What A Waste

Scriptures:     Isaiah 43:16-21,  Psalm 126

Philippians 3:4-14    John 12:1-8

Some of us may remember reading author O Henry’s story from many years ago, “The Gift of the Magi”.  It was about a young couple, Jim and Della, in dire economic circumstances but very much in love, who sacrificed greatly to buy presents for one another.  And if you’ve read stories by O Henry, there’s always an unexpected twist at the end.  Della had her long, flowing hair, of which she was very proud, cut off and sold to a wigmaker, to raise money to buy a chain for Jim’s watch, which he’d inherited from his grandfather.  Meanwhile, Jim had sold his one possession of value, the prized watch from his grandfather, in order to buy a lovely set of combs made of jeweled tortoise shell for Della.  On Christmas Day, each was disappointed to discover that the gift chosen had been rendered useless – Della had chosen a beautiful chain for a prized watch Jim no longer owned, and Jim chose beautiful combs for hair Della no longer had.  And yet the narrator tells us that each was pleased with the gift received - the extravagant, costly sacrifices each made reaffirmed the profound love that Jim and Della shared for one another.  How different from, to use a more current and very different example, the storyline in an old Seinfeld episode about “regifting,” taking an unwanted, unused, unopened present one has received – perhaps an ugly sweater or a hideous tie – and wrapping it up and passing it along as a present to someone else.  Ironically, from a material standpoint, in the Seinfeld example, everyone wins – the giver gets rid of unwanted clutter and at least there’s the hope that the receiver can make use of it – and yet “regifting” does nothing to strengthen the bonds of affection in the way that the costly giving of O Henry story portrayed, in which, from a material standpoint, Jim and Della both lost out.

Which brings us to the costly gift received by Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson.  While we have spent much of the year thus far reading from Luke’s Gospel, today we take a detour into the Gospel of John.  Jesus and the disciples were at the home of Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead, and the sisters Mary and Martha.  They gave a dinner for Jesus, with Martha, of course, serving – very much in character for practical Martha; it’s what she did best.  And we may remember from Luke’s gospel, 10^th chapter, the story of Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet while Martha served, and once again Mary likewise acts in character. Mary took a pound of perfume made of pure nard – which was imported from the Himalayan mountains; you can imagine it was quite costly – and anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair.  John tells us that the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.  Judas Iscariot, who would betray Jesus, lays into Mary, asking “why was this not sold for 300 denarii” – one denarius was  roughly a day’s  wage, so three hundred of them was almost a year’s wages – “and given to the poor.”  From a practical standpoint, what Judas says makes perfect sense. Who could argue with he’s saying? And yet John’s gospel gives us a strong hint not to side with Judas: “Judas said this not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse for the disciples and used to steal from it.”  Jesus rebukes Judas: “Leave her alone” – parallel accounts in Matthew and Luke quote Jesus as saying, “she has done a lovely thing” – “she bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.  The poor you will have with you always, but you will not have me with you always.”

What’s going on here? – quite a lot, actually.   First, we want to unpack the old church tradition that tells us that Mary Magdalene anointed Jesus feet and washed it with her hair.  This tradition is an attempt to pull together the varying accounts of the anointing in the four Gospels. Mark 14, the earliest of the gospels, and Matthew 26, which followed Mark in this tradition, describe Jesus being anointed on his head in Bethany near the end of his ministry, 2 days before Passover, at the house of Simon the Leper by an unnamed woman; Luke chapter 7 describes Jesus being anointed on his feet in Galilee, much earlier in his ministry, in the home of Simon the Pharisee by an unnamed sinful woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her hair.  And of course we have John’s account of the anointing of Jesus feet and washing with her hair by Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazazus, 6 days before Passover at the end of Jesus’ ministry – so early church tradition equated Mary in John with the sinful woman in Luke.  But that’s not what John is telling us – Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were a family, two sisters and a brother, living in Bethany – the name means “house of affliction” or “house of poverty” – whom Jesus knew and loved. Scholars think that Bethany may have been a place where there was a poor house, similar to the homeless shelters of our day….and since one of the Gospel accounts mentions ”Simon the Leper,” it’s possible that there was a leper colony there as well. Certainly it would have been a place of great destitution and pain, and yet in Mary and Martha and Lazarus’ welcome, for Jesus it was also a place of great love.   Scholars disagree whether these varying traditions among the four gospels represent one anointing or more than one, but we should let each account stand as the various Gospel writers tell them.

