Dying to Live

Epiphany UCC

John 12:20-33

Title: Dying to Live

Some Greeks were among those who had come up to worship at the festival. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and made a request: “Sir, we want to see Jesus.” Philip told Andrew, and Andrew and Philip told Jesus.

Jesus replied, “The time has come for the Human One to be glorified. I assure you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it can only be a single seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their lives will lose them, and those who hate their lives in this world will keep them forever. Whoever serves me must follow me. Wherever I am, there my servant will also be. My Father will honor whoever serves me.

“Now I am deeply troubled. What should I say? ‘Father, save me from this time’? No, for this is the reason I have come to this time. Father, glorify your name!”

Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

The crowd standing there heard and said, “It’s thunder.” Others said, “An angel spoke to him.”

Jesus replied, “This voice wasn’t for my benefit but for yours. Now is the time for judgment of this world. Now this world’s ruler will be thrown out. When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to me.” (He said this to show how he was going to die.)

I have to say that this past week Confirmation class was one of my favorites, and this is from someone who has been teaching these kinds of classes for a quite awhile. This year’s class is a bit smaller in number than we’ve had in the recent past, but they made up for their small ize with a lot of big question – and their unwillingness to let me get away with pat or easy answers to their difficult questions. I like to think I don’t offer simplistic answers to their questions, but if I do, they certainly don’t let me get away with it, as they shouldn’t, of course. In reality, these young adults reflect the kind of confirmand I think I would have been if I had gone through confirmation myself, someone who would have questioned the answers, and questioned them again, if the answer to my question didn’t make sense. Maybe it has to do with the size of the class that the questions and skepticism are easier to express – but I’m enjoying it and I hope they are as well.

And that questioning showed up last Thursday, as we talked about one of the central doctrines of the Christian faith, the belief about the incarnation, this idea that Jesus was God, and God was Jesus, though Jesus was as human as you and I are. I shared a bit about how the church struggled with this belief, and how various Christians through the ages have tried to explain this idea that God could be both human and divine in Jesus. Eventually, I said, the church stopped trying to explain it rationally, or logically because the various ways Christians of the first three centuries tried to explain the incarnation either diminished Jesus’ divinity or Jesus’ humanity, and the majority of the church would have none of it. In the end, most of the church settled into the uneasy and illogical and absurd belief that Jesus was completely God and completely human, and it was simply a paradox, something not understandable to the sometimes logical human mind. And it would have been especially difficult for minds of antiquity, where difference between God or the gods and human flesh were understood as starkly difference – how the corruption of the human bear the weight of divinity itself, the protest would have been made? But it did, most of the church would reply, and we have no idea how it was so. Well, some of the confirmands would have none of that as well, but we talk about paradox, about how two contradictory things put together can sometimes lead to a greater and more profound truth. I close my eyes so that I can see, goes one paradox, and there is the one from Hamlet that any parent knows when one has had to discipline a child so they can learn a difficult life lesson – I must be cruel only to be kind. Or for those who celebrated St. Patrick’s Day this weekend, there is the humorous paradox that goes: Nobody goes to Murphy’s Bar anymore — it’s too crowded. I think the confirmands came to understand the power of paradoxes to be a way to come to understand a deeper truth, though the truth, or what I believe to be truth, that Jesus was a human as I was, and was yet God in some mysterious way, is still a paradox that some of us struggle with. And I would argue that to struggle with it, and even not quite buy it, well, that’s OK – thank goodness that salvation, that wholeness is not about what we believe, but is about what we God believes about us, that we are worthy of God’s love and sacrifice, God’s goodness and mercy.

