Message: We Are Seeds / John 2:22-32

Today is the second Sunday of Easter. Last week, we proclaimed that Christ is risen. This week, we are invited to go deeper and reflect on what the resurrection means for us and for our lives. Today’s first scripture reading, Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, helps us see the resurrection more clearly.

In Acts, Peter speaks in different ways to different people. The good news remains the same, but the words and images are not exactly the same, because the audience changes. Language, assumptions, and experience all shape how the message is heard.

Here, Peter was speaking to a Jewish audience. They knew David. They knew the Psalms. They understood what it meant to wait for God. Because of this, Peter spoke of Jesus through the shared memory and hope of his people.

Peter said, “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs.” Jesus was not hidden. His life was lived in public. People had seen the healings. They had heard the teaching. They had watched him welcome those who were pushed aside. They had encountered in him a kind of life that was different from a life shaped by fear, power, and control.

Then Peter declared, “you crucified and killed him.” These were hard words. But he was not speaking from a safe distance. When he said “you,” he was speaking to his own people, and that included himself. Peter had denied Jesus three times. He followed from afar, and at the crucial moment, he turned away. He was not pointing from outside the story. He was standing inside it.

The same is true for us. When Peter says “you,” our first response is not to think about someone else, but to look at ourselves. Where do I still resist Christ? Where do I still choose fear over love? Where is the place I keep turning away from? We are called to sit with those questions before we move on.

“But God raised him up.” This is the heart of the sermon. People handed Jesus over, but God raised him up. People acted in fear, but God remained faithful. People tried to end the story, but God opened a new chapter.

To make this point, Peter turned to Psalm 16 and quoted David: “For you (God) will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One experience corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.”

For Israel, David held memory and hope together. He reminded them not only of what God had done in the past, but also of what God had promised to do. When Peter recalled David, he was not just using a familiar text. He was saying that their hope came from God’s promise, which nothing could stop.

“Hades” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Sheol.” This is not the same as what many people today understand as hell. In the Hebrew Bible, Sheol is the deep place of death, the place where all the dead go. It is not mainly a place of punishment. It is the realm of death, where life seems to end.

Among Jewish groups at that time, there were different views about the afterlife and resurrection. Some groups, like the Sadducees, rejected the idea of resurrection. They accepted only the first five books of the Bible as authoritative, and these books do not speak clearly about life after death. For them, when people died, they went to Sheol, and that was the end. Others held to the hope of resurrection, but understood it differently, thinking it would come only at the end of time, when God would set everything right.

But Peter proclaimed that God had already begun something new. Jesus was not abandoned to the place of death. This was a sign that God would not only come at the end, but was already bringing new life here and now. Self-righteousness, arrogance, hatred, and apathy led him to the cross. Violence, injustice, mockery, and ignorance tried to bury him. But he did not remain there. God raised him up.

There is a saying known as a Mexican proverb: “They tried to bury us. But they did not know that we were seeds.” It is a way of expressing the refusal to be broken by oppression and violence. History has shown that this was not an illusion. What seemed buried could rise again and bear fruit. What looks like an ending to the world can become a new beginning in the hands of God.

The Bible shows this truth in the story of God’s people. Egypt tried to hold them down. Babylon carried them away. Rome crucified the Messiah. Not only from the outside, but also from within, they fell into Sheol, into Hades, into the deep. They themselves failed to love God. They gave in to the powers of the world and became part of its brokenness. But again and again, God brought life out of what looked like an ending. What was buried became a beginning.

Because Christ is raised, those who belong to Christ begin to see their lives differently. We are seeds. Not because we are strong enough to overcome everything in our lives. Not because we control our future in the way we want. We are seeds because, through Jesus Christ, new life is planted within us.

We cannot meet the risen Christ as Peter did. But the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit Peter received, allows us to experience the resurrection in our lives. It is not an unreachable mystery. Sometimes it comes through the faces of people around us. Sometimes through hymns, prayers, scripture readings, and moments of quiet in worship. Sometimes through the beauty of nature. Sometimes through art, literature, music, and poetry that draw our hearts toward the truth. Resurrection is not about historical debates. When we open our hearts to the Holy Spirit, we begin to see that death does not have the last word.

Leo Tolstoy opens his book Resurrection with these words:

“Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal, still spring was spring, even in the town.

The sun shone warm, the air was balmy; everywhere, where it did not get scraped away, the grass revived and sprang up between the paving stones as well as on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards. The birches, the poplars, and the wild cherry unfolded their gummy and fragrant leaves, the limes were expanding their opening buds; crows, sparrows, and pigeons, filled with the joy of spring, were getting their nests ready; the flies were buzzing along the walls, warmed by the sunshine. All were glad, the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children.”

Tolstoy was not writing theology. But he saw what resurrection looks like in the world God made. The ground can be paved over. Every vestige of life can be scraped away. And still, spring comes. Life presses up through stone.

Let us live as Easter people who know God who brings life out of places that seem closed, tired, and hopeless. Seeds do not remain in the ground forever. They break open. They take root. They rise toward the light. 

Through the resurrection of Christ, we are seeds.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Min Hwang