March 18, 2018 - Sermon - Rev. Hamilton Throckmorton

Scripture:  John 12:20-33                                        

 

     At my ordination into the Christian ministry thirty years ago this coming September, Jim Crawford issued what is called a “charge” to the ordinand.  In it, he reminded me that the core of my ministry lies in two things.  First, he said, give your congregation your time.  We live in this hectic, frenetic world in which so many of us often take little time with each other.  Take time for the people of your parish, Jim said.

 

     To illustrate the second crucial element of ministry, Jim told a little vignette. “You’ve heard the story, I know,” he said, “of the minister who believed himself quite a rhetorical gymnast.  His preaching was filled, as they say, with platitudinous ponderosity, polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity.  One morning he arrived in his pulpit and found a little note written just for him.  ‘Sir,’ it read, ‘we [wish to] see Jesus.’”

 

     Here’s my guess: not one of you woke up this morning saying to yourself, or a family member, “I wish to see Jesus.”  But I am willing to bet that, at some level, that is indeed what you most want.  It’s what I want, too.  There’s a church member whose daughter and grandchildren are suffering from domestic abuse.  Another has just gotten bad news about a biopsy.  Another worries about a child’s health. 

 

     And in all that, we might put words into their mouths and say, “They wish to see Jesus.”  Or to put it another way: they wish for the presence of God in their lives.  They wish to be saved from danger, or jolted out of their lethargy, or shocked with a passionate hope.  They wish for what God gives in life, the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). 

 

     Look what we live with day-to-day.  Vitriol dominates public life.  Loneliness, as we noted last week, is epidemic.  Some come here weighed down by anxiety.  Others come burdened by grief.  Still others go through their days like a child’s fidget spinner that simply cannot stop whirling.

 

     I used to think God only showed up when I was happy.  If I was happy, that was the sure sign, the guarantee, of God’s presence.  Happiness equaled holiness.  Smiles were the mark of God’s showing up.  I have never quite gotten over that simple equation—it lurks in me still.  And partly I think that’s because there’s some truth in it.  Joy, after all, is one of the fruits of the Spirit.  When we see real joy, God is unquestionably there.

 

      But God is not just in those smiles of happiness.  That’s the mistake I’ve too often made.  God can certainly be in the smiles.  It’s simply not true to say, though, that, if smiles are absent, God is absent.  It may in fact be the deepest truth that, precisely when those smiles are absent, that is when Jesus is most present.  That when sickness strikes and franticness reigns and fear runs rampant and grief overwhelms and death looms—it’s just then, says the good news of God, that Jesus is most alive.

 

     In John’s story about Jesus, a turning point comes partway through the gospel.  In the first half of his story, John has repeatedly told his readers that Jesus’ “hour” has not yet come (2:4, 7:6, 7:30, 8:20).  When John talks about Jesus’ “hour,” he is talking about Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Jesus’ hour, when it comes, will be that seamless moment of dying and rising that everything in Jesus’ life is leading up to.  It’s where the whole story comes together.  It’s as if John is repeatedly saying to his readers, ‘No, not yet; that pivotal moment is not here yet.’

 

     Until, that is, we get to today’s episode.  When these unnamed Greeks come asking to see Jesus, it’s then that Jesus finally says, “The hour has come.”  It’s time, in other words, for the climax of the story to be told.  It’s time to see the story’s full unfolding.

 

     And the full unfolding, the true flowering of the story, happens as we come to see, not just the Jesus who performs signs and miracles, but the Jesus who is killed and raised from the dead.  The story cannot be complete without seeing that culminating chapter.  On a murderous cross and in its vindicating, revelatory aftershock: that’s where we see the fullness of God’s glory being “pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19; “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” v. 2).  In death and resurrection—right at the point of brokenness, in other words: that’s where we see the real Jesus.

 

     So when you and I endure abuse or hear of a distressing biopsy or witness a child’s struggles, that is likely the time when we most want to see Jesus.  And the conviction of the gospel is that that’s precisely when Jesus shows up.  What’s needed, from our angle, is the right lenses, the right soul-vision, to see the crucified and risen Christ right there in our midst.

 

     A friend of mine once wrote that “what [you and I] have in common in this life are the ways we can be broken.  That is our common ground—that we can be shattered.  That is our shared humanity, and it matters more than those things which separate us—things like economics, politics, [and] religion” (Don Snyder).  And while you or I may not be experiencing that brokenness in this moment, it is something none of us avoids forever.  We’re all broken at one time or another.

 

     And the gospel, the best news we could ask or imagine, is that the fullness of Jesus is pleased to dwell in those very moments.  You wish to see Jesus?  Look at your happiness and your smiles, certainly.  But don’t stop there.  Look, as well, to the shadowy places in your life—to the despair and the anxiety and the pain and the loneliness.  That, too, is where you’ll see Jesus.

