Unless a Grain of Wheat... Lent 5

 Theologian Karl Rahner wrote, “the earth is the body that holds the ‘soul’ until resurrection.”

The earth is the body that holds the soul until resurrection.

In my heart of hearts, I would love for every human being to mediate on this line, even just to say it aloud a few times throughout a day. The earth is the body that holds the soul until resurrection.

I believe that the nuance of the idea that the earth is the body, and we are working parts within that body – giving the soul purpose and connection with other souls to be in service of the earth – is enough to change how we sojourn and live.

Often when we contemplate change, repentance, forgiveness we think of an hundred percent turn around; all or nothing. Yet, it only takes a 2% movement in our thinking, to be change.  It is not about the all-in, it is change little by little. How would the world change if we took time to consider the earth is the body that holds us all?

Karl Rahner’s comment -the earth is the body that holds the soul until resurrection- was highlighted as a phrase to cause movement in thinking and in people’s hearts. The phrase was used in his discussion and observations around burial practices and how such practices have changed and in their changing have caused a loss of connection with humans to the earth.  As a society we have become un-rooted to earth and the rhythms of life and death outside of ourselves. Consider the changes in our practices of death over the past century:  how many of you have washed a loved one’s body after death? Or been to a wake in the person’s home with the body present? Have you sat vigil with a body on and off over a couple of days? Have you hand dug a grave or filled one in? Have you wrapped a body in a shroud? Trudged through the cemetery, walking over other graves, to see the hole in the ground? Wailed in the cemetery? Taken care of a grave – added dirt on a settled plot, planted grass seed on it in the spring? Walked passed grave markers resurrecting the names written on them by reading them?

Many have not had experiences of the earthiness of death. In recent years, more and more people are choosing no visitations, no ceremonies, no burying or scattering of bodies turned to ash. Urban living and the funeral industry have sanitized and sterilized death.

We have lost connection to the earth -a connection to God- because of an un-rootedness in burial practices.

 

Whenever I hear the Gospel reading from today read, I am immediately transported to another place. ... There I am, a little apart from a huddled group of people, fixing black shoes on a patch of higher grass as it sinks into the mud, breathing in the smell of fresh earth, feeling the bitter wind on the tips of my ears, hearing the call of birds as focus goes to the hole in the ground. From my mouth come the words: Very truly I tell you, 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.

And in that moment, I am grounded; my faith is firmly rooted; I am -the group is- embraced by the body of the earth.  I am connected to the rhythm of life and death and resurrection. At any other time one may find me all over the map, as to the percentage of faith I have, or feel, or how connected to God I may be... but never, in that moment on the lip of an open grave, in the elements, standing on Mother Earth, have I ever been in doubt that the return to earth is the beginning of resurrection.  ..unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies...

 

We begin Lent each year with Ash Wednesday, a day with rituals and prayers to change our minds and hearts.  The day is but a start to a 40 day season to focus on sojourning to and through death; it is not a quick fix, but time under pressure. Ash Wednesday and Lent are part of the rhythm of the church year; having us purposely sojourn in uncomfortable places because if there are no uncomfortable places our hearts and minds never move, never change, and the possibility of resurrection remains dormant.

Obedience to the rhythms outside of ourselves – means seeing and experiencing a bigger vision- we move beyond individual ego and concerns, and enter the body of the earth; Relationship with the Creator of all.

Pastor Brooklyn from Mahone Bay shared with the Lutheran clergy group a thought about the Gospel and what she might preach today.  She reworded the imposition of ashes line from the Ash Wednesday service to, “Remember that you are compost and to compost you will return.”  The image works, we understand the richness of compost, the life giving qualities of compost, the fruit that compost bears. – For compost to be compost, living things sacrifice life.

 

Death, - this past year- sacrifices, griefs, reconnecting to the simple, to the earth, --- this extended sojourning in an imposed Lent-like landscape has changed us; maybe not a 100%, but at least 2%. We are no longer who we were a year ago when COVID closed the church’s physical doors. As individuals, a congregation, a worshiping community we have sojourned with death and that is changing everything.  We are in varying degrees of composting.

There is hope stirring in vaccines; there is talk of opening this and that; conversations that include dreams looking further into the future than just a few days; resurrection is in the air, it is just around the corner.

 

As we enter the last week of Lent, I am giving you a task.

Remember that you are compost and to compost you will return.

