Fifth Sunday in Lent

Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8

Smells are powerful things. Take, for example, the smell of matches. For me, it’s a specific match: Ohio Blue Tips. When I smell that pungent combination of smoke, sulfur, and phosphorus, flaring into existence, I think of Ohio Blue Tips. And immediately I’m sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen, on an old green wooden step stool, the pale yellow cabinets on my left, the gas stove on the right, and the burning match, held between my grandmother’s fingers, hovering over the burner, waiting for the gas to reach it and ignite. It’s a common experience; a known phenomenon that actually has a name: It’s known as “odor-evoked autobiographical memory” or the Proust phenomenon.

It has biological roots: It has to do with the way your brain processes odors and memories. Smells get routed through your olfactory bulb, which is the smell-analyzing region in your brain which, in turn, is closely connected to the brain regions that handle memory and emotion. For that reason, smells evoke of memories much more strongly than any of the other senses.

John reports: 3Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. A profound and complex aroma, a combination sweet/spicy/musky, Patchouli, camphor, and sassafras; an earthy and organic scent.

And Judas complains: 5“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 300 denarii: a year’s wages for the average laborer. That would be about $33,000 today. $33,000, poured out upon a man’s feet and then wiped clean with her hair. But why the feet? Anointing with perfume or with oil, that was something that you did back in those days. Kings were anointed that way. But anointing the feet, that was something you did only after the person had died. It was what you did in preparation for burial.

      Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor writes beautifully about this:

“So Mary rubbed his feet with perfume so precious that its sale might have fed a poor family for a year, an act so lavish that it suggests another layer to her prophecy.  There will be nothing economical about this man's death, just as there has been nothing economical about his life.  In him, the extravagance of God's love is made flesh.  In him, the excessiveness of God's mercy is made manifest.

This bottle will not be held back to be kept and admired.  This precious substance will not be saved.  It will be opened, offered and used, at great price.  It will be raised up and poured out for the life of the world, emptied to the last drop.  Before that happens, Jesus will gather his friends together one last time.  At another banquet, around another supper table, with most of the same people present, Jesus will strip, tie a towel around his waist, and wash his disciples' feet.  Then he will give them a new commandment: Love one another, as I have loved you.”

The abundance, the excessiveness, the extravagance of God. We saw it last week in the story of the Prodigal Father. The father, who is lavish and unstinting with his love and forgiveness. We see it in Jesus who, earlier in John’s Gospel, puts himself at personal risk in order to return from across the Jordan in order to raise his dear friend Lazarus. We see it in the woman Mary who, casting aside all pretense and societal norms, uncovers her head in the presence of men, touches a single man, pours out a year’s wages worth of perfume on his feet, and then dries them with her hair. We see it in the Rabbi, the Teacher, The Messiah who, humbles himself by stripping down, wrapping himself in towel, and washing the feet of his apprentices. We see it in that same Man who is also God, who pours out his very life upon the cross, journeys through death, and rises again so that all humanity might be drawn to God.

And yes, it creates confusion and unease. And things are not always clear to everyone involved, like Judas who criticizes Mary. Or Peter, who later protests against his Rabbi washing his feet. But that is the nature of transformation. The chief priests didn’t seek Jesus’ death because he was quietly going about his business of healing and redeeming people. The chief priests sought the death of Jesus because the transformative nature of his ministry was upending the way things had always been, the way things ought to be, the way things should stay forever and ever, amen.

Isaiah proclaims that God is about to do a new thing! The One who has delivered the children of Israel in the past will deliver them again, bringing them from captivity to freedom, from the heaviness of the past to the openness of the future. God is taking the initiative and presenting new possibilities to a people who saw no way forward.

“Behold I do a new thing” is an important message for us to hear. Most churches are in the wilderness and don’t see a clear pathway ahead. They struggle with budget deficits, shrinking memberships, and aging congregations. And it’s tempting to stop right where we are and continue as long as we can, unable to afford even the hope for revival. We struggle between tradition and innovation, and past and future. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading [people] to higher levels of justice."

Our future does not depend primarily upon our programs and initiatives but upon our response to God’s initiative. The lessons for today invite us to be open to God’s provocative possibilities for the future. God calls us to be a headlight and reminds us that even small and struggling churches can be vital and missional, if we open ourselves up to God’s new thing. Saving souls can save the world, and any congregation can be a world-saver.

Just how radical is the future that God offers us? It’s a total reversal! Isaiah writes: 19I 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. 20The 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, 21the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.”

The people of Israel, those whom God delivered by turning a sea into dry land, this exiled people will now return to that same land through a desert that flows with rivers! It’s a transformation so complete and total that even the Ostriches and the jackals will be praising God!

The apostle Paul truly embodies this kind of radical transformation.

            “4bIf anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
7Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.”

For both Israel and Paul, the past is defining. Yet what Isaiah, Paul, and indeed the ministry of Jesus make clear is that God cannot and will not be contained by that past. In the reading from Philippians, Paul challenges us to go forward in faith. Faith is not backward-looking, nor does it rest on its laurels. Paul had accomplished a lot in his zealous youth. He was at the top of his game. But then God invited him to something more – to a living relationship with a living God. Everything before his encounter with Jesus, Paul says with more than a little hyperbole, is rubbish compared to where he is going. Paul is not jettisoning his past. His rhetoric cannot dismiss his youthful ardor. In truth, Paul would not be here, straining toward the goal, if he hadn’t been there, a zealous Jewish leader, committed to preserving the purity of his faith. His moving forward depends upon his past just as our moving forward as a congregation depends upon the commitment of those who have gone before us.

Paul challenges us to keep our eyes on the prize. Healthy faith – abundant living – looks ahead, and is inspired by visions of the future, grounded in the accomplishments of the past.

The Gospel reading demonstrates two essential facets of love. In order to make the point even more clear, I’d like to remind you of another story that involves Martha and Mary, this one from the Gospel of Luke. The one where Jesus comes to visit, and Mary sits at Jesus’ feet while Martha is busy in the kitchen, preparing the meal. “40 But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” 41 But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42 there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’”

We see this difference in their natures in the reading from John, as well: “1Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.2There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. 3Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

The sisters, Martha and Mary, show us the two sides of faith, the active and contemplative, the quotidian and the ecstatic. In both passages, Martha is serving. She ensures that the guests have appropriate hospitality. Although Martha tends to become too task oriented and anxious. She wants things just right, which anyone who is a “Martha-type” would clearly understand. Martha’s service is essential to the evening and makes Mary’s attentiveness possible. We need people concerned with brick and mortar, and we need mystics and imaginative thinkers. They are the yin and yang of congregational life, spirituality, and our own maturity in the faith. Martha pays the bills, so Mary can love extravagantly. We need housework and romance in a relationship and consistency and mysticism in the church and our personal lives. There is a time for building the infrastructure and ensuring institutional well-being for the long-haul, this is Martha’s gift. And there is a time to throw caution to the wind, which is Mary’s contribution.

The challenge is to find the creative synthesis of order and novelty, security and abandon, quotidian and transcendent. That’s why we must continually be steeping ourselves in scripture, prayer, meditation and mutual conversation. We must be in a continual process of discernment, so that God’s vision for us will be made known which becomes refined into a clear sense of mission for us. The whole earth reflects God’s glory and in response, even brick and mortar can be windows into the divine.  God calls us to something new, but it’s grounded in the history of God’s unfailing love for all creation.

AMEN