Grains of Wheat
“Grains of Wheat” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning! It is good to be with you on this late autumn day; one which is beginning to feel lie November. It isn’t just the temperature which reminds us of the time of year, of course. It’s the shorter days and longer nights, the increasingly bare trees, the corn stubble and empty fields. Although it’s easier for me in Indiana than it was in California, you don’t have to be a farmer to sense the turn of the year and agricultural seasons. Agricultural seasons, although they differ in particulars and scale from 1st century Palestine to today in N America are still deeply embedded in both cultures.
You can probably think of, without even checking your phone, agricultural stories and imagery in the Bible. The disciples gathering grain and eating it on the Sabbath; the parable of the sower, and seed falling on different kinds of soil; or perhaps the parable of the workers in the vineyard, and those who got hired at the end of the day being paid the same amount as those who had been working since morning. In a culture where nearly everyone supported themselves by working the land or keeping livestock, agricultural imagery would have been universally understood and accepted by Jesus’ audience.
Our text for this morning is from the gospel of John. You’ll remember that of the four gospels John is the only one which does not record parables of Jesus. Luke has the most with 24, Matthew is right behind with 23, and there are eight parables in Mark’s gospel. This is a teaching from Jesus, and the context and timing of this teaching are significant. Back in chapter 11, Jesus raised his good friend Lazarus back to life after Lazarus and been dead and in a tomb for three days. This understandably attracted a lot of attention, including from Jewish leaders who had been with Martha and Mary, and were part of the group who followed Jesus to Lazarus’ tomb and witnessed Lazarus coming back to life. They went to the Pharisees and reported what happened, and the Pharisees called a council of the chief priests who determined that people were starting to believe in Jesus as the Messiah, and that would attract the attention of the Roman government, and the Romans would come in and destroy their holy places, their Temple, and their way of life. The council decided that it was better for one man to die than to lose their entire nation, and determined to find a way to put Jesus to death.
Jesus had stopped going out in public, but in Chapter 12, the Jews decided they need to kill Lazarus, too, because the people are so intrigued with him and his story. So Jesus makes a bold move when there are thousands of pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Festival of Passover: he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, and the crowd goes wild, paving his path with their cloaks and palm branches. The Pharisees shake their heads, wring their hands and say, “Look, the world has gone after him.”
And that is what has happened immediately before this morning’s text from John 12:20-26. Even non-Jews — Greeks–what to see Jesus. The Greeks talk to Philip who talks to Andrew, then Andrew and Philip decide to talk to Jesus. And Jesus, who knows that his death is imminent, says, “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. For those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
As someone who loves life and Creation generally and my own life specifically, this imagery doesn’t feel very comfortable. I want to try to put Jesus’ words into a bigger context this morning.
Slide 1: This is a field of wheat — I’m not sure where this picture was taken, but if you have spent any time in Iowa, Kansas, or Colorado, you have undoubtably seen fields like this, stretching for acres and acres across level ground. I’m confident this image was taken in the United States — certainly no anywhere in the Middle East. It’s an image of growth and abundance.
Slide 2: This is also a field of wheat — not necessarily the same one — but later in the season. This is the kind of scene which inspired the evocative lines from America the Beautiful, “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.” These wheat plants have stopped growing and are now ripening and getting ready to harvest.
Slide 3: And although the impression is of one golden mass, shifting and waving together, it is of course made of individual stalks and individual grains of wheat.
Slide 4: And this is the goal of any row crop: to be cut down and gathered in. For the bounty which has been produced to be harvested so that it can be used and shared.
I believe the point of Jesus’ metaphor is to celebrate the process of growing, ripening, bearing fruit, and being harvested. In my opinion, this is not about hating our lives, but it is an acknowledgement that harvest and death are part of the cycle of life in this world. We see it every year in the crops we grow and harvest, and we see it over the course of a lifetime in the people around us, and in ourselves. Of course there are untimely and tragic deaths, but especially after a long life, death is inevitable. Instead of denying death, we are to understand it as a part of the purpose of our lives. Jesus would have said this at a time when he was acutely aware of his own imminent death, and how he would be glorified (John’s word) by God through it.
What we know for sure about what happens to us after our death is that we don’t know for sure what happens. What I can tell you, especially those who are grieving the loss of a loved one this morning, is that we as a community have the privilege and the responsibility to remember the people we have loved, what they meant to us, and what we learned from them. We have been blessed as individuals and as a community by the members of Creekside whom we celebrate today — some who were part of this community of faith for their entire lives of more than 60, 70, 80, or 90 years. I meet with many ministry teams, and I still hear these names when we talk about Church World Service, the Prayer Garden, a roof for this building, Camp Mack, or the Cookie Walk. That is the way that individual grains of wheat continue to grow, ripen, and bear fruit. It is in the way we remember and continue the work and service which they did — because that work and service had been planted in them by a previous generation and the generation before that.
The life and death of Jesus Christ is where this harvest can all be traced back to. I love that the Church of the Brethren establishes its identity in the tagline, “Continuing the work of Jesus.” We all trace our roots back to that holy ground, and the promise that death is just a step closer to eternal live. We remember and give thanks for those individuals who demonstrated how to continue the work of Jesus; we give thanks for the opportunity to continue that work with our own lives and service, and to plant that seed in future generations who will carry that work forward. When the people we have loved are not forgotten, when their lives and their work are not forgotten, then they are part of that harvest of eternal life which happens right now, in the world we know. Thank God for those who have given their life to continuing the work of Jesus, so that we could grow into that same promise. Amen.