In the Earth

 John 12:20-33

I’m not a good gardener. I frequently need help even with resilient house plants. Soil and seeds and harvesting are generally a mystery to me. But even I understand this metaphor Jesus is teaching today:
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.  It’s the cycle of life every spring; seeds need to “die” and transform in order to grow. Right? 

This is a life-giving story that I like, one I’m glad to hear and repeat as we get closer to Holy Week: to our annual remembrance of Jesus’ own death – and resurrection.

But then Jesus goes on, and starts talking about hating life, and losing it. And it starts to feel more personal for me, more uncomfortable. 

Oh, I see. He’s not talking about death and life confined to a painless vegetable metaphor, but death and life that have real impact on me, on you. 

He’s talking real loss as part of real transformation.  Real commitment and risk, in following and serving him.

Now my soul is troubled, too, just like Jesus says his is.

Should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ he asks.

No.

For this I have come; Father, glorify your name.

Now Jesus is talking about not being afraid of the loss and transformation he’s telling us about. Not being afraid of the real and far-reaching impact of death and life on our own lives – or more truly, not avoiding that impact, the transformation, or the loss itself. Not letting fear stop us from growing into abundant life.

Again, that sounds good in the abstract.

It’s harder on the ground.  Or maybe in the ground, right here in the earth, with the seed that dies and bears fruit. 

We’re kind of there right now, all of us together.

We know the process of new life beyond the Covid pandemic has begun. As spring becomes more real, as more vaccines are produced and administered, the world around us is starting to prepare for a summer that includes actual gatherings. 

We’re ready to imagine new opportunities at church, in our families, or at work that just wouldn’t have been imaginable five months ago, or twelve months ago – or two years ago, in the old “normal.”  

And at the same time, we’re still waiting for that new life. We’re still buried in the earth. We’re still surrounded, every day, by the deep soil of loss – the conveniences and opportunities missed, optimism disappointed, the burden of work and school and relationships and church all crammed into our homes and phones and computers; the burden of an imperfect world where injustice and division are so visible and disruptive to our comfort and sense of our selves and our community – or where injustice is invisible to many, while cutting deep into our own lives.

This eart we’re in affects each of us differently, but it’s around us all.

Some of us are deep in the soil of grief, surrounded by the reality of illness and death, when healing should be so near.  I find myself taking it really personally now when beloved people get ill, or die, because we should be so close to healing and protection, as a whole. 

It's tempting – natural, faithful even – to want to cry out: God, save us from this hour.

It’s hard to be seed, buried in the earth, waiting through the processes of death and life. Hard to accept the losses, and lose ourselves to transformation, instead of holding tight to what we were, how we used to be. Hard to wait out the time it takes for loss and death to slowly grow into new life. 

Yet that is what Jesus is calling us to.

I’m reminded of a classic Frog and Toad story,* in which Toad plants seeds and expects a beautiful garden “quite soon”.  The moment the seeds are in the ground, he expects flowers. 

“Start growing!” he begs the seeds, urges them, commands them.  

Until his friend Frog suggests that the seeds are afraid to grow.  

Now Toad’s concern changes. In the middle of the night he wonders if the seeds are afraid of the dark – afraid of the unknown. 

So Toad brings light and stories and music to his seeds, commits himself to nurturing those seeds through the fear they might be feeling.  Until his seeds aren’t “afraid” anymore, until they grow.

Jesus is telling us – like Toad’s seeds – not to be “afraid of the dark”; not to be afraid to grow. Jesus is telling us that he himself will be with us in this confining soil; nurturing and encouraging us through the loss and uncertainty or change we might fear. 

More, Jesus is encouraging us to follow him into transformation – to open ourselves to everything that can’t happen if we are stuck, if we believe that the earth surrounding us now is a prison, an ending, rather than a place to put down roots, open ourselves, be nourished, and grow.

Because by himself falling into the earth and dying, Jesus turns death into the home of God, the nurturing soil of new life for us all. The presence of God in death itself is revolutionary; it changes everything. 

By himself falling into the earth and dying, Jesus demonstrates that neither death itself, nor the losses we fear, will separate us from God, but are actually full of God’s own presence and abundant life. That when we ourselves “fall into the earth” – whether of a global pandemic or a more personal trouble, change, or ending – that earth will be full of God’s power: a place where the loss is acknowledged and real, and also full of potential for transformation and growth. 

That’s why Jesus can talk about his own death and say, not “Father, save me!”, but rather “this is why I have come; this is part of God’s glory!”

Jesus invites us to do the same.

