05
Lent B 2006
Christ
the
Rev’d
Matthew Anderson
When
One Door Closes
Speak
to us Lord, through your Word and by your Spirit. We ask it in Jesus’ name.
AMEN
It was
over twenty years ago this summer that I moved away from
I cried. I cried so hard I could barely see the highway. I had to stop
for a bit before putting it in gear and starting driving
again.
I was so sad I could barely
speak.
And now almost twenty-one summers and winters
and springs have passed, and here I still am. In one piece. And if next year I
were to get into another car, and hook up another trailer behind it, and
know that I was leaving
Yep.
It’s a kind of death, every time you move. Every time you
graduate, or leave home, or have a child leave home, or lose a husband or wife,
or sell a house, or whatever it is. Something changes so drastically that you
know, just know, that life will never be the same again. And you are
right. It never will be.
And Jesus answered them: ‘The hour has come for
the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, 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.’
There is so much here from Jesus we could spend a
lifetime just learning from this saying. Renunciation is, oddly enough, the path
to growth. It is by dying that we become new. In other words, Jesus is saying
that despite our airs, we human beings are not so different from the perennials
this month, or the trees that are just starting to bud. We are part of the same
world as them. They die in the fall. And then they come back. But they come back
different. We need, sometimes, to die to be renewed. When one door closes, like
they say, another opens.
In a movie, if you know something that the main
characters in the movie don’t know, and some little hint of what is about to
happen takes place, that is called “dramatic foreshadowing”. It’s like watching
the butler come in and pour a cup of innocent tea if you know that later, that
same teapot will be used for the murder. That’s usually when the music swells
up.
Well, the music should have been swelling for one little
part of John this morning. Because there is some dramatic foreshadowing in our
Gospel lesson this morning as well. It says that Jesus was at a religious
festival, and the music swells when some of the people who had come for that
festival came to Philip and said; “Sir, we would like to meet Jesus”.
At first glance it all seems a bit convoluted:
first they come to see Philip, then Philip goes to see Andrew, then Andrew and
Philip go to see Jesus. Why so indirect? The Gospel never ever says this, but it
does say that Philip was from
And that is dramatic foreshadowing. Because the Gospel doesn’t even tell
us if they actually ever got to see Jesus. It’s as if it doesn’t matter. What
was important for the Bible is that this particular group came and asked.
When all around him, his own people, including the disciples, were getting ready
to deny him, here’s this group of foreigners who go out of their way to meet
Jesus.
And of course, that’s how Christianity became Christianity. The outsiders
– our ancestors, the non-Jews – became by far the majority of the new sect that
eventually became a new religion. So many Gentiles came in that eventually it
just couldn’t be a Jewish religion anymore, and Christianity was born. Those
Greeks who came to the festival and asked to see Jesus were pioneers.
But they also meant the death of the old. Peter – a Jew, and John – a
Jew, and Andrew and Philip and Bartholemew and all the rest – if they had known
what was about to happen - would have been forgiven if they looked at these
Greeks and shed a tear or two. Because those Greeks coming meant that a door was
closing. But for us, another was opening.
And so it still is today.
I had a student in one of my classes who wrote a very
moving description of what it is to be blind. “It means that I don’t
discriminate in the same way as other people,” he said. “Because I absolutely
can’t judge by appearances. So appearances aren’t important for me. I have
gained something through my blindness.”
Please note that I am not saying we should be like those
hopeless and somewhat idealistic optimists who tell us things like: “always look
on the bright side of life.” Death is death. Disaster is disaster. There is
nothing wrong with reacting with grief sometimes and sadness and even some fear
for the future. These are all normal, human
reactions.
But the hard lesson of Jesus is that sometimes there is a
clearing needed to bring growth. And so it’s not just a suggestion. We are
commanded to risk, to take up our crosses – which is, frankly, unusual in
churches: Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains
alone. But if it dies it bears much
fruit.
In your life and mine there are almost certainly ways we
see ourselves that need to die. There are habits from the past. Tendencies.
Falsehoods. Maybe ways of being that are so automatic we inherited them from our
parents – that need to go into the ground and lose their life. And only then can
we start to be open to the new ways that may make us healthier and more the
creatures we were created to be.
And as an institution what kind of stale life are we
holding on to that might be keeping us from new life? Jesus died partly because
he dared to challenge the old ways, and it is one of the more ironic parts of
history that the church named after him is so often so dangerous when threatened
in any way. After all, Jesus was killed precisely by institutions trying to
protect themselves. Seeds that didn’t want to go into the
ground.
If you will pardon the pun, at the root of all of these
questions is faith. On what is our faith based? If it is based on
ourselves and what we’ve built, then we will not willingly let anything
die. We can’t. But - if our faith is based on the promise we’re given and the
realization that all things – people and institutions – die anyway, then our
faith will help us go through death to life.
We cannot have spring without winter. We could
not have Christ the Redeemer church if both Christ Lutheran and Redeemer
Lutheran had not closed their doors. I could not have had
Our faith doesn’t deny death…it tells us we have to go
through it. And not just at the end of life, but many times, almost like
practices, before that.
May God grant us the grace to see faith, not in what we
hold onto, but what we are willing to let go. And may we be blessed in that
letting go so that all things might become new, and hopeful, and truly
alive.
AMEN