Anointed: Wednesday Evening Medititation on John 12:1-8

Scripture can be found here...

You have to understand: every day there was a party.

Every day, beginning with the day her brother had done what no one does.  Every day, beginning with the day he had stumbled, bound in strips of cloth, out of a tomb. No. He had not been the pall-bearer. He had been the dead man at that funeral.

Now that Lazarus was alive again, every day there was a party.

The house was ever swarming with guests. Relatives. Friends. The oldest living uncle, carried by his equally ancient friends from a town miles away. All, there to celebrate. To break bread. To drink wine, which flowed as if from a miraculous, bottomless source. The house was filled with their laughter, with their songs, with the aromas of the foods that were brought in and prepared. It was like a wedding! Lazarus was alive again.

Now, many, it is true, came for other reasons. There were the hired mourners, somewhat put out that their paying gig had come to an abrupt and premature end. They came to make certain the family of Lazarus the dead man was not trying, simply, to get out of an expensive contract. And then there were the religious authorities, who had a certain gift of entering a room and draining it of all life, noise, and joy. They looked Lazarus over as if he were a horse for sale. One of them made him open his mouth to show his teeth. After they left, he’d shown them for hours, grinning, laughing, singing, and eating.

Every day there was a party. And finally, on the seventh day of celebrating, Jesus joined them.  

She had been waiting for him to come. She had known it was only a matter of time. Of course he would stop by on his way to Jerusalem for the Passover. And when he did, she, Mary, would have a gift for him.

The tenor of a party when Jesus was there was unlike the other parties. That’s because those who didn’t know him came into his presence with a kind of shyness, or wariness. He was known—he had preached in the temple and on the streets, he had performed astonishing signs and miracles. He was known as a personage of importance, perhaps a prophet, a religious leader in his own slightly off-center right. The parties would thus begin on a more somber note.

That is, until Jesus spoke. Then, something would happen to those around him… they would understand, almost immediately, that with him they were in the presence of someone utterly unlike anyone they had ever encountered. They would know instinctively, intuitively, that in him, they were in the presence of pure love.

That is what Mary wanted to convey to him. Pure love. Pure gratitude. She wanted to say, “I see you, I understand who you are and what you bring.” And so that night, at the end of the meal, as her sister Martha poured wine from a jug into cups that were nearly empty, and as her brother Lazarus leaned against Jesus, listening intently, his newborn eyes shining, Mary slipped from the room. She went to the place she and her sister slept, and took from a high shelf a jar of alabaster, holding a foolishly large quantity of oil of spikenard, the most expensive, most fragrant, most luxurious ointment she could buy. She had spent a small fortune on it. She did not care. She would have spent a thousand great fortunes on it if she could.

She carried the jar into the great room, filled with their guests, satisfied and smiling from the delicious feast and the sweet company. Her siblings both looked up at the same moment, and if they were surprised, neither of them betrayed it. For her part, Mary only had eyes for Jesus. He too was looking at her, but with another expression on his face, one she only understood later.

She knelt in front of him. She took his feet in her hands and broke open the jar, pouring the ointment on his feet. It was lavish. It was wasteful. It was irrational. But it was love.

Immediately the fragrance rose—like the incense in the evening psalm, like the prayers of the pilgrims rise up to heaven. The fragrance rose and danced around the room, and every one inhaled it and sighed at its beauty, and every eye was on Jesus, watching his reaction. He looked down at Mary.

She took a long time. She rubbed the ointment into his feet, feet that had crossed the Holy Land so many times on his journeys. Nazareth to Bethany, to Jerusalem. And back to Bethany, and then to Galilee. Countless miles his feet had walked. He had the feet of a worker, a farmer, strong and calloused, tendons showing through his brown skin. She massaged the fragrant nard into this feet as tenderly, and as lovingly, as if he were a baby. Then she lowered her head, and unpinned the great length of her thick black hair, and it cascaded down onto his feet. She began to wipe his feet with her hair.

No one knew why, but Martha was weeping. Lazarus too. Jesus’ eyes sparkled in the lamplight, but no tears brimmed over. The mood of the room was thoughtful, and perhaps somewhat confused.

Mary was not confused. Mary knew what she was doing. Mary knew the meaning of her actions. It was love. Pure love. Pure gratitude. And, she understood later, only a few short days later, it was the beginning of a wrenching goodbye.

The Work of a Servant: Sermon on John 13:1-17

Artist: Robert Gilroy, SJ. More at http://www.prayerwindows.com/

Scripture can be found here...

