Hinde Street Sermons
Sermon preached on 2 April 2006 by
Simeon Mitchell
Readings: Jeremiah 31:31-34, John
12:20-33
It’s time to let go.
That was Jesus’ message to the Gentiles who came to see him in today’s Gospel reading. It was God’s message to Jesus as he faced his own painful journey to the cross. And it’s my message to you today.
Let go of selfishness, of pride, of the fear of failure and
of death.
Let go of all that stops us taking risks, putting our faith
in God and into action.
Jesus says: If you cling to your life, guarding it against
all threats, it will slip away from you, but if you let go and follow my way,
you’ll never lose it.
It is a command which recurs in similar form in all four
Gospels, so we can be confident of its importance. Yet it can be a troubling
instruction, an apparent paradox that is all too easy to dismiss. If we are
serious about being disciples of Jesus, about our Christian commitment, it is a
message we need to hear over and over again.
“Whoever
loves his life will lose it, but he who hates himself in this world will be
given eternal life.”
What does it mean? That we should do our best to be
miserable, because unhappiness is a shortcut to heaven? That would go against
everything we know about God being the bringer of life and joy. That we should
eagerly anticipate our own demise – and be reckless in the way we care for
ourselves? That would go against everything Jesus says about the purpose to
which we should put our lives.
But do we need something of the dissatisfaction of the
former attitude, and the willingess to take risks of the latter. For Jesus is
saying that the meaning of life eludes those who try and live it up. When life
revolves around me, I am not really living at all. But when my self-centeredness
finally begins to die, finally I begin to live.
Jesus turns to images of nature where death and life coexist
on a constant cycle, to make his point. The seed dies in the ground and
comes up again with new life, giving a great abundance back to the earth. We
watch the trees every autumn as green leaves lose their life-giving power of
photosynthesis, turning brown, yellow and red and plunging to colourful
death. But what might these natural examples have to do with a human life,
when we die not with beautiful leaves or more seeds but in loss of faculties
and bodies that waste away before us?
The truth is parts of us are dying all the time. We’ve each
lost several million cells since the beginning of this sermon. The healthy
human body loses about 100,000 cells per second. Fortunately, just as many
new cells are usually produced to replace them. Healthy bodies have this
constant cycle of dying cells and rebirth of new ones. It is those cells that
don’t die off in the normal cycle that are the problem. These are the
cancerous cells which corrode from within, getting in the way of the healthy
development of the body.
This is true in the spiritual and emotional life as well as
the physical one. “Whoever loves his life will
lose it, but those who lose their lives for my sake will save it.” Our
failure to let go and let some things die is a primary spiritual disease, for
new life can’t come without some death. The failure to forgive leads to
death of relationship, while anger and bitterness ravage the spirit like a cancer.
Holding on to regrets strangles hope before it can lift us to new
life. Trying to control events and other people leads to frustration,
excessive stress, and exhaustion. Forgiveness and letting go of control are
spiritual exercises in the art of dying so that new life may abound.
So this dying is not something which happens just once at
the end of our life. It is something which happens every day. We need to die to
our selves, our selfishness and our fears. We need a willingness to let go,
surrender control, accept where the journey takes us.
What do we, what do you,
need to let go of today, in order to live?
It can be hard to let go. We fear losing face, losing our
grip, losing our sense of security. And above all, we fear death. Even Jesus
feared it. In the Gospel passage, we encounter John’s version of the Gethsemane
moment, when Jesus considers pleading with God to save him from the fate which
awaits him. It is a temptation we all face – to turn away from difficult
realities and hard choices.
So how do we let go? Like Jesus, we have to trust God. Trust
in the promises he makes to us, again and again through history. Trust in the
words spoken to the prophet Jeremiah: “I shall be their God, and they shall be
my people. All of them, high and low alike, will know me, for I shall forgive
their wrongdoing, and their sin I shall call to mind no more.” We can let go,
because we are held secure in the hand of God. As the hymn we shall sing later
puts it, God’s is a love which “will not let us go”.
And we let go by following Jesus, the way of the cross, the
way of service. As Jesus says, “If anyone is to follow me, he must serve me;
where I am, there will my servant be. Whoever serves me will be honoured by the
Father.” By giving our lives to the service of others, as Jesus did, we move
away from that corrosive self-centredness, and put ourselves on a path to true
understanding and real discipleship. As John Vincent memorably puts it, if we
put our feet where Jesus’ are, then our stomach, our heart and our head will
follow – usually in that order!
Or, as it’s phrased in the prayer of St Francis of Assisi,
“it is in giving that we receive; it is in dying that we are born to
eternal life.”
This points to the most important reason why we need to let
go. Not only because the things that are behind us are not good for us, but
because by letting go, we open up before us a world of new possibilities. As TS
Eliot says in the Four Quartets, “to make an end is to make a beginning.”
Endings are something I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately,
as I prepare to leave London to get married in a couple of months time. Finding
the right way to let things go – the friends I’m used to having around me, my
home and my neighbourhood, this church and all that it means to me – so I can move
on to the excitement of new life in Oxford. Letting go therefore seems an
appropriate subject for what will probably be my last sermon at Hinde Street!
In order to move
on, we must take the risk of letting go of all that we hold secure. We must
give up the seed to the ground in order for it to take root and bear fruit.
Jesus had to follow the road to death, before he could draw everyone to himself
in glory.
For the journey we are asked to make every day precisely
mirrors that which Christ had to make to the cross and beyond. Letting go of
our fears and our selfish desires, trusting in God, allowing death to happen so
new life can spring forth. In this passage, Christ uses the meaning of death in
both senses; his literal death was his death to the self for the good of
others. The analogy of the seed, which has to die and be buried before it can
germinate and bear a rich harvest, paints this point beautifully. Christ’s
death and resurrection became the example and the power for our self-giving.
So to come back to where I began – for, as Eliot says, “what
we call the beginning is often the end.”
It is time to let go.
Let go of all that harms you. The past is forgiven,
forgotten. Put it behind you. It has died: today is a new beginning.
Let go of all that you fear. Embarassment, exposure,
failure, death. Trust in God.
Let go of all that corrupts you. Leave your pride, your
selfishness, your desire for possessions or sensations behind. Follow Jesus.
And you will have life.
Amen.