 

     Sometimes what it takes is just a simple reminder.  It’s what a gratitude journal can accomplish.  What if, at the end of each day, no matter what was going on and how discouraged you might feel, you were to say “Thank you, God, for  . . .” and then list at least five things.  We can all easily recount the many reasons today may be a lousy day, from the leaky toilet to the computer that froze to the snarky remark a family member made to the disturbing news item you just noticed to the bitter feelings you have about the way your NCAA tournament pool has blown up—and you know it did!  Most of us can run through the litany of all the grimness without batting an eye.  You want to see Jesus, though?  That’s where gratitude, even during abysmal challenges, can make an enormous difference.  In good times and bad, gratefulness matters—gratefulness for the simple things: the sun, the comic that makes you laugh, the call from your daughter, the honey roasted peanut butter you put on your banana every day, the path you often walk in the Metroparks.  Take note of these things.  This is where we see Jesus.

 

     And then there are those places in which suffering and struggle are transformed, those places where Jesus shows up in the tension and the dis-ease.  I, for example, am enormously grateful for the dinner we hosted last Sunday evening, in which Federated members and friends shared a meal with new friends from the Chagrin Valley Islamic Center.  Christians and Muslims in this country have, of course, not had an easy time of it lately.  So when sixty or so Christians and fifty or so Muslims eat together and talk together and learn from each other, Jesus is there.  As I commented publicly that evening, in the midst of cultural tension, it was an opportunity for us to build bridges of respect, trust, and acceptance.  It was an occasion in which we could break down some of the stereotypes we have about each other.  It was a time we could learn from each other.  And it was a way of countering the influence of extremists and agents of hate.  Into the tension that too often keeps Christians and Muslims apart came a rich and lively occasion of grace and acceptance.  Thanks be to God—I see Jesus!

 

     Recently a friend and I found ourselves crossing our signals and not connecting the way we normally do.  I was slightly put off by something he had said in an email, and found I needed to address the mix-up.  I called.  And he listened.  And with enormous grace, he understood.  And the distance between us—and this was a typical, everyday misunderstanding—was bridged.  Thanks be to God—I see Jesus.

 

     Jesus shows up in a thousand different garments.  His grace-filled wardrobe is spectacular.  He’s there in the good times.  And he’s there in the bad times.  The struggles and challenges that sometimes gnaw away at us slowly and sometimes hit us like a Mack truck are simply occasions for grace to come in by way of a side door.

 

     I was struck this week by a piece written by op-ed columnist Michael Gerson.  Gerson’s mother died about five months ago, and he finds he is still overwhelmed by the loss.  “One of the worst parts of grief,” he writes, “is thinking, at a random moment, ‘I should give Mom a call,’ before reality crashes back in.  A great loss is many losses, as the mind adjusts to living in a different universe. . . . The experience of an adult losing a parent is predictable, nearly universal, but still painful as hell.  Getting hit by a truck, it turns out, doesn’t hurt any less because you can see it coming from afar.”

 

     Gerson writes on his mother’s birthday, and beautifully describes some of her most notable characteristics.  Then he says, “With the death of a young person, we are conscious of what will never be.  When an older person dies, they take a whole world with them.  Millions of experiences end in an instant.  Voices that won’t be heard again.  Sights that die with the dead.  A little girl’s memories of hot, cricket-loud evenings, of playing with dolls made out of rocks, of plugging her ears while the pigs (which she had named) were slaughtered.”

 

     Gerson’s grief is palpable.  “The connection of child to parent,” he says, “is deeper than conviction or memory, formed even before the establishment of a self. . . . [T]he loss of a mother or father leaves a pit, a void. . . . The woman who [loved me] is in the cold ground.  And, in one deep, unrecoverable way, I am alone. . . . I am blessed with many kinds of love in my life.  But losing its original form is not a minor thing.  It makes the universe feel colder.”

     You who have experienced such a loss know just what Gerson is talking about.  And, especially if it’s recent, it may seem, at times, as though you can’t go on.  The cold universe may feel irredeemably frigid.

 

     But here’s what Gerson also says.  “It is funny what you remember from childhood.  One of my first memories is slipping my mother’s hand at a grocery store and finding myself alone and terrified in a crowd.  Retaking her hand was my first definition of safety, of home.  I realize this is not every child’s experience of a parent.  It is hard for me to imagine the feelings of betrayal that result from abandonment or abuse.  But my mother loved with an irrational extravagance—a love that covered all past error and contained all future forgiveness.  As Wendell Berry said of his mother: ‘So complete has your forgiveness been/ I wonder sometimes if it did not/ precede my wrong, and I erred,/ safe found, within your love.’”

 

     Even in his grief, Gerson can find and extol the richness of his mother’s bottomless love for him.  And his column’s last words tell what that means for him now.  Losing her, he says, “brings to mind the experience my boys will inevitably have.  I apologize in advance that there will be so many boxes of books to deal with.  But I hope you will know how much your awkward, reticent father loved you—lavishly, totally, more strongly than anything you could do to forfeit it.  And if I succeed in making this clear, it is because my mother showed me how love could be done” (http://plaindealer.oh.newsmemory.com/publink.php?shareid=06bd37fa1). 

 

     In good times and in bad, in joy and in sorrow, in life and in death, Jesus comes to us and sits with us and holds us close.  That risen Christ loves us to death, and, at the same time, beckons us to be, ourselves, living, loving lights.  Can you see Jesus?