And to hear, from the voice of thunder that answers Jesus, that God’s glory isn’t something for the distant future, but is ongoing. Glory has already started, is happening now in the earth that we fall into, as well as in the growth that is yet to come.

God’s name is already glorified in the same deep soil of uncertainty, loss, and change we share now. 

As a congregation, in the midst of this, we’re meeting and exceeding our outreach challenges, stocking the food pantry that supports many who are struggling more than ever. 

You and I are individually finding and giving of ourselves to organizations that save lives through medicine, disaster relief, shelter, and justice. Others are digging roots into the hope for transformation: for equity and reconciliation and generous love to come from the loss and death and inequity revealed in this pandemic year.

That’s taking part in God’s glory, happening already in the midst of the deep soil of need and longing and change.

Or perhaps, in this deep soil, in this waiting time, you are exercising hope by intentionally preparing to bear much fruit: through prayer, reading, reflection, and conversations that draw us closer to God. 

Or by actively planning for how our new “normal” will be more creative, welcoming, hope-filled and abundant than the old normal that’s been dying for a year. 

Perhaps you’re starting to grow, in this soil, by cultivating patience and generosity – reserving judgement and waiting to unmask.
Starting to grow by listening longer and more attentively, by cultivating trust that opens the heart to transformation. 

God’s glory radiates from that rich, dark soil, even before the leaves and fruit appear.

And not just in this pandemic, but in all the other times in our lives when we “fall into the earth” through a sudden diagnosis or loss, or find ourselves “buried” in work or grief. God’s presence in the deep earth that surrounds us welcomes us to a place of transformation; welcomes us to be at home with God in the depths of true sorrow and loss, in the dark of waiting and uncertainty, as God unwraps the new life within us.

When we fall into the earth, we don’t have to rush to the surface. 

We don’t have to plead to be plucked from the depths. 

God sings and whispers to us in the deep soil itself: don’t be afraid to grow in the dark. I am here. I am with you.

*"The Garden", from Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad Together, Harper Collins, 1971

Different Plans

Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

When will we get back to normal?  

I just want things to be normal again.

Have you heard that recently? Said it yourself?  Gotten really, really used to that yearning for the way things used to be?

Moses knows all about that.

Ever since the moment the people of Israel got loose from Egypt and entered the wilderness, they’ve been demanding to get back to the way things used to be.  Egypt wasn’t lonely, like this wilderness. It had melons and garlic. Lots of water and meat. It was better than this stupid wilderness where we have to journey long and work hard to get to the promised land.

I particularly like today’s complaint: “There’s no food and water, and we hate this miserable food [that we miraculously have!].”

Never mind that “how things used to be” was actually slavery and genocide. New is hard. The wilderness – the uncertainty and in-between-ness and loneliness – absolutely wears us out.

The parallel isn’t perfect – COVID certainly didn’t deliver any of us from oppression – but the exhausted yearning of the Israelites in the wilderness might feel familiar to many of us now. 

We too complain against our leaders – and sometimes against God – because we’re just stuck. The vaccine rollout is uneven and lots of us aren’t even eligible yet. Schools are open; but it’s wrong. Schools are closed; and it’s wrong. The economic relief is the wrong size and shape and it’s great but it’s awful, too.  Remote worship – like manna – is a miracle and a weary grief, both at the same time.

But we’re not going back to Egypt.

We’re not going back to normal – not the same normal we came from, anyway.

God isn’t ever going to put us back where we were. God has bigger plans for us than that.

When we are up to our eyeballs in uncertainty, when things just seem to get harder, it’s natural to want to go back to how it used to be, even if how it used to be wasn’t objectively all that good.
But God wants – God demands – our trust, and our commitment to moving forward, following God to the land of promise. God expects – commands – our whole-hearted commitment to being part of Jesus’ work of life triumphing over death, even when we’re so stuck we feel like we might as well be dead.

And to drop out of that trust, that commitment, is deadly.

Jesus talks about how those who do not believe – who do not commit themselves to Jesus’ promises and mission, who don’t love God’s truth above all – are “condemned already”.  

It sounds harsh, doesn’t it?

The people of Israel drop out of their trust in God’s protection and care; drop out of God’s vision of a holy, vibrant people in a land of abundance and promise; and get bitten by deadly snakes.

Also harsh. Scary, in fact.

I can’t make these stories of God’s wrath or condemnation comfortable for you, because I’m not comfortable with them myself. 

But I know that they’re being told to us – have been told to generations of God’s people for thousands of years – because the people who wrote them down wanted us to know what they had learned. 

That they appreciated a God who would draw boundaries, who would insist on keeping us in the faith, keeping us on the road toward God’s promises, even at the cost of pain to us. 