But it is also paradox that Jesus is putting before us in our text today, this one from the 12th chapter of the Gospel of John. In our passage today, Jesus is visited by some Greeks, or at least they try to visit him—it’s never quite clear whether or not they actually get to talk to him, but what the visit does is to spur on thoughts from Jesus about the meaning of his own life, and, the reality of what he will soon be doing for the sake of others, and what he will be asking his disciples to do with their own lives. Jesus is said to have spoken these words while he is in Jerusalem, days before he will be crucified, before he will be the seed that falls into the ground, but who will produce much fruit. There is a quiet resolve here, but it’s still tinged with the human, with the human feelings of sadness, maybe even worry—the Scriptures say that Jesus was troubled at what was to come, what seemed destined to come, the paradox that his death would bring life to so many others, but he accepted it, he embraced it, even if the embrace of it was half-hearted, and full of sadness – that was beautiful human side of him, mourning all the goodness he will miss when he departs from this world. Surely, he was concerned about himself—yes, as much as some of us tend to make Jesus otherworldly, that we want to focus on his divinity, there is no doubt he would be as scared and disturbed as we would be in such a moment. To be human is to be scared, even if you know that your life and death will mean something, that it would and could change the world. The time has come for the Human One to be glorified. Jesus says, I assure you that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it can only be a single seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.

That death, of course, that death, is so important for us followers of this Nazarene, because this one death sets us free from prison; it opens up the doors, and shows us a way to live and a way to die. That image that Jesus uses, the image of a seed being put in the ground in order to grow, that is beautiful to me, and one can see what Jesus is pointing to: the seed of his life would make no sense if he did not experience the final human journey, the journey of death—he could not be another Elijah, another Melchizedek, those in biblical lore that are said to have never tasted the bitter pill of death. Living and dying, they are a human pair, maybe even a pair that all creation shares, a truth I’ve been thinking about lately. Some of you have heard me speak of Clifton Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia, the congregation I attended while I was a student in seminary. Clifton was a special little congregation that I discovered while searching for a different kind of Christianity, and different it really was. The church was housed in an old house, in which the church ran a homeless shelter for 36 men 365 nights a year, and on Sunday, the men would roll up their beds in the sanctuary, which would let the church members put out the folding chairs, which then sat the 35 or so who gathered there for worship every Sunday. Church members, and other folks from other churches would staff the place at night, which was always interesting, at least it was for me. Clifton was also the first More Light congregation in the Southeast, which is basically the Presbyterian equivalent to Open and Affirming in the United Church of Christ, which added another layer of specialness, at least it did in my heart. It explicitly welcomed the LGBT community well before any other Presbyterian, doing as they did in 1970’s.

My first year in seminary I didn’t do a lot of church going, for a lot of complicated reasons, one of which was a deep disappointment with the church in general, but Clifton and its beautiful uniqueness, it helped me to find my way back home to the church, for which I will remain every thankful. Some years ago, I found out that Clifton had closed awhile back, and there was no more worshipping community there, which was heartbreaking to me, because of what it meant to me, and the people that I knew there, and what they taught me about God and life together. When I found out about it, It put me in a funk for a few days. And then I contacted another former member, and she told me that the homeless ministry was still going on, and that apartment complex for homeless folks that was just getting off the ground when I left is still there, housing people. In many ways, the worshipping community of Clifton Presbyterian Church had to die in order to fully focus on what God had for that ministry with the homeless. Like Jesus, I was troubled, and profoundly sad about it, for awhile, this seed dying back into the earth, and yet, it’s just part of the rhythm of life, as seen in Christ’s own life—to live you must sometimes die to the old ways of doing things, which is what Christ seems to be saying in our passage today, and, more importantly, we have to be willing to let go of the life we’ve always known so that we can have the life that is being given to us in the present. Paradoxically, Jesus says we ought to hate our lives in this world, which seems so harsh, because I don’t hate mine, imperfect as it is, to be sure. But I don’t think he means hate the same we think of hate – what he does means is that there may be times in our lives may be there moments when sacrifices will be asked of us, stands for justice or kindness or mercy that we will need to make, and it may cost us something, maybe even our life,this willingness to give up our life, hate our life, enough, to let it go for the right and the good and the just. So many people don’t stand up and stand out, but others do – and, I don’t know if you’ve realized this truth, but sometimes the ones who stand up and stand out get themselves crucified. Clifton Presbyterian Church stood up for and beside the homeless of Atlanta, and they stood up for and beside the gay and lesbian people of Atlanta before the rest of the world was willing to do such a thing, in the 1970’s. What they got in return for standing up was a slow death, and a profound and good legacy, and they are dead as a community but they are not gone, surely – Clifton has an eternal life, the very eternal life Jesus promises us in this text, those who don’t cling so tightly to that life which sometimes must be given away for the sake of love. If we love our lives too much, the comfort we have at the moment, how little or big that may be, we many never have the courage to supposedly waste those lives on the doing the right thing, especially if it costs us anything.

