The Purpose of a Seed

Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on John 12: 20 – 33.  Focus on how a seed needs to die to become alive.

What does it mean when Jesus says – “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified?” He’s obviously referring to his death, but why does this have to happen? That is a question that people have asked me throughout my entire ministry. Did Jesus die for or because of my sins? Or was it a bit of both? And how does his death save me from my sins?

In some ways I feel like the Greeks who came looking for Jesus. They must have had a lot of questions for Jesus, but unfortunately they got caught up in a game of phone tree, a maze of prompts and holds. It’s a first-century version of your call is important to us. Please hold while I consult Andrew and then, please hold while we consult with Phillip. All of our operators are currently serving other customers. To return to the main menu please press 9. Please wait for the next available operator. Your call is important to us and it will be answered in the order that it was received.

And the only answer that comes is the cross. The cross stands as a stop sign to all of our attempts to approach God with our self-assurance and self-righteousness. It’s a stop sign that is lifted high so no eye can be averted from it, which gets at why Jesus had to die. He had to die because the world kills people like Jesus all the time.

And in this we are all guilty. In the sense that we turn our eyes away from seeing how we can destroy so very quickly all that is from God. So I think its safe to say that we all killed Jesus in one way or another. We may have not driven the nails in, but we denied, we lied, we turned away, we said, “I’ll follow but only on my terms.”

We are not exactly sure why the Greeks sought Jesus out. They said they wanted to “see” him, which in John’s Gospel is code for wanting to understand him. Which brings us right back to our questions of death, life and now salvation. What is that path? And what is this death like? Why does it bring eternal life? How might we experience here and now?

He says you must be like a seed that is buried in the ground. You must die in order for something to grow. He uses this simple image to describe why he is going to die and why we must die.

And it’s the central paradox of our faith and of life itself. You must die in order to rise. You must give if you are to receive. You must have a higher allegiance, a higher trust than yourself, to be saved from yourself. And left to our own we can do one thing very well – die. So we need a savior but salvation is and was an experience long before it became a doctrine. And here is what I mean by that, because if you have never had this experience than you have missed the kingdom:

When you are doing what you are best at doing, that place where you forget about time, or that chill that rises over your body when you hear great music or see greatness in human achievement, or when you said, “This is the best year of my life”, or the experience of laughing till you cry and crying till you laugh then you have experienced what eternity will be like. All these experiences are related to the experience of salvation because in all of them two things happen: (1) you lose yourself, and (2) you find that you are more fully yourself than usual.

A closer analogy is the experience of love. When you love somebody, it is no longer yourself who is the center of your own universe. It is the one you love who is. You forget yourself. You deny yourself. You give of yourself, so that by all the rules of logic there should be less of yourself than there was to start with. Only by a curious paradox there is more. You feel that at last you are really yourself.

The experience of salvation involves the same paradox. Jesus put it like this: “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:39).

You give up your old self-seeking self for somebody you love and thereby become yourself at last. You must die with Christ so that you can rise with him, Paul says. It is what our baptism is all about. We do not love God so that, tit for tat, God will then save us. To love God is to be saved. And when we love another person like this we are experiencing what heaven is like. We are getting a glimpse of what eternal life will be like that which we call salvation.

Love is a gift not an achievement. You can make yourself moral. You can make yourself religious. But you can’t make yourself love. “We love,” John says, “Because God first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)

Who knows how the awareness of God’s love first hits people. We all have our own tales to tell, some moment happens in your life that you say yes to it right away. Like when I met Dotty. I knew she was the one! Or it could be laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks. Being in bed with somebody you love. Holding someone’s hand as they pass from this life into the next. Watching life emerge for the first time. Watching your children and your grandchildren as they play.

And whether you thank God for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, you will miss the ball game and not even know it. If you throw your arms around such a moment and bless it, it may save your soul.

Think about the person you know who may never have had such a moment in their lives. Maybe someone who is so jaded by loss and bitter by dreams never realized or someone hopelessly crippled, and in a moment when you meet such a moment you may be their moment of salvation. You may be the angel of the Lord without even being aware. Now just imagine how much you could do if you were aware all of the time.

Can you imagine yourself as that person who could bring each day good news to those around you? Can you imagine bringing others to faith by sharing your hopes and dreams and by loving them for who they are? Maybe you are the person to bring them, incarnate for them the Good News that no matter what has happened in their past they still have a future and there will be the resurrection to a new day. For me as I look over my life it has always been those who have incarnated the love of God that have saved me. I believe with all my heart and soul that salvation is a process for us. Even though it was an event that happened once upon a time.

So you can doubt it, you can deny it, you can live by another story, but you will have to live by a story and whatever story you pick one thing is certain – you are going to die. So the question is: What story do you want to stake your life on?

And frankly I haven’t found a better one than this. Because the resurrection is God’s statement that what we cannot do, which is to rise, God will do for us. Loss, failure, depression, despair, job loss, death will not have the final word.

Resurrected life will.

The hour is at hand Jesus proclaims. It’s decision time folks. What’s it going to be – life or death? Amen