This World Wasn’t Built for Us

John 12:20-33

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, ‘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.

‘Now my soul is troubled. 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.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

Let’s be real—this world, the world we live in right now, is just not conducive to being a Christian. And no, I’m not saying it’s hard to be a Christian in any kind of way relating to oppression. Christians have, since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, had a monopoly on power and influence in this country, to be sure. As I’ve talked about in recent sermons, following Jesus requires huge sacrifices, is risky, and often dangerous. And here we have Jesus, through John, once again speaking in mind-bending contradictions, giving followers, listeners, and readers a heads up about what it means to follow Jesus in this world.

“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Is Jesus telling us that we’re better off dead here? Is Jesus once again asking us to throw all our possessions and commitments and loved ones to the wind to follow him? Not quite, I don’t think. What I want to focus on here is the simple three words, “…in this world…”. In this world. Think about the people Jesus was talking to… who in his world would hate their lives? The powerful? Those surrounded by riches and servants and with more food than they could eat? Of course they don’t hate their lives in the world they’re living in, they’re winning the world they’re living in. No, those who probably hated their lives were the poor folks, the folks whose lives didn’t revolve around money because they didn’t get money to revolve around… those who hated their lives were the ones doing the very unpopular things Jesus was commanding, like giving up your attachments to money, to self… like going up against oppressive powers and calling for change and a new way of life. Life was not easy for those folks. So this was a warning of sorts, but also encouragement. Things are tough now, but I promise they’ll get better. “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it…”, I believe, is a much more convoluted version of “the meek will inherit the earth.”

Fast forward to today: think about the people who make top news stories, think about people who are in power, think about the kind of attitudes that our society rewards… rarely are thoughtful, quiet, and humble people put on a pedestal. In a world that rewards the loudest, the most arrogant with success, with attention, with power, it can feel like if you’re not acting totally bombastic, clawing your way to the top, that you’re not trying hard enough, that you’re not doing life right. It can make the meek among us feel like failures. And you know, maybe by this world’s standards, this world’s money-driven, consumerist standards, maybe they, maybe we are failures. But church, in a world where success is measured by volume and money, hard-headedness, and hard-heartedness, do we even want to be what’s traditionally thought of as successful in this world?

When I was doing my chaplaincy internship in Beverly, MA, my supervisor recognized something in me—she recognized that I tended to give myself a hard time about being as quiet and reserved as I was—that I was sort of self-deprecating about being an introvert. She gave me a book to read, about surviving being introvert in an extrovert world. If I’m being honest, I don’t remember much of the actual content of book, but what it did was show me that this world that we live in really does cater to a specific type of person, and if we don’t fit that mold, the world is a lot harder to navigate. And being an introvert in a world that caters to extroverts is just one of many examples. Let’s also think of what it means to be a disabled person in a world that caters almost exclusively to the able-bodied—so many seemingly simple things we take for granted are virtually impossible for disabled folks to navigate—keeping track of what spaces are accessible and which aren’t, what kind of transportation they’ll need to get to said space, and how much more time it will take them than an able-bodied person. And to be a Black person navigating predominantly white spaces: Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale, speaks of Black folks navigating traditionally white spaces, like the Ivy League, for example: he says, “You have to disabuse people of the idea that their ghetto stereotypes apply to you. You have to do a dance to demonstrate that you’re educated, that you’re clean, that you’re not a gangster,” —and doing this “dance” as Anderson says,  is in addition to doing whatever work is required of you in that space. And being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated space: A good friends of mine works for an engineering firm in Boston and constantly has to put up with comments about what she wears, or told to calm down when tactfully expressing an opinion, making her feel uncomfortable, self-conscious, adding another layer of anxiety to an already demanding work environment. There’s being LGBTQ in predominantly straight spaces, there’s being neuro-atypical, or coping with mental illness in spaces that just don’t take those things into account; Church, the list goes on, and on. I want to us to remember the fact that Jesus did not fit in—the world did not cater to Jesus, and in fact actively worked against him—because he was working to bring about a world that would cater to everyone, a world that would bring the powerful down a peg or two or several; and he struggled and suffered and died for that purpose. 

