Shane Hughes 8-23-26

I wasn't going to tell you this, but I think I'm going to. If I've learned anything in this past year, it is about the power of community to really provide healing and support during difficult times. That is painfully obvious in my life right now. And so I encourage them in the way that I'm going to encourage you. I encourage them like, hey, this is a great time of year because you don't have your assigned seat again.

I mean, maybe some of you have, like, found it back because you're back in second. You love where you sit. You got your place, you got your community. That's great. But if you don't have someone sitting around you right now in your kind of little neighborhood of Highland that you are caring for, you don't have someone you're checking on and you miss them if they're not here on Sunday, I want to encourage you to do something a little bit abnormal.

I want to encourage you to move. Not churches, just in the auditorium, right? I want you to find some people. You need a neighborhood, because you never know when you're going to need a neighborhood, and you never know when your neighborhood's going to need you.

There is going to be a day at some point where I can get through worship without weeping, but that day is not today. And mostly that's because of the way that this community has blessed me and my family over the last six, eight months. And I'm grateful for it. Now. I was talking to a friend of mine, a fellow preacher, and we were going over our sermons and say, well, what are you thinking about?

What are you gonna go? And he said something to me. He's like, dude, you can't talk about Middle Earth all the time. And I'm like, what, is there some sort of quota here? And he's like, yes, there is a quota.

I'm like, okay, once a month. He's like, twice a year. And I said, first of all, this is it. I'm hitting my quota. You won't hear about Tolkien for the rest of the year.

And you don't know how nerdy my church is. So here's the thing, and I'm talking about Lord of the Rings. I want to talk about the Hobbit. Now, you can watch all three Hobbit movies this afternoon or you can actually read the book faster. So I encourage you to read the book.

But somewhere, under a mountain in Middle Earth, there is a dragon. And this dragon is lying on top of more gold than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes. And he can't get up. He's trapped. But it's not because he won't move.

And I love this dragon's name, Smog. It just. It perfectly captures kind of the sense, the essence of this. This poor character. He has organized his entire existence around a pile of.

Of coins he does not need, he did not earn, he cannot use, and almost has entirely lost the ability to enjoy. He knows every piece of or gem and piece of gold down to the very last. So much so that if a missing cup of his hoard is missing, he cannot sleep for 100 years.

And I think the point is, is that this is no longer wealth. This is possession. But it's running in the opposite direction. And Tolkien has this brilliant name for this. He calls it Dragon sickness.

And the frightening thing about dragon sickness is that you don't have to be a dragon to catch it. Because the other hero in this story is Bilbo Baggins. And he starts in a much smaller, much more sympathetic version. The same disease. He doesn't want a mountain of gold.

All Bilbo Baggins really wants is a full pantry, a warm kettle, and a front door that he can shut the rest of the world out. He doesn't want anybody bothering him, and he doesn't want his comfort disturbed.

He wants a life with no chapter that he doesn't see coming. And if I'm going to be honest with you, I think Bilbo's hoard is probably more familiar to some of us. It's smaller and cozier. It's far more respectable. Dragon sickness.

But it's the same species of disease underneath. The instinct to grip, to bolt the door and to let nothing in that might cost us something. And the reason why I want to talk about this today is because I think it's more applicable because it's so American. I think our desire for greed. You don't have to have a pile of gold to be caught up in greed.

And if anything, more than anything else, I think what Americans are willing to sacrifice anything for is comfort and security. But here's what makes Bilbo different from Smog. And it's not that he wants less. It's not that he's content to have less than a dragon. It's that somewhere in the middle of the story, Bilbo starts giving things away.

He gives away his safety by walking out on his own front door without even a handkerchief with him. He gives away the moral high ground more than once to help people who don't deserve it. And near the end of the story. He's holding on to the most valuable thing in the entirety of Middle Earth. It's called the Arkenstone.

If you don't know what that is, read the book. But. But he has it. It's his. It's in his possession.

And he lays it down. He hands it over to the enemy to buy a piece nobody else in the story is brave enough to buy. You see, Smaug spends the whole story getting smaller and smaller curling tighter and tighter around what he already has. Bilbo spends the whole story getting larger opening his hands again and again until there's almost nothing left of the Hobbit who was originally afraid to leave his hole. It's the same affliction with two entirely different endings.

And the difference isn't talent or luck or being naturally braver. Bilbo is scared out of his mind as we go through the story together. The difference between the two is what he was willing to lose.

And I want you to hold on to that thought. Because we're about to meet a gospel writer who understood something about almost identical to what he has has to break before anything else or real is allowed to grow. Would you pray with me, please? God, we're grateful to be gathered into this place to be centered around your table and to explore more deeply and completely the depth of your word. Father, we are grateful for the lives that we have been given.