Accepting that this year has been one of sojourning with death, consider the rich compost we have become because of loss and grief and sacrifice. Our hearts and minds have changed.  We are grains of wheat that have fallen into the earth, died, and are now ready to bear much fruit. Your task is to reflect on: what things will you let go and not pick up again?  What practices have you learned over the year to bring with you into new life? What does church life and being the people of God look like/feel like moving forward? How will you, how will we, live resurrection?

 

Easter is not here yet, there are awkward days ahead and a long difficult journey: deciding when to shake hands, hug, or touch another person; when -if ever- to stop wearing a mask; when to let people into your house; when to go back to coffee hour; how to act around people you haven’t physically seen for a long time; and being prepared to let down walls and to experience pent-up emotion seeping out of your eyes.  It is going to be a muddy journey. I am thankful that as community we play in the mud together. Remember we are all compost and to compost we will return.

Resurrection will come, there will be much fruit.

 

And for now, the earth is the body that holds the soul until resurrection.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sojourning: Moving Towards Water

 

Let us help one another according to the Creator’s intention of putting us on this planet. This is a line from the Mi’kmaw, Honour Song, which I understand acts as a sort of national anthem. Keep these words in the forefront of your minds:

Let us help one another according to the Creator’s intention of putting us on this planet.

 

At National Church Council meeting last weekend, one of the presenters in their slide presentation used a map showing the Continental Divide of North America and North America’s six water basins. Instantly the image connected in my mind to our Lent theme of ‘Sojourning in the Land.’ 

Although I am sure that I learned the water basins at some point in my life – this time the visual clicked. When North America receives rain or snow, the water starts its journey downhill to eventually enter an ocean (in all the basins except for the Great Basin which is landlocked): West Coast waters journey to the Pacific, East Coast waters journey to the Atlantic, the Mississippi and outlying areas of that river drain to the Gulf of Mexico; the North drains to the Arctic Ocean; and the Central North basin waters journey to Hudson Bay. Conceiving  North America in terms of water basins changes my thoughts on sojourning in the land.

            The image totally draws attention from the land, moving outward to the oceans, deep seas.

Sojourning in the land is in the end a journey to water.  Some may find it sobering, others exhilarating, that eventually when our bodies die, and are laid to rest -and as our particles return to the earth- slowly the particles are washed to the nearest ocean. I find comfort in this continual cycle of death and rebirth through the cycle of water.

The image relates to my understanding of Ephesians “for by grace you have been saved through faith, this is not your own doing; it is a gift from God”   -like the water cycle: first lifted from the immensity of the ocean (God), rains down (grace); the journey is then faith filtering, finding God, then returning to the great I AM.  Life is cyclical, continual, renewing – water in many forms; changing, flexible, in tune with its purpose in each part of its cycle.

 

The map of the Continental Divide has affected how I hear the story from Numbers. The Israelites find themselves journeying in the wilderness. The book is full of stories of rebellions and complaints, arguments with Moses, and annoyance with God; we hear of their encounters with various enemies; and new-to-them prescriptions (rules) interspersed along the way. The people are not so happy. The journey is not so comfortable – the slavery they left is looking better than the wilderness. Today I think I get it.

Of all the water basins in North America, there is only one that is completely different. The Great Basin, located primarily in the states of Nevada and Utah, is landlocked. Water in the form of precipitation does not go to the ocean, instead it collects in lakes or swamps, to evaporate and make salt lakes. There is heat and desert. For those living in other water basins this anomaly is interesting and confusing. To live in this water basin – to sojourn there requires a different set of rules and ways of being.

Now think about the Israelites.  Before finding themselves in the wilderness, they were living in Egypt where life, weather, health, commerce were depended on the Nile River.  The Nile provided water, food, a way to make bricks to build shelter. This water basin provided a known order and routine; seasons, with the water eventually getting to the ocean via the Mediterranean Sea.  The Israelites had lived along the Nile and on its flood plain for generations – this is all they knew.

And then they find themselves in an anomaly. Consider that the wilderness journey was like plucking us up (from the East Coast Basin) and depositing us in the Great Basin without a guide book to help us journey across this strange land.

How do you travel through an unknown land; one you do not intend on settling in because you have a destination on the other side; this journey is a pass through.  You find the land inhospitable: you know not the customs or language of the people whom you meet; the weather patterns are different; the floral and fauna are unusual; you have no idea the potential dangers; or what you need to know for survival. No wonder the people act as they do. The situation really bites!

 

And according to the story – with the appearance of snakes- literally does bite!

In the wilderness the people’s new normal has been to take their complaints to Moses, and ask Moses to pray to God on their behalf; God responds in a saving manner. In this case God suggests to Moses that he craft a bronze serpent on a pole for the people to look at when bit and they will be saved.  It sounds awfully simple, and full of hocus-pocus; like God has a magic wand in the eyes of the people. It is a sign – God works a miracle as God imbues the snake sculpture as the magic wand.

