Extravagant Gestures

John 12:1-8

About once a year, Doctors Without Borders sends me some kind of tchotchke in the mail – a pen that’s a multi-tool, a tote bag, a mini flashlight.

And I open the package and complain out loud.

“Why are you sending me this stuff?! I sent you money to help sick and wounded people! I’m definitely not giving you more money if you’re just going to spend on sending me junk!” (as I throw the appeal letter in the recycling, unread.)

 

(Sigh.)

I mean, if people would just listen to me, charities, churches, and governments would all spend their money much more wisely, and for better purposes.

Right?

Anyone else here have that experience?

 

So – in spite of the narrator’s comment in today’s gospel story calling Judas a thief – I know that more than once I’ve said basically the same thing he does:

Why was this wasted this way, when it could have been doing so much more work to feed or heal so many people!?

 

That’s actually a very natural point of view for people who follow Jesus; who have heard Jesus constantly refocusing our attention toward the multitudes, those who are hungry, or poor, or sick, or oppressed.
It’s a very natural point of view for those of us who think people who have plenty should help provide for people who have little – or for people who have had even their little taken away from them.

 

And Jesus doesn’t exactly disagree!

When he says “the poor you have always with you”, he’s reminding everyone listening that the Torah, the law, requires us to always be openhanded and generous with those who have less than we do, because there will always be someone who has less.

 

He’s reminding us that 99% of the time, or more, there is indeed some conceptually “better” use for what we are doing, giving, or spending. Something more completely compassionate, more perfectly effective, more rigorously holy and right than what we have thought of, or planned.

I often hear that voice inside my head, always pushing me to do the most right thing, the best thing, the most loving or most holy thing…

Maybe I’m the only one who gets stuck in a cycle of not deciding to do something, because I can’t tell what would be best.

Or maybe I’m not the only one, and some of you know about that, too.

 

One of our vestry members, commenting on this story a couple of weeks ago, mentioned that we’d never even be able to pray together if we had to measure everything we do against the greatest possible good in the use of our time, and resources.

 

But, as another Vestry member pointed out, Jesus is telling us that even if the expensive, extravagant ointment in the story could have fed three hundred families for a day, what Mary has done with it instead is, in fact, a worthy action.

 

It is, first of all, an act of love, intimacy and trust. This dinner, and Mary’s anointing, are direct, physical acts of discipleship, of heeding Jesus and becoming like Jesus.

This action demonstrates that Mary is living out her belief in Jesus just as Jesus has been teaching us to do: loving others as Jesus loves, abiding in him as branches and vines are knit together, and listening to his voice.

She acts in imitation of Jesus, pouring out extravagant abundance as an act of love – divine and human love.

 

And when Jesus tells us that “She’s kept this for the day of my burial.”

We know that Jesus knows that Mary has heard and understood what else Jesus has been teaching.

And while by John’s timeline of Jesus death and burial, Mary has poured out her burial anointing almost a week early, I think Jesus is telling Judas, and us, and anyone else listening, that Mary gets it.

 

In a room full of followers who have consistently misunderstood, or denied the possibility, any time Jesus suggests that he’s going to be crucified instead of seizing the crown of Israel, Mary already stands with Jesus under the shadow of the cross; in the reality of that tragic and courageous gift of death and life to the whole world.

 

Just before and after John tells the story of this dinner party, he explains that the raising of Mary’s brother Lazarus is what tipped the political and religious leaders of Jerusalem into deciding to kill Jesus. And that Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem for the last time, where they will kill him.

On some other day, a different time, pouring out a year’s salary in perfume might indeed have been a waste.

Here and now, it’s an act of affirmation, trust, and love that recognizes, beautifies, and sanctifies the extravagant gift that Jesus himself is in the process of giving.

 

In the noisy, distraction-filled world that you and I live in, and when many of us have heard some story of Jesus’ death and resurrection more times than we can conveniently count, it may be hard to be certain in our hearts when the moment is right for our own gifts of love to be poured out in faith.

It may be hard to be sure in our guts that you or I have found the right moment for the extravagant gift of money, time, or skill – to God via the church, or a charity doing justice, or healing, or feeding, or lending listening ears and helping hands. 

 

It may feel like there’s never a right time for a lavish gesture with our time or voices – a question of whether it’s ever worth it, or possible, to stand and speak your truth for twenty-five hours like Senator Cory Booker this week.

Or to write a list of every possible argument against scams and financial abuse and injustices and nail them to the door of the church (or the courthouse, Congress, or corporate offices these days) like the 16^th century saint Martin Luther.

