Brazen Acts of Beauty: Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 3, 10 AM

Sermon Text

I was moved by Rev. Joann’s sermon last week. She invited us, through two letters, to find ourselves in the Prodigal Son story. I was so moved that, this week, I wrote my own letter. You could call it a prayer.  But first, a song.

Wonderful things of folks are said when they are passed away.
Roses adorn to narrow bed over the lifeless clay.
Give me the roses while I live, trying to cheer me on.
Useless the flowers that you give after the soul is gone.^[1]

Dear Jesus,
Yes, the poor will always be with us. We have heard you say this for millennia. Lifted out of context, it sounds like you wouldn’t be someone who had much to say about poverty or the marginalized, when you, yourself, you were poor and marginalized. You recruited unlikely disciples for your cause. Women like Martha and Mary kept you fed and housed. You dined with grimy sinners and comforted the disinherited. You showed us how to love, and I, for one, believe what I was taught in seminary about God’s “preferential option for the poor.”^[2]I thought it was harder for a camel to thread the eye of the needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom. I thought you told us to sell all we had and give it the poor.

Jesus, I worry for the good people in your churches today who focus on “the poor will always be with us” to justify their apathy. I know, it’s shocking but I have witnessed firsthand. Do you remember that night twenty-something years ago when I came home after a church meeting so angry and disappointed? I cried. I prayed to you to turn their hearts. They had voted to divert mission money to resurface the social hall floor. It had been resurfaced three years before, but it had scratches from those kids playing in there. And they repeated to me what you said, Jesus, the poor will always be with us, and the poor can come stand on this new floor. What on earth are we supposed to do with this?

I guess the first thing I must realize is that you say this verse to a very cynical Judas. If people want to follow your advice to Judas, to each their own I guess, but it’s not for me. I can’t escape your story’s arc, the history of redemption.

In this passage I see you, Jesus. You’re headed for the end of your earthly ministry. The religious authorities were incensed by how you raised Lazarus from the dead. Everybody was talking about you. The headlines say a rabbi is sought by the authorities. You have upstaged the establishment for the last time. They’re coming for you, lest you destabilize the Roman economy that mandates desperation. Poor people are needed as cheap laborers, just this side of slavery, workers who submit to exploitation to survive. Poverty was, and I guess still is, manufactured, a necessary sin in the systems we benefit from. So, I understand how poverty will always be with us, but you call us to keep expand our faith and widen circles of care. We Presbyterians like to say that we are Reformed but will always be reforming, full to the brim and spilling over.

I refuse to believe that you just slipped up when you said the poor would always be with us. I confess how disturbing I find your words in this passage, but I have always found life-giving truth in bible’s most troubling parts.  But Jesus, too many Christians think “the poor will always be with us” is a commandment. And it’s not. It’s just not.

Your words are too-easily decontextualized, the perfect smokescreen to hide the fear we carry around inside just under the surface. The fear of poverty. The fear of being mistaken and having to change. The fear of not being able to provide for ourselves in old age.

Some of the seniors here at Calvary have had to face that fear, priced out of their homes, displaced by the costs of rent and food and gas and healthcare. I have prayed to you about this many times, Jesus, about how [Sam] lost the right to self-determine where she would live out her days. She died where the system placed her, alone, way down the Peninsula, away from home and her friends. I prayed to you about [Redge] Rodger and how he was forced out of his apartment, even after he enlisted me to go to his management company as his advocate, and they told this pastor flatly that they did not care about him, and at 75, [Redge] was forced to start his life over in Chico. I prayed to you about Elaine, Jesus, and how she chose not to take her medications and die rather than be moved out of her apartment to who-knows-where at the age of 80. If this is what you mean by “we will always have the poor” I want no part of it. There are tens of thousands of homes in this city standing empty for the sake of rich foreign investors, empty homes traded like stock while the people I am ordained to love and serve are shuffled around like game pieces.

Sometimes I want to pull into myself, Jesus, focus on me me me, but when I do I gie into fear, and I disobey you. And I don’t want to help seniors age in place only because it will eventually help me. I promised myself to a bigger calling. I want to grow in faith by expanding who I understand, expanding who I help, expanding what little influence I have in this messed-up world. And I pray that your people will stop contracting and defending decisions based in fear and instead, to know real expansive life through serving one another, like Mary in that brazen act of beauty, perfuming your feet.