Perhaps it was not the wand at all. It was Moses turning back to God at the behest of the people to take their concerns to God. The miracle, the health of the people, was in a shift of thinking and focus, no longer on their plight but rather the taking steps to move towards grace (God).  

The bronze serpent on a pole worked as a sympathetic kind of magic; meaning the human consciousness causes one to believe in magic based on the connection of an image to the thing that it represents.  The people believed that the pole would bring healing, so it did.  The people were afraid of the landscape they were journeying in; complaining about no water, no food—and what food there is, is griped about as detestable; and to top off the situation they are impatient and annoyed with God. Snakes come into their midst --- in some ways creations of their own making; all the whining and complaining, being afraid and annoyed are certainly biting. And then the bronze serpent steals away their attention, and offers a focal point of hope, to move the people beyond complaint, fear, annoyance; their biting at Moses and at God.  In this place the serpent makes sense – and with some reflection perhaps we can understand as we live through pandemic.  I am sure there are items that have become focus shifters for you; hope builders; items that help you cope day to day. For the most part, these things that save us, are good.

The trouble is however, sometimes we get stuck moving towards grace.  We get stuck and stop moving towards the ocean. That’s what happened with the bronze serpent on a pole, when the crisis was over, the people decided not to leave it behind in the wilderness as they moved on.  The reminder of the crisis – the serpent- came along, and so too the reliving of the trauma of the event; over and over again. Eventually the serpent was idolized and became a revered relic.  After the 40 years in the desert, as the people began to settle, the serpent pole was set up on a holy hillside;  and there it remained even after the Temple was built. By the time of King Hezekiah – that is - people had been in the land for a really long time and those who had lived through the situation in the wilderness had passed away generations before;  the book of 2nd Kings records that people were making offerings to the serpent pole and had named it Nehushtan. Something that represented a saving action, had now became destructive.

 

It’s as if for some, settling in the land prohibited the thought of journey – or sojourning. It is like drawing a line in the sand and saying here I am, I am not crossing over; and then setting up shrines to mark certain pieces of history – generally shrines to having supposedly come out the other side of a traumatic experience; where the shrine is a trigger to pull one back to continually relive the trauma; that doesn’t sound like a healthy, life-giving way to live.

 

Sojourning in the land, moving towards grace, is an important concept for the worlds’ peoples today. Through pandemic we have found those things that brought us through, ‘saved’ us. But so help us God, if we now carve in stone these same things.

The story from Numbers should remind us, wake us up, that some things work for a time; only a time, so don’t assume it always will-  if pandemic has taught us anything, it is that things do not work in all times, places, and circumstances.

 

I return to the Continental Divide and the image of moving towards the ocean – moving towards the waters of creation and the Creator. Sojourning in the land means being purposefully part of the water cycle: taking care of it, living grace, filtering faith and seeking God, returning to God to start all over again. The stories of the Israelites in the wilderness remind us that along the way we can get stuck and loss our purpose; we can experience trauma and end up in a salt lake, wandering there for decades; and we have also witnessed journeying through to the other side because salvation and hope were offered at just the right time.

In this time -  as sojourner in the land, flow towards the ocean of God, and along the way bring others with you, especially those who have hardened into salt.

 

Let us help one another according to the Creator’s intention of putting us on this planet.

Warning: Dangerous Landscape

 

First Lady, Rosalyn Carter, said, “A leader takes people where they want to go.  A greater leader takes people not necessarily where they want to go, but where they ought to be.”

 

Today our sojourning in the land is a journey of a different form – not on land per se, but rather a

hike through the landscape of scripture text; crawling and exploring through the Bible’s pages into unknown landscapes.  Today we sojourn with great leaders – not to go where we want to go, but to go where we ought to be.

 

I love to read.  I love stories in all forms: literature, music, movies, spoken word. I am not alone in this. Human history reflects a gathering around story – ancient pictographs, hieroglyphs, totem poles.  Humans share their stories with each other: poems, songs, epic sagas, fables, parables, jokes, memes, history accounts, wisdom, scripture, commandments. It is no wonder that faith too is passed on in these forms.  Stories in all forms have a unique attribute – story is able to bypass the critical intellect – a story gets inside our heads, our emotions are aroused and engaged, and once inside then the story gets tossed around, thought about, interpreted, applied... once inside the pieces of a story can be tackled by the mind to discover what the possible message could be; arriving at meaning from the inside out.

