Sermon Lent 5 - 2015
When Maddie was just a bit short of two years old, she dressed up as Tinkerbell for Halloween. It was a super cute outfit, the green tights, the little wings, and, of course, the magic wand. As any nearly two-year-old would assume, when Maddie was dressed up like this, she literally became Tinkerbell, working wand and all. So as we are getting ready to go trick-or-treating she looks over at Sam, who was dressed up as a pterodactyl. She points the wand right at him and says, “Toof!” That would translate as tooth, for those of you who don’t speak two-year-old. Nothing happens. She stares at the wand for a second, then points it at Sam again. “Toof!” Again nothing. At this point, she turns to me, shakes her head sadly, and says, “This wand no work.”
We will return to Sam and Maddie briefly toward the end, but for now let’s talk about our Old Testament passage.
Jeremiah gives us the language of change. God is establishing a new covenant, and the terms of this covenant serve to create a new people. But notice the phrasing: I shall be their God and they shall be my people. This same basic promise was made to Abraham, and to Moses, and to many other prophets, patriarchs, and matriarchs before Jeremiah. God was already their God, and they were already God's people. Yet with this new covenant, God wants them to recognize in a new way a fact that was already true: That God is their God, and that they are God's people.
To illustrate what is going on here, let me give an example from my work. I work at M&T, and a big part of my job is explaining complicated concepts about securities over the phone. Now a challenge of this job, if you are me and have a tendency to talk with your hands, is that you cannot communicate anything with body language. There are times that I would love to do a video chat, because just by waving my hands the point would be so much clearer. Oh you don’t understand what a market-linked CD is? (exaggerated hand waives) Well, how about now? I feel that God is doing something similar in this new covenant. God has tried to make the previous point, now God tries to say it again with a little more handwaving, handwaving that we might call the incarnation, and that we will get to in a minute.
But there is further point to be brought out of this language about a new covenant. Jeremiah speaks in the context of the fall of Jerusalem and the exile. In a book about destruction, but also of lamentation, this is an extended note of hope. Jeremiah is the weeping prophet, but here he foresees comfort. Jeremiah lamented at length the destruction of his homeland, but here he saw hope for the future. Here he saw that temporary trials and travails, no matter how severe, were not enough to destroy the good that God could and would do. Here Jeremiah gave us in miniature the lesson of lent.
Turning to the gospel now, Jesus makes the same point, though in a bit more obscure way. Using the analogy of a grain of wheat, Jesus says, "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." The death of the grain of wheat, then, is not the end. It is instead the start of something much greater. In the context of the upcoming crucifixion and resurrection, this basic point about a plant gains a lot more force.
Context is key to understanding this passage. In John's gospel, this story follows immediately after Palm Sunday. Not only do we get the Easter story about good, about hope, coming from unspeakable darkness. We also get the Lenten story of dark coming out of joy. The story of the Christian life covers the full spectrum, as does the story of Lent through Easter: we go from joy to pain to joy again.
This topic always makes me think of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He had a gift for expressing these ideas with amazing insight. In an article in 1958, he wrote:
Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ arose and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” There is something in the universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.”
But to add on to Dr. King’s words, we see good triumph, we see the victory of joy over pain, we see the triumph of the resurrection over the Crucifixion, because we constantly strive toward them. We strive as we are enabled by a loving God. We strive to surpass the limits of the problems and sadness and darkness that hold us back.
Remembering our first story, about Maddie and the wand, even on days when you want to turn your brother into a toof, that is not the end of the relationship. Whether we are talking about one bad relationship or ten, one bad job or ten, one crushing loss or ten, that is not the end. Our gospel tells us that we can persevere through the dark times of lent, through stories of dying and the supremacy of death, to the greater truth of Christ conquering death, and hope and joy triumphing over pain.
I want to wrap up by talking a bit about that word I just used, gospel. One time, my family and I were walking out of a barbecue place in Tulsa, OK, when a woman came up to me and asked, “are you saved?” I said was a little startled but quickly said yes, and she went on her way I’m certain convinced that she had shared the gospel that day. Gospel in the New Testament is the Greek work euangelion, which means literally “good news.” What was the good news in what that random woman said to a total stranger? No. The good news that we have, the gospel that we share, is that God through Jesus Christ triumphed over death, that joy will triumph over pain, that Easter will follow Lent, and that we can always trust in the power of the resurrection following upon the terror of the crucifixion.
As C.S. Lewis said, “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
Amen.
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