And give us the courage to lay them down. Lay them down for your church, for the will of your spirit. Lay them down for the least of these among us. And so, Father, we pray now as we turn our hearts and our minds to Scripture that you would pour through me the gift of preaching that I might speak. Speak your truth and love to these, your people.

It's together that the church says Amen. And I think the Gospel of John is written a little bit like this story.

It's like a book where nothing is wasted and everything is timed. And if you read the Gospel of John, you'll notice that it's very different than Matthew, Luke and John because there's not as many parables and there's not as many stories. But in each story, if you pay attention, you will see this detail and this detail. If you consider it and meditate on it, don't just brush past it, but really cogitate there. It unlocks the rest of the story.

And you see this. And this shows up again and again and again in John. And one of the ways that it shows up is the way that John repeats words.

One of those words is Our.

And it shows up first in the wedding of Cana. You might remember this story. If you don't, you can read it. It's in John chapter three, because the wedding feast has run out of wine. And Jesus mother says to him, you need to make more wine.

And he says back, my hour has not come yet. And it shows up again and again and again as you read the book, it's like a countdown clock ticking quietly away. In the Gospel, more than once, religious leaders try to arrest Jesus. And every time the text says they couldn't because it was not yet Jesus's hour, his hour had not yet come. And for 11 chapters, tick, tick, tick, the refrain is the same.

Not yet, not yet, not yet. And then we come to our text today in John chapter 12, and there's some Greeks that have come and they want to speak to Jesus. And these Greeks don't belong in the story because this is a Passover story in Jerusalem. This is the last place you'd expect them to be. But here they are showing up and they're asking Philip, hey, can we talk to him?

And it's almost a small throwaway detail in the text. Again, if you're not paying attention, you're going to miss the keys in John. And Jesus hears it, and for the first time in the whole book, says the sentence that John has been holding in Reserve for 11 chapters. The hour has come. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

And then look what happens right off the bat. The arrival of the strangers from outside of the family. These Greeks don't just represent those Greeks, they represent. They represent the world. This is everybody coming into the Gospel, symbolically showing up and asking to see him.

And it's what finally trips the wire. And when the hour Jesus describes as glory finally arrives, what does it look like? It doesn't look like a coronation. It's not a display of power for political or military or any other sense. What Jesus says in that moment when his hour has come, that a grain of wheat must fall to the ground and die.

And here's my suspicion. My suspicion is that the entire gospel kind of hangs on this moment.

I think it's the hidden key to this whole story. Every time John uses the word glory, he means something that almost nobody in the first century would have guessed. It's not visible triumph, but it's love poured out all the way down to the end, with nothing held back. In John, glory looks like a grave. And Jesus offers a preface here.

What he begins to say with Is this a double amen? And in the older text, the King James, it's Amen, Amen or truly. Truly, or verily I say unto you, which means pay attention. And then he puts it in the most plain agricultural terms that everyone could understand. A single grain of wheat left whole and unplanted will never become anything more than a single grain of wheat.

It is only by falling to the ground and dying that it multiplies into a full head of grain. In the nrsvue which we heard today, very truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, unless it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. And this sounds like a tragedy kind of dressed up like a metaphor. Dying does not sound like flourishing. In fact, it sounds like the opposite of flourishing.

But Jesus is not describing a tragedy. He's describing biology. This is what a seed is for. This is what a seed is created to do. A seed that refuses to be planted, insists on saying whole, dry, intact, safe inside of its own shell, will do exactly one thing for the rest of its existence.

It will remain a seed. It will never be bred. It will never be a field, which is a vision like that image has stuck with me all day. That one seed would one day become a field. The very qualities that make it feel safe, its hard little coat, its self containment, its refusal to break open, are the same qualities that guarantee it will never become anything more than what it already is.

And there's this whole category of seed that comes out of California, right? Sequoias, the sequoia tree conifers. Like these seeds, not only will they are they tough and hard and will endure the longest of drought, they don't open until there is fire.

And so here's my best advice, for whatever it's worth, on how actually to live this out rather than just to admire it on a Sunday morning. And I know there's a lot of college students here and you're here for the first time and you're just, man, I got to tell you the truth. If you are a freshman and you just showed up because your friends are coming to Highland, like, bravo. Like that take a ton of courage, right? We're glad you're here.

And you're going to hear a lot about, like, maybe you find the church that you need to find. Maybe you need to, like, find what church fits you best. That's actually the worst advice. You need to find a church and stick with it. You need to find people here in Abilene that will love you and care for you.

And if Highland doesn't do it for you, then you need to find another church.

Because if we're not able to serve you in that way, then you need to find a place that will. But we really want you to stick with us. I got to tell you that right now we think what we have here is pretty good and we want to share it with you. But here's the reality. College students, and I think even younger than college students, I think 13 year old kids can make this decision and make this commitment in their heart.

And I think there is something about powerful, about a 10, a 12, a 13 year old that makes a commitment into their heart that is more powerful than a 48 year old making the same commitment. I don't know why that's true, I just know it is. And so here's my best advice from this text. Decide early.

Decide early.

Because here's what happens. Decide young and as soon as you can that you are going to die and be reborn in Christ. Don't wait until your 40s or wait until the diagnosis or wait until your marriage is in trouble to find out for the first time if you actually believe if all of this is true. Because here's what happens if you don't decide early.

It becomes very easy. Not because you're a bad person, but because you're living on human kind of default mode. It's the default setting, I think, of every human heart to spend the rest of your life quietly assuming that it is in fact your money. That you think because it's default mode, that it is your career that you can build and do with what you choose, right? That that your your house and your neighborhood and, and.

And you have a say over how your story goes. That you get to write the next chapter. That it's easy to become to assume that you have the right to vengeance and that you get to make it out that if somebody genuinely wrongs you at some point and the ledger stays open until you've evened it yourself, it becomes easy to assume that there is a scoreboard in your marriage and and someone needs to be winning it, so it might as well be you. And here's the thing that blows your mind. None of this requires your decision to live that kind of life.

It simply lives by default if you never choose otherwise. By default you are going to choose a fancy car that you don't need instead of a cheaper car and the margin in your life to feed the poor. That is going to happen unless you Choose.

It's easy to choose that. You only pick the friends that can help you, and you don't have to return the favor. The seed doesn't have to decide to stay a seed. Staying sealed in safety is the default setting. Opening is the only thing that requires a decision.

So I want to encourage you as early as you are able to decide, decide that you're going to die to Christ. Not once in some sort of dramatic fashion, but it's going to be a posture that you keep returning to in every relationship you have with everyone around you. And then you spend the rest of your life practicing your way into that decision making. Because you're not going to arrive by it by accident. You will not arrive to it once and then be finished with it.

But we know this because Jesus adds one more line. Whoever loves their life, and by that he means their self and their story about who they are and what they're owed. If you love that, you're going to lose it.

And whoever is willing to loosen that grip in this life will keep it forever.

He isn't asking you to be careless with your body.

He's naming the tighter, far more respectable grip most of us keep on our own narrative and telling us that grip is exactly what has to open. And that's how the transformation happens. It's really that easy. It's not admiration at a safe distance on a Sunday morning. It's a decision and then a lifetime practicing it.

Paul says the same thing when he's writing to this church in Rome a few decades later. He takes the same seed logic and grounds it into those, something those Roman Christians already understood with their own bodies, their baptism. And he asked them, beginning in chapter six, whether they'd forgotten what their baptism actually meant. He writes, do you not know that all of us that were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death.

So that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we might also walk in newness of life. For if. For if we have been united with him in his death like this, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so we know it might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin.

But if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over Him. The Death he died. He died to sin once for all.

But the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also too must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Going under the water was a real burial, a genuine participation in Christ's own death, undertaken specifically so that the same power which raised Christ from the dead, the from the grave could raise them. Excuse me, I was singing too hard.

Raise them into an eternity, a new kind of life on this side of the grave, not only on the other side of it.

And Christ says, Paul says, that we have been united with Christ in a death like his. We will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. The word he uses there in Greek, it's an agrarian word again, it's an agricultural term. It's when you use two plants together that are grafted so completely you can't tell that there was a graft there at all from the outside, where one begins and where the other ends. And I think the early church may have taken this more literally than we tend to.

Cyril of Jerusalem. He's teaching new converts in the 4th century about what happened to them at their baptismal pool. And he told them in the same water, at the same moment they had been both buried and born, that the pool was both a tomb and a womb in a single motion and there was no way to receive the second without passing through the first. Centuries later, Martin Luther put nearly the same idea into the hands of ordinary parents trying to teach their kids about Jesus. How the old self should be drowned daily by contrition and repentance and die there along with all the sins and evil desires, so that a new self can rise up fresh each morning and live before God.

What the two theologians had in common is their understanding that this kind of life needs to happen every day. And for Paul, at the end of chapter six, this word is, he uses this kind of boring financial term. It's unglorious, it's. Reckon it, consider the books closed.

But what I think this looks like is it looks like something that happens every day. Neil Ford tells this story about a time that he was in a, he was in a cafe and he was sitting at the counter. But this father walks in and he's got his 1012 year old, 8 year old, I don't know, daughter, and she's dressed up like a princess. She has the big dress, she has the slicked back hair, she has the tiara. It is clear what's happening.

This is a daddy daughter day. But it's not going very well, but these other college students that were already waiting for a table, these two girls, they see what's happening and they go up to that little girl and they say, are you a princess? Are you Snow White? And that little girl immediately beams into a smile and she says, yes, yes, I am. And they say, can I have your autograph?

And they pull out a notebook and this little girl signs it with big flourish. And then there's a table ready. And these two college girls say, let them go first, we'll wait. And then they didn't wait. And so they come up to the counter and they sit next to my friend.

And he kind of noticed. He saw what was going on. Neil saw it all. And he said, that was a cool thing you did. And they just brushed it off.

But he didn't let it go. He said, no, seriously, I think you made that little girl's day and her dad's. And one of the girls said, well, the reason that I did it was because of my grandfather. And Neil said, oh. And she said, my grandfather was a little boy at the end of World War II in Italy.

Now, at that time, right after the war, the Americans were still occupying the that space, but there were a lot of scores to settle. But there was one American GI, he was 19 years old, he was a big guy. They called him Rhino because of his nose. And he was just this really great guy. He would share his chocolate rations with the kids.

If something he carried, he would be the one carried it. If he could fix a problem, he would fix it. And the whole village just kind of fell in love with Rhino. Well, at the end of World War II, it was kind of an opportunity for scores to get settled. Personal scores, political scores.

And so this college girl said there was one time where a group of men came to the village to settle a score with my grandfather's family.

And the only thing between my family's safety and these vigilantes was Rhino, this 19 year old kid who wasn't going to let the injustice happen. But she said, because the village loved him, because he had been so kind to them in a thousand little different ways. The village stands up and stands in front of Rhino. And so these men from a different town, what they see is the American military and this village protecting this family, and. And so they decide not worth it.

And then she said, my grandfather taught me to live in the echo of small kindnesses, to live in the echo of small kindness. He told me when I came to go to college to leave every room a little bit more Bright with one more smile, with one more good experience.

So that's what I tried to do today. And then Neil said, you know, the whole time that we're sitting there at the counter and she's telling me this story, she picked up that paper menu and she had begun to fold it. And when the bill came, you know, she took it out and she left it on the bill as a reminder of Rhino and the good you can do with the echo of small kindnesses. All right, back to the Hobbit one more time because we're not finished with that story yet.

Bilbo makes it home, eventually back to the Shire. He's years late. He's changed almost to the past of recognizing him and having walked away from a literal mountain of gold he could have kept. And he when he arrives back in the Shire, he finds his own front lawn full of strangers. There is an auction underway, and Bilbo Baggins has been declared presumed dead and his belongings are being sold to the highest bidder and his relatives are walking away with his silverware and he has to spend a fortune to buy his furniture back.

And half of the Hobbiton won't quite believe that it's actually him who's come back officially on paper in the eyes of his neighbors. Bilbo Baggins is dead.

But they weren't entirely wrong.

The Hobbit who walked out that door the year before really did die somewhere along the road. Or at least the version of him that needed the pantry full, the door shut, and the schedule uninterrupted, that Bilbo did not come back. What's come back instead is a Hobbit who can sit at a table with Elves and dwarves alike, who has a story that he'll spend the rest of his life turning into poetry, who has already practiced once the hardest kind of letting go. And that's exactly why, many years later, at the end of his life, he will be the one person in the whole story able to set down the most dangerous object in Middle Earth and walk away from it without so much a fight at all. His neighbors thought the auction was the tragedy, but actually they had it backwards.

The real tragedy would have been if Bilbo had never left the hole at all, if he'd kept the door shut, the pantry full, the story unlived and had died eventually, with nothing more dramatic than never once having been asked to give anything away.

The Greeks come to Jesus and they ask to see him. And what they were shown in an answer was a single seed on its way to the ground. Not because death is the point, but because it is the only door anyone has ever found into a life too large to fit inside a hobbit hole or a hoard or a self of anyone ever worth protecting alone. And so decide early.

I guess that's the sermon. Like that's the whole sermon really. Decide early and spend the rest of your life practicing it. Everything else has been just trying to show you what that looks like, to show you the best way. Would you please stand for a benediction?

There is a voice in your heart. It is the voice of God, the Spirit speaking to you now, calling you into a life and a story, an adventure that you never knew you would ever be able to live. And if you have the courage to let your hands go, you will receive more than you possibly would have imagined. May you be filled with God's spirit. May you hear that voice and go in peace.