Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · March 21, 2010

The Fifth Sunday of Lent

Litany and Confession

From Psalm 126

When we found our lives restored, it was like a dream.

            We could laugh again and find joy in our days and nights.

God has done great things in our midst.

            Those who sow the seeds of mourning will reap the harvest of healing.

Let us be honest about the ways we have turned from our God and failed our neighbor:

            O God of all mercy, we ask that you restore us with the power of your

            forgiveness and healing, for we know our brokenness and turn to the

            brightness of your grace!

God is merciful, abounding in steadfast love!

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Pastoral Prayer

Tim Carson

It is only the splendor of light that hides you from our eyes, Eternal Presence.

Appear now that we may see you without squinting or stumbling away blind.

As a dream, we found our voice again, and the old things pass away

            making way for the new. Fill us with the adoration that transforms

            and the passion that makes a difference in worship and service alike.

As we walk the long road ahead, help us to watch him as we go:

            The way he stops to care, spooning out hope like medicine,

            pulling out the unexpected best in each one, and daring to put it all

on the line.

Lord of Life, it is so easy to mouth the words, “What would Jesus do?”

But really doing it is the thing, is the hard thing, the seemingly impossible thing. We want to look away. Or run. Or hide. But you keep drawing us to him, like a magnet, to the way he is going, even when he asks us to pray the incredible words that we sing now…

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen, Amen.

New Testament Lesson

John 12:1-8

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary 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. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (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.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

Message

Rest Stop: Are We There Yet?

Tim Carson

I love this story. After reading and studying it, I think about it all the time. It stays with me, working on me, working into me. And it’s not only because it is the classic example of how the different gospels take a core story and customize it for their own audience and theology – how texts made their way into different churches of the first century and took on different forms – but because it takes us to such profoundly deep places in the heart. Like any great story, the truths are multi-layered. Like peeling an onion, the next layer gives way to the next and the next.

But let’s start with the adventure of reading this Scripture text. This core story is the poster child for comparing and contrasting the different forms that a single story took as it was passed from one Christian community to another. Every time, in the ancient world, that it changed hands and was re-presented in a new community with a unique situation, it was modified or ornamented.

The core story of Jesus at table and the woman anointing him shows up in three gospels – Mark, Luke and John (Mark 14:3-9; Luke 7:36-50; John 12:1-8). It is the story of three different Christian communities in the ancient world. Since Mark is the earliest of the gospels, the earliest source of the written form of the story, we presume that both Luke and John had access to him in written form. But what we don’t know is how this story took on a life of its own in oral tradition and was passed by word of mouth from one Christian and one congregation to another. Was it used in the preaching of early evangelists, who were using it as an illustration in their preaching?

One thing we do know is that the story was so powerful, so prominent, that it showed up in three different Christian communities as a part of their primary story-telling tradition. That is impressive. And what we also have to recognize is that trying to harmonize all these stories is a fruitless project. Trying to read these biblical texts as though there are no contradictions or contrasts is simply being untrue to the witness of the New Testament as it comes from many sources. For example:

Two of the gospels (Mark and John) locate the story in Bethany, but they place the incident in two different homes there (John – Lazarus; Mark – Simon the Leper). The third gospel (Luke) has the meal taking place in the home of Simon the Pharisee.

The woman who anointed Jesus is portrayed alternately as Mary, of Mary and Martha fame, in the home of Lazarus (John), or a sinful woman from the community who needs forgiveness (Luke), or an anonymous woman who is never named, who Mark declares as a unique example of faithfulness at the end of the story: “Wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her”(Mark 14:9).

The characters who oppose the extravagance of the woman, suggesting that such an expensive offering could have been better used for a benevolent purpose, change from story to story. In Mark, it’s just some who were at the dinner. In Luke, it’s the Pharisee who invited him to dinner. And in John, since it’s portrayed as happening shortly before the entrance into Jerusalem and Passover, it’s Judas.

As for the time, in both Mark and John, it takes place before Passover. In Luke, it takes place by the Jordan River following the baptism of Jesus by John – early in the Jesus story.

So what do we make of all this diverse detail from three different stories? It’s preaching! And you know what preachers do. They tell stories to bring you to faith, to excite your imagination about God, to speak to this context, not another context. All of them did that very same thing. Each gospel writer took this story of Jesus to make a different point and changed the particulars. They are not especially interested that it all somehow stays consistent. That’s the farthest thing from their minds. The ancients didn’t think that way. We think that way, and we think history should be told that way. They are telling the story to bring a person to truth, or to faith, or to enlightenment. In all of these presentations of the same story, the core story remains. It is so powerful that it survived frequent transmission and interpretation. 

Here is the core story.

