John 12:20-33 Common English Bible
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 don’t think I will ever forget hearing John Maxwell, at a conference on how to help navigate a church through change proclaim with such trite and yet truthful words:
“The only person who likes change is a baby.”
Even when we know change is necessary and needed --- most of us resist it.
Change is hard and often very messy.
We don’t go to bed one night saying I am going to change, and wake up the next day and be a new person.
Change is full of fits and failures.
We take two steps forwards
And three steps backwards
But slowly, over time --- things can change.
Even over the course of the 2000 years of Christianity --- change has happened
A few years ago, we celebrated the last great change in Christianity.
2017 marked the 500th Anniversary of a young Roman Catholic Priest, nailing his “95 Thesis”, his 95 ideas of change, for the church that he loved, to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany.
Luther condemned the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the papal practice of asking payment—called “indulgences”—for the forgiveness of sins.
At the time, a Dominican priest named Johann Tetzel was in the midst of a major fundraising campaign in Germany to finance the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
This campaign was authorized by Pope Leo X and the Archbishop of Mainz
Prince Frederick III had banned the sale of indulgences in Wittenberg
Despite that, many local parishioners were willing to travel to purchase them.
Much to Martin Luther’s dismay --- when his parishioners returned, they claimed they no longer had to repent for their sins --- because they had purchased forgiveness.
The “95 Theses,” proposed two believes that we don’t even think twice about today --- but in Luther’s day they were seen as radical and heretical.
that the Bible is the central religious authority
and that humans may reach salvation only by their faith and not by their deeds
While we would accept these ideas as “orthodox” today --- when Martin Luther suggested them --- things did not go well for him.
Instead of changing the church from the inside out ---
Pope Leo X formally excommunicated Luther from the Roman Catholic Church in 1521.
Later that same year, Luther again refused to recant his writings before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany.
Charles then issued the famous Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw and a heretic and giving permission for anyone to kill him without consequence.
Eventually, his ideas --- and those of other reformers --- resulted in the split between the Roman Catholic Church and what becomes known as the Protestant Reformation.
But the reformation didn’t happen in a day.
On November 1, 1517 --- Martin Luther didn’t wake up the member of a new church.
Change takes time
And it is often painful and messy.
Denise Anderson wrote --- “change, even when welcome, means death.”
Remember, it was Jesus who said:
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.
In 2008, Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly, lecturer and author wrote: “The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why.”
In it she argues that Christianity is currently undergoing a massive upheaval as part of a regular pattern that occurs every 500 years, in which old ideas are rejected and new ones emerge.
Ultimately, the old expression of Christianity is refurbished and revitalized, while a new, more vital form is created
Tickle used the analogy of “The 500-Year Rummage Sale” to describe religious change over the years.
She argues that historically, the church “cleans house” roughly every 500 years, holding a “giant rummage sale,” deciding what to dispose of and what to keep --- making room for new things and ideas.
Tickle argues that in the Christian Era we have encounter these Rummage Sales many times.
In the Christian story the first was ‘The Great Transformation,” when a man who was called “Emmanuel, God With Us” --- Jesus --- created a new understanding of our relationship with God.
Five hundred years later saw the collapse of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages. In this period, the church entered an era of preservation as the church went underground with monks and nuns practicing the monastic tradition in abbeys, convents, and priories.
Next, at the beginning of the new millennium in 1054, came “The Great Schism,” when the Christian Church split into the Eastern and Western branches that we still see today in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches.
Then in the 1500s, “The Reformation” resulted in new branches of Christian tradition, with different understandings of how people relate to God personally through direct prayer and individual interpretation of the bible.
Every 500 years or so, Tickle says, there are tectonic shifts in the Christian tradition, resulting in huge changes of both understanding and of practice.
I would agree with Tickle as she suggest that we are plum in the middle of one of these tectonic shifts --- one of these Rummage Sales.
I don’t have to tell you --- it is a hard and messy time in the church --- whether a member of the church or as a clergy person.
Particularly in our own denomination.
Seismic changes are taking place --- and none of us --- if we are honest --- really know what the church will look like on the other side.
The only thing I can say for certain --- it won’t look like the church that was founded in Isaac Wilson’s cabin 200 years ago.