I feel like I need to apologize to you about this next part, Jesus. Usually when I preach I tell people “be like Jesus” and call it a day, but this time I am inclined to observe your actions more than your words and tell people to be like Mary, the woman who brazenly went and got a pound jar of nard, perfume that costs a king’s ransom, over a year’s wages for a laborer in the ancient Near East. A year’s wages, broken open running on the floor around your feet. And she mopped it up with her hair? Well, that sounds like some crazy black-bos-theatre performance artist down in the Mission rubbing her essential-oil-drenched hair into a rabbi’s feet.

I’m also needing to apologize for agreeing just a little bit with Judas. That money could have helped seniors and low-income households remain in their homes. But then I sat in silence with this perplexing passage. Now, I get it, and it’s personal.

You knew you they were coming for you, John makes that clear. You knew that this was one of the last suppers before The Last Supper. You knew that, in the morning, you will get up and tell your disciples to find you a donkey and then ride into Jerusalem to give humanity one last chance to hear the Good News and get it right.

And you knew that the despots will always be with us, too. And the mean and the demagogues that scapegoat vulnerable people, like they’re doing right now in Texas scapegoating children and investigating families in order to destroy them. You knew that mean people will always be with us, so will all of your betrayers. Some of them masquerade as your best followers, like cynical Judas, like it’s a contest or something, but you see them exploiting your people. Those poor people!

So this is why you told Judas to back off, leave Mary alone. She’s worshiping her Lord with her whole body. This is her protest and—man!—it is brazen! The neighbors could smell that perfume! Her responsible sister Martha probably wanted to deck her—all that money seeping down into the floor. Martha had bought that nard for Lazarus dead body, but you raised him. This nard, this treasure is rightfully yours, and Mary did not want to wait until you were dead to tell you how thankful she was for bringing Lazarus back to life. You put that family back together.

I love that you shushed naysayer Judas for a foot massage, aroma therapy, reflexology. Mary needed to offer it, and you needed to receive. Recharging in preparation for all that is to come. I like to think that you leaned back, clasped your hands and said, “Tomorrow, we ride!”

And I see the theology that Mary is doing for us in this passage. Mary wasn’t anointing you to die. I know John says that, but consider the story. Mary was anointing you to fulfill your destiny. To enter Jerusalem as messiah, literally the Anointed One. She is like the other woman who called you messiah, the Samaritan at the well in Chapter 4. In John’s gospel, it’s the women, isn’t it, two lesser-thans, who name you messiah and then anoint you messiah.

More than that, at least for me, is that Mary shows you how much she loves you while you are still alive. She doesn’t wait until it’s all over. That’s what this passage is teaching us, isn’t it? For us self-styled do-gooders, Mary and Jesus, you show us how important it is to stop and tell, no show our friends and families how much we love them before it’s too late. Tomorrow, it could all go sideways.

Faults are forgiven when folks lie cold in their narrow bed.
Let us forgive them e’er they die, now should the words be said.
Give me the roses while I live, trying to cheer me on.
Useless the flowers that you give after the soul is gone.^[3]

In your holy name, Amen.

^[1] James Rowe & R.H. Cornellius, “Give Me the Roses Now” in Calvary Hymns, 1925, p. 225.

^[2] “Option for the poor” explored at<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_for_the_poor> (April 2, 2022)

^[3] James Rowe & R.H. Cornellius, “Give Me the Roses Now” in Calvary Hymns, 1925, p. 225.

Scripture

John 12:1-8

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ² There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. ³ Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them^[a] with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. ⁴ But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ⁵ “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii^[b] and the money given to the poor?” ⁶ (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) ⁷ Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it^[c] so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. ⁸ You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

Isaiah 43:16-21

Thus says the Lord,
    who makes a way in the sea,
    a path in the mighty waters,
¹⁷ who brings out chariot and horse,
    army and warrior;
they lie down, they cannot rise,
    they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
¹⁸ Do not remember the former things,
    or consider the things of old.
¹⁹ I am about to do a new thing;
    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
    and rivers in the desert.
²⁰ The wild animals will honor me,
    the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness,
    rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
²¹     the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my praise.