Cracked Open

Do you know what I mean when I say the words “prosperity gospel”? Also called the “health and wealth gospel.” Forms of it have been around for centuries. Look at the Book of Job and you can see what people have been thinking for centuries about how this thing called “faith” is supposed to work. But a uniquely American version rose up and took particularly potent form here beginning in the late 1800s, and it still thrives, maybe more than ever.

At the core of the health and wealth gospel is the claim that God rewards faith, particularly with financial blessing and physical well-being. It’s a theology of success. It’s a theology of control. It teaches that you can control the bad things that happen to you simply by having more faith, enough faith, the right faith, better praying, better thinking. It teaches that you can bring happiness and good things into life by living and thinking in the right ways. Your faith is a ladder to your success.

This is not the gospel Jesus preached. The cross did not look very much like a ladder to success. And up until two months ago, I did not think that this was the gospel I believed. I thought I understood that faith was not about being rewarded for our belief or our actions. I have preached my entire adult life against the heresies of such a contractual, self-serving, idolatrous, individualistic understanding of faith. I have understood the temptations of this teaching – it’s all around us – but I thought I had thoroughly rejected it. I was wrong.

Two months ago, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with advanced cancer, and I discovered the truth. I am as hung up on the gospel of success as any American Christian. Turns out, I fully expected that my life was meant to be a series of progressions, from one success to the next, and only ever up. It turns out that I thought, just like every other American Christian, that I was exceptional. With some losses here and there, of course, but nothing that would thoroughly detonate my happy, successful, well-built life.[i]

A difficult diagnosis can have a way of breaking you down, of making you see the things you believe that you didn’t think you believed, of making you admit how much you had been counting on the life you had planned, how much you’d been clinging to those plans, and how much you’d been assuming it was what God had planned for you, too. You might even discover that you in fact did assume that the good things you had in your life were some kind of reward for right living, right thinking, and right praying.

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Now here we are, in the deep of Lent, and while I’m still trying to make sense of my own personal suffering and losses, I cannot help but see how urgently Lent presses us to be honest about suffering and loss in all its forms. How clear the Lenten journey makes it that suffering is not a sign of God’s punishment but is instead a bearer of God’s presence. As Christians, we embrace a path that has death at its very center. Center. Not its end, mind you, but its center. The cross stands at the center of our faith, and if we don’t reckon with it, then the gospel we are trying to live is not the gospel of Jesus. It’s the gospel of America, it’s the gospel of success, but it’s not the gospel of Jesus. If we cannot understand suffering, loss, and death in a radically different way from our American culture of success, then we do not really stand a chance at seeing Jesus, much less following him.

We heard it in our gospel story a bit ago. Some foreigners came one day to Phillip, one of Jesus’ disciples. They were Greeks, in Jerusalem for Passover. They came to Phillip and said, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” And Phillip told Andrew, and together they went and told Jesus. And here is how Jesus responded to this request – he told them he was going to die. He said “glorified,” “the Son of Man will be glorified,” but it turns out what he meant is that he was going to die. The cross is at the center not the end.

“We would see Jesus,” they said. “You want to see?” he responded. “See this: My suffering. My death. The hour has come.”

Then he tells a little parable. “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

What does a seed do, but go down into the dark? It falls down, into the deep, into the dank earth. And it dies. It cracks open. It gives itself up. And it does this not for the sake of dying but for the sake of living, for life to spring out of it. It has to break, for the life to come. And this is how Jesus responds when the Greeks say they wish to see him. Look at this, he says. Look at the seed, how it falls, how it cracks, how it dies. See me.

Jesus saw his death coming, and John makes it very clear that he gave himself to it. He was no victim. “No one takes my life from me; I lay it down.” He laid his life down into the pain of this world.

It was what he came for – to give himself completely, in love. He did not avoid suffering, or deny it, or try to lift us all out of it (as if that could or should be done); instead, he gave himself to it. The grain falls to the ground and dies so that the wheat can grow. His death, like that of the seed, is necessary, and it is life-giving.

“Those who love their life will lose it,” he went on to say, “and those who reject their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me.” To reject the life of this world is to push back at our culture’s narrow definitions of what it means to live an abundant life. John makes it so clear that Jesus has come to bring abundant life. But the abundant life Jesus brings does not fit into our small, success-based definitions. We cannot limit the abundance of Jesus to such self-focused matters as health, wealth, happiness, “success.” The life Jesus came to bring blows the limits off our imaginations.