But it is not just within the church that this seismic change is taking place --- it is in our society as a whole.
The entirety of my 60 years has been one of turmoil, uncertainty, and uneasy change.
The protests of the sixties
The sexual revolution
The battle over Women’s Rights
The anti-war protests
The civil rights movement
The war against drugs
The homophobia created by the AID’s crisis
The Me Too movement
The black lives matter movement
The turmoil over LGBTQI inclusion and rights
I could go on and on, but what is the point . . .
My lifetime has been one crisis --- one change effort --- one protest after another.
I wonder, how our great grandchildren will look back at this time in history.
When I reflect on my great-grandfather --- Steven Conger, by the way --- I often wonder where he and his parents stood on reconstruction, on slavery, and seeing people of color as being fully human?
I am afraid that I know the answer.
What will my great grandchildren think about me, and my response to the rummage sale of my lifetime?
Will they see me as holding on tightly to things that 50 years from now will be seen in a whole new light?
The prophet Jeremiah --- during a great rummage sale in the life of the Israelites wrote these powerful words.
The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors . . . No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins. (Jeremiah 31:31-34 CEB)
Jesus, like Jeremiah before him, helped reframe the covenant with God.
According to Jeremiah, our sin was already forgiven.
But what Jesus reminds us is that we have forgotten God.
I hope you took some time to read our story from John’s gospel in the context in which it is found.
Jesus has been busy right before our story:
He has been at a dinner at the home of Mary and Martha
He had just previously raised Lazarus from the dead
At this meal he predicts what is going to happen to him
The crowds have gathered as he enters Jerusalem to shouts of:
“Hosanna!
Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessings on the king of Israel!”
And then we get to our story
John tells us:
There were some Greeks in town who had come up to worship at the Feast. They approached Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee: “Sir, we want to see Jesus. Can you help us?”
When they find Jesus, do you remember what Jesus said?
“Time’s up. The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.
“If any of you wants to serve me, then follow me.”
For 2000 years, we have been trying to figure out what it means to follow Jesus.
And, if Phyllis Tickle is right --- and I think she is --- every 500 we decide to do a house cleaning and attempt to get rid of the stuff that is keeping us from following Jesus.
Change is hard --- but the good news is we don’t do it alone.
Again and again, Jesus invites us to follow.
Again and again, Jesus invited us to be transformed
Not as a transaction --- Luther helped clear out those rummage sale items
But as a change of heart
I don’t know if you have seen David Brooks latest editorial. It was first in the New York Times on Thursday but has been in many other publications since. It is worth reading in its entirety.
Brooks writes about interviewing Essau McCaulley, a New Testament professor at Wheaton College. And he reflects on McCaulley’s vision for the future.
He writes:
This vision begins with respect for the equal dignity of each person. It is based on the idea that we are all made in the image of God. It abhors any attempt to dehumanize anybody on any front. We may be unjustly divided in a zillion ways, but a fundamental human solidarity in being part of the same creation.
He goes on:
From Frederick Douglass and Howard Thurman to Martin Luther King Jr. on down, the Christian social justice movement has relentlessly exposed evil by forcing it face to face with Christological good. The marches, the sit-ins, the nonviolence. “You can’t get to just ends with unjust means,” McCaulley told me. “The ethic of Jesus is as important as the ends of liberation.”
He pointed me to the argument Thurman made in “Jesus and the Disinherited,” that hatred is a great motivator, but it burns down more than the object of its ire. You can feel rage but there has to be something on the other side of anger.
That is the ethic of self-emptying love — neither revile the reviler nor allow him to stay in his sin. The Christian approach to power is to tell those with power to give it up for the sake of those who lack. There is a relentless effort to rebuild relationship because God is relentless in pursuit of us.
“Listen carefully: [Jesus said] Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.
Again and again, Jesus offers to help us through the messy time.
I don’t want to pretend to sugar coat it
This is a hard and challenging time
Arthur Ashe once remarked
True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever the cost.
And the cost as Jesus suggested --- is to be reckless in our love.
If we put our focus on Jesus --- he tells us what following him is all about:
“Love one another, as I have loved you”
--- Jesus will help us find the way.
Again and again --- we can be transformed.
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