Year B: March 21, 2021 | Lent 5
Lent 5, Year B: John 12:20-33
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
March 21, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 24:10 in).
“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’?” – John 12:27[1]
It’s been a rough week. I always want the Bible to be our guide on Sundays, but I also feel a responsibility to address some of our recent national issues. I’ve been internally split—even stuck—knowing what to say or how to approach things because I’m pretty sure people will be upset with me no matter what I do today. However, avoidance won’t get us anywhere, so I guess for now I’ll skip over the Good News and start with the bad news.
Some background info on me: I hate guns. You don’t have to agree with me, and it really doesn’t matter if you do. I’ll still hate them, and you’ll still feel how you feel. Personally, I neither want nor deserve the authority to make decisions about whether or not something else gets to live. Guns are tools designed explicitly for death, and Death is a god I neither wish to attach myself to nor serve. In my ideal world, no one would have guns—not individuals, not police, not even militaries. I know that isn’t going to happen, but it’s what I wish for. At a minimum, it would be nice to have a society where the expectation starts with “no guns” and we can then set up exceptions for people who genuinely need them for obtaining food or other significant reasons.
Second, for much of my life, my church background was what I can only describe as misogynistic. People I know who are still connected with those organizations wouldn’t recognize that in them and would probably be highly offended or even distressed hearing me describe them that way. They view their stance more along the lines of both obeying a very strict interpretation of the Bible and protecting women—at least, that was my own understanding of it from within that culture. Few of the people involved have any active ill intent, but the system itself is still disempowering to and stacked against women. Beyond simple misogyny, I know from experience that it also serves to allow perpetrators to continue their aggressions while silencing other frequent victims of abuse.
Third, as a young adult, I had the privilege of spending a year teaching conversational English at a computer college in northeastern China. Additionally, I served a brief period as an intern at St. Alban’s Anglican Episcopal Church in downtown Tokyo during my time in seminary. Both opportunities still rank as some of the top experiences of my life. Spending time in Japan and living in China helped me appreciate and come to love their distinct cultures and customs. But beyond that, those encounters actually altered the ways I participate in life and expanded my ability to think. As a result, Eastern Asian philosophy has had a significant influence on my view of the world—and the Bible, for that matter. We Western Christians have a lot to learn from our global family members.
So this week’s shootings in Atlanta have been a big trigger for me, what with their combination of guns and sexual/sexist violence specifically targeting the Asian community. Having learned in high school not to talk about trauma, to just ignore it until it hopefully goes away on its own, I find myself caught between needing to address our continuing scourge of white terrorism and not knowing what to say.
The truth is, I’m tired—tired to the point it’s hard to feel anything anymore. I’m tired of all of this garbage: gun violence, hypersexualization, racist rhetoric and actions, and the self-serving political polarization of any attempts to even initiate change. I want it all to stop. How many attacks by “lone wolves” do we have to endure before we realize that we’ve created and empowered a society built on self-obsession and predation? How many women and people of color have to come forward or die for us to start thinking about ways to empower or at least defend them? How many “thoughts and prayers” (and human lives) do we have to keep offering to this voracious “God and guns” entity before we recognize it has nothing to do with the living God as revealed in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Our culture is deeply broken, and looking from the inside, I have no idea how to actually fix it.
The first Sunday of Epiphany we talked about starting with confession: telling the truth and admitting our weaknesses and failures to one another. That alone is hard, and I for one keep forgetting to follow through with it. But the important thing is to keep going even when we realize we’ve failed. However, I need to emphasize that confession is just the starting point. It’s sort of the static part of repentance. We’ve recognized the problem, which is essential, but we still need to work to change it.
Sometimes I think that repentance as active change is hard not just because of the difficulties of unlearning old habits and implementing new ones but because on some level, we identify ourselves with the way we’ve been living. Our private and public failures come to define who we are, so in moving past them, we feel like we’re losing parts of ourselves. And some of that is true: we are choosing to leave portions of our past behind.
Something of a side issue, but one that tends to have deep connections to experiences of repentance and confession, is learning how to handle and where to appropriately place our shame. Harm that you caused others—intentional or not—that burden is yours to carry and correct, to do your best to make right and to wait for reconciliation, should it be possible. Harm that others inflicted on you, however, is not your fault, and though you might always carry the scars, that shame does not belong to you, and it is not your responsibility to continue bearing it. In those situations, your role—which is neither simple nor easy—is to learn how to set it down. It’s a long and difficult endeavor, and I highly recommend finding support groups and working with a licensed mental health therapist as you learn to untangle what happened to you from who you are. But know that being abused is not your fault, and you are not alone.
