The text was the Gospel of John, chapter 12, verse 24.

The words were those of Jesus. A foreshadowing of his fate. His fate not being some final, static state, feeble as nothing and dead as a cross nail, but transformed, alive, vivacious, and bearing the fruit of life.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies,
it remains only a single seed; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

♦     ♦     ♦

The topic was humanization and sanctification, making human and making holy, which Brother Weeps always said was “one and the same thing.”

Brother Weeps said, “Not all saints are dead, but every saint experiences dying. The reason there are so few saints among us is because of our aversion to dying and our illusion that we only die once.

Becoming a Christian does not require being born again. It involves being born again and again and again. And every new birth requires a previous death which means the ongoing process of becoming a Christ-one involves dying again and again and again.

“What does dying during life mean?” asked a thin man standing in the back.

“It means learning to let go of having to have our own way. Not in a trite or trivial way, but in an essential and total way. It means not resisting the truth that our lives are not our own to do with whatever we want, but a gift entrusted to us to be put to good use toward whatever is true, noble, or right; to whatever is just, lovely, or worthy of praise.

Dying to self is not dying to the self now ‘hid with Christ in God.’* It is dying to our artificial self, our superficial self, our manufactured or illusory self, our self-serving self. The Christ-one knows in her bones not only that life is sheer gift but that it is also a seed. And the way we honor our seedness, and its sower and grower, the way we honor not our givenness but our God giftedness, is by “actualizing the quiet imminence of our being,” as Rabbi Heschel would say.

Our lives are seeds, not meant to stay enclosed upon themselves for our own self-preservation, but rather to be broken open, take root, sprout, grow, flourish, produce fruit, and give its life away. No one who hopes to be fully alive and spiritually mature can live a life that is mainly self-referential. But because there is a bit of ourselves in every true act of giving, there is a little dying as well. That’s the Christ paradox: our lives are given to be given away.

If we can’t let go of the tunnel vision funneling what benefits me, my, mine while living, when we come to the final threshold, how will we ever be ready to step into the Great Giveaway?”

* Colossians 3:3.

~ Dan Miller, © 2020. All Rights Reserved.