More important is the transition that is taking place in this section of John’s Gospel.  Jesus has just raised Lazarus from the dead, bringing Lazarus from death to life.  At the same time, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, with full knowledge that he’s going there to die.  Indeed, the religious authorities are searching for him, and even Lazarus, whom Jesus had brought to life, is under threat from the religious authorities, because people are coming to see Lazarus, and the raising of Lazarus is drawing disciples to Jesus. Jesus’ time with the disciples, his time in earthly ministry is growing short; indeed, is rapidly drawing to a close. The next day – which we’ll celebrate next Sunday – will mark Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  All too soon will come the betrayal in the garden, and the events of Good Friday.  So the writer of John’s gospel is preparing us for what is to come.  In today’s Gospel, Lazarus, brought to life, and his sisters are hosting Jesus, who is preparing for death.  Mary anoints Jesus’ feet – and when a body was prepared for burial, it would have been packed in spices for preservation, beginning with the feet.  The Greek word for perfume, myrou, is related to the myrrh that was used as a preservative.  She wiped Jesus’ feet with her hair – and in her culture a woman would have let down her hair only in moments alone with a spouse, or during time of mourning as a sign of distraction.  So Mary, perhaps not even fully realizing the implication of what she was doing, made a costly offering of pure perfume of nard out of the purity of her great love for Jesus, in preparation for Jesus’ upcoming death and burial. Because, as Jesus told Judas, they would not, at least in bodily form, have Jesus with them always.

Those words of Jesus about having the poor always with them sound callous to our ears, and they’ve been misused to promote policies that leave the poor in their misery – after all, some would say, Jesus said there would always be poor people, so who are we to contradict him?  As always, context is important; this conversation was likely taking place in a high poverty area, so they and everyone around them was likely impoverished.  Poverty was no abstraction; indeed, it was pervasive, and so to the extent they helped anyone there, including Jesus, they’d be helping the poor.  Jesus was not saying that the poor should not be helped – indeed, in Matthew 25, Jesus taught that helping the poor was helping him, and those not helping the poor might find themselves eternally separated from Jesus in the world to come.  But he did not want to dishonor the beautiful sacrificial offering of love Mary made. 

At the same time, the words of Judas have a familiar ring:  “Why was the money not given to help the poor.”  We hear echoes of the words of Judas every time someone begrudges aid to some group by saying that there’s some other group more worthy of help:  “Why should we help refugees, when we have our own to take care of?  Why should we help the homeless, when our veterans deserve help?” – of course, many of our homeless are veterans.  Of course, when we advocate public policies, taking public dollars, to helping homeless veterans, someone will say, “The churches should take care of them” – ignoring the reality that we at Emanuel know only too well, that churches don’t print money, and can only work with what we’re given.  The truth of those who argue in the spirit of Judas is that most of the folks who begrudge help to refugees often do little or nothing to help the homeless or even veterans, while those more openhanded, who are willing to help, are often willing to dig deep to help refugees and homeless and veterans, without distinction.  When it comes to helping people, the way of Jesus is not “either/or”, but “both/and”.  In the eyes of Jesus, the categories of “deserving” and “undeserving” don’t exist – after all, what did St Paul write to the church at Rome? – “While we were yet sinners” – and that’s all of us, every single one of us,  you, me, everyone in this room, everyone outside this building, everyone – “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for” – for who? Say it with me….  “Christ died for us.”  (Romans 5:6-10)  Nobody deserves God’s grace – that’s the point!  Arguments that pit help for one group against help for another group come from the same place that the words of Judas come from, that is to say, from the bottom of the pit of hell. 

More broadly, in today’s gospel reading we have a contrast between the wisdom of our culture and the way of Jesus. Our culture tells us to be prudent, calculating, cautious.  Waste not, want not, as our parents taught us, especially if our parents grew up or were alive during the Depression of the 1930’s.  Wise words for difficult times, such as we face today. 

And yet our faith tells us that, while there are certainly times for prudence, there are also times when we are called to put caution aside, when our response to God’s great love cannot be calculating and measured and even stingy, but extravagant and costly, as is God’s love for us.  God’s love for every single one of us cost the death of God’s own Son.  In the words of the book of Lamentations (1:12), “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”  Indeed, how can we hold back, when God calls for our undivided love and devotion in response.   So this Gospel reading is a challenge to our natural tendency – that is to say, our sinful tendency - to hold back on our love for God and neighbor, to dribble it out in small, carefully calibrated doses.

At the same time, we can draw comfort from this story.  When we are faithful in our discipleship to Jesus, we rarely see the results of our actions.  A branch of science called chaos theory says that small changes in local conditions can snowball into large effects far away, sort of like a small change in the setting of a ship’s rudder leading it to a different destination.  Or in a popular illustration, chaos theorist Edward Lorenz postulates that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings outside our window may trigger a thunderstorm halfway around the globe.  In the same way, our prayers and acts of devotion to God and love of neighbor, made as an offering to Christ, may play out in powerful ways that we’ll never know on this side of eternity.  Our neighbors will chide us – why spend so much time and give so much of your means to the church?  What difference does it make?  What a waste!   And in our moments of discouragement, we may be inclined to agree.  And those moments of discouragement come to all of us.  God knows moments of discouragement come to me as well…many are the midnight hours I’ve asked myself, “Is anything I do making the slightest difference to anyone?  I could just sleep in on Sunday.  Why bother? What’s the use?”  And yet those who were faithful at my home church fifty years ago when I was growing up had no idea that someday I’d be pastoring a church – all they saw was a scrawny, shy kid with asthma and coke-bottle glasses…and yet their faithful offerings of love bore fruit in my life, and hopefully through our time here together, in your lives as well.  The same is true for what we do here.  We here are planting seeds of God’s grace, and will likely never live to see the full fruit of what we plant. We can draw comfort that in the eyes of God, who sees all, our prayers and acts of love are lovely offerings when offered in faith to Jesus.  Mary poured out an extravagant offering of perfume in love to Jesus, and yet in God’s eyes not a drop of her offering was wasted.  Nor are our greatest – or smallest – prayers or acts of kindness wasted when offered to Christ.