This is troubling for some of us, as it for Jesus, this call to die in order to live, even if metaphorically, this invitation to give away what is most precious, our lives for the justice and the realm of love Christ is yet building in this world. And yet, what could it and does it mean for us, today, we who thankfully so rarely get offered the chance to sacrifice our lives to the degree that Christ did for us, or the earliest disciples, women and men who gave up their lives rather than deny they were followers of the Christ, this paradox of humanity and divinity wrapped within mystery itself? I’ve struggled with answering this question, and I think will try to answer it this way: look, we obviously don’t have to die as Jesus did, or die as Clifton did for the sake of its larger ministry with the homeless, and those who sometimes felt homeless in this world, the queer community. Maybe we won’t have to be that seed that dies, that goes into the ground but comes out of the earth in wholeness, in abundance. But hating one’s life, of choosing to sacrifice people’s regard, and sometimes respect, and friendship because we to have to say something and we have to do something, which invites their scorn, their contempt, their mockery because we spoke up for the right and kind and just, that can happen at any moment. When we love our lives too much, when what matters most to us is that we are safe, that we are respected, that we are loved by certain kinds of people, and we will not give any of it up, to let parts of what we want, that safety, that regard, that love, go into the ground to die for the sake of others, then we won’t experience eternal life, which in John’s Gospel always begins on this side of eternity, which begins here and now, in our lived lives on this side of the veil between life and death.

In the year 2005, the United Church of Christ did what it so often does – it became the first to do a thing, to do the right thing – and during that year the delegates of the General Synod of our denomination voted to support the right of same sex people to be legally married, a full decade before it became so in 2015. We had ordained the first woman, we ordained the first openly gay man, we had been the first multi-racial denomination led by an African-American man – those faces are found in our fellowship hall downstairs in a mural painted by our own John Gingrich. And our own John Thomas was the General Minister and President of our denomination and he elegantly led the prayer after the vote, a vote that was not unanimous, and a vote he knew would not come without a cost, a series of deaths. John knew what many knew as well, that there would be congregations who would not and could not support this particular first, as other congregations hadn’t supported some of the other firsts in our past. Eventually some 250 congregations left our denomination because of that vote, despite the fact that votes at Synod are not binding, and congregations are free to live out their own values and beliefs in their particular settings. Even in celebration of this historic first, some were troubled because they knew the cost of taking that brave stand, as Jesus was when ruminated over the life he was about to give away to us. I wasn’t at that particular Synod but I remember watching that vote online, and being overwhelmed with emotion, crying at my desk at First Congregational Church in Houston, Texas – that a people stood up and stood out, knowing that there would be a profound cost to them, in terms of size and money. I had spent years trying to do ministry with integrity, and to do it without living a lie, a lie of commission or omission, and most of the time I found people were unwilling to stand up and stand out for people like me – they loved their lives too much, or the life of their church too much, to do the right thing. God will be glorified, Jesus tells his disciples, by the seeming dramatic failure of his life – and that which we let die, the respectability, the admiration of others, even the seeming love of others, that which we let fall into the dirt, into the grave, for the sake of the good, the right, the just, it will bear much fruit, one day, perhaps on a third day, something we will be reminded of again, on Easter morning. Amen.