In a previous congregation, a woman I’ll call Cindy was very much engaged in the life of the congregation: serving on council, consistently showing up to help out, contributing her gifts to the ministry of the congregation. Not long after I met Cindy, a family in the congregation went through a time of turmoil, and Cindy was a good friend of the wife but not the husband. Cindy was not pleased with how I handled the situation, and she wasn’t shy about telling me—or telling anyone else. Even though she was very angry, she continued to come to church. After Cindy stirred up anxiety and conflict in the congregation for a few months, the family managed to work through their difficulties, and I went to find Cindy who was volunteering at the church with the renovation of a bathroom. By this point, I wasn’t so much mad at Cindy as confused and wondering what caused her to be so upset about a matter unrelated to her own life or family. So I asked her, “What’s this all about?” And because Cindy had shared with me and the rest of the council that she had been raped as a young woman, I asked her, “Is this because you were raped?” She immediately turned to me and said, “I’ve been thinking about that. I think that might be true.” Cindy turned her back to the wall, slid down it, and sat on the bathroom floor, crying. I did the same, just crying next to her on the floor. The next day, she packed up her tools, resigned from council, and stopped coming to church. It was a death. Cindy let go of the congregation as her faith community, and she let go of her anger towards me. She also let go of the illusion that her anger had something to do with her friend’s situation or my response—instead of Cindy’s own trauma.
A man I’ll call John approached me one day shortly after I arrived at Grace Lutheran in Phoenix. He introduced himself and told me that, though he was a member of the church, he had been barred from the property because he had gotten into a fight with another member the year before. John asked if he could possibly come back, and I agreed—on the condition that he would sign a covenant stating he would not engage in physical violence with anyone on church property. The covenant also stipulated his coping mechanisms for when he felt angry which included conversation with trusted people, going for walks, and breathing deeply. Suffice it to say, I spoke with John on a near-daily basis for a couple of years after he signed the covenant as he had both the desire and physical capacity to hurt others. Nearly 12 years later, on my last Sunday at Grace, John came over to hug me and said: “You’ve made me non-violent, Pastor.” He hadn’t been in a single fight all those 12 years. And of course, that was his and the Holy Spirit’s doing, not mine. It was a death, the death of a person who uses violence to solve their problems. I got married for the first time when I was 23 years old. The kind, gentle man I married was the wrong fit for me—and me the wrong fit for him. We just made a mistake. After multiple rounds of counseling, numerous books read, endless conversation, and 13 years, I finally said: We need to get divorced. It was 13 years later because I didn’t want to get divorced. I had read what Jesus says about divorce, and he’s not a fan. I had spent my entire adult life with my first husband and couldn’t imagine life any other way. Our divorce was a death, the death of a marriage but also the death of an illusion I had that happiness in this life doesn’t matter. I share these death stories today because today’s gospel is also a type of death story. The Jewish leaders had decided in the previous chapter that they were going to put Jesus to death. You see, Jesus had just raised Lazarus from the dead, and because of that, crowds were flocking to Jesus and believing in him. The Jewish leaders had said to one another: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” So they determined to kill him. In today’s gospel, Jesus announces that the hour has come for the Son of Man, who is Jesus, to be glorified. Explaining this glorification, Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls in the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Jesus uses agriculture imagery here to make clear what his glorification entails. And we, like Jesus’ ancient listeners, know that grains of wheat, when they are buried or sown in the ground, we know that does not mean death. Instead, a grain of wheat buried is the first step to new life, to new life sprouting and fruit borne. The Jewish leaders wish to kill Jesus, and they think they are burying him in a grave. Turns out, they are planting him like a seed. Jesus will not simply die but also be raised, and his resurrection, like fruit borne, will mean the birth of the Christian church. We humans, we avoid death like the plague. We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to give into it. Even when a person has lived a long and joyous life, we rarely acknowledge death and its inevitability. It’s only when we see people or other animals suffer that we welcome death. It seems we avoid other forms of death as avidly as we do physical death. I’m not the only person who has miserably stayed married and avoided the death of an unhappy marriage. John isn’t the only person who has spent decades of their life stuck in cycles of violence and avoided change. Cindy isn’t the only person who has lashed out due to their own trauma and avoided healing. Death, strangely, is not always to be avoided. Jesus’ own death and the deaths I have seen among God’s people lead me to wonder: What might death make possible in my life and the life of the world? What fruit is potentially borne when I or we let go of that to which we so avidly cling? I have no pat answers to these questions, just the questions that we each might wrestle with them. But I know this: at baptism, we were put to death. As the Apostle Paul writes in Romans chapter 6, Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. At baptism, we were drowned, we and our old, tired ways of bitterness and grudges, our ways of spite and envy, our ways of indifference and greed. We were drowned that we might walk in newness of life, a baptismal life of love for our neighbor, a baptismal life of forgiveness and service, generosity and joy. Our baptismal death is not to be avoided but embraced because death makes newness of life possible. And friends, that is the truest of all death stories. What might death make possible, and what fruit is borne through it? For Jesus, it was us, here, the body of Christ extending the love of Christ in every generation. We are the fruit borne of Jesus’ death. For that, we can say: Thanks be to God! Amen.
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AuthorPastor Sarah Stadler shares her sermons from the previous Sunday. Archives
May 2024
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