One of the first
books I ever bought for myself was the paperback Pocket Books edition of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,
the narrative of the Jewish teenager and her family who spent the years 1942 to
l944 in hiding from the Nazis in a house in Amsterdam. It was published in the
fifties and cost, I think, 35 cents. I
was in sixth grade when I got it, and I quickly read it from cover to
cover. I think it spoke to me then for a
couple of reasons. It was written by
someone close to me in age. And the
elementary school I attended in Beverly Hills, California was almost entirely
Jewish. So the account of a Jewish
teenager's hiding from the Nazis was bound to be a compelling read when World
War II was still a fresh memory.
Last week Kathy and I
were in Amsterdam for a couple of days on our way back from visiting some cathedrals
in England. We spent Thursday morning at
the Anne Frank house and museum and found the experience both sobering and
ennobling. How could any regime declare
someone like Anne Frank its enemy? And
how could a young woman who loved movies and theater and the outdoors spend two
years locked away from them and still declare that she found hope for humanity?
The Anne Frank house raises more questions than any museum can answer.
And then there is the
fact of the confinement itself. As we
were leaving, Kathy admitted that she had begun to feel claustrophobic after
about a half an hour in that small, narrow, blacked-out space. I agreed. The
Frank family couldn't look out a window in daytime. They couldn't make any
noise. They were packed in like
sardines. The whole place gave me the
creeps.
And yet I found
myself cheered by some of the house’s human touches. There were decorations on the walls and
magazine photos of movie stars in Anne's bedroom. There was a ladder leading to
an attic skylight through which the children could look at the treetops, the
birds, and the sky. A place like the Anne Frank house sends two contradictory
messages at once: people are no good,
and people are better than you could ever think they might be.
As we make our way
through Lent toward Holy Week and Easter, those two messages assert themselves today
in our scriptures. We human beings are a
mess. And yet we witness moments of human depth and compassion that show us
what we might be on our way, with God's help, to becoming. A bit about each.
Our Old Testament
reading from Jeremiah [Jeremiah 31:31-34] expresses both the prophet's and
God's frustrations with the human community. Yet for Jeremiah, God’s solution
to human cussedness is not destruction but rather a total remaking of the human
person. As Jeremiah puts it,
I will put my law within them, and I will
write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
[Jeremiah 31:33]
You and I resist
God's will for us because we see it as something external to ourselves,
something imposed on us from the outside. Human nature is broken. We fall for things we should avoid, and we
shun the ones that give us life. God's solution to our resistance is a
compassionate one. God isn't going to
muscle us into obedience. God is going
to remake us so that we will love what is good and true and right. As another prophet, Ezekiel, says, “A new heart I will give you, and a
new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of
stone and give you a heart of flesh.” [Ezekiel 36: 26] God
will put a new heart and a new spirit within us. God will heal and remake us
into the people we were created to be.
In today's Gospel
[John 12: 20-3] Jesus gives us an inkling of how this might work:
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. [John 12:24]
Jesus often used
agricultural figures to express spiritual truths. In this instance he turned to
the seed, that mysterious package of life and energy at which the ancients
marveled. How could such a tiny thing
produce a mustard plant or a tree? And
why did you have to bury them in the ground in order for them to fulfill their
purpose and spring to life?
For Jesus, the seed
was the perfect image of the way that new heart and new spirit worked in the
human person. We must die in order to
live. We must experience pain and loss
and grief in order to be open to the full radiance of what God offers us. The mysterious connection of suffering,
death, and rebirth is central to all great religions. It is the enigma that confounds our intelligence
yet confirms our experience. We never
fully live until we have died. We never
know what grace and love and acceptance and forgiveness are until we have found
ourselves in need of them.
This Gospel passage
about the seed dying was the text for Oscar Romero's final sermon, delivered
just moments before he was shot by Salvadoran death squads on March 24,
1980--twenty-five years ago this Tuesday.
Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador who was grieved by the
government's violence against the people and abuses of human rights. Toward the
end of the sermon he said this:
Those who surrender to the service of the
poor through the love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies. .
. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies. . . . We know that every
effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin,
is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us. [Oscar Romero,
March 24, 1980]
Earlier this year,
Pope Francis declared Archbishop Romero a martyr for the faith, clearing the
way for his beatification and possible sainthood. Oscar Romero died resisting
tyranny and standing with the poor and oppressed. Anne Frank died an anonymous
Holocaust victim. Both of them have become symbols of the depth and power of
human hope. The harvest of which Jesus
speaks is the fulfillment of that new heart the prophets promise. It's not only that we have to die to
ourselves to be open to the liberating love and forgiveness of God. It's also that in taking on the plight and
suffering of others we become like that grain of wheat that dies so that all
may be born.
Toward the end of her Diary, Anne Frank says this:
It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so
absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite
of everything, that people are truly good at heart. . . . I feel the suffering
of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything
will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and
tranquility will return once more-- July 15, 1944
People are no
good. People are better than you could
ever think they might be. Anne Frank and Oscar Romero suffered and died at the
hands of human beings, and yet they are witnesses to the power of human
goodness and hope. They are like the
seed that dies so that we all might be reborn.
Their lives and stories enact the depth of what Lent, Holy Week, and
Easter are all about. Jesus gives
himself that we may have life, and he empowers us to do the same.
If the Christian
religion means anything at all, we see it on offer this morning. God really does intend to write the law on
our hearts. God really does mean to
remake us into those who love what God commands and desire what God
promises. God really does help us make
sense of our world and our suffering by showing us what those new hearts will
mean for us. God does that by sending us witnesses--a German teenager in
Holland finding her voice and her spirit in captivity, a formerly carreerist
archbishop becoming a martyr for compassion and justice--witnesses who show us
the heights of what we are capable.
I pray that no one in
this cathedral this morning ever has to face what Anne Frank, or Oscar Romero,
or Jesus himself faced. But I know that
life will dole out its challenges and traumas, its gifts and blessings, to all
of us in one way or another before we depart.
May we face into those challenges and blessings with the new heart the
prophets promise, so that we may, like Jesus, become seeds of life in a harvest
that will bear the fruit that can change both us and the world. Amen.
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