Or to keep gathering crowds to speak about reconciliation and transformation and the eternal future of our human souls, until someone lynches you for upsetting the powers that be, like the twentieth century Martin Luther King, Jr or the first century Jesus of Nazareth.

 

Or the right time for opening your dinner table or home to someone who needs comfort, friendship, refuge;

standing up to the school or office or neighborhood bully – and offering to help them heal what’s hurt them;

or writing the difficult letter no one else can write;

or whatever other extravagant gesture lies within your reach.

 

But it’s possible Mary wasn’t sure either. Didn’t know that the time was right for her extravagant gift of love, so long ago in Bethany.

It’s possible she just knew that this was one thing she could do, one act of love that she needed to give, now.

And that she trusted Jesus to receive it.

 

Because there’s one other thing Mary could have done with that ointment, besides pour it over Jesus or sell it to feed the poor always with us.

She could have left it in a cupboard.

She could have done nothing.

 

You and I always have that choice, too.

To find the “most perfect” thing to do with the resources to hand.

Or to do the thing that’s right before us to do. The thing that is worth it, in the hands of God, because we did what love led us to.

Or to do nothing.

 

Which has the advantage, usually, that no Judas will mansplain to you that you did it wrong.

But which robs Jesus of the chance to make our actions matter.

To receive our gift of love, or hope, or trust – extravagant and inadequate, both at once – and with his love, and power, and grace to transform action into miracle, ordinary into gospel, and one moment into eternal life.

 

You and I, all of us, have some potential extravagant gesture in our hands, no matter how empty or full those hands are right now.

Jesus is with us.

I wonder, now, what will we do.

 

 

One Story; Many Ways

Luke 15:1-3; 11-32, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

There he is, that elder son, standing in the field, clinging to his hard-working righteousness and unable to make himself join the festive dinner with his father and his lost brother. 
Every time we get to that scene at the end of Jesus’ parable, it feels just like where we started this story, with Jesus’ philosophical and political opponents griping and muttering about all the sinners coming to be welcomed to dinner by Jesus.

 

And since the parable doesn’t resolve – since the elder brother neither goes in to the party or actually walks away, we are left in that same tension, deprived of a “right” answer to whether it is holy to party with sinners.

That lingering, unfinished end of the story must have driven the Pharisees nuts.

It certainly itches at me every time I read it; every time this story comes up in our calendar at church.

 

And that unfinished ending, repeated, makes me wonder if this parable isn’t some kind of biblical form of the classic movie “Groundhog Day”, where we must cycle through the same story over and over and over, trying out all the different ways to live it, until we find the one where all the relationships come into balance – healed, healthy, mutual, and holy.

 

Because every perspective you can take in this parable has lessons and healings for our spiritual development, our relationship with God, and through God with one another.

(That’s true of many of Jesus’ parables, really. There’s never “one right way” to read them, or learn from them. Always many ways.)

 

There’s the perspective of the younger son, the one with the big conversion moment. The son who snatches at everything he believes to be his, blows through it, and discovers not only that he is hungry, and alone, and wishes he weren’t, but that there is still someone he can trust, even after he’s wrecked himself.

 

His repentance – his great turning of heart and life – starts with the remembrance of the generous support his father’s workers receive; with the recognition that here is the fundamental source of trust and goodness in his life.

You and I, too, in order to repent – to turn our hearts and selves to God, as we talked about last week – need to be able to notice and rely on God’s goodness. 
To know that in God we do trust. 
Even when we are at our own very worst.

 

Then this lost-and-found son has to learn to accept love and joy and welcome as an unearned gift. To let go of the inheritance he thought was his, and accept that his welcome – even his identity and role in the family, whether hired hand or son – isn’t something he earns or owns, but something he must accept from the overwhelming force of unconditional love.

 

I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I wonder if some, or many, of us here find it challenging to trust in God, or in someone else, when we are at our very worst? 
I wonder if any, or many, of us find it uncomfortable to let go of what we earn, or own, or deserve on our own merits, in order to accept welcome as an un-earned gift.

 

Then there’s the father. 

Obsessively watching the road home, ready to throw away all his dignity, all his injuries, and embrace his lost son. 
If we can put ourselves in his place, we might be able to feel that deep hope and longing for one we have lost. And learn that it is worth it – always worth it in the life of God – to hope and hope that someone who has hurt us, or who has gone astray, will repent. Will return seeking to heal past injuries and begin anew, and give us the opportunity to feel the peace of forgiveness and joy of reunion.

