol, and he was killed by that state two weeks before the liberation of the concentration camp in which he was executed.
Alexei Navalny, a more recently familiar name, quoted the Beatitudes at his trial: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” He died in a Siberian work camp north of the Arctic Circle, still hungering and thirsting for righteousness on this earth.[ii]
And this passage, the one from John that we read today, is the one on which Archbishop Oscar Romero was preaching at the moment that he was assassinated in 1980. Romero lived under the threat of death by the cartels of El Salvador, and he gave his life to the cause of resisting evil, resisting any corruption of his Christian conviction that the humble service of justice and mercy outrank any earthly powers. Immediately before he was sacrificed at the altar, he said, in part,
You have just heard Christ’s Gospel, that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life which history demands of us …
We are warned that it profits one nothing to gain the whole world and lose oneself. Nevertheless, the expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for perfecting this earth, where the body of the new human family grows, a body that even now is able in some way to foreshadow that new age. And so, to the extent that temporal progress can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of serious concern for the kingdom of God, even though temporal progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom.[iii]
Even though temporal progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, because our vision of justice is dim and our capacity for mercy sorely constrained; even so, as these brave Christians said and lived, we should be concerned to bring about a more perfect understanding of what it is to be human, to be mortal, to be created in the image of the immortal, to be moved by the breath of God.
And despite the lessons of these martyrs, Jesus has no love for death. He will defeat death, trampling it under his discarded grave clothes on Easter morning, and harrowing hell to rescue his saints from its power. Jesus has already said that he came that we might have life, and have life abundantly (John 10:10). The question he poses here is, what kind of life?
If I cling to a life of security that depends on the threat of violence, what sort of life is that? It is one that will be nailed to the cross, since that is how order and security are kept by the powers of this world.
If I hunger and thirst to be right, to be proven right, instead of humbling myself to seek God’s righteousness, and a right understanding of God’s image in the other, and to thirst for mercy, what sort of a life is that? As the deer longs for the water-brooks, so let my soul be athirst for God, and not for my own understanding.
If I gaze in prayer and meditation upon the cross but ignore the suffering taking place at my right hand and my left, the indignities of inequity, poverty, and more, is my vision any clearer than that of the centurions surrounding the cross on calvary?
If I try to hold my breath, will I live?
I could say something here about our life as a parish; how, if we try to hold on to the past, even the present, instead of trusting God enough to fall into an unknown future, we are holding our breath, holding ourselves captive to fear; but that could be seen as self-serving, under the circumstances. Suffice to say that I believe that this community has faith enough to plant itself firmly in the grounding of Christ, who wants nothing less for us than life, and life in abundance.
You see, despite the metaphor that Jesus uses, his poetic language for the burial and transformation of the seed (and you know I love some poetic language), even so, germination is not a process of death but of regeneration. In fact, it is when a seed does not submit to its transformation that it is in danger of dying. A quick bit of Wikipedia research finds that sacks of wheat seeds entombed with the Pharaohs were no longer viable, while seeds buried by squirrels in the Arctic some 31,000 years ago still contained enough living material to recreate an ancient version of the narrow-leafed campion that went on to produce viable seeds and generations of its own.[iv] The call of the seed is to be a seed, not to preserve itself but to undergo conversion and transformation in order to produce food and beauty, life abundant for the world.
To undergo conversion and transformation in order to produce life for the world. That is the call of the seed, and the call of the Christian, and the gift of the Spirit: the breath of life, and life in abundance.
Amen.
[i] The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Macmillan, 1963), 99
[ii] https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/2024/03/02/navalnys-christianity-under-reported
[iii] https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/10/12/homily-oscar-romero-was-delivering-when-he-was-killed
over the water 