5th Sunday in Lent (Year B) – Sunday, March 25, 2012
Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church,
Lancaster, PA
Text: John 12:20-33
Until
about a year and a half ago, I had never watched anyone die. In
fact, probably the closest I'd come to death was a mousetrap. You
see, I was born in 1985 and I didn't grow up around farms like the
ones we have about 15 minutes in any direction from where we now
stand, where death is a constant, and normal, part of everyday life.
No, I've grown up in a technological age in which we have succeeded
in compartmentalizing death into hospitals, hospices, and nursing
homes, poultry plants and mechanical slaughterhouses. We have been
incredibly successful in sanitizing our lives of death. We don't
kill animals to eat, we buy food, we buy pre-cut, pre-flavored, even
pre-cooked pieces of meat that bear no resemblance to the cute little
fellows at the farm. In the medical world, we can go to
extraordinary lengths to keep hearts beating and blood pumping even
when the person we know is gone. In fact, we can push off death for
so long that we have introduced a new moral agony into our lives –
the decision about what to do with a suffering parent, when pulling
the plug seems like failure, like giving up on Mom or Dad.
I
think we're beginning to convince ourselves that we can actually
conquer the final enemy, the old foe that has always come for us
sooner or later. As we seem to win more and more of the time in our
struggle with death, it seems to me that we have carried over this
expectation of immortality into other endeavors in our lives. It
seems as though our society is growing less and less tolerant of
human weakness, of our natural limitations. We're not supposed to
fail anymore.
In a
way, Jesus raised expectations of a life without death. A chapter
before where we pick up today, Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from
the dead, and in doing so he stirs up a huge crowd excited to see
more signs and wonders. Among this crowd are some Greek-speaking
Jews who had come to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, and they
ask, “sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Perhaps they wanted to see
this death-denying power in person. But when they finally see this
amazing Jesus, what does he tell them??? Well, it's my time. Time
for me to be “glorified.” “Unless a grain of wheat falls to
the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it
bears much fruit.” In other words, I'm going to die. And if you
want to serve me, you must follow me to this death.
There
comes a time when we must face death, and there is nothing we can do
about it. We cannot run forever. It was about a year and a half ago
that I was doing my clinical pastoral education at the Hospital of
the University of Pennsylvania in Center City Philadelphia. GSW's,
that's gun shot wounds, were, tragically, a pretty routine occurrence
in the trauma bay. As chaplains, we responded to every trauma that
came in and so it was only a matter of time before I would have to
witness the end of a young and promising life. It didn't take long –
my second week there, at about 4 in the afternoon, I stood in a room
hardly twice the size of this pulpit next to a young man's mother
when she heard that her son had died on the table after being shot
outside the grocery store where he worked and dreamed of the college
he would be attending that fall. It was chaos. It was horrible. It
was loud. It was unfair. I couldn't clean it up. I couldn't
reconcile this. I sure as heck couldn't explain it. I could barely
stand to be there.
We can
keep death at arm's reach for most of our lives, but today Jesus
shoves it back in front of our faces. For Jesus, being “lifted up”
means being nailed to a cross, and he calls it his “glorification.”
He says his death is the main reason he's here on earth. Glory for
Jesus is a shameful death. But we continue to insist on a life
sanitized from death. We insist that we should not fail. We imagine
that we are not limited by our humanity. And so our expectations
become oppressive for ourselves and others. We can see this all over
the place, for example:
- Sports teams are supposed to win the title every year or the coach gets fired...
- All kids are supposed to pass the same test, and if they can't, well, it's the teacher's fault...
- Relationships in which the love, trust, and mutual self-giving have long since died are expected to be kept on life support because it just might get better...
- Soldiers and Marines are expected to go on their third and fourth and fifth tours without mentally and emotionally breaking down...
- In the church, we see the loss of members and the lack of money that are almost entirely the result of a drastically changed culture and neighborhood and yet we internalize the guilt that we have somehow failed where our parents succeeded.
Brothers
and sisters, let's stop being so hard on ourselves! There's a truth
about us that I think Jesus wants us to know: Remember you are dust,
and to dust you shall return. You are a human being. Being human is
not your fault. You did not create yourself. You are not Jesus.
You are captive to sin and you cannot free yourself. You have
limitations. Everything that has life dies. Death will come, and we
can't clean it up.
But
when death comes, Christ will be with us. Jesus says, “Where I am,
there will my servant be also.” In death, we face nothing our Lord
Jesus Christ has not already faced, and mastered. We need not fear
death – in fact, here in the Church we welcome it. Right over
there at the font, we believe that in our baptism, in those waters we
face death with Christ, and are then raised with Christ to new life.
It is one of the most confusing and yet most important parts of
Christian faith. We go to the font to die. And there we die the
only death that ever matters. Our life on our own, without Christ,
desperately trying to please God, and others, and ourselves, trying
to avoid failure and death, comes to an end. Our new life with
Christ, knowing we are dust and to dust we will return, knowing that
we are forgiven by Christ in spite of ourselves, free in Christ to
serve our neighbor in this suffering world, begins.
Each
day of your life, as you face all the little deaths, all the crosses
and suffering of this world, remember that you are baptized. Cling
to it like nothing else. Remember that you are marked with the cross
of Christ and sealed forever with the Holy Spirit. You need not fear
death – it will come but it has met its match in Jesus Christ.
Wherever a life comes to an end, there will be Christ, dying with us,
as the seed falls to the earth. Remember that we wait with a sure
hope for the day when Christ will return and all the dead will rise
from their graves to have abundant life with God.
But
better than that, God gives us this abundant life now! Even as the
cross and death approach, look for shoots of green springing up from
the ground. Those folks in our reading today were looking for Jesus.
Where can you see him? Wherever there are endings, you don't have
to run away, but you can look for God bringing about new beginnings.
Look for Christ in yourself given permission to be human, knowing
that God loves you even as you fall short. Look for Christ in your
sisters and brothers, to whom he has joined you, none of whom are
better, or worse, than you. Consider the possibility that no ending,
not even death, of a person, an institution, a tradition, can
separate you from God. Take a look at this cross, an instrument of
death, and see instead the tree of life, the very seed of
resurrection. Amen.
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