Finding Our Way

Homily for Sunday, March 25, 2018

Lately I’ve been revisiting memories of riding in a car as a child, of being taken new places by my parents. Although I may not have known where we were going, I always trusted that my parents knew the way. I loved being a passenger, looking out the window and seeing something new and unexpected. My dad had an insurance business in Madison, and when I was preschool age, he would sometimes take me with him in his pickup truck to go into town to retrieve the mail from the main post office there. At that time, we were living on the road to Criglersville, just a short drive from Madison, and we had to cross White Oak Run and make a steep and winding curve up a hill as we approached town. From my seat, I could peer out the window and look down what seemed to be a precipice to the stream far below. I decided there must be alligators living in that river. It certainly looked like the kind of place alligators like, at least in my imagination, but I knew I was safe with my dad.

There are the familiar roadways of childhood memory, the roads oft taken, and there are also the ones we may have traveled only once. Even so, something about having traveled that particular way stays with us. Looking back on such a trip, to a little known and unfamiliar place, takes us off the map of memory, and yet, when we come across that place again years later, we may recognize it. Aren’t such experiences also common to our spiritual journeys?  Often we are taken within ourselves to places we have rarely encountered before, by guides familiar and unfamiliar. Sometimes, years later, we may recognize that spiritual touchstone when we encounter it again, as if we finally REALLY see it for the first time. Something has changed within us as a result of the continuing journey of our lives. For a moment, we are shown the path before us, and it becomes a bit clearer.

In John 12, the source of today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus and the disciples travel to Jerusalem for the Passover. Jesus makes his controversial “triumphal entry,” to the loud hosannas of a crowd waving palm fronds. Some curious Greeks have also come for the festival, and they find the disciple Philip and say to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” When Philip relays the request of the Greeks to Jesus, the Lord’s response shows us where he is at that time on his irrevocable journey to the cross. The curiosity of the Greek tourists is not a priority for the Lord. He tells Philip and Andrew that the hour approaches when he will be glorified—before a much larger audience than a few sight-seeing Greeks. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, 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. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” What Jesus calls his glorification involves his death, like the grain of wheat that dies and bears much fruit. The bearing of fruit through love and sacrifice is where Christ leads us.

“Whoever serves me must follow me.” Jesus reminds us once again that we demonstrate our love for him, our willingness to align ourselves with his teachings, when we behave as he does, when we follow his way. As in that parent/child relationship, when a parent drives the car and a child comes along for the ride, we depend on his navigation. Then, when we become self-driving adults, we can evoke our memory of the way Christ traveled and seek out the path of self-sacrificing service and love He would have us follow.

The Lord might remind us that his way is not as difficult to follow as we imagine since the map is written on our hearts. That’s the way love works, isn’t it? In today’s lesson from Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet tells us that the Lord decided to make a new covenant with the house of Israel. He says, “It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband.” Isn’t that a tender statement? How powerful is the Lord’s love for his people that He is willing to put his own broken heart behind him and make a new covenant with them! “But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Many generations later, Jesus would be sent as the ultimate fulfillment of that covenant, the covenant of love written on human hearts.

In the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah we have seen God speak of himself as the husband of the people. In the Letter to the Hebrews, we are reminded that God announced to Jesus from Heaven, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” The law God has written on our hearts is of the most intimate, familial kind. We are to model our love for each other, our love for strangers, after the love of a husband for a wife, or a mother for a child. Having written the map of that kind of intimate love on our hearts, God will inspect our hearts to make sure we follow his way. As we are told in 1^st Samuel, when Samuel is checking out the sons of Jesse to find the one—David—that God intends to anoint as the next king, “God does not see as human beings see; they look at outward appearances, but God looks at the heart.”

Reading and following the message God has imprinted on our hearts could sound like a potentially difficult and perplexing task. We may wonder if we need some kind of code in order to decipher the message. Fortunately, God imprints the message and provides the code-breaker.  When I think of the Lord’s promise to his disciples, that he would remain with them and within them, I am reminded that the Holy Spirit is already there in my heart. The Holy Spirit is both the message and the messenger.

As Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning once wrote, “The Spirit is among us to give us the strength and wisdom we need to be more than we are, to help this old world become more than it is. It is enough for us that the Spirit is among us, more than enough. It is abundant life, even in the face of the sufferings we see around us, even in the face of those we mourn within our own hearts. Life in the Spirit is abundant life: not heaven on earth, but earth in sure and certain hope of heaven.”

The abundant life is the fruit of love, of God’s love for us and of our love for one another. AMEN.