The 5th Sunday in Lent-Year B

The 5th Sunday in Lent-Year B March 21, 2021 We’ve got our seedlings from our Lenten bag growing in two pots in the window near our dinner table, so every day, I get to watch the progress of our little seeds. This week, I was struck by the appearance of one of our little green shoots, so I had to take a closer look. As I leaned in, I discovered what had looked so odd from a distance. One of our little green shoots was wearing a sunflower seed hat. The sunflower shoot, in its growth out of the dark earth of the soil had cracked the seed wide open, and it was still recognizable but also completely transformed into new life, new growth. Our gospel reading from John today is Jesus’s last public teaching in that gospel. Tensions have been rising. Passover approaches. Jesus has just raised Lazarus from the dead and the religious authorities have set in motion their plot to kill Jesus. Jesus has entered Jerusalem triumphantly (which we’ll see next Sunday in our Palm Sunday liturgy). And then we have this rather strange scene from today of two Greeks who want to see Jesus, Jesus’s two flummoxed disciples who don’t really know what to do with them, Jesus’s teaching about a grain of wheat that must fall to the earth and die in order to bear much fruit, his prayer to God and God’s response so that the gathered crowd hears, and Jesus’s promise that when he is lifted up, he will draw all people to him. On this last Sunday in Lent, it may be helpful for us to look back at this image of growth that happens in the darkness of the soil, the new life and resurrection that happens when the seed dies, or in the case of my sunflower plant, gets cracked open so that it is no longer entirely recognizable. In my Ash Wednesday sermon, I quoted the Benedictine Joan Chittister who writes, “Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” How might you be grateful for the darkness of this Lent in which you have been invited to grow this season? And if you haven’t had this experience, well, we still have one week left in Lent and of course, Holy Week is coming. As a part of my Lenten practice this year, I’ve been reading a book of Lenten devotions titled A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent by the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. In his offering for this past Thursday, which is titled The Future, he writes, “The long history of faith, with all the saints, is the story of walking into the future given by God. Lent is a time for sorting this out. Popular Lent is too much preoccupied with guilt and repentance. But not here. Lent is rather seeing how to take steps into God’s future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present. Lent is for embracing the baby given to old people [like Sarah and Abraham]; resurrection to new life in Easter; and the offer of a new world made by God from nothing….You will find verification [of God’s promises kept] among the daily performances of the trusting ones who live out their trust in ways the world terms foolish…So imagine, in this Lenten season, moving beyond treasured pasts, moving beyond precious present tense arrangements to new God-given prospects.” i In what ways has this Lenten season cracked you open, offered you a small d death so that new life can break forth in you like a shoot breaks forth from the earth? What treasured pasts might God be inviting you to move beyond to embrace new God-given prospects? In closing, I offer this poem prayer by Steve Garnaas-Holmes. Invite you to close your eyes and by still why I pray. Soil 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. —John 12.24 You have tilled the soil of my grave, Beloved. Scatter me. Let me slip through your fingers. Drop me. Let me fall into the earth of you, disappear into you, great, fertile Source, womb-globe, garden tomb, holy darkness. Let the little me-ness of me die for love of you. My husk will fail, a broken heart; what is within, given, urged, born by your unseeable mystery, will emerge, fragile, green, tender, muscular— later. But first let me fall into you and die in you, Beloved Soil of love.ii i. Brueggemann, Walter. A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent. Compiled by Richard Floyd. WJK: Louisville, 2017, pp46-48 (Kindle version). ii. Steve Garnaas-Holmes. Unfolding Ligh:t www.unfoldinglight.net March 15, 2021