The 5th Sunday in Lent-Rev Melanie Lemburg
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.
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
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