Thanks be to Thee, O God, that I have risen today,

To the rising of this life itself;

May it be to Thine own glory, O God of every gift

And to the glory of my soul likewise.[i]

It’s a story that makes us cringe. It’s a scene many churches replay each Maundy Thursday, and not everyone loves it. It’s a gospel passage that is just plain uncomfortable.

We have Jesus, whom this gospel has shown us to be the living presence of God in our midst, taking on the role of a slave and washing the feet of the people who are looking to him as their leader, their Lord.

We have push-back—an incredibly pained and uncomfortable conversation between Jesus and Peter, who insists on reversing those roles to the more comfortable and expected order.

And finally we have that conversation-stopping statement of Jesus. “Not all of you are clean.” Which means, to Judas, the one who has already sold him out to the authorities, I know who you are, and I know what you have done.

Today we have reached a turning point in the gospel of John. The public ministry of Jesus has come to an end. With the raising of his friend Lazarus from the grave, Jesus came to the conclusion of what scholars call “the Book of Signs.” Now begins “the Book of Glory.”

This is a passage we often hear on Maundy Thursday, and so it’s odd for us to hear it a full four weeks before Holy Week arrives. But this is another unique feature of the gospel of John. In the other gospels the story of the betrayal and crucifixion are saved for their very last chapters. But John devotes fully one half of the gospel to it. The other gospel writers seem to be struggling to fit the terrible scandal of crucifixion—a death reserved for rebels and slaves—into their overall story.

John is different. John sees Jesus differently, and he sees the crucifixion differently. We will talk more about that as we come closer to Holy Week. For now, it’s important to remember once again: this gospel is different.

One feature John shares with the other gospels, though, is this: In the last hours of his life,  Jesus gathers together with those closest to him. His disciples. His followers. Those who have shadowed him—men and women, though the gospels highlight the men—those who have been with Jesus through it all.

And so the story begins:

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (John 13:1)

Sit down angel friends.

Sit down Cana couple.

Sit down Martha and Mary.

Sit down Patrick and Bride.

Sit down guest and stranger.

Sit down poor and homeless.[ii]

Jesus turns his attention to “his own” in these last hours. And with his withdrawal from the public eye, we find there is a different tone in what he says and does. There is a meal, but it is not the Passover meal in John’s gospel. It is not Passover yet, because, for John, Jesus will embody Passover. But that’s later. Here the focus is not on what happens at the meal, but what happens afterward.

Jesus comes to wash our feet.

Jesus comes to dry them well.

Jesus comes to pour our wine.

Jesus comes to break our bread.

Jesus comes to heal our wounds.

Jesus comes to lead our song.[iii]

It is extraordinary. Jesus rises from the table, removes his outer robe, and, half-naked with a towel wrapped around his waist, proceeds to wash the feet of his disciples.

What does it mean, for Jesus to have washed the feet of his disciples? In the ancient world it was common courtesy to have your slaves wash the feet of your guests. My dad, when he was living in Ventnor, had a standing, twice-yearly appointment with a podiatrist for the purpose of caring for his feet as he got older. I know lots of women who make it a regular treat to get a really great (and lasting) pedicure. I know people who would tell you that they would rather die than have someone look at and touch their feet. But it’s also true that there is a remove when you are paying someone, a professional, to do these things, to handle this part of the body that we don’t expose for much of the year, and with which we’re often uncomfortable. Our feet carry our weight, and they show the wear and tear of age—callouses and bunions and thick toenails.

To wash someone’s feet, or to allow your feet to be washed, is an intimate act. Now imagine presenting your feet to be washed by the person in the world you most look up to—whoever that might be. Your favorite author, or sports figure, or actress. The Dalai Lama, your yoga teacher, the Pope. The president you most admire, or senator, or congressperson. Rachel Maddow. Bill O’Reilly. Imagine the very last person in the world you would ever want to look at or touch your feet.

Then imagine being in Peter’s shoes. So to speak.

Jesus has given us all these signs, to tell us of who he is, and who God is. I think that John slips some other signs in, too, but they don’t get as much airplay. Here is one of them: Our God is a God who cares about our souls. Of course. But ours is also, very much, a God who cares about, and cares for, bodies.

God to enfold me

God to surround me,

God in my speaking,

God in my thinking

God in my sleeping

God in my waking[iv]

I’ve been weaving little prayers throughout this sermon, all drawn from Celtic Christianity. When Saint Patrick “converted” the Celts sometime around the fifth century, they held on tenaciously to their conviction that the body was good and important. That notion is something which set them apart from much of Christianity, which, somehow, got caught up in this idea that the body is only a vehicle for sin, for messing up. For Celts, the body was a precious gift from God, and so Celtic Christianity came to be permeated with prayers and songs and actions that reinforced that conviction.