But this is a tricky tightrope to walk, Church. We can understand and recognize that the world runs counter to everything Jesus teaches, and we can be mad about, and we can fight it (and we should!), but what we can’t do is revel in it. We can’t suffer and struggle just for the sake of suffering and struggling. Because yes, Jesus is warning us that we might have a difficult time following his ways in this world, but we know that God, and in turn Jesus loves us unconditionally. God doesn’t want us to suffer. We’re not medieval monks, we don’t have to go around wearing hairshirts and self-flagellating to prove our faith. I think, in fact, a lot of harm has been done by glorifying pain and suffering. There’s been a sadly pervasive notion in some sects of Christianity that suffering makes one closer to God. But this just isn’t true. We don’t suffer to be closer to God. God, in the form of Jesus, suffered to be closer to us. Jesus suffered so that whenever we do suffer in a world that is not built for us, we are not alone in that suffering. And if we do glorify suffering, it makes people less likely to do the work to alleviate the suffering of others—if we think that suffering on its own makes someone more holy, why would we fight that? Church, Jesus ultimately conquered that suffering and death in his coming resurrection; why in this world would he want us to continue to suffer?

“My soul is troubled…” Jesus says. Proof here, that Jesus did in fact suffer even before his crucifixion. Proof that though Jesus was confident in God’s plan and understood what is necessary, his soul was troubled by the fear of what lay ahead. Proof that Jesus did not always like living in this world that fought tooth and nail against his radical vision of harmony and peace, his vision and mission for lifting up the meek and outcast. But Jesus stayed true to God’s plan for him and suffered and died for this radical vision.

My soul is troubled daily, Church. Isn’t yours? Continued reminders that this world caters to the powerful and the moneyed, not the meek and the poor. Continued reminders of the extra hurdles the underprivileged have to jump to have a chance in this world. Continued reminders of despicable violence against those who are already marginalized—there was a racially, misogynistic-motivated mass shooting again this week, Church! My soul is troubled.  

But the good news is this: we’re not Jesus, Church. We’re not called to suffer. We are warned that we may surely struggle and suffer doing the work Jesus calls us to do in this world, but Jesus does not want us to suffer. Jesus only warns us that in this world, we may not be able to avoid it. In this world that has turned against the light, that pays no attention to the outcast, this world that has ignored the pleas of Asian-American activists for months about the growing number of hate crimes and racist harassment since the beginning of this pandemic. This world.

“Now my soul is troubled,” Jesus says. And we know what happens in the coming weeks, what Jesus is foreshadowing—we know Jesus did not go quietly, we know Jesus felt pain and grief, and that makes me know that Jesus doesn’t want us to feel that pain. He knows how it feels to be hurt, to be reviled; so how could someone, something that loves us so much want us to feel any semblance of that pain? Jesus doesn’t want that. God doesn’t want that. But Jesus knows that if we continue to live in a broken world, if we live in a world that has been so profoundly corrupted by greed and arrogance and hate and violence, that our lives in this world won’t be easy if we don’t give into that greed and arrogance and hate and violence.

But I don’t want us, I don’t want anyone, to hate our lives, to hate their lives, Church. I also don’t want to give into the temptations of an easier life. What I do want is this: to work towards a world in which the meek, the poor, the good, won’t hate their lives. I don’t want us to have to wait until our next life to have contentment. What I want is, with your help, to work towards a new world that caters to all. Church, when Jesus says “…when I am lifted up from the earth, [I] will draw all people to myself.’ That all there is from a genderless Greek word. When Jesus says all, he means all. Every single person. We are all saved, we are all going be okay. But in this world, even after everything Jesus went through to overcome hatred, violence, and death, in this world, things are too broken for Jesus’ death and resurrection to have the meaning it’s supposed to.

So Church—this is a big task—but let’s change that. It’s Lent. It’s a very Lenten Lent, and there is hope in the immediate horizon; Jesus’ resurrection is about to usher in warm weather, gathering and worshipping together again, in person; Jesus’ resurrection is about to usher in a new post-COVID era. Let’s make Jesus’ death and resurrection mean something again. When we hear God’s voice confirming for us that Jesus and Jesus’ works of peace, justice, and reconciliation must be glorified, we won’t mistake it for thunder; we won’t mistake it for angels. We’ll know that it’s our call to change this world. We’ll change this world so that it’s no longer a world that’s impossible to navigate for some and unthinkably easy for others.

I don’t know about you all, but I don’t want to wait until the next life to have a comfortable world for all. I don’t want a world in which people have to suffer and die and be martyred for real change to happen. Did eight people really have to violently die this past week for us to realize how much racism against Asian-Americans had increased? Or to make remind us how horrible hatred of and violence against women remains in this country?  Let’s not wait until the next world for everything to be okay. Let’s work to save this one. We can make Jesus’ death and resurrection mean something again. When we struggle, when we suffer, we can take some heart that this broken world wasn’t made for us… but we can’t let it end with our suffering. Let’s be sure that struggle motivates us to change this world into a world that is navigable and good for all people. Amen.