To see Jesus clearly requires looking honestly at suffering, loss, pain, death. To follow him means we, too, willingly die. Not necessarily physically – though of course that is coming for us all – but we die to our claim on the life we thought we deserved. We die to our illusions of self-made success. We die to our notions of positive thinking in the American tradition. We die to the notion that life is a series of rewards or punishments based on how successfully we can pull ourselves together and manage our lives and think positive thoughts and pray perfect prayers.

The seed of Jesus’ life fell to the earth, was buried, sat there in the dark, hidden, until it swelled, cracked, and broke open into new life. That life blossomed into a community of the beloved, people who, together, would redefine the meaning of their life based on his death – they would quit their self-focused, individual ways, and turn instead towards each other and the world, in this self-dying, self-giving love.

In his suffering and death, Jesus absorbed the worst the world could do and he didn’t do any of it back. It was put to death with him. Which is not at all to say that bad things don’t still happen, but that in his death, he broke their power over us.[ii] He conquered their ability to define us – or our response. In his death, the power of God’s transforming, self-giving love was lifted up over every other power.

Part of what this means is that we do pray and ask and hope for what we want and need. Of course we pray. We say our audacious prayers. We name our deepest desires before a loving God. But in our praying, and in our thinking, and in our living, we also practice radical trust – the trust that, beyond any disappointment, defeat, despair, or death, God is still and always at work, for our rising, for our abundant life, beyond what we can imagine or control.

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If you are living right now in a season of cracking, breaking, falling, know this: you are not alone. When you fall to the earth like a cracked open seed, there are more of us there, so many more of us, who are there with you, including Jesus himself. You do not have to resent or deny your reality. You can open your heart to the pain of it, trusting that the pain will not be the whole story. Because the cross is not the end; it’s the beginning. There is life, abundant life, coming for you, in ways you cannot predict or control, not even with your prayers. There is life, abundant life, coming for you, and in you, in us.

And if you are not living right now in a season of cracking, breaking, falling, know this: it comes for all of us, sooner or later. There is no escape from pain and suffering, not in this life, which is why Jesus keeps inviting us to die to ourselves. It’s good practice. The more often we practice dying to ourselves, the more we loosen our grip on what we think we deserve, the more we quit our self-focus, our sense of entitlement, our sense of exceptionalism, the more we disabuse ourselves of the notion that our success is some kind of reward for good living, the better able we will be to follow Jesus down – not up – follow him down into the painful realities of our world, where we will see him, and where we will become the fruit of his love for the world he loves.

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Here is something I have learned in the two months since my diagnosis. When your life cracks open, you still have choices. You can resist the breaking, let it make you bitter, hard, resentful. Or you can deny the breaking, pretend that everything is fine, let no one see you vulnerable or scared or sad or angry – in other words, let no one in. Or you can yield. Submit. Accept. Give in (which is not the same as giving up). Let yourself be cracked open. Let yourself fall. (By the way, if you choose the path of resentment or denial, it doesn’t mean your life won’t crack open – it just means you will be bitter or in denial when it happens.)

When your life cracks, if you let it happen, if you let yourself fall, you will also find the truth of what Jesus teaches: something will bloom from the seed of your broken heart, something you cannot yet see or comprehend. There’s a temptation, when our lives are so put-together and we feel so on top of things, there’s a temptation to be self-focused, self-interested, self-managed, self-made. But unless a grain falls, it remains just a single grain. In the falling and the cracking, something new happens. There’s an openness that wasn’t there before. Instead of the well-defended, put-together life or the life-in-denial-of-difficulty, there is the cracked-open heart. A seed broken open to life beyond itself. To other seeds beyond itself.

In the falling and the breaking, you can find a new, deeper kinship with all who suffer, including Jesus. When your life cracks and your heart breaks, if you yield to it, if you let yourself fall with it, you will discover that there are other broken-open seeds there in the ground with you, ready, waiting, to grow into something more with you. That’s us, church. That’s us. That’s who we are. That’s what the church really is – we are the seeds of Jesus’ love, seeds that fall together into dark places so that, together, we might bloom with abundant life for each other, and for the world.

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[i] It was in reading the book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, by Kate Bowler (Random House, February 2018), last month that I was confronted with how much I had bought into the gospel of success. Dr. Bowler, a church historian who also wrote the first comprehensive history of the American prosperity gospel, was diagnosed at the age of 35 with stage IV colon cancer. I highly recommend her recent memoir.

[ii] For the core of my understanding of this text, I am indebted to Barbara Brown Taylor, specifically “Unless a Grain Falls,” in God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering (Abingdon Press, 1998), and to Gail O’Day, “John,” The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke – John (Volume 9), (Abingdon Press, 1996).