Jesus was invited to dinner. During the dinner, a woman approached him, bowed down, opened a container of very expensive perfumed ointment, and anointed his feet. People objected that it was too extravagant, inappropriate, unseemly, and that the money could be used in a better way, such as for the poor. Jesus reprimanded them and said, “Leave her alone. She is anointing me for my death.”

That’s it. That is the core story as it made its way from community to community, to preacher to preacher, to writer to writer.

So, it doesn’t matter exactly when or where it happened, whose home they were in, who the woman was, or who actually resisted her action. What does matter is the story itself, and what it means, and the power it has to inspire us to faith, and truth, adoration in our time and place. And what I want to suggest this morning is that the internal power of this story derives from its universal nature, that it lives inside all of us already, whether we know it or not. That’s why it resonates when we hear it, because it is a part of us already.

In the movie Chocolat, a mysterious woman and her daughter show up in a sleepy and very conventional French town. The restrictive mores of the community are enforced by its strict mayor, who controlled the population by using the young priest as his puppet. Right at the beginning of the season of Lent and the Lenten fast, the new woman in town opens a chocolate shop. It is like no chocolate shop you have ever seen before. She intuitively reads the emotional needs of people and then prescribed just the right chocolate to “reveal their internal yearnings and destinies.”

For her nonconformist ways, she was vilified by the mayor and some of the townsfolk who were trapped by their own sense of propriety and religious duty. They were living totally by external roles. She was told to get in step with everyone else or else.

The mysterious woman led them toward a sense of passion, freedom, and love, as the mayor urged people to follow the rules down to the letter “T.” It was the Saturday before Easter, and the mayor, himself lonely and heartbroken, headed over to the chocolate shop to destroy the very thing he longed for most. You will remember he ended up in the front window of the chocolate shop having OD-ed on chocolate.

Of course, something has to die in the display window of the chocolate shop. It is his false notion of righteousness, of what it means to be a person of virtue, of what it means to live in the Spirit. Something died that day, and, through merciful grace, he experienced resurrection.

We are always tempted to destroy that which we fear most in ourselves. The part of us that is afraid to die battens down the hatches and creates even more structure and rules to keep all the disorderly chaos of our feelings and deep intuitions at bay, until, of course, we can’t any longer.

When the woman knelt at Jesus’ feet, she broke through every social convention to do so – a woman touching a man in public (in that time, strictly taboo), daring to express herself lavishly, extravagantly. And then the push back from the surrounding society was enormous. “If he only knew who she was.” “How wasteful; the money could have been used for a worthy cause. What an embarrassment.”

But she, says Jesus, leads the way while the rest of us spend our energy resisting. She is leading the heart to where it belongs with extravagant adoration, surrender, and demonstrating passionate love. We, on the other hand, rent out space to an internal monitor, a governor to keep us from going too far, and it doesn’t let us express the real love that is within us.

Do you remember the scene from the movie Dead Poets Society in which the English instructor (played by Robin Williams) is at the prep school? He asks his students to rip out the “introduction to the poetry section” in the front of their literature textbooks? The introduction suggested that the students evaluate poems using a rational scale and grid, like they were dissecting a toad. The teacher walked the aisles with a trash can, taking all their torn-out introductions, and reminded them that poetry was not algebra, but rather pieces of art that plunge us to the depths of the heart.

There are some places you cannot go when you operate according to a mathematical formula, and faith and mystery and the adoration of God is one of those. Love is not a commodity that can be sold or traded. When love is reduced to an object to be measured or traded, it can never be extravagant, because extravagance pours out for entirely different reasons or in spite of what seems reasonable at all.

The power of this story, a story that has survived being passed on over and over, from one community to another, changing its details as it went, is this: The story already lives inside us. And so, when we hear it, we are hearing something we already know. Like our dreams, universal stories portray the characters that already live inside of us.

Inside of us, there is a woman who bows down, humbles herself, and gives all to the mystery that breaks bread at her own table. This woman pours out the costly perfume of her life, wets his feet with tears of sorrow, and dries them with her own hair.

But also inside of us is the Pharisee-the crowd-the Judas, the accountant from Hades, who has an endless list of bottom-line reasons that we shouldn’t do any of this. His favorite words are, “No. There is not enough, better hold back, it’s not proper, and you’re not worthy.” He spoons out all the reasons that we should not risk, not be extravagant, not be out of control, and not make fools of ourselves for the sake of the wild, untamed love for God.

And there, in the midst of spilled perfume and accusations, we see his feet. And even with such a chorus of voices echoing around the room, we dare to bow down. Is it for his death that we anoint him? Or for our own? Is this the last stop before the end? Or before the beginning?

These questions I ponder in my heart.

Amen.

Benediction

Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship and communion of the Holy Spirit be with you always. Amen.