Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from Sunday, March 29, 2009:

“Jesus has planted the seed of love and hope in us so it can grow and blossom into new life in Christ.”

Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-33

Woody Allen has been one of my favorite philosophers, with sayings like: “People ask me if I am trying to achieve immortality through my work. I’m trying to achieve immortality by not dying.” And “Dying is one of the few things one can do really well lying down.” More pertinent to today’s readings is this one: “We are at a crossroads. One path leads to despair; the other to total extinction. I pray I have the wisdom to choose wisely.”

Jeremiah certainly could have described the situation of the people of Israel that way. The book of Jeremiah is distinguished by its unpleasant pronouncements. He predicts the death of the king, the death of the prophet Hananiah, and the fall and destruction of Jerusalem. His name is associated with repeatedly saying things people do not want to hear: the term for that in the English language is a “jeremiad.”

In today’s first lesson we have the most frequently quoted Old Testament passage for Lutherans. (We read it every year on Reformation Sunday.) Jeremiah lived through a time of disaster. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had been destroyed some years before. Josiah, the second of only two good kings after David in the southern kingdom, was dead and replaced by a succession of faithless puppet kings who were vassals of the Chaldeans under King Nebuchadnezzar. Since there was no strong king to assert faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Canaanite fertility religion was taking over. The threat and then the reality of exile in Babylon loomed large. In addition, Jeremiah suffered persecution because of his warning of what was to happen.

The people’s exile was richly deserved, Jeremiah predicted it throughout most of his writing, but he never gave up hope of its one day ending and God restoring his chosen people to the land the Lord had promised them. The Lord was God no matter what rulers did. The covenant was broken but even that did not break God’s steadfast love, his covenant with his people.

Chapter 31 falls about two-thirds of the way through the book of Jeremiah. By Chapter 29, the people were already in exile. We know that because it contains a letter Jeremiah sent them telling them that the Lord says they are to “seek the welfare of the city in which I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (v. 7) Also in that letter is the verse “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” (v. 11) (There is a good chance someone in this room had this as a confirmation verse.)

Jeremiah envisions a new covenant between God and the people, not written on stone like the law and Ten Commandments, but written on their hearts – internalized. The Lord will do this in the future and the people will respond because they will have been changed by God.

Today’s reading from Jeremiah sounds more like the words that Isaiah wrote to hopeless exiles. In it Jeremiah is rhapsodically hopeful because he is relying on God to do a new thing and not on the people to come to their senses. Christians apply this to Jesus Christ – that in Christ, God has done a new thing to save us from our faithless ways. Jeremiah proclaimed that God would transform, would start fresh after the exile. In the Lord, suffering becomes salvation.

The promise that God will transform us – will do what we cannot do for ourselves – is evident in the parable of the grain of wheat that Jesus uses in today’s gospel. It is a veiled reference to Jesus’ death and resurrection. If he clings to life and the way things are, nothing will happen. For the seed to fulfill its potential as a plant, it has to die as a seed. For Jesus to bring the hope of resurrection he has to be willing to die.

We used to sprout beans to add to salads. We kept them in a glass jar on the window sill so we remembered to rinse them every day. We could watch as they softened, enlarged, then split as a sprout would emerge. By the time they were usable as bean sprouts, all that was left of the seed was the pieces of the hull. The seed was destroyed as a seed, but something new came forth from it.

Diane was widowed at 57. She had two grown children, one grandchild, many nieces and nephews but she was stuck on the impossibility of living without her husband. She had relied on him, even goaded him into taking care of her. Now all she could see was that she was alone. In her bitterness, she started staying away from worship and from her friends. When pressed about it she said “I can’t understand why I believed in God all these years if it was going to turn out like this.” She was clutching the unsprouted seed, not able to see that there could be hope in the future.

Then there is Grace. She too was widowed in her late 50s. It came suddenly, leaving her to supervise the nursing home care of her husband’s parents. The following year her mother and mother-in-law died, then her father-in-law. An only child, she had no siblings or nieces or nephews. Her pastor was concerned about her dealing with all those deaths over just a couple years. When the concern was expressed a few months after the last death, Grace said “I’m OK. I know I am not alone – the Lord is with me. I go dancing every Friday night. I’ve been on a few dates. I’ll be OK.” She was quietly hopeful. She felt God was doing something new in her life, and she was open to the seed sprouting and growing after its death as a seed. In Christ, suffering can become salvation and hope.

No matter how bad our situation may seem, God in Christ is not finished with us. Jeremiah was rhapsodically hopeful because he was relying on God to do a new thing and not on the people to come to their senses. Christians apply this to Jesus Christ – that in Christ God has done a new thing to save us from our faithless ways. Jeremiah proclaimed that God would transform, would start fresh after the exile. In the Lord, suffering becomes salvation.

He will crack open the seed so it can die and new life can come out of it. He has written the covenant of grace on our hearts in our baptism into Jesus’ death and resurrection. He has planted the seed of love and hope in us so it can grow and blossom into new life in Christ.

God does this. We have our part to play – to respond to him – but the God who raised Jesus – the God of Israel and Jeremiah – reaches out to us from the future to draw us to himself eternally. We can say with Jeremiah “the days are surely coming” and hear Jesus say “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”