 

(Now it might be worth noting that in the terms of the parable, the lost-and-found child may be restored to the belovedness of a son, but not to an expectation of further inheritance. This forgiveness isn’t an invitation to repeat the original offenses, but a chance to start anew where the possibility of the same offense is removed.)

 

I wonder if any of us long for the chance to forgive, to start again, to welcome back someone who has left us?
I wonder if any of us would be relieved to know that God thinks there is no shame in watching and wishing for the return of love that once was lost.

 

But that’s not all of the father’s story.

Because then he hears how his older son feels insulted, offended, by the welcome of the “sinner”. And may have discovered that he has something to repent of himself. 

Had he taken the faithfulness of the older son for granted? Had he not made sure his close, reliable, child heard and knew the trust the father had in him? The joy and love that underlaid the everyday?

 

I know I’ve had to learn that lesson myself sometimes. 
I don’t know if any or many of you also need nudges to remind us not to take faithfulness for granted – whether it’s the faithfulness of a family member, a friend, or God’s own self.

 

Finally, there’s the older son, standing in the driveway, unable to either go in to the sinner’s party, or stay outside alone and righteous.

I wonder if perhaps he missed, in his life, the same thing I usually miss in reading this story.

That right when the uppity younger son demands early access to his inheritance, the father divides his property [his life in the original Greek] between his sons, implying that the older son, too, has alreadyreceived his inheritance. 

It’s easy to miss in the story, with the father still acting as the head of household and ordering the servants about, but what if it’s literally true already that “all that is mine is yours”? 
That the older son already has all the young goats he could have wanted to celebrate with; has already been given his father’s “life”, his father’s everything?

 

This is the big spiritual challenge of Christianity.

How do we – you, and I, and that mythical elder son – how do we respond to the truth that Jesus has already given us God’s life, God’s everything?

 

It’s the question Paul’s wrestling with for his friends in Corinth, today. Who are we, when we are already a new creation? No longer our old selves waiting to be noticed, cared for, recognized.

Paul answers that by announcing that we are agents of Christ, agents of reconciliation, of healing the brokenness in anyone’s relationship with God, with one another.

 

How many of us – I will ask for show of hands this time – how many of us go through the world – through the office and the chores and the daily news and the desire for a nice dinner out for once – how many of us go through our dailyness fully aware that you are agents of reconciliation? 
That you are, for God’s intents and purposes, Jesus’ presence in the world right now?

 

Or how many of us, I wonder, could be that elder brother, not quite aware that we have already been given all we could ask for, and more? 

How many of us, I wonder, is God inviting today to practice seeing the world through the eyes of God’s own favored child, already gifted with everything God has?

 

How many of us might even be standing – metaphorically – on the step of our own house, God’s house, still trying to realize what it means that we have already, always been beloved, favored, gifted with God’s life, and empowered with the love to welcome, and celebrate, and rejoice in, every loss being healed, every sheep being found, every sibling restored and loved?

 

It's too many lessons to learn in one day.

Too many ways and places to stretch our hearts, and be filled with healing and blessing and love, to fit into one telling of the story.

 

So maybe this story, this parable of Jesus, is a good one to wake up to, over and over. To live through for ourselves: one way, and then another, and then another – until our whole hearts and souls and selves are filled up and flowing over with trust, and rejoicing, and with the unearned and undeservable gift of God’s love.

And the urge to share it, and share it, and share it, this day, and all the days to come.

 

Urgent Fruit

Luke 13:1-9 (Exodus 3:1-15)

I tell you, unless you repent, you will all perish just like those Galileans slaughtered with their sacrificial animals. Like the eighteen people under that collapsed tower at Siloam.

 

Unless you repent, you will all die.

 

Feel uncomfortable yet?

I do.

 

I hear this type of rhetoric from TV preachers after hurricanes, fires, other fatal catastrophes – “you’ll all die like this if you don’t repent/make America a Christian nation, etc.”  Sometimes explicit, sometimes just implied.

 

But today we are hearing it from Jesus.

Jesus. The one who literally came to save us from disaster and evil.

 

From Jesus, while he is telling a crowd in Jerusalem that the TV Evangelist and Pontificating Politician trope of “disaster is God’s punishment for sinners” is wrong. Telling the crowd that their local equivalent to “fires in LA are proof of God’s judgement on sinful sexuality or immoral diversity and equity” is plain nonsense.

God doesn’t drop walls on people because they are worse humans than others.

God doesn’t send fire or tsunami or indiscriminate slaughter by Roman-collaborating law-enforcement to punish people for being bad.

(He told us that two thousand years ago and we still haven’t all managed to internalize it.)

 

Because Jesus is very clear that disaster is not God’s punishment for sin.

But, he tells us, if you do not repent, you will die like them.

 

That seems a little… self-contradictory, maybe?

 

But it’s not.

Because Jesus is telling us that God doesn’t punish that way.
AND that it’s vital and urgent to be right with God, whether we happen to die in our beds at a great old age, or suddenly in a meteor strike.

That if we don’t repent, we – like the local disaster victims cited in today’s conversation – will die without having found the center and purpose of our lives.

 

Because when Jesus talks about repentance, he’s not talking about making a list of our faults and misdeeds and promising not to do the Bad Things again.

When Jesus says “repent”, it means turning your whole heart, your primary attention, toward God’s presence and work in this world. Turning your whole being to the love of God calling us to be transformed by God, to love like God.

 

Of course, that’s easier said than done for many of us.

Jesus knows that.

It can be quite difficult, often, to understand what God is actually up to in the world. And I think it’s a pretty safe guess that was as much of a challenge in Jerusalem twenty centuries ago as it is in the US right now.

Or in Gaza, or Congo, or a lot of other places in the world today.

Turning our whole selves to God, getting fully aligned with God’s love and action in the world, would be a lot easier if God would make it obvious how the day-to-day obstacles and frustrations of our lives have anything to do with God’s love for all people.

Turning our whole hearts to God’s will would be a lot simpler if Jesus clearly explained how international chaos or a mounting pile of national lawsuits, or anything else on the internet or evening news is supposed to help carry humanity to eternal life.

 

But we probably won’t get the clear memo explaining all that this week. Or even in our lifetimes.

And still, urgently, that turning toward God is what we need. That shifting of our attention toward unconditional love, toward the possibility of transformation, toward awe at the holy presence choosing to be with us, is what Jesus urgently warns us toward, demands of us – in the face of frustrations and chaos.

 

Because we need it, to truly live.

Sometimes we need it merely to survive.

And we absolutely need it to “bear fruit”.

 

To become people whose own actions and choices and words nourish others, and ourselves, with God’s love. Like Moses, in our story today, turning from “Why me?” to the deep awareness of God’s promise to be with us, and becoming a beacon of liberation for God’s people.

We need that turn toward God to become people who shape the world around us – a little at a time – to be more like God’s kingdom: generous, and brave, and hope-filled. Growing and life-giving for us, and for others.

 

We need that shifting of our hearts toward the active love of God in order to “bear fruit” of words and actions and choices that may even truly save someone else’s life, or soul and heart. Or save our own.

 

Our world needs that fruit from us now.

It always has.

 

And we ourselves need to experience that fruit of peace and generosity and profound hope and insistent love growing in and through us. Because the fruit we bear for God and others nourishes our own souls first.

And it’s who and what we were created to be and do.

 

But Jesus knows we don’t pull off that essential, urgent transformation all by ourselves.

You heard the story he told us, of the gardener who wants to help that fruitless fig tree become fruitful. Who knows that a fruitless tree can’t be sustained, but says, “let me do everything possible to help this tree grow and bear. Let this round of the seasons be an opportunity, even if it’s all over this time next year.”

 

There’s still time to repent.

Still time to bear fruit.

Still time to be helped, guided, and nurtured so that we can.

 

And equally, urgently, THIS is the time.

This place, this season, this moment as Jesus talks to us, is the time to urgently reorient ourselves to God, away from the demands and noise of cultural expectations, of daily business, of “success” and “failure” and “how it is.”

Before the tree is cut down, this, urgently, is the time to bear fruit – to confidently seek God’s love amid the noise, and let God’s love grow through us into generosity, and courage, and nourishment, and practical, everyday care for one another: helping hands, encouraging words, demands for justice, food for this day, pain relief, inspiration, joy.

 

And the good news is that there is someone to help us - someone who is working to loosen the tight-packed soil of anxiety, strain, and self-interest around our hearts. Working to fertilize our souls with awareness of the strengthening, life-giving presence of God.

 

And when we respond, when we start to open ourselves, draw from God’s earth and God’s people the nourishment we need to bear fruit, every degree we turn toward God, the easier it gets (a tiny bit at a time) to see God’s love at work.
Every step you or I take closer to diving entirely into the flow of love and transformation God pours out into the world, the clearer it is to see God’s work bringing love here, everywhere – right in the middle of all those daily frustrations and obstacles, right in the path of the chaos or intractable challenges swirling around the globe.

And the more we may become the gardeners who help others bear fruit. 

 

So we cannot wait – truly – we cannot wait to begin.