And here, in the midst of the gospel which can be pretty esoteric and otherworldly, we have Jesus engaged in an act of care for the bodies of his people, “his own.” And this, some would argue, is the true birth of the “Beloved Community,” both in Jesus’ act of service, and in his instruction to his followers that they should do likewise.

“I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15).

We are called to engage in acts of service to one another, in imitation of Jesus and in his name. I’d like to suggest that, for many of us, this service also encompasses the hard, intimate work of being in human relationships. Here is how one pastor describes it:

I think of the word conspire. Not in the secret, plotting way we might think of the word, but with its roots. Con + spire (spih-RAY). To breathe with. Intimacy means a kind of breath sharing, a closeness that breeds a movement together, a waiting and dependency.

This is intense. This is what it felt like around that table. There was a conspiracy afoot, but it was not about crucifixion. It was a joint breathing- a God-breathing human being with other God-breathed beings, gathered together, and brought into a new kind of intimate community. This is what it means to be the community of Christ- to be a group who breathes together in worship, in work, in play, in service.[v]

Intimacy can be powerful and beautiful and life-giving. It can also be excruciating and embarrassing and vulnerable. But I think this is what’s at the center of the persistent metaphor for what it is to be the church: we are the body of Christ. You can’t be much more intimate than that. But that intimacy is what the great Patrick acknowledged, submitted, and yielded to in the prayer we call “the Lorica,” or “breastplate”:

Christ with me,

Christ before me,

Christ behind me,

Christ in me,

Christ beneath me,

Christ above me,

Christ on my right,

Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down,

Christ when I sit down,

Christ when I arise,

Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in every eye that sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.

This is our calling: a life of service that is not at a remove, at arms length, but one of God-breathed intimacy. A life in which we let our bodies be vehicles of blessings—from the water poured over us in baptism to the ash smudged on our heads at Lent’s beginning; from the bread we break at home and at church and in a soup kitchen to the dear bodies of friends, children, beloveds we cling to; from the welcome of a hand outstretched to the healing hug of forgiveness. Having been loved by God, who breathed life into us from the beginning, let us love one another until the end. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[i] Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, Lindisfarne Press 1992, p. 188.

[ii] William John Fitzgerald, A Contemporary Celtic Prayer Book, ACTA Publications, 1998, p. 62.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Carmichael, op. cit., p. 204.

[v] Rev. Julia Seymour, “Narrative Lectionary: How Beautiful Are the Feet Edition,” RevGalBlogPals.org, March 11, 2014. http://revgalblogpals.org/2014/03/11/narrative-lectionary-how-beautiful-are-the-feet-edition/

The Dead Shall Be Raised: Sermon on John 11:1-44

Scripture can be found here...

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Just about everyone has prayed this prayer, in some form or another. God, where were you when my daughter was arrested? When the one I trusted betrayed me? When I got the diagnosis? When I lost my job? When my son, grandson, wife, mother died?

In the midst of life there is death. Sometimes, many times a day, as described in a chilling song from the Sondheim show, “A Little Night Music.”

Every day a little death

In the parlor, in the bed

In the curtains, in the silver,

In the buttons, in the bread.

Every day a little sting

In the heart and in the head,

Every move and every breath

And you hardly feel a thing

Brings a perfect little death…

In the midst of life, there is death—and at times, the only thing we can do, like Mary, is to cry out into what feels like the void where God lives, our song of lament:

Lord, if only you had been here…

We are just about at the midpoint of John’s tightly structured gospel, and we have come to the last and greatest of seven signs, all designed to reveal to us the truth about Jesus. We’ve heard about most of these signs in our Sunday gospel lessons, though one of them fell between our passages.

The first sign: turning water to wine at the Cana wedding.

The second sign: healing the child of the royal official, who came all the way from Capernaum.

The third sign: healing the paralyzed man by the Bethesda pool.

The fourth sign, the one Jeff preached about while filling the sanctuary with the aroma of freshly baked bread: the feeding of five thousand people.

The fifth sign—the one between the passages, one we did not hear about: Jesus walking on water.

The sixth sign—one I’d planned to preach on last Sunday, a casualty of my knee surgery: the restoring of the sight of the man born blind.

And today. The seventh sign. Numbers are incredibly important in scripture, and seven is the number of perfection, of wholeness. This sign perfectly shows who Jesus is: he is the giver of new life. In his own words, “I AM the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).