They trusted the God who shows us where we fall away, and provides the incentive to return to God’s path, instead of just letting us wander away until we lose ourselves, and lose our way home.

The people who told us these stories appreciated that God would actively and uncomfortably send snakes to change our minds when dropping back to our old comforts in a broken world seems like a better deal than committing to the work and hope of God’s dream of a holy and healed world for us.

Because whether we like it or not, God’s not going to put us back where we used to be.  God has bigger plans for us than that.

And the snakes aren’t actually going to win.

God’s people in the wilderness responded to those snakes by remembering that God actually can and will protect them from death. They ask Moses to plead for God’s help, and God sets up this snake on a pole.

It’s one of the weirder miracles of the Bible. Instead of a direct healing, or the banishment of the snakes, when you get bitten, you look at this image of a snake, and you are healed.  It’s a bit nonsensical as an anti-venom treatment, but it’s extremely effective as an anti-doubt treatment.

   

We don’t passively receive healing for the wounds caused by our lack of trust. We take an action – turning or journeying to contemplate the snake – to place ourselves in God’s hands. To actively, consciously affirm that we are putting our trust in God’s healing, protection, and care. 

And then we live. Live more spiritually whole and strong, because the action of re-committing ourselves to God’s care heals the doubt that bites at us.

The healing God offers in Jesus is actually just as odd.  The whole world can’t keep it together in God’s path of promise; evil is all over; it’s easy to give up on the commitment to a healed and holy world universally close to God. 

Snakes aren’t enough anymore.  So God innovates again, with incarnation.

God becoming vulnerable human flesh and dying – dying at the hands of an oppressive human system – that’s a really weird way to save the world.

And it’s another invitation to the kind of deliberate, risky trust that places us directly into God’s hands. With the same result: we live. 

Not just live another day, but live abundantly, fully, eternally, joyfully closer to God. 

Because God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Once we’re in God’s hands, God won’t ever put us back where we were, where we imagine we were comfortable. Because God is always working for universal salvation, and we’re not there yet.

Today, in our wilderness, those invitations to deliberate trust look a little different than the crucifix or the snake, of course.  There’s a vaccine – lots of vaccines, actually – which were developed faster than ever before, and about which we still have much to learn. It’s a miracle for which we have to take actions of deliberate trust: roll up our sleeves; search diligently; or wait our turn. Some of those actions are easy for many of us; others are hard.  All are actions of trust in God and in our community.

For many of us, it requires an act of deliberate trust to attend remote worship, depending on God to be present and nourish us in new and strange ways. 

We have to actively trust in God and one another that our friendships, our essential relationships, will go on and even grow, while we are separated for another week, another month, another long, and difficult time. That act of trust is chosen when we show up – on the phone, by text, by card and letter, on the other side of a mask or glass or computer screen – in all the ways that feel wrong, not enough. Those are the actions by which we stay in the new wilderness, looking for God’s promises together in spite of the discomfort and uncertainty. 

We have to actively choose to trust God and one another by planning for continued change, by making commitments to ways we won’t return to normal – like our audio-visual investment at Trinity that commits us to a future where our worship won’t be only in our building ever again.

Because God won’t ever put us back where we were, no matter how much we miss it. 

God has different plans for us, and insists that we stay in the journey. God is committed to keeping us in the journey of promise and trust; of change and uncertainty and eternal, abundant life. 

Commandments of Connection

 Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22

When my friend Amber, a chaplain at an Episcopal elementary school, begins to teach her students about God, she offers to draw them a picture.

Now, if you listened carefully to the reading from Exodus this morning, you may suspect that Chaplain Amber is on dangerous ground. After all, isn’t the second commandment a warning against making images of God?

But Amber doesn’t draw a face for God, like Michelangelo did, or many other artists. She draws a cloud. A cloud with a big question mark inside it.

She draws a mystery, the unknown.

Which is exciting if you like big ideas and abstractions, but is actually really hard to relate to for a lot of us.

Particularly, I imagine, for a motley bunch of refugees from oppression, stuck out in the desert – the land that no one else wants – wondering what happens next. Who did they really follow, out here into the wilderness? 
They’ve seen fire and cloud and miracles, but how do you build a relationship with a thundercloud, a pillar of fire, or a power that inexplicably makes food out of nothing and manipulates entire seas? 

This morning’s Exodus story is the answer.  Or part of the answer, anyway.

God longs for relationship with these motley people, with Israel, with us. God wants us to be close to God, to identify with God, to have the sense that we belong. 