Matthew’s account of the anointing says that “truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what this woman has done will be told in remembrance of her” – and indeed, the story is preserved in all four gospels to this day.  Our prayers, our caring for those less fortunate, our acts of love, are a fragrant offering to God – and not a drop is wasted.  May future generations tell of the love offered in Christ’s name by the members of Emanuel Church.  Amen.

Embracing Love

Scriptures:        Joshua 5:9-12                           Psalm 32

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

Today’s Gospel reading gives us one of the best-known of Jesus’ parables.  It’s commonly known as the parable of the Prodigal Son.  But it can also be thought of as the parable of the father and two sons – though Jesus told more than one parable of that description.  From another standpoint, it could be called the parable of the Elder Brother.  One meaning of the word prodigal is being lavish and extravagant in the use of one’s resources, to the point of being wasteful.  And from that standpoint, the parable could also thought of as the parable of the Prodigal Father, given his lavish welcome of his returning son.  It may seem like a matter of wrangling over words, but each of these terms – parable of the prodigal son, parable of the elder brother, parable of the father with two sons, parable of the prodigal father – sheds a spotlight on a different part of the parable, lifts up a different character or set of characters as the focus of the parable, gives us a different sense of what the parable is “about”.  And, of course, Jesus’ parables rarely had just one level of meaning, but had many layers of meaning waiting to be peeled back like the layers of an onion.

Context is important in understanding this parable as it is in understanding any parable.  In the preceding chapter, it was the Sabbath, and Jesus had eaten at the home of a Pharisee. It was a tense moment; Luke tells us that Jesus was being carefully watched.  And, Jesus being Jesus, he let them carefully watch him heal a sick man on the Sabbath, which went against their interpretation of the Sabbath laws, but was typical of Jesus’ conviction that in God’s eyes, any time was the right time to bring healing.  Jesus then told his parable of the banquet, in which the invited guests blew off the invitation and ghosted the host – and so the banquet sent his servants to invite everyone they could find, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, even bodily dragging random strangers off the streets and through the door if it came to that.

While Jesus likely made his host uncomfortable, his words attracted many of those who were considered society’s riff-raff.  The motley crew surrounding Jesus drew mutters from the Pharisees – likely including Jesus’ host – and the teachers of the law.  What are these sinners doing here, stinking up the place?  Why did Jesus invite them?   But Jesus being Jesus, what else would he do for those considered sinners and outcasts, folks who likely were rarely invited anywhere, but invite them. It’s doubly striking in that Jesus had just gotten done telling a parable about the host of a banquet who wound up inviting a random assortment of strangers to his banquet…..and now the Pharisees complained because Jesus invited a random assortment of strangers to listen to him. 

In response, Jesus told not one, but three parables.  He began with the parable of the lost sheep, also found in Matthew’s gospel, in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go in search of the one sheep who had gotten separated from the flock.  This was followed by his parable of the woman in search of a lost coin.  In both cases, the lost sheep and the lost coin are found,  and the owner invites the neighbors over to celebrate.

And then Jesus tells the parable we heard in today’s Gospel reading.  The younger of two sons asks his father to give him his share of the estate.  According to the laws of the day, the elder son got a double share of the property, while the rest was divided among the other children.  Normally, of course, a father’s property was divided among the sons at the time of the father’s death….and so the sons’s request doesn’t say much for the value placed by the son on his relationship with his father.  But the father complies with the son’s request, however reluctantly.  We know what happened next – the son collected his possessions, turned his back on his family and community to set off for a distant country – a distant Gentile country, we should understand -  and, as the text states, “squandered his wealth in dissolute living.”  As we would say, he pissed it all away, all that his father had given him.  He ran out of money, and there was a famine in the land, and he began to be in need – as another translation says, “he began to feel the pinch” of poverty.   He hired himself out to some farmers to tend pigs – again, not an occupation to which Jews would normally aspire, to put it mildly – and was on the point of eating the pods he was feeding to the pigs.    We’re told that in that moment, as the son was envying the pigs for their pods, as the son was considering pulling pods up out of the pig slop and trying to wipