“Losing Direction, Finding Purpose”
John 12:20-26
An excerpt from Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World
Seeds, like people, come in different shapes and sizes, with a range of characteristics, needs, and, if you will, personalities.
Some seeds really need to be started indoors. If we hope to have summer tomatoes, for example, we’ll need to plant the seeds in good soil, keep that soil warm and moist, and give the seeds lots of light. After the seeds have germinated and when it’s warm enough outside, we can transplant the seedlings to an outdoor spot.
Other seeds can be sown directly into the soil. But even with those seeds—think cucumbers and sunflowers, zucchini and carrots—we must be patient and attentive. We need good-quality seeds, and the seeds need rich, loose soil that’s warm enough and a location that will afford them plenty of sun and water.
And then there are Morning Glory seeds.
While they can be planted in the poorest of soils and then pretty much left alone, they require a ridiculous amount of attention to get them ready for planting. These small, hard seeds must be nicked with a knife and then soaked in water. Only then do they stand a chance of sprouting when covered with dirt.
And with all seeds, germination—the sprouting of a plant—marks the end of the seed. Its various internal parts have, with the help of sun and water, fulfilled their purpose and reached their natural end.
Listen carefully, Jesus tells the people who’ve seen the wonders he’s performed and want to get in on the action: People are like seeds.
I’ll pause for a moment to let that sink in (no pun intended).
Think about it long enough to wonder whether Jesus was speaking metaphorically, literally, or both.
Because chances are you’ve seen the same signs I have at protest marches and rallies. The ones that proclaim:
They tried to bury us but they didn’t realize we were seeds.
I remember seeing such a sign at the post-Charlottesville march in Boston in 2017 and thinking, “Yeah! That’s right! They tried to bury us, but we’re seeds!”
So there!
It didn’t occur to me at that time, and apparently it hasn’t occurred to many people since then, that unburied seeds are, well, worthless. I suppose they’re still alive, for a limited time, but they won’t grow anything or serve any purpose. Getting buried so that a whole new thing—and new seeds—can be born is kind of the point of a seed.
Getting buried and dying so that new life can spring forth is a seed’s purpose.
And people, Jesus, says, are like seeds.
Our lives, Jesus says, are like seeds.
Which is to say: Until and unless we let ourselves be buried and filled with so much Light and Love that we split open, sprout new life, and die to our old seed selves, we will continue to exist, but we will not have fulfilled our purpose.
In other words, mere existence is not our purpose; survival is not our ultimate purpose.
Our chief end as humans, according to the 17th-century Shorter Westminster Catechism, is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.
Our ultimate purpose as followers of Jesus, according to Jesus and as paraphrased in The Message, is to live in such a way that, like Jesus, we are “reckless in our love.”
Now Jesus was very clear about his purpose. We don’t know exactly when his purpose became clear to him—whether before his baptism or after—but he lived with a liberating clarity of purpose.
And so we should also be clear about his purpose: The purpose of Jesus’ life was not, as so many of were taught, to die. And still, every year at this time, I feel I have to say this many times: The purpose of his life was absolutely not to die for our sins.
Rather the purpose of Jesus’ life was to live out the love of God for us—fully and selflessly, clearly and life-givingly, recklessly and joyfully. And the purpose of that love was to give us and all people and all creation the fullness of the love and life, justice, peace, and joy for which we were created.
And as Jesus lived out his purpose—as he preached subversive messages, hung out with the marginalized, broke religious and societal rules, healed the sick, fed the hungry, loved the lost, gained a relatively large following of powerless people and then seemingly raised a man from the dead, creating not only good trouble but the prospect of utter chaos and a deadly crackdown on the people and temple of Israel by the empire of Rome—it became clear to him how things would end.
The point of Jesus’ life and ministry was not to die a martyr’s death, but as it became clearer and clearer to him that this is what would happen, Jesus also came to understand himself as a seed. And he trusted that like a seed, his death and burial would not be the end, but rather the beginning of something new and different and powerful.
Jesus also understood that this kind of living and loving was how the realm of God, the Beloved Community, would come into being. Not by the power of the sword or the power of organizing, not by the power of determination or even the power of prayer, but by the power of God’s love lived out by individuals who had given themselves in love to God, one another, and their neighbors.
Jesus knew that this kind of living and loving in community is how ordinary people would fulfill the purposes of their own lives.
So how do we fulfill our purpose?How do we live in such a way that, like Jesus, we become seeds that, when filled with Spirit and broken open, give birth to new life and hope, new joy and love—for ourselves and for others?
As we begin the fifth week in Lent, my short answer probably won’t surprise you: The way we live with purposeful, reckless, self-giving love is with practice and with intention.
And still, I want to try to be clear: In our individualistic culture and in our privileged lives, we talk a lot about calling and vocation. What are my gifts? we wonder. Who am I called to be, or what am I called to do? We can spend long years and lots of energy trying to figure it all out.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, especially if we have yet to find the sweet spot where the world’s needs and our joy come together.
And yet it seems to me that what we do with our lives is, ultimately, less important than how we do it. Jesus, after all, did not go into the halls of religious power to find his disciples; he walked along the seashore, where the lowly fishermen worked. He wandered the byways, where he called the poor and the corrupt.
Perhaps he figured that people with less to lose might be more willing to let go of their former lives and ways of thinking to become a part of something bigger than themselves and more meaningful than the struggle for wealth and status.
So how do we let go of what we thought life was about and let ourselves be buried like seeds, trusting that we will gain new, real, true life in the process?
Sometimes being “buried” is as simple—and as hard—as practicing living with an open heart, being willing, as much as possible, to let our hearts be broken open to both the beauty and the pain of the world. Sometimes it is changing direction, turning around—repenting, if you will—letting go of our old ways and taking on the mind of Christ and the heart of a God who can’t stop loving us or our broken world. Sometimes it is committing ourselves to practice waking up to and attending to God’s presence within us and all around us—and letting Spirit heal and transform us.
The Sufi poet Hafiz put it this way:
It used to be
That when I would wake in the morning
I could with confidence say,
“What am I going to
Do?”
That was before the seed
Cracked open.
Now Hafiz is certain:
There are two of us housed
In this body,
Doing the shopping in the market and
Tickling each other
While fixing the evening’s food.
Now when I awake
All the internal instruments play the same music:
“God, what love-mischief can WE do
For the world
Today?”
