Reverent Submission

Scripture Lessons: Hebrews 5: 5-10 and John 12: 20-36 Sermon Title: Reverent Submission Preached on March 21, 2021 On more than one occasion, I’ve made fun of the great early 20th Century governor of Texas Miriam A. Ferguson. Though she was the second female governor in United States history, the first female governor of the great state of Texas, a college graduate and was by most accounts, a great leader, a populist, a fiscal conservative, and a great opponent of the Ku Klux Klan, she is perhaps most famous for saying, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for Texas schoolchildren.” Jesus, you see, did not speak English. He spoke a language called Aramaic. But seminary students, trained to read scripture, in the language scripture was first uttered in, learn to read, not Aramaic but Hebrew and Greek. I knew why I was supposed to learn Hebrew, but on my first day of Greek class when I first started seminary, I had no idea why we were being forced to learn Greek and I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t learning Aramaic. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone why we were learning Greek however, so I just went on learning it, not knowing why I was learning it, until one day I overheard a conversation on the subject: “Greek was the universal written language of Jesus’ world.” So, the Gospels were not written in Aramaic as it was not much of a written language, not Hebrew as pretty much only Jews learned to read that, but Greek, which was at the time was the language of pretty much everyone. It was the language of Asia Minor, Ethiopia, and Spain. It was at the time of Jesus, the written language of the Roman Empire. At that time, Greek was what Latin was to the world for much of the Common Era during the great expansions of the Roman Catholic Church, and what English is to much of the world today. In language schools in Tokyo and Paris children learn English because their parents want to give them a leg up. Bands from Germany, Afghanistan, and Singapore sing in English to appeal to a wider audience. English might be the closest thing the world has today to a universal written language. It is the language of the most powerful nation on earth. It is the language used in the most exciting movies anyone can see; it is the language of President Joe Biden, William Shakespeare, and Wall Street. People who have something to say to the world today are saying it in English, just as people who had something that was worth saying in the ancient world wrote it in Greek. It was the language that people who were educated enough to be literate learned to read, it was the language of Homer, the language of democracy, power, empire, and influence. So, these Greeks go to Philip, we assume that something about living in Bethsaida in Galilee meant that he could understand their Greek or that they all could speak Hebrew, these Greeks go to Philip in the hope of seeing Jesus but it’s important to think about why. Why would these Greeks go to see Jesus? Not only was their language the one that everyone spoke, but what did the Greeks need from anyone else? Athens was the peak of culture and wisdom at the time and is still one that many societies hope to emulate, so what did these Greeks need from Jesus? These Greeks didn’t need Jesus the teacher. They were Greek and they already had the greatest philosophers of the time. As we still learn from them today, you might argue that these Greeks had the best philosophers of any time. They had Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and Diogenes. They had the philosophy of the Stoics, so you can’t imagine they needed Rabbi Jesus to teach them. But not only that, these Greeks had Hippocrates and the most modern medicine available to help them avoid suffering, illness, and disease. Did they need Jesus the healer and miracle worker? Nor did these Greeks need Jesus the Prince of Peace as they already had democracy, they trusted the voice of the people, and were able to avoid the tyranny of leaders too powerful through election. I believe that we can safely assume that they didn’t need any of the things that people often go to Jesus looking for, so we should wonder why they went up saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” What did the Greeks need with any other culture? Why did they want to see Jesus? It would be like a French Chef from the Cordon Bleu traveling to New York City to learn how to cook. It would be like our NASA, calling up the Soviet Union, in the heat of space race, asking for a little help getting a rocket off the ground. The great cultures of the world don’t go across boarders asking for help. It’s hard for me to imagine even people from regions of the same country asking for help from their fellow countrymen. Last week I was thinking about the TV show, Hee Haw. One episode had grandpa announcing to his family, “Well everyone, I’m moving up north.” The family couldn’t believe it. “Why, grandpa, would you ever do something like that. You don’t even like people from up there. You call them yankees and complain about them all the time.” “Well family,” grandpa says, “I’m getting up there in years, and I figure it’s better for one of them to die than one of us.” There it is. Would Grandpa go up north asking for help? Never! But notice, not the South nor the North, not the Greeks nor the Romans, has figured out what do with death. Certainly, we don’t have it figured out. I’m reminded of that every time I hear the number of COVID-19 deaths. Last time I looked it was 535,997, and I have to go and look it up. It’s a number so large that we don’t really put it in the headlines. It’s more than half of Cobb County. That’s almost nine times the population of Marietta. It makes number like 2,977, the number of people who died on September 11th, or 2,403, the number of US troops killed at Pearl Harbor, look like a drop in the bucket. It’s more than we lost in World War I. It’s more than we lost in World War II. It’s more than we lost in Vietnam. It’s more than we lost in all those wars combined. But we can’t talk about it. Maybe, because to lose one is so much to bear. We’re talking about grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives. We’re talking about people who are gone, some without a funeral. Others, who breathed their last without a hand to hold. This is one of the great struggles for all of humanity in all of human history. Not just how to live, but how to deal with the reality of death, a reality that every facet of our culture wants to avoid. When they go to see Jesus, he offers them something that no other culture, not Greek culture and not our culture could have offered. When the Greeks want to see Jesus, he gives them this: 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.” He gives them a reverent submission to the reality of death rather than an urgent denial or even a miracle cure. “Now my soul is troubled [he said] and what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” You see, the way of Christ is not the way of our culture, as Christ does not fear death. In fact, he submits to it. He doesn’t run away from it. He looks it in the eye, for in every needless death is a lesson to learn and in every sacrifice is the seed of new life. Like these Greeks, we too must learn from this teaching, for as we look over this earth as the champions of the space race and the greatest military power the world has ever seen, we are slow to face the glaring frailty that half a million deaths reveal. But might each one be a seed that pushes us to create a more noble health care system. Might each one be a seed planted that sprouts in us a desire to eliminate misinformation, for propaganda and denial costs human lives. Furthermore, as this virus has spread the world over, person to person and place to place, we are invited to see that our borders hardly mean anything. There is no wall we could built that a virus would not pass through, and so let us hear from the Prince of Peace, let us hear it in the deaths of so many sisters and brothers the world over, that Christ invites us to share more than an infection, Christ invites us to reach across the boundary lines, the rivers, the fences, and the lawns to create a better world, better neighborhoods, better communities, a better future, by learning the lessons that death has to teach. Today, as we struggle to understand how eight people were murdered, six of them Asian Americans, let us recognize that the way we talk, the way we see people, that just calling something the China Virus, can have divisive and dehumanizing effects. In death there is a lesson for us to learn, and despite everything that we have, everything we’ve done, and this great nation that we’ve built, we’ve been dealing in hatred and division for too long, so let us learn now what death has to teach. For Rome took our Jesus and nailed him to a cross, trying to preserve power and maintain the order of the way things had been, yet his blood changed everything. His sacrifice changed everything, because death has its own enlightenment to offer us. Let us embody enough humility and reverent submission to learn. Amen.