5 Lent, Yr B (2024) The Rev. Karen C. Barfield
5 Lent, Yr B (2024) The Rev. Karen C. Barfield
Jeremiah 31:31-34 St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
Psalm 51:1-13
John 12:20-33
In the name of the one, holy, and living God:
Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifying Spirit. Amen.
Today’s text are all about God doing something new!
I’m all for new things…
as long as I don’t have to change anything.
There is comfort in the old,
the predictable,
the routine.
The illusion of control offers some peace of mind.
So, while something new is great every now and then…
don’t ask us to change, please.
However, the thing about the season of Lent
is that we are called to not get trapped in the past…
to not get trapped in ways of living that short-circuit new life.
And, when we get right down to it,
that’s hard.
If we think it’s not hard to let go of the “old,”
we deceive ourselves!
In today’s gospel Jesus knows that his life is about to change;
something difficult and new is about to happen.
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,”
he tells the disciples who seek him out to say that some Greeks are looking for him.
“Now my soul is troubled,” Jesus says.
“And what should I say…‘Father, save me from this hour’?
Jesus knows the boat we’re in when God asks us to do hard things…
like showing the world the way of love when the world thinks it’s foolish.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain;
but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Now, being a city girl I don’t know much about wheat,
but I do love flowers!
Some years back, one evening I went to a church dinner at a parishioner’s house,
and while meandering through their backyard,
I came across a crop of beautiful orange-speckled flowers
that were small and delicate,
with leaves that looked like an iris.
To me they looked a bit like a toad lily.
I asked the host what they were.
The common name, I was told, is the blackberry lily.
He was quick to tell me that they were taking over his backyard.
Some time later I was attending a dinner at another parishioner’s house,
and this same gardener told me that before I left, he had something for me on the porch.
It was a bunch of dead stalks of his blackberry lilies with lots of little seed pods still intact.
“Just sprinkle them around your garden,” he said.
So, I did.
And, I must say, they were prolific!
Every year I took delight
as I watched the flower pedals unfurl each morning
into their bespeckled rust and orange delicacy.
Each evening as the sun went down,
they curled back up until the next sunrise.
While I enjoyed their blooms,
I recognized that if they didn’t die and scatter their seed into the ground,
they would not create such abundant new life.
Now, Jesus is talking about much more
than a grain of wheat
or a seed pod of a blackberry lily falling into the ground.
“Those who love their life lose it,
and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
“Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am,
there will my servant be also….”
“Now is the judgment of this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”
What is the ruler of this world?
Perhaps it is hatred and greed and oppression…
anything that diminishes the image of God in another person or in ourselves.
Instead of this “ruler of the world,”
God offers us newness of life…eternal life, in fact,
but we will have to let go of some things to find it.
And that takes courage.
Even Jesus had to find the courage to not fight back his accusers.
The writer of the letter of Hebrews says,
“In the days of his flesh,
Jesus offered up prayers and supplications,
with loud cries and tears.”
Some of those prayers and supplications were on his own behalf:
“Father, let this cup pass from me,
but thy will, not mine, be done.”
Or on behalf of others whom he healed and even raised from the dead,
like Lazarus, at whose tomb he wept.
Today’s Psalmist cries out, as we did on Ash Wednesday:
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness;
in your great compassion blot out my offenses….
“you look for truth deep within me,
and will make me understand wisdom secretly….
“wash me, and I shall be clean indeed.
Make me hear of joy and gladness,
that the body you have broken may rejoice.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me.”
And we also hear God’s promise of new life to us in today’s reading from Jeremiah:
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant….
I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts;
and I will be their God, and they shall be my people….
“I will forgive their iniquity,
and remember their sin no more.”
New life awaits!
But the old ways – the ways of malice and evil,
of greed and envy,
of pride and control,
of asserting my wants and desires above those of another…
these grains must fall into the ground and die in order for the fruit of love to be born.
And only with God’s help can we do that.
As Lent draws near its end and we follow Jesus to the cross,
let us renew our self-examination
and ask God to help us name those things in our lives that may bring harm to ourselves or others
and then seek the courage to let them go
so that our lives may be transformed.
There is a practice that we yogis engage at the end of each class.
In this practice and posture we remember that each moment of life is a new beginning.
After working hard for an hour or so and then quieting down our bodies,
we roll over onto our sides and curl up in a fetal position and remind ourselves,
“this moment…every moment, is a new beginning.”
It is true.
Regardless of what has occurred in our lives prior to this moment,
at any given moment,
we can move forward in our lives with an invitation to newness.
Each day,
each moment,
we are faced with what we are to do with our life.
Will we risk falling into the earth,
where we may die to self and world,
and be cracked open to new life?
What will be our answer?
The world is waiting.
Abundant life is waiting.
Amen.
