Heart Like a Seed: An Easter Sermon

There are two main threads running through Easter — one relates to the complex relationship between life, death, and rebirth, or resurrection, or life after death, or life eternal; it relates to the Biblical story of Jesus’ resurrection. The second relates to the onset of spring, the emergence of new life. We’ll touch on both of these strands today, perhaps even draw some fine threads that connect the two. We’re gonna start with a story — as you might remember Jesus was a big fan of using stories to help people struggle with hard things. So, we’re going to honor that tradition this morning with a third hand story — now you can look at that two ways: You can say to yourself, that third hand is used, likely to be inaccurate, near to being disposable. OR you can say, here’s something that might be of some worth, might be valuable enough to get handed from storyteller to storyteller as a way of grappling with the way life is… This story was lived by Martín Prechtel, who shared it orally with Stephen Jenkinson, who wrote about it in his book, and I’m going to quote it for you now…

Martín Prechtel told this story a good number of years ago, and I was lucky enough to be there when he did. I’ll probably add a little without knowing it and leave out something important, but I think the bones of the story are here. He was sitting one day with the old man who as his teacher. Maybe they were making things, or passing time together. All at once outside the house there was a great hue and cry going on. People we calling the old man’s name and generally in an uproar. The old man asked them in, and got them to calm themselves enough to say what their worry was. it seemed that the Protestant missionary that had set up shop in town months before was having a revival of some description in the town square. most of the folk had shown up. he’d whipped them up to a considerable torment with his stories of hell and sin and the rest, and these people took it to heart. So the old man had to come quick.

Now this old man was the head shaman to many thousands of people in that part of the country. He’d lived long enough to see just about everything, at least once, and his elaborate way of living with the unseen was duly noted far and wide. So of course he knew what was happening in the town square and what was at stak. The missionary was one part of the latest wave of a thorough legislative, religious, and military assault on indigenous people in that area and their way of life that had been ebbing and flowing for several hundred years. Off the old man went in the direction of the clamor.

He found the missionary in full fervor, dealing in sin and redemption in a slurry of badly managed Mayan. he found many of the people in real disarray and torment, particularly regarding this idea of hell. Most of us would probably guess that they feared ending up there. But the hardest part of this message for them was the possibility that their relatives and friends who had died without being saved were doomed and writhing at that very moment. They took their relationship with their dead, and their obligations to them, very seriously.

The missionary knew the old mand to be a staunch traditionalist and kingpin of the village hierarchy. The old man hadn’t yet appeared at the missionary’s performances, and many a thing looked to hang in the balance. If he could get the old man to sway, the whole place might come over to his particular Jesus. All eyes were trained on his unlikely and sudden appearance. The old man sat himself not at the periphery of somewhere in the crowd, withholding his attention, arms folded in sullen resentment, but right under the missionary’s nose, and he gave the acrobatic stranger his full face. The missionary turned his full zealous swagger on the crown of the old man’s head.

After a few minutes the old man began to nod in agreement with some of what he was hearing. He could be heard in a a kind of stage whisper admiring the snake and garden story, the tower and the babble story. A few minutes more and the began to show signs of real distress, holding his head and moaning a little. All eyes were upon him, and all — missionary, traditionalists, Protestant converts, Catholic stalwarts — were astonished at how quickly he was being made to see the light. Sensing that it was probably time to sink the hook, the missionary launched himself into a full articulation of the wages of sin, and then stopped.

“It needen’t be that way, brothers and sisters,” he said. “None of this need come to pass. If you take Jesus now as your own personal savior, you will gain the gift. Take Jesus, now, and the life everlasting will be yours. You don’t have to die.”

The old man was in full lament, but suddenly stopped. he lifted up his face, now wearing something like wonder with a hint of having known all along. “What? What was that you said, son? I won’t die?”

“No, grandfather. That’s what I said. This is the news we all want, and it is there for you. you won’t die.” The missionary was fairly sure he could smell fear, self-interest, and conversion (the usual brew in times like these) in the air.

The old man stood up slowly and gave the missionary a kind face. “Oh son you know, you almost had me. You almost had me there, you did.”

The missionary asked him, “I almost had you? What do you mean, grandfather?”

“Well, you know that we’ve been here for a long time, us Indians, and we’ve thought of a few good things. But that story of the garden and the snake, that was a good one. We don’t have anything like that. And your God sounds like a good one, giving us His son because He loves us. The water and the wine. Good ones, those. I liked everything I heard, until that part about not dying. Oh, no. You lost me there, son, and you won’t get me back.”

The Gothic cathedral of the missionary’s vision began to shift and moan and crack under the weight of this withered old man’s refusal of the gift of being saved from death. “But that’s the best part, grandfather. That’s the answer to all the fear and the suffering, and the sins.”