“I AM.” This passage, in addition to showing us the culmination of the seven signs, also gives us an opportunity to talk about another feature unique to John’s gospel: the famous “I AM statements.” Whereas Jesus in the other three gospels is hesitant, even cagey when it comes to either confirming or denying his identity, in John he speaks openly (if poetically) with statements like:

I AM the bread of life (John 6:35, 48)

I AM the light of the world (John 8:12, 9:5)

I AM the gate (John 10:9)

I AM the good shepherd (John 10:11)

And the one that may be the most stunning of all, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” (John 8:58)

Those who heard Jesus say these things would have had no problem identifying the exact thing in the Hebrew Scriptures he was referencing; they would have had a big problem, an enormous problem, maybe even an insurmountable problem with the implications of what he was saying. To say “Before Abraham was, I AM” is for Jesus to identify himself as being one with God, whose name in Hebrew, a name so holy Jews to this day decline to say it aloud, means, “I AM WHO AM,” or “I AM WHO I AM,” or “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE.” It is no exaggeration that these “I AM” statements forms the foundation of Christian claims about the identity of Jesus, our confidence that he is the visible incarnation of God among us. In Jesus, we claim, we find one who is both fully human and fully divine.

And now Jesus says, “I AM the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Do you believe this?

In the midst of life, there is death.

When we think of Jesus as ‘the resurrection and the life,’ we can’t help thinking about his resurrection, how God did not allow death to be the final word of this beloved son, how on the third day he was raised again, according to the scriptures. But—have you ever noticed this?—in each and every gospel, there are other resurrections, somewhere in the middle. My friend Rev. Miller Hoffman pointed this out, and now I can’t stop seeing it. Many scholars think the stories of Jesus being transfigured on the mountain are resurrection stories that have been reworked and plopped down in the middle of the gospels. And we’ve read the other more obvious ones: Jesus raising the daughter of Jairus in Mark’s and Luke’s gospels; Jesus raising the son of the widow at Nain, in Luke; Jesus raising the daughter of the synagogue leader in Matthew. Every gospel has a least one resurrection in the middle, and here we have John’s. My friend Miller says, “This is Lazarus raised a couple weeks before Easter to remind us that resurrection is more common than we think.”

Resurrection is more common than we think.

For those of us reading this story some two-thousand years later, it’s critical that we get beyond the specifics and the logistics of Jesus reanimating a corpse and recognize the profound truth that Martha preaches right in the middle of her devastating experience of loss. While Lazarus is still stone-cold-dead and decaying in the tomb, Martha affirms God’s loving intention towards her, and him, and all of us. “Yes Lord, I believe,” she says, with no evidence, as yet, that her bizarre, unspoken request might actually be answered. When it comes right down to it, she doesn’t want Jesus to open the tomb after all… In the King James Version, her warning is, “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days” (John 11:39). The demand for life seems like an outlandish one, a request that can’t possibly hold up to the smelly reality.

This is the part of the story that is ours. This is is for us. Both sisters speak with our voices, and whether we are Martha—wavering in our confidence in the goodness of God even in the face of our own pain—or like Mary—moaning in her grief—we are represented here. Our anguish is heard, and lifted up. Our prayers rise up to God like incense, whether they are words we can formulate or sighs too deep for words. Jesus hears the words and the sighs. Jesus not only hears, he weeps right along with us, he is disturbed in spirit, which means he is angry, at the old losses and the new, the wounds that have scarred over and the ones still bright with blood. And if Jesus hears, God hears.

Jesus gives us signs as to who he is, and who God is.

In the Cana wedding wine, Jesus shows us a God who showers us with delicious abundance.

In the healing of the gentile royal official’s son, Jesus shows us a God who breaks down barriers of ethnicity.

In the Sabbath-day healing of the paralytic at Bethesda pool, Jesus shows us a God who is not bound by our ideas of who or what is appropriately devout.

In the feeding of the hungry crowd, Jesus shows us a God who offers his very life to nourish us and give us strength.

In his water-walk, Jesus shows us a God who refuses to remain hidden behind the veil separating earth and heaven, but who joins us here and now.

In the healing of the blind man, Jesus shows us a God who destroys once and for all the notion that our pain is somehow earned and deserved; who rejects any causal connection between sin and suffering.

And today. In the raising of Lazarus from the dead, Jesus shows us a God who weeps when we are weeping, and who is the bringer of life in the midst of death.

