The Chapel of St. James the Fisherman

Jesus and his disciples are walking down a country road and pass a grain field. He picks a blade and says, There is something about this grain that is true of all life, even our own. “Except a grain falls into the earth and dies it lives to itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This is true about life; it always follows death.

Fred Buechner is one of my favorite authors. He wrote once an article in the Christian Century called How My Mind Has Changed in the Last Ten Years. In that article he says that he used to dread his own dying and all that goes with it. But over time he had come to believe that “death is a nonevent,” as he put it, and continues “We become something new by ceasing to be something old.”

In other words...One stage of lifeopens into the next; there is nothing in between. Christ spoke about this process, a grain dying and a new life emerging. The old becomes new. Always.

Think of your own growing up..Born-baby-child-teen-married-parent. Though we are not aware of it at first we died at each step before going on. We are unaware of dying at first then as a teen we begin to hold on to certain things. In our adult life, things begin to get more complicated as we hold on to more and more things and the final death looks to be an end. The truth we come to know is that the child in us must die before the adult can be born. And we also come to gradually know that the best of each stage is born into the next stage. The hard part is learning to let go and so move ahead. The old must cease before the new can begin.

And then we see this same process as we deal with our spiritual self. Sins, habits, prejudices, failures, selfishness, guilt, regrets etc. hang on. It gets harder here; we often can’t see ahead. Again the fight is to let go of the baggage. We can only do that when we are assured that a death of any of these things leads to a new life we cannot imagine. Christ says it does. So we learn to let go.

There is in the Prayer Book a wonderful prayer for youth. “Help them to take failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a chance for a new start... give them strength to hold their faith in you. ” And there is a beautiful absolution, “Now there is rejoicing in heaven, For you were lost and are now found, You were dead and are now alive in Christ Jesus. Go in peace.”

Something new comes out of something old. We are dying into life.

You can see the same process in the life of Christ. He was called out of carpentry into servanthood. He couldn’t be both. He had to leave his manner of life in order to be a servant. When he began preaching he became an embarrassment to his family and he was asked to leave and that was a death. then one day as he took up the life of servanthood someone asked him about his mother and father and brothers and sisters. He said, Look around you; here are my mother and my father and my brothers and sisters. Finally, on the cross (the sum of all the other deaths he has known) he says, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. It is this same trust that he has shown all through his life, believing that the new comes out of the old.

And so he died the final death in this world just as he had died all the smaller ones. And suddenly his followers declare that he is with them again. How-in what form or shape-doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is the excitement in all of them. They knew, saw, heard him with them. They all had the same experience of him. He was there with them.
God is faithful, Christ had said. Out of the end God creates the beginning. Trust was a key word in Christ’s life. So trust is our word. For it is into that life of growing to trust that we are baptized. Baptism is not the automatic key to heaven. It’s our beginning a life of trust that life follows any death. The symbolism is clear. We are baptized with water. Water is a sign of death. We cannot live in water. But it is also a sign of life. We cannot live without it.

At Baptism we started to become something new by beginning to let go of something old. We began to put ourselves , as Paul wrote, at God’s disposal “as dead people raised to life, ambassadors of the new life of Christ.” Out of the end a new beginning over and over. We can trust him. The last death is the same as all the little deaths. They all open into life. Out of nothing God creates something new. Out of death comes life. Trust it to be true. It never ceases in this life or ? Life follows death as the sun follows night.

John Masefield wrote:

Sing earth and heaven, sing.
For God our life and King
Has given us light and spring
And morning breaking.
Now may our souls arise
In kinship to the skies
And God unseals our eyes
To an awakening.

After the winter snows
A wind of healing blows
And thorns put forth a rose
And lilies cheer us.
Life’s everlasting spring
Hath robbed death of its sting
Henceforth a cry can bring
Our Master near us.

Life follows death just as sure as the sun follows darkness. Something new out of something old. And after life here and death, we go from strength to strength in that heavenly kingdom just as have been doing on earth.

Christ is risen! We too are risen again and again, now and forever.