“I know you think so, son. It probably is the best part where you come from. But listen to me. I’ve learned some things in my time. You see all these people who have been listening to you? They come to me quite a bit for help and advice, and I try to teach them what I know. The truth is, no matter how long I talk with them from here on, even in big groups like you do, I’d never be able to tell them all the things I’ve gathered up through the years that could help them in their lives. They’ll have to wait for me to die to hear the rest.”

“Listen. We have a crazy old custom here. When I die they’ll make a big feast for me, and I’ll be there! They’ll dress me up good. They’ll start telling stories about me, true ones and some they’llmake up, and they’ll start remembering all their people who have died too and retelling their stories, and they’ll soon see their own death coming along some day and the ceremony that’ll be done for them, and how life is, and that’s how the rest of what I wish I could tell them will get told. They’ll tell the rest to each other. That’s how it will get spilled out for them. But if I take your Jesus, you say I won’t die. And if I don’t die there’ll be no feast. And without the feast, all these people won’t eat what I have learned. And they’ll starve a little. So I’ve thought about it, and I’m not going to starve them. Life here is hard enough, without having not to die.” the old man turned to the villagers and said, “Me, I’m going to get ready to die. You people can do what you want with what our friend here is telling you.” The old man dusted himself off, gave a good nod to everyone, and headed back to his house for supper.

I don’t tell you this story to ridicule missionaries, much as I feel the destruction that is done by them, unwittingly or not. I don’t tell it to lampoon theological sophistication or anyone’s one God religion, nor to whisper that every indigenous person has got it figured out and we don’t. But imagine being a kid in that crowd, hearing all that. The old man’s act of hard-earned faith in the way things are, his willingness for his life to be gathered up into Life, all during his life and at the hour of his death, his willingness to really die so his people could live, just as the corn in his field does, is the best teaching there can be on what it looks like for someone to be at home, living something that to him looks a lot like heaven, making his dying mean something to the the faithful witnesses around him, without rancor or argument, without having just visited the world. If heroism it is, then his heroism is the kind that has no enemy and no fight. Instead his way of loving his culture was to hold himself out to it in service by loving his life and by insisting that his way of dying serves life too. He wasn’t fighting with the missionary or with monotheism or with Jesus, I don’t think. He was wrestling the angel of what all of our lives are made of, endings of all kinds, and insisting on making there justice and mercy and meaning, without demonizing anything of what brings us there.

— Stephen Jenkinson, (Die Wise, p. 350–355)

Now, when I wrote my Christmas sermon, we struggled with Jesus’ core teaching about the transformative power of love — and we did some work to distinguish the religion OF Jesus from the religion ABOUT Jesus. This story invites us to peel back another layer of that onion. It invites us to ask questions that feel fraught with peril in this time where we’re trying to recover from generations of racism and colonialism — What would Jesus have thought about what was done in his name? And this story isn’t the worst, it’s not even in contention for such a title. Yet, I think that if Jesus had been hidden among the crowd that day, listening to the village elder and the protestant missionary. I think he would have heard, in the old man’s words, echoes of what he tried to tell his disciples at the last supper. My time is coming. Eat my death, that it might enrich your lives and teach you all that I won’t have time to teach you before I die. Remember what I taught you, remember me. In a way, he was asking of his disciples that they learn how to die by his example. Let’s contrast that with the missionary’s story, a story that IS colonialism in a nutshell. I, and I’m speaking as the missionary here, I am a representative of the chosen people and I have the password to eternal life, give up your heathen ways and follow me.

That’s what colonialism is, it is condescension on steroids. It is cultural superiority and racial superiority and social superiority and spiritual superiority all mixed up in a stew that tastes like this, “You have everything to learn from me, and I have nothing to learn from you.” And if I had to draw a fine distinction between how Jesus would have been with the Mayans and how his followers were… it would be this. I think Jesus would have approached the Mayan headman with the same curiosity and respect that he showed John the Baptist, the same acknowledgement of wisdom enthroned in human flesh.

We’ll turn now to our second story, the one from which the title of today’s sermon, Heart Like a Seed, is drawn. Like our first story it comes to us from one of my wisdom teachers, Stephen Jenkinson, again from his book Die Wise.

There are big things to know, and many of them hurt. At least they hurt the first few times you learn them. After that, after learning how to be devastated by how it is through this way of initiation, you might learn how to live as if how it is has justice and mercy and necessity to it. You can learn how to be a faithful witness, to be wrecked on schedule, to put your grief in your carry-on bag together with your other treasured things. My friend has twin daughters who are about eleven years old now. He split with their mom years ago, and sometimes you can see a little of the sadness stitched into the linings of their play clothes. One spring, when they learned that my wife and I would be on the road teaching and wouldn’t be able to plant seeds on our farm, the girls got some seedlings up and running for us, their first. In May they invited us to their house and presented us with some squash and tomato plants, a little spindly from want of sun and air but ready to carry on. In the fall, when they came to the farm for a visit, we had the squash for dinner. This is what I told them:

Most of the seeds that I’ve planted over the years, even the tiny ones, have a seam running down the middle of them. It’s the place where the two halves meet, or it’s the thing that keeps them from quite meeting, or it’s all of that. It’s a fissure or it’s a weld, or it’s both. Did you ever notice how almost every seed looks like a heart in some way? A little eccentric or lopsided, a little lumpy, the way most hearts are, maybe having more than two sides to them, but always that seam. That’s the place where they break. It’s not a metaphor. You can see it.