Readers, often come to the Bible with an attitude that reading it automatically makes one better – reading doesn’t work that way. It is the journeying through the words, romping in its meadows, afterwards, where ‘bettering’ happens. ‘Bettering’ also happens in the discipline of hiking through the pages of your Bible, over years and a lifetime. Through this time we experience different parts of the story because we bring with us who we are and how we at the time; so each time getting a more dimensional feeling of the story.  If we are angry, we read angry, we see angry, we listen angry, we interpret angry – scripture will be angry – and so too will our understanding of religion, faith, and God. I mention an attitude of anger because some have taken Jesus’ action in the Temple and focused on his anger, not exploring other possible paths in the story.

We also walk through the landscape of scripture as products of Western civilization where we believe the myth that everything has an explanation. Could we – dare we-  accept that scripture is inexplicable? That scripture was written to read us, not us it. The texts, and especially the crazy ones, are there to jar us out of complacency.

This is the point of today’s texts.

 

This Jesus story – the episode in the Temple- is Jesus being jarred out of complacency having heard and recited and mulled over the Commandments since the time he was a young boy.  The Commandments have read Jesus, down to his very heart; and observing the world around him, Jesus is unable to see a living of that particular story from the Word of God.  The disconnect annoys Jesus’ sojourning with the text, the Law.  The episode in the Temple is a wake up call to his fellow travelers, pointing to the distance humans have created between themselves and others, themselves and God. Jesus, by throwing over the tables in the Temple is not telling us to refrain from having garage sales or other money maker events in the Church; Jesus is reacting to the religion’s failure to live the Law – the summary being the Commandments we heard earlier – love God, love your neighbour.   The letter of the Law - the rules about changing money, offering sacrifice, policing who can and can’t come to God, judging the sin of others- has become more important than the spirit of the Law; the spirit to focus on relationship and perfecting relationship with God, people, and creation.

Temple religion was keeping the Law which was by no means wrong, but the trouble was that hearts were disengaged, relationships were broken; evident in the vast numbers of people being left out, abandoned, forgotten – like the poor, the widow, the orphan, the slave, the foreigner, the sick, the aged, women.

What Jesus is experiencing is rearticulated again in the poetic words of George Elliot Clarke’

“It is the distance between earth and heaven, us and God; not God with us, but us with God.”

 

Jesus turning the tables in the Temple is the beginning of John’s telling of the Gospel story. Again and again the religious leaders will address Jesus with questions starting in points of Law, pointing out failure to follow the Law; pointing fingers at those breaking the rules- particularly Jesus and the disciples. John’s telling of the story has Jesus placed in moments were he faces following the letter of the Law, or deciding to set the letter of the Law aside, and follow the spirit and heart of the Law. The heart is Jesus’ choice. Courageously Jesus chooses relationship every time: Jesus sits down and has an intimate conversation with a Samaritan woman, Jesus sees a sick man and despite it being the Sabbath heals him, Jesus sides with a woman caught in adultery, Jesus let a woman anoint his feet, Jesus touched those not to be touched -the blind, the leperous, Jesus called Lazarus from death back to life.  This epic saga has Jesus breaking the rules and redefining the Law at every turn.

 

Today’s text is John’s warning to us, the readers and hearers of the story, that this story is going to be messy, it is going to get people into trouble, it is full of angst and argument and putting people in their place.  This is a story not for the faint of heart or those with gentile sensibilities. The story is an epic battle of cosmic proportions. Such stories, as told through history, include blood and brutality, wherein the hero faces suffering and often torture or death; but if you stay with the story one usually finds redemption and liberation on the other side.

 

Today you are being warned, that sojourning with the biblical characters, walking in the texts, --following Jesus in his mission to clean house and transform hearts in this revolutionary re-telling of God’s vision that it is all about relationship -  is not going to be comfortable! No matter how good you are, or how good you think you are, you are being called from complacency -- expect blisters, bruising, being short of breath, perhaps a twisted ankle --- the texts are going to lead us, not to the places where we want to go (green pastures and still waters); but, rather, lead us to the places we ought to be.

  (Places were our relationships are broken, or don’t exist at all. The hard places were there is suffering, pain, and grief. Places where we face confession, forgiveness, and guilt. Places of lament, where we need to listen and not talk. Places where there are relationships that we can’t just fix. Places where societal rules will need to be set aside. Places that bring us face to face with death: of ourselves, of others, of peoples, of creation.)

We are being forewarned that the story we are reading – the story that is reading us—is taking us to the  cross with Jesus.  

Not where we want to go --- but where we ought to be.