Practicing Dying

Pastor Kyle Clark

Gospel Lesson: John 12:20-33

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Fifth Sunday in Lent

Even without a calendar it’s easy to tell that we are getting closer to Easter. (No, not because it’s March Madness). All we need to do to know we are coming to the end of Lent is pay attention to the tone of the Gospel texts we read. Each week during Lent we have read texts that reminded us of our baptismal covenant, of God’s great love and of our call to choose how we will live.

Each week as we have journeyed with Jesus to Jerusalem we draw nearer and nearer to the cross. And each week the texts become more and more challenging. The closer we get to the resurrection of Easter the closer we come to death.

We who have been raised in the church, especially in a tradition that follows the liturgical calendar, know this. Yet if we really listen to the words of the seasonal texts we find ourselves getting a little more uncomfortable around this time of year because our readings often speak increasingly about death and dying.  We see that in our text today.

Jesus speaks about seeds falling into the ground and dying, about people loving this life and losing that life and hating one life and gaining another.

Death and dying is all around. It’s the time of Passover when the Jews remembered and celebrated their deliverance from Egypt – you know the story: a lamb was killed, blood was shed, the first born sons of Egypt died and Pharaoh let these people go. Now Jesus has entered Jerusalem, the Holy city for the feast. Only a few days earlier he had been at a tomb, the grave of a dead friend, Lazarus. Again you know the story – Jesus tells those gathered there to remove the stone covering the tomb. He shouts, ”Lazarus, come out!”  And the dead man was dead no more.

News of this miracle spread and the religious leaders were having a fit. They are complaining that the whole world is going after him, so they plan to kill not only Jesus, but Lazarus as well. After all, we can’t have any dead men walking around, can we?

But you can’t stop the spread of news like this. Word has even spread through the Gentile world. Some Greeks, we are told, who were in Jerusalem, want to see Jesus. When told of their request Jesus says something unexpected, “The hour has come…” Even the words Jesus uses here are dripping with the bitterness of death. These words, “Now the hour has come,” are code words in John’s gospel for death, Jesus’ death. Death and dying, dying and death.

Yet we know the story right? Death, this death, his death is not final. The seed dies but it bears much fruit. Out of Jesus’ death comes life. When he is lifted up, arms outstretched, to die, drawing all people to him, new life springs forth. This is what the church has taught for centuries. How can we not be excited about this?

But, that’s not everything. What about these two little verses? “Those who love their life in this world will lose it while those who care nothing about their life in this world will keep it for eternity. Anyone who serves me must follow me.”

This is where it gets challenging for us. The past couple of weeks we’ve talked about choices. Yes – what God does, what God accomplishes through Jesus, God does for all. That can never be changed, that can never be taken away. We call this grace. This is what we believe. Even so, we have choices to make when it comes to living what we believe – we call this faith. We have choices about how we are to faithfully respond to grace and these choices for us are difficult. They are difficult because they force us to wrestle with belief, specifically to believe what we say we believe.

Believing is risky business. It’s not something that comes naturally for us. Insofar as we are talking about believing Christ, truly believing or “believing truly means dying. Dying to everything: to our reasoning, to our past, to our childhood dreams, to our attachment to earth…[dying as real] as at the moment of our physical death.”[i]

This is so difficult for us because this kind of dying to self may be the only thing we do completely on our own. Even Jesus struggles with dying. Look at the words he speaks in our text today. Jesus, fully God, knows “this is the reason that I have come to this hour.” But Jesus, fully human, struggles because “now my soul is troubled, my heart is troubled.” (NRSV, NIV). Dying this way was a radical act of love, and this act of radical love was something that only Jesus could do. Jesus, fully God, understands that full, complete, reconciled relationship between God and creation, humankind depends on this death.

Jesus, fully human, understands that dying this death requires total trust, complete faith. He has come too far now to go back. He can’t stop. His entire life and ministry up to this point has been to teach, to instruct, to encourage. Now the work of God comes to completion. And we who follow begin to understand that we are to love radically like this. Radically love each other, all others. Restoration of community is expensive. Jesus has shown us that the cost of loving all God’s people is high.

Just as no one could take Jesus’ place in death on the cross, no one can take our place in the leap of faith – not even Jesus. Believing is up to us. Believing, like dying to self, is personal. No one can, no one is able to, take our place. While almost everything else we do as followers of Christ involves our participation with others in community – our worship, partaking in the sacraments, our service, our witness, this act of faith is uniquely personal. It is risky. It involves us down to the very core of our being.

So, what is a modern, fairly well budgeted, Methodist church in southwestern Oklahoma supposed to do with all this talk about dying? I mean, it seems rather unpleasant and annoying; something to be avoided if possible and if not avoidable, well let’s clean it up a bit, sanitize it, make it impersonal.

We don’t really like this kind of stuff. If we’re honest, we must admit that we live by the pleasure principle – avoid pain, avoid risk, avoid truth, avoid death whenever and wherever we can. We don’t understand dying and death like this and many of us don’t want to understand. We would just rather go along having a nice day. If we must deal with it we want someone to explain it so that we can understand.

But you see, it is not by understanding that we are made righteous before God. The great theologian Karl Barth sums it up like this, “Here is a truth that we cannot understand – we can only stand under this truth.” The truth that he is speaking about is this, a Savior came among us with loud cries and tears (Hebrews 5:7) taught us, ate with us, suffered for us and died for no other reason than us. We don’t, we can’t understand that. The cross you see is not meant to be understood, it is simply to be seen as it is lifted up. We are to look at it.

Yes, in a couple of weeks we celebrate the resurrection, victory over the cross, life coming forth from the grave. But today we must acknowledge death and dying.

Death and the cross always come before life and the resurrection.

This is what we are invited to participate in – taking up our crosses daily. Choosing to live for, to serve, to love others out of our love for Christ. Dying to self, being willing to let go of the things that we have done in the past and continue to do, willing to transform and change. It takes time to do this, to come to grips with this. It takes time and practice. We don’t, we can’t do it all at once. Ultimately how far we get in our journey both as individuals and as a church depend on how much we are willing to let go.

Death is necessary for life. The future crop harvest is rooted in the death of the seed. Our future in eternity is only available through the death of Jesus. The church has a future; we have a future, but for that future to be realized some things must die. Our failure to let some things die is a spiritual disease.

Jesus died on a cross with arms outstretched drawing, inviting all people to him. As the body of Christ in this world we are to invite all people to him.

I don’t know what has to die in your life. There are some specific things that have to die in my life and I have some thoughts of what must die in the church. We will talk about this at another time. But this I do know for certain, we all have some choices to make, individually and as a congregation. And these choices are all about dying in order that life may abound.

Dying to the old way of life is difficult, challenging. It takes practice. The psalmist offers a beautiful prayer to aid us in this. “Have mercy on me, O God.” (Psalm 51)

Let this prayer be on our lips as we continue to practice dying.

Amen.