When we put seeds into the ground we have a feeling of hope for the future, maybe a feeling of promise for some kind of bounty on the other end of it all. It would do us all good to plant more seeds, probably. It would be a good thing if we thought a little about what we’re asking when we plant seeds, what we’re asking of the seed, what we’re doing to it. The seed catalogues won’t tell you this part, but it is true. First, it’s a little hard to tell if the seed is the youngest part of the plant or the oldest, or mysteriously both at once. Whatever it is, we make a hole in the dark earth and we bury it. We make as if it is dead, and we bury it. Or wa are asking it to die by burying it. Or both. We are losing sight of it, that little heart-shaped thing, and we won’t see it again. When you call it “planting” you don’t quite get the feel of what you are doing to the seed. When you say youare asking the seed, the grandfather or the grandchild of the plant you want to see, to die, you’re getting close. You’re getting a little of the feel of things, a little of the consequence of what you’re asking.

In the cool, dark ground, if all goes well, the seed breaks. I don’t know if that means it is willing to break, but breaking seems inherent in it being shaped that way. And it seems that it can’t break on its own, sitting in a jar on a shelf somewhere. Some subtle combination of things has to congeal, and then it can break. There seem to be thousands of ways those things can combine — lots of water or not much, cold or cool or warm temperatures, who knows what kind of soil nutrient combinations — but for all that it still seems a delicate, unguaranteed thing that against the odds happens anyway. It breaks, and then life comes. It has to be brought to the ground to break. It isn’t a metaphor any more than your heart is a metaphor, or your grief, or your death. It is this way with our life and with our inner life. Everything we treasure deeply, and even our way of treasuring deeply, has that shape, has that weld, that way of knowing how to break. Our job is not to break it. That is the job of the world, which knows very well how to break it. Our job is to be willing to have it broken and to learn to live that way. Our job is to make a little hole in the field of our days with an old digging stick, to ask the heart-shaped desires we have for our lives to die, to lose sight of them, and to learn to recognize the new life tendril that has cleared the surface sometime after we forget where that heart-shaped thing went into the ground. Simple.

The unlikely, ordinary miracle of this rises up out of the earth of our life dangling the seed sheath that once was who we thought we were and what we thought most deserved to last, almost split in two but joined close to the new shoot. The sheath that was the heart-shaped thing is brown and withered. It’s one half is our sorrowing realization that life asks, nudges, sometimes forces the heart of each living thing to break, so that life can live. It is the grief that grows from giving in to the greater understanding that life is bigger in every way than the human life span, and must be. The other half is the awe and the love of life that begin to shir in us, born from seeing that this has all been going on without us knowing it, feeding us this whole time, waiting for us to come to this understanding and to take our place in the story and to keep up our end. Keeping up our end means awakening to the obligation we have to all that has given us life, to all that has lived and died before us. With it all comes and unbidden understanding that each of us is incalculably, inextinguishably obligated to life for our life, and that this is a debt that we cannot and should not be able to repay. It will always be so. With the soil temperature and the chemistry and the moisture — that is, with the head of the heavy labor of learning all this, with the elixir of willingness and capacity of the heart that this learning makes in you, with the tears of knowing that there are tears in all things — just so, your broken heartedness becomes your life, where all this understanding is lived.

Just keep up your end and let your heart be planted. The, without you meaning for this to be so, your time of dying can turn into an old field with all the plough ruts mostly filled in by the wind, where others who are out for a walk unexpectedly, finally, and without seeking it get a chance to learn big things. They don’t know they are walking through the windblown field of your ending days. They just hear a bit of the story, they might turn to face the wind, and it begins. Even your loved ones will lose sight of you for a time, by asking you to die finally and by getting our of the way and by helping you do it, more and more heartbroken all the while. If your dying time is messy enough and gives a whole village of people lots to do, your heart is planted in the soil of their lives. By finding in the little tendril that comes from your broken heart and theirs, the green straining toward life, you live. By learning what you meant to them while you remember all those who until now have been unremembered as you went your way, you grow kinship. By asking the Old Ones to remember you now, and to make a place for you among them: That is how grief waters life. That is how grief gets learned. That is how a village is made, by your life being spilled on the groaning board in the banquet hall of life, where all the big stories are told again. That is what human redemption looks like.

— Stephen Jenkinson, (Die Wise, p. 373–376)