Every day a little death, or a big one. Somewhere today a family is reeling because their son was killed in an accident involving a drunk driver. Somewhere else, a family is homeless because of a fire. Somewhere else, troops are marching on a town and people are hunkered down in terror. Somewhere today, thousands upon thousands—hundreds of thousands—of people are barely surviving in refugee camps. Somewhere today someone’s heart has broken because of an unkind word.

In the midst of life there is death. But God hears the prayers of each and every one who suffers, whether they are howls of anguish or silent whimpers. “I AM the resurrection and the life,” Jesus says, and promises that in the midst of death, God will bring life.

God hears. God weeps. But there is resurrection in the middle of the story, even before the glorious promised ending. God hears, and God weeps, and God will bring life. May it be so, and thanks be to God. Amen.

Following the Shepherd: A Meditation on John 10 for Ash Wednesday

Scripture can be found here....

There’s a little controversy going on. I say “little,” because you only would have heard of it if you were a., a churchy-type of person, and b., if you participated in social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and c., if you happened to be friends with the folks who have a stake in this controversy, and who are out there trying to persuade people to their point of view. Otherwise known as, fighting.

And the argument is not over something as mainstream as, say, who gets to be ordained, or, whether we use wine at communion. The argument is about ashes. Specifically, “ashes-to-go.”

Mieke, a great friend, of mine isn’t involved in the argument, but she is involved in the ashes-to-go. All day long today she has been at Union Square in New York City, part of a group of eight people from a church that calls itself “Not-So-Churchy.” They are carrying pots of ashes (mixed as they had coffee in a local Panera this morning), and a sign that says,

Free Ashes

Free Prayers

Free Hugs

(Don’t worry, we’re nice)

I don’t have to tell you why this is controversial. You already have a hunch. Ashes have traditionally been offered and received as a sign of a community’s decision to commit to following Christ by observing the Lenten disciplines. The problem is, how do we know who these people are, the strangers who take these ashes on the street? They’re not members of our church. What if the people who take these ashes are the kind of people who really need to turn their lives around?

In our reading from John’s gospel tonight, we have a Jesus who seems to be dashing back and forth across this very argument, arguing both sides against himself. On one side of the argument, Jesus proclaims: I am the gate. I am the good Shepherd. Not those other guys, who are really no more thieves and bandits. I am the gate.

This is the nearest Jesus gets to a parable in the gospel of John. Unlike the other three gospels, John’s Jesus does not wax eloquent on seeds or yeast, buried talents or bridesmaids with oil lamps.

But here Jesus is, telling us, “I am the gate. I am the good Shepherd.” And part of what he seems to be saying is, “There is a way to be with me, and there is a way to be against me. Be sure you’re with me.”

Jesus on the other side of the argument, though, lets something slip. “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16). And suddenly, everything he has just told us about who’s in and who’s out is challenged, because… we have no idea who and where and what this other fold is. And that is the point.

The Not-So-Churchy folks are happily sharing ashes (and prayers and hugs) with all and sundry today, in the confidence that, even though their way of following Jesus involves getting together to worship and pray and sing and share communion, still, there might be other ways of being Jesus-followers that they haven’t found yet.

Each year on Ash Wednesday we take the sign of ashes upon ourselves, because, as the Buddha reminds us, “The trouble is, you think you have time.” We think we can put off the changes we want to make in our lives, big or small. We will be able to start the diet tomorrow, or start exercising when it gets warmer. We will be able to devote time to prayer and scripture reading after we retire, and we will be able to volunteer at the soup kitchen after the kids leave for college. And—all that may be true, or it may not. Life has an unpredictability to it that has left us legions of poets and playwrights urging us, “Carpe diem.” Seize this day, because it is the only day you know for sure that you have.

The traditional disciplines of Lent are designed to take us from where we are to somewhere new. Prayer and meditation to open our hearts to God’s word. Fasting and abstinence to open our bodies to experiencing our need for God in new and tangible ways. And service and giving to open our eyes to beholding Christ in the stranger.

The time to enter through the gate is now. The day to commit to following the Shepherd is today. Not because tomorrow God will be stingy and lock the gate on us. But because God is as prodigal with his love as the Not-So-Churchy people are with their free ashes, free prayers, and free hugs. Why wouldn’t we want to spend each moment, beginning with this next moment, basking in God’s care, resting in God’s grace, and rejoicing in God’s love?

So, I invite you: Here is the gate. Here is the Shepherd. Here is the love of God: absolutely free. All we need do is receive it, and be glad. Thanks be to God. Amen.