It’s been a weird week. At the same time I was attending a church member on hospice in his last days, the first daffodil bloomed at my new house. This weekend marked both the anniversary of all the Covid shut downs, as well as the anniversary of my first marriage. A year ago I was lamenting the fact that I would never be able to leave Mankato because of a shared custody agreement, and a year later I own a house in Wisconsin. Last winter, I struggled to believe that I could ever return to traditional parish ministry because it doesn’t match well with the life of a widowed parent, and now I am planning for my first Holy Week with a new congregation.

Everywhere I look death and resurrection stand right beside each other.

And even though I know this is how our faith life goes, I’m still resistant to the death part. I only want life and resurrection, spring and new growth, joy and sunshine. I want to skip the dying and letting go, the decay and dark clouds. Into this resistance, all week Jesus has been speaking these words from the Sunday gospel I was preparing to preach: “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”.

In John’s gospel more than any other, Jesus comes into his ministry knowing he will die and fully accepting that. In other gospels, he is resistant like me, asking that this hard thing be taken away from him as he prays in the garden. In John? He says dying is exactly what he came to do. To dwell with us, to abide with us, and to die like us. I covet his acceptance, his confidence in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life as the Lutheran funeral liturgy puts it.

We know from our experience of the seasons that death and resurrection is built into the very fabric of this world. We witness this impossible truth annually, that what dies in the fall, and lies frozen and bare in the winter needs only the nudge of warmth and water to spring back to life. We trust all winter that this dormancy will return to life in a matter of time, yet we falter in trust when it is the death of our beloveds, our relationships, our hopes and dreams on the line. 

Resurrection is vegetal, as one commentator I read this week said, but we don’t trust it in our own animal experience. 

What would happen, I wonder, if we simply gave in to the deaths, little and enormous which surround us daily? What would happen if we trusted that what is currently dying is the single grain which must fall into the earth, so that its decay might feed abundant fruit?

Please hear me, because I am not saying that death is a good thing in itself. There is good reason to resist it. But we are foolish to think that the God who died in Jesus cannot also use death to make something new. We aren’t listening to the story if we cannot hear promise in the midst of ashes and dust. We aren’t paying attention if we think tombs could ever be the end of the story.

Every spring, in every leaf and sprout and bud, God bears witness to the persistence of life in this world They have made. Every spring, we rehearse this same story of Lent and Holy Week and Easter which tells us even the most sudden and tragic and cruel death cannot destroy the promise of life which God makes. Resurrection requires death, they work in tandem to reveal the power and glory of God. Resisting death that we know is coming only delays resurrection.

What would happen if we simply embraced the rhythm of death in our own lives, trusting that every dying thing, vegetal, animal or ethereal, becomes that single grain that bears much fruit in the economy of God? 

What could we let go of if death is not the end but the precursor to resurrection? What could we trust God to do with the things we have killed, which are killing us, which are dying deaths natural and unnatural, if we truly believed that death is not the end?

Trust me, these are questions I’m asking myself as much as I’m asking you. But the questions are powerful, and I hope you’ll let them work on you as we encounter this story of Holy Week and Easter again, as you see the leaves budding and tender shoots journeying up from the dark ground where they laid dead all winter.