And God also knows humans well enough to know that we’re fairly bad at relationships with the abstract. Physical presence and nearness make most relationships easier for humans (you are, after all, more likely to become friends with someone who lives or works or learns near you than with someone who lives and works on the other side of the globe. Or in a part of the next county you never go to, for that matter.)

Transendence, infinity, invisibility – these make it hard to connect with God. 

And God wants to be close to us; wants us to be close to God, to feel connected.
So God creates a covenant with Israel. A concrete set of expectations and practices – commandments – that give practical form to belonging to God. 

We heard the root and beginning of that covenant, those practices of belonging to God, this morning. We repeat those core practices often, and put them on the walls of our Sunday School classrooms, calling them the Ten Commandments.

The prohibition of images, the special respect for God’s name, the practice of Sabbath – these are things that mark space and time and words as special, holy, and sacred, so that we have a way to feel that God is close to us, and we are close to God. And the way we treat other people is rooted in that special relationship with God, too. Loving our neighbor as ourself, as Jesus later tells us, is an important part of being close – feeling close – to God.

God goes on to offer Israel many more ways of marking place and time and actions as holy, as ways to connect and be close to God’s incomprehensible power, ways to mark ourselves as belonging to God.

One of those – the tent of meeting – eventually becomes the Temple in Jerusalem – a place meant to bring people close to the untouchable mystery of God. 

The place Jesus smashes up in the story John tells us today.

Less than half a century after Jesus turns over the tables the whole Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed. The Temple practices of sacrifice and worship – that particular form of sacredness, of coming close to God – have been gone from humanity’s relationship with God for nineteen centuries and counting, now.

When the Temple fell, God must have felt impossibly distant once again to the people of Israel. 

You and I might feel some sympathy for them, having been mostly cut off from our own place of shared worship, our own practices of God’s closeness – like communion, or singing together – for a year and counting. 

Many of us have felt those disconnections before, in some other loss or wilderness in our lives. For a time – short or long – you or I may have found ourselves feeling cut off from the things that bring us close to God. Prayers seem unanswered; God feels far away in some trouble or sorrow, or completely disconnected from the day-to-day demands of getting through life. We might be daunted by the mystery, distant from the incomprehensible power that is supposed to have created us, supposed to guide us.

And that might be one reason why Jesus disrupts the Temple so dramatically.

He grabs everyone’s attention so we’re listening when he says that the Temple – this particular place and practice of drawing near to God – can be destroyed. He can rebuild it in mere days.  No one wants to believe something that ridiculous, but John – the gospel author who loves a cryptic revelation – wants us to notice that right here and now Jesus is substituting himself, his body, for the physical Temple. The Temple will go, and Jesus is offering a new concrete way for us to draw close to God. 

Chaplain Amber draws Jesus for her students as a human figure with the cloud and question mark of the mystery of God inside. It’s a way to represent the personal connection to God’s mystery and power that the people around Jesus felt from him – and told us about in the stories they handed on.  

Those stories of Jesus, told and re-told, are another way of drawing close to the incomprehensible God who would otherwise feel strange and far to us.  Telling and hearing those stories is a practice that doesn’t depend on a particular place, or any special object, so it’s a practical way to draw close to God in the wilderness, when we’ve lost other connections.  

Those stories also tell us that in Jesus’ physical life, God created a way for that mystery and power to come live inside you and me and others. We celebrate and seal that at baptism, when we are marked as Christ’s own: children of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, the incomprehensible power of God kindled close inside us – just as we saw that power and mystery in Jesus himself. 

This Lent, in particular, I’ve come to suspect that over and over in our lives, you and I – all God’s people – are going to find ourselves in the place of Israel in the Sinai wilderness, or the ruins of the Temple, or the foot of the cross. 

We’re going to find ourselves wondering how God got so distant, why God’s ways are so strange; why our prayers seem unanswered.  Once, or often, we’re going to feel distant and separated from God, disconnected from the invisible, infinite One we can’t really understand.

And that’s actually what the commandments are for. For those times when we need to go back to the roots and beginning of God’s desire for relationship with us; the expectations and practices – commandments – that give concrete and practical form to belonging to God. 

Taking special care with God’s name, practicing Sabbath to imitate God, rooting our relationship with other human beings in their relationship with the God who creates and guides and liberates us – all this is how we make our own lives sacred, actively part of God when we don’t see or touch God. And we tell and retell the stories of Jesus, remembering the way God deliberately came close to us, so that we can again feel close to God. 

God makes a way, over and over, to be close to us in the wilderness, to come near to us when our ways of coming near to God have been pulled away.  Because that cloud of mystery Chaplain Amber draws is also – always – the shape of love that will not let us go.