Please join us for the last supper and midweek worship service today, March 20th. Supper is at 6 pm and worship (Holden Evening Prayer) is at 7 pm both are in the gathering space.
Week five: Listen, God is calling you to bear fruit
from: “Listen! God is Calling.” SEIA Synod Resource
by the Rev. Erika R Uthe Director for Evangelical Mission, Assistant to the Bishop Southeastern Iowa Synod, ELCA
Verses
Jeremiah 31:31-33
Overview
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant… Once again in this fifth week of Lent, we have a new covenant, a new way of God saving God’s people. Only this time there are no outward signs, no miraculous deeds done, and no angel visits. This time the covenant comes as a quietly cleansed heart on which is written God’s law. It is an entire people that no longer needs teaching or reminding because their hearts know and follow God. As we’ve spent time hearing again the stories of God’s various covenants with God’s people over the last several weeks, it has been a beautiful study of how God’s love is forever calling creation onward. ‘It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt…’ With each new generation, God calls the people to a new covenant, one that meets them in their need and provides God’s salvation. As we near Holy Week, we are reminded in the covenant from Jeremiah that God’s forgiveness of sin and freedom from iniquity lies at the heart of this life God intended and that Jesus Christ, God’s son given for the salvation of the world, is the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets, the final covenant. It is in the person of Jesus Christ that God’s covenant of love for all the cosmos is finally fulfilled, not in power or might, but in faithful, gentle, and persistent love, which is so selfless Christ was willing to enter into death itself to bring redemption.
Jesus himself said that, ‘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.’ This pattern of death and resurrection, while extremely difficult to live out and trust, is in fact how God’s love overcomes sin, death, and the devil. It is the call and of discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in The Cost of Discipleship:
The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering that every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
This entire season of Lent has focused on the promise of death and resurrection, the daily dying and rising with Christ in baptism, and the new ways God has continually provided life out of death. As disciples we are called to welcome this cycle of death and resurrection, to trust that only by letting go can we experience the life God intends. God is calling the church of this generation – come, and die, not the final death, but the death of a seed waiting in the dark soil for life to spring forth. The theme verse for our season talks about God making rivers in the desert, a way when the path is obscure.
The question for our generation is not, ‘how can we bring the past back?’ but ‘what needs to die in order for God’s Spirit to bring new life?’ The question could easily accompany questions about our own motivations, our own idols, and our own insistence that we know what is best for God and the world today. Listen church, do you not hear? Can you not perceive? God is calling the church today to look for the rivers in the desert. Food deserts came up in conversation the other day, along with all sorts of other kinds of deserts that have cropped up in the fertile ground of rural Iowa: healthcare deserts, social service deserts, etc.
What kind of river will God bring forth in these deserts? What kind of fruit might be borne from the seeds of the church’s death today? Could it be that the ministry of tomorrow looks less like education wings full of children, and more like space used by county services or traveling nurses? Or the rides to worship on Sundays transformed into rides to dialysis on Monday? Of course, these kinds of rivers are already starting to flow, as congregations become re-rooted in their neighborhoods and communities. Congregations partnering with community gardens and feeding programs, or their neighboring elementary schools. These signs of the church bearing fruit are the signs of God’s covenant – of love lived out in discipleship. It is as the camp song from a few decades ago went (feel free to sing this in your best rap voice):
By this my father’s glorified:
that you bear much fruit (much fruit).
So you p-p-prove to be
disciples of me
By clinging to the cross of Christ, the very cross marked on the brows of believers in the waters of baptism, the cross etched on in ash at the start of Lent, the church finds that in the act of dying, it might bear the fruit of God’s love.