Today I need you to help me create this
sermon. Please pass these vials of oil
around, and put a little bit on yourself – wrists or hands are probably the
best choices. If you’re particularly
scent-sensitive, skip this, and let your neighbors know!
At Diocesan
Convention last November, participants were invited to make scented oils in
workshops led by women from Thistle Farms.
Many – even most – of the folks at convention didn’t have time to
participate, but you could smell it in the air all day long.
Tiny cups of
that scented oil were placed on the tables that delegates and clergy sat at to
deliberate and vote, and at one point, we were invited to anoint one another, to
rub just a bit of that scented oil into someone else’s skin. You could smell
it – in the air, on your neighbors – all afternoon, not strongly, but subtly,
unexpectedly.
Anointing is
slippery stuff.
It doesn’t stay where
you put it; it wafts out, touching folks who were never interested. It gets
into your nose, your hair, your skin, and it follows you around.
When I got home
from Diocesan Convention that night, I could still smell it. Just hints, tiny
whiffs – each an unexpected surprise – but it was there.
Anointing is
sticky, insistent, persistent, and doesn’t want to let you go.
We do it at
baptism, and for healing, so that the newest Christians, and those of us in
need of hope, go home from this place with the scent of our prayers upon them –
very subtly – the aroma of blessing and rebirth, of God adopting us and shaping
us and saving us.
There’s nothing
subtle, though, about the way Mary does it now. She pours a vast amount of
scented oil onto Jesus’ feet, excessive and absurdly expensive – worth a year’s
salary. And then – right there at the dinner table – starts wiping his feet with
her unbound hair. (That’s an action that belongs in the bedroom, or at least
behind closed doors, as much or more in Jesus’ time than in ours.)
It’s flagrant.
It’s excessive. It stinks up the whole place. You can’t get it out of your
nose; you’re going to smell it on your clothes for days. (And Mary’s hair is
going to smell like this for weeks.)
It’s wasteful.
But Jesus
defends her, saying that she’s doing this for the day of his burial – for the
transformation that begins for Jesus now, here, outside the gates of Jerusalem,
on the eve of his passion and death, burial and resurrection.
Here and now,
Mary anoints the Anointed One – that’s what “messiah” means, after all:
“anointed” – pours over his feet the expensive scent of his calling, and she
does it in such a way that it gets into everyone around: into our noses, our
skin.
When Mary
anoints Jesus, it spills over so that the scent of burial and resurrection, of
our own rebirth, the scent of God’s mission of reconciliation and healing, clings
to us, reminding us that as God anointed Jesus to make us whole and strong and
forgiven, we too are anointed to fill the world with the scent of that healing,
with the aroma of grace, making it abundant and persistent, like the scent of
Mary’s expensive, excessive perfume.
Because perfume,
anointing, is not the only thing that clings to our skin, fills our noses
-- becomes sticky, hard to lose.
Death is one of
those things.
There was death in Mary’s house not long before, a subtle whiff
of grave that clung to her household as her brother Lazarus was anointed and buried
by his family, then raised by Jesus.
Abuse, violence,
addiction, tragedy are sticky, too. They cling long after the event is gone, triggering
memories when we least expect it.
The women at Thistle
Farms, the original Magdalene House in Tennessee, like the women who will find
a home at Magdalene Chicago, have been
followed by the scent of death, by the sticky, clinging, film of abuse and
tragedy, addiction and violence.
But now the
women at Thistle Farms make healing oils. They make perfume, holy scents, to
fill homes and lives with healing. The women of
Thistle Farms, like Mary of Bethany, anoint the Body of Christ for
transformation.
The leaders of
Magdalene House Chicago have been touched by that anointing, gotten it up their
noses, under their skin. They’ve been anointed for transformation. And like
Mary of Bethany they are inviting us to share in that anointing, to help “pour
the foundation” of a home in our neighborhood filled with the aroma of
forgiveness, strength, patience, compassion, insight, healing, and grace.
Now I’d like to
invite Amity Carrubba, one of the leaders of the Magdalene House Chicago
project, to tell you a little more about our hopes for the house and why it
matters....
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