Sermon — March 17, 2024
Michael Fenn
In the Gospel today, there is a small rhetorical device used that carries a lot of weight. I don’t know if it is easy to miss, because I am such an avid fan of plants and ecology that it jumped out at me immediately. Jesus says that “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”. I think naturally many of us intuitively know that this is how plants work, seeds in general must fall and be put into soil and die in order to grow again. But there is a beauty and majesty to the fact that one seed from an apple can grow into a tree that then produces thousands of apples, one ear of corn can seed a field of corn, one kernel of wheat grows an entire stalk of wheat, or even how a caterpillar can metamorphosize into the splendor of a butterfly.
However, I am skipping ahead within the rhetorical device. Before we get to the new apples, the rolling field of corn, the strong stalk of wheat, or the butterfly. We must go somewhere darker–we must fall to the ground. In a very classic kindergarten project, kids will get caterpillars, watch them as they turn into cocoons, and then patiently wait until what were once caterpillars emerge as butterflies. However, what is not talked about nearly as much is that all holometabolous insects–including all butterflies and moths–dissolve and digest the vast majority of their own body in the darkness of the cocoon; leaving only the essential plans of butterfly-ness and making everything else into a kind of bug-slime. Similarly, essentially any seed of any kind of plant will experience its dark moment; for many seeds inside fruits this occurs by being actually physically eaten, humans and animals eat countless seeds that then germinate in our byproducts. Or if not that, then many seeds will experience the fruit that once housed them rotting around them as it decomposes. And like Jesus says, many other seeds will fall to the ground into the darkness of the soil and “die”. If this has been a bit gross for you, my apologies, the biologist that lives inside me got the better of me when writing this sermon, but I hope I have invigorated the notion of the darkness attending to this metaphor. There is a moment of true darkness when the seed falls away, when the seed is planted, as it waits to germinate and grow into something beautiful again. The moment of the seed “dying”.
Importantly, Jesus seems to use this rhetorical device to qualify the surrounding statements in the Gospel reading today. Just before this metaphor he talks about how the time has come for he himself to be glorified, just after he gives the direction to the disciples that they must “lose their life”, and in the next chunk he tells the disciples how his soul is troubled even as he is going to be glorified.
Jesus uses this metaphor to anticipate both the crucifixion and the resurrection and to help understand what is going to happen. He is indeed greatly troubled by the idea of the crucifixion, but the troubled nature passes through the understanding of the kernel of wheat metaphor. Which helps us to understand that the crucifixion is in some way necessary, but that it is also not a permanent state. It is scary, but one moment on the path to something truly greater. Like the kernel of wheat that falls, the crucifixion is one moment on the journey, not the final destination. The resurrection is anticipated in this metaphor, the kernel of wheat will naturally grow into a stalk that produces many kernels of wheat, and that is its final point on its particular journey.
It also points Jesus into a direction of relationship and trust. Jesus even asks rhetorically if he ought to ask God to spare him this endeavor, this fear, the hardship he must endure. Ultimately, though, Jesus says that he cannot do that, and will not do that. First because it is necessary–a kernel of wheat cannot grow into a stalk if it remains on the stalk. Second, because there is trust. There is a trust in Jesus’s relationship to God that God will glorify Jesus again. Jesus trusts in the fact that in his moment of falling to the ground that God will indeed lift him up again. When Jesus finds himself heading into the fearful darkness of the soil, he does not flinch away from it, does not ask God to spare him from the moment of trial, instead he moves deeper into a relationship of trust with God.
Returning back to our gospel story, Jesus, ever the teacher, gives his followers some direction after he says something scary and ominous. Right after he gives the metaphor of the kernel of wheat, he tells his followers that those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life will keep it forever. It does feel like a “heads I win, tails you lose” kind of scenario. With either option, I either lose the life I love or keep the life I hate forever. So personally, I think understanding the confusion of this statement requires the understanding we get from the kernel of wheat metaphor.
To love our life in the sense of this story would mean to cling onto the stalk of wheat, to demand that God give us the easiest straight path to follow, to always do what is easy instead of what is right, to do what is efficient over what is just, to do what is profitable instead of what is loving. In this sense, to love our life as it is is not a natural thing, it would be unnatural for the kernel of wheat to remain stuck forever onto the stalk–even though that is the most secure and safe place for it to be. To love our life means to be unwilling to undergo transformation, unwilling to leave the stalk, to be unwilling to do what is just, right, and necessary. To lose our life would mean to lose ourselves to pursue love in all its forms: justice, joy, community building, mercy, and so on.
To lose our life means to embrace the fact that there will be times where our pursuit of this love will take us off of the stalk of wheat and into the dark soil on the ground, buried and waiting for what will come next. It will almost certainly get difficult, and strange, and inconvenient, and unpleasant. It may be the wisdom behind the pessimistic adage that “no good deed goes unpunished”–following Jesus, doing good, is hard. Unlike the adage though, we have the promise that when we inevitably find ourselves in the darkness of the soil, after falling off the stalk of wheat, we have a trust in God that we will not remain there in the soil forever.
I will say with almost certainty that everyone in this church has already experienced what I am talking about. The pursuit of love is, for example, what led all of us to isolate ourselves in our houses for months on end during the various stages of COVID, an anxious and dark time where love meant separation and boredom.
However, it is also maybe not always that large and looming. Most of the time, we live quite ordinary lives with quite mundane problems. What of the dark soil then? I also think the pursuit of this love, and the subsequent darkness of soil, manifests in smaller ways throughout our lives. Maybe not in grand gestures of dark times, but in the small inconveniences we take upon ourselves to make our community better. I see this kind of thing acutely in my life when college students give up their entire summer to get paid a few hundred bucks to sleep in cabins and care for people’s kids——when they could easily make ten times that doing almost anything else; I see it when people regularly take hours out of their week to attend building committee meetings, vestry meetings, and such things——when they could easily say “no thanks”; I see it when tiny little churches devote days and dollars to welcome dozens of people into their parish house for a free weekly meals——when simply surviving another year as a church would be considered a success.
As we move through Lent this time around, I am reminded through the darkness that Lent entails, that we understand that a Christian life, in its pursuit of love, is not always easy. Whether it is an everyday darkness in soil–losing your life bit by bit; or a more profound darkness in the soil, and losing your life feels much bigger. BREAK As we approach Easter, I am reminded that a Christian life, through the action of Jesus, also promises a profound and powerful resurrection in return. And like Jesus did, we can place our full trust in God for this resurrection. In the name of the one who loved us first.