Going back to our main discussion, it’s like when Jesus talks about the grain of wheat in this week’s Gospel. It doesn’t really come across in English, but in Greek I get a sense of volition from the seed, almost a feeling like it doesn’t want to fall off its stalk, that it’s afraid to do what looks to it like dying. So it has a choice. It can desperately cling to its position until the parent plant collapses from weather and old age. Once forced to the ground, it can continue to close itself off from the rest of the world, clinging tightly to the shell that once protected it as the be-all and end-all of reality, the only “right” way to live. It’s like it refuses to realize that its coating isn’t the same as the potential plant within it. A seed that never releases its protective shell will eventually just decay away from the inside, leaving behind only a hollow and empty memory of its own lost potential. But if that seed would just let go, if it would stop fighting against the water and light sent to waken its inner self, if it would accept the nutrients from the soil around it, it could become something greater than its history or its imagination, something entirely new. The shell might still cling to the seedling for some time, but eventually the young plant grows so far beyond what it once understood to be the limits of its reality that the shell falls away forgotten and simply becomes another source of fuel for healthy development. The end result? More seeds, more life, and an indefinite, though continually changing, future.
It’s the same thing with the “life” people love or hate in verse 25, which is not the same “life” referenced at the end of the verse. They’re two completely unrelated words. The second, zoe,[2] is almost always translated as “life,” but the first[3] we sometimes translate as “soul” instead, like in verse 27. My guess is that these two words represent concepts more easily distinguished in Eastern than in Western thought. Zoe seems to reference something akin to Chinese qi or Japanese ki—it’s more like vitality or the inexplicable energy of life itself. Any time you see the phrase “eternal life” in the Bible—a concept which I think is likely closer to “boundless vitality” than unending preservation of the individual—zoe is the word that’s happening. The other life/soul word here is the root behind our word “psyche” and seems to carry more of the idea of personality or independent self-hood. All of us share varying amounts of zoe, but that energy is shaped by and expressed into the world through distinct psuche. So although Jesus’ words are enigmatic enough in English—“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life”—he’s offering us a much deeper paradox—and one more closely tied to his seed example—than we’re easily able to perceive.
The fact is, whether we’re looking at an individual or our church or our broader regional or national culture, we all define ourselves to some extent by what amounts to the shell encasing our seed/self. Shells are what they are: layers of protection at some point deemed necessary to preserve the immature inner plant. The shell we have is the shell we have. It’s the result of factors beyond our control, and whether we like it or not, none of us can change it. And while that shell may have encapsulated our past, it doesn’t need to continue to define our future. The person who clings to old, harmful ways of doing things will never thrive. The church who refuses to accept the direction and input of God’s Spirit will never have an opportunity to change or grow. And the nation or culture that refuses to leave its prejudices, failures, and sins behind, that grasps those things as its defining identity, has no future beyond rotting away from the inside, leaving only its empty husk and the “what if” of what it might have become.
As I said, the shell is what it is. In my own life, shutting down in silence was a survival tactic—it was a shell I needed to protect me from even greater harm in a toxic environment. But I’m no longer in that position of survival, and I need to accept both the responsibility and the abilities that God has given me to break my habit of silence and use my voice on behalf of others, to denounce our continuing exploitation and abuse of people of color, to condemn the commoditization and dehumanization of other people’s bodies, and to reject in no uncertain terms the false gods that our nation and even our fellow professing Christians have come to worship. It’s time to let go of that old shell, that old personal and corporate identity, and to embrace the transformation and adventure that springs from the new life trapped away inside it.
Confession is a good place to start on our individual and collective journeys, but confession is useless if we still cling to and define ourselves by those old, dying ways. The Bible roots the Christian life in repentance, and repentance is about change. Confession accepts and acknowledges the past for what it is. Repentance embraces the pathway and struggle that leads away from the limitations of individualistic preservation and toward the greater hope of boundless vitality in and through Christ.
We opened Epiphany with confession. As we come to the close of Lent, maybe we can best hope to unveil the Kingdom of God by renewing not only our own lives but those around us through active and genuine repentance.
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] ζωή
[3] ψυχή (psuche)