Broken Open to New Life

Sunday, March 17, 2024 – John 12:20-33, Also Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 51:1-12,Hebrews 5:5-10

We’re surrounded by plants. We walk on lawns of green grass. We’re sometimes shaded by tall trees. Flowers bloom everywhere we look. Even in our kitchens, we see food that came from plants – plants that began as seeds somewhere. We probably didn’t plant those seeds, but we live from the life that others grew, tended, and picked for us. It’s so easy to take those plants (and people) for granted, that we don’t think about what it took to get from that seed to those apples and oranges.

I love those time-lapse videos that show seedlings sprouting and the way they reach for the light. According to the University of Illinois,

When a seed is exposed to the proper conditions, water and oxygen are taken in through the seed coat. The embryo’s cells start to enlarge. Then the seed coat breaks open and a root or radicle emerges first, followed by the shoot or plumule that contains the leaves and stem.” They go on to say that “Some seed coats are so hard that water and oxygen cannot get through until the coat breaks down.”

It’s just like we read in the gospel of John, that in order for a grain of wheat to bear fruit, it has to fall into the earth and die. It has to be broken open.

Many years ago, I read a wonderful book by an author named Elizabeth Lesser called Broken Open: How Difficult Times can Help Us Grow. It was about the struggles she faced in her marriage, in the work she and her husband started, and in her feelings of deadness inside. She wrote of how the pain she experienced in the loss of both marriage and business opened her heart in new ways to more life.

Our readings for today have a lot to say about heart and about pain. And they give us such a hopeful message about transformation and new life. They show us both what is and what is possible. This is what I love about sacred text.

In Jeremiah, we read how God promises to “make a new covenant” with God’s people, not like the covenant that the people broke. So right out of the gate, we see that God never gives up on us. We may break the covenant, we may fail to do what God asks of us, but God is faithful. And God is also creative. When we can’t keep the law, when we can’t keep the first covenant, God gives us a new one. In this new covenant, God says “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.”

This is God making us God’s own, no matter what we do. And nothing will keep God from us. Our relationship with God is not determined by what we do. Not by our good behavior or bad behavior, not by our success or failure. God has covenanted, promised, to be with us forever. And God won’t even remember our sin. You know the phrase “forgive and forget”? That’s basically what God promises to do regarding our failings.

God will write God’s law on our hearts. Not human law, but God’s law. And it is written on our hearts – meaning that it now becomes our inner conscience and our inner authority. I love this idea that God gives us what we need to live rightly and to flourish within our own hearts. When we tune into the deep, inner voice of God, we know what is right, and we know who we belong to. But we so often choose not to listen to that deep Voice.

We see a similar idea in the Psalm where the psalmist connects inner truth with being taught wisdom in our “secret heart.” Our secret heart may be the side of us that no one else sees, but it may also be our deepest soul. That place that we keep protected and shielded from the outer world that often wants to hurt or take advantage of us. Or we may shut out what our secret heart is dying to tell us because we’d rather not hear it. We’d rather not have to make those decisions that might be difficult or require us to make difficult changes, like end a marriage, or a job.

Sometimes the pain of life leaves us with a very conflicted heart or a heart that believes untruths about ourselves or the people around us. If Jesus was fully human, then it would be impossible for him not to have had a conflicted heart about what he faced. John tells us that Jesus accepted his path, but he also says that Jesus’ soul was “troubled.” And the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears.

In our Wednesday worship services, we’ve been talking about holy lament, what we read in the book of Lamentations and some of the psalms. We are lamenting when we cry out to God for help in our pain. When Jesus was crying out to God with loud cries and tears, he was lamenting. He was calling out to the Source of his life for help. And he was heard by God. When our hearts are conflicted, we can cry out to God for help, for guidance, and for comfort. And I truly believe those prayers are heard and held even if they’re not always answered in the way we’d prefer.

What about when our hearts believe things that are not true about ourselves or the people around us? Sometimes our hearts get filled with toxic poison that becomes a dark lens upon our eyes through which we see the world. I believe this is what the psalmist means when he prays for a “clean heart.” When we believe toxic things and see the world through that lens, our heart has become covered in a kind of grime or filth. It’s not clean. And our vision becomes so clouded by this that we can’t see anything clearly.

Here again, we have guidance in the prayer of the psalmist who prays, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” Many of us easily remember those words by heart because we’ve sung them in the liturgy for so many years.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been struggling with toxic beliefs or views and knew that what I needed was a clean heart. In those times, I’ve literally prayed those words by calling them to mind with the tune that we’ve sung in the Lutheran church for a long time. I encourage you to try this practice for yourself.

I know that spontaneous prayer may not come easily to many of us. We can easily call to mind the Lord’s Prayer, and that of course is a prayer you can always pray. But when I’m struggling with what’s in my own heart, it’s the “Create in me…” prayer that I go to. And it never fails to bring me some measure of peace.
Our hearts are amazing organs. They keep pumping day in and day out with never any need for us to make it happen. It’s just like God’s faithful covenant – it doesn’t depend upon my action. But human hearts are also vulnerable, and like precious crystal, they can break.

Parker Palmer writes that the heart can be broken in two ways. First, when devastating losses turn us toward bitterness, our hearts can become splintered like shards of glass. And those shards can then be directed like daggers toward those who hurt us, or toward ourselves. But he says that there’s another way for hearts to break. Like clenched fists, hearts can also be “broken open” into a largeness of life, into an expanded capacity to hold our own and the world’s pain, as well as its joy. We have the choice of whether our pain make us bitter or make us better.

Jesus shows us clearly the better choice. He shows us that when we’re willing to let that hard seed coat be broken open by the right conditions, new life arises from that seed’s death. He says, “When I am lifted up from the earth,” like a seed growing into a plant, “I will draw all people to myself.” God brings life from what seems like death. And that new life is powerful. It’s magnetic. We don’t have to push people to Christ. When people learn about his life, his Way, and see the changes it’s made in us, Jesus is like a magnet, because we come alive through his life.

About her book Broken Open, Elizabeth Lesser writes that

During times of transition, amid everyday stress, and even when we face seemingly insurmountable adversity, life offers us a choice: to turn away from change or to embrace it; to shut down or to be broken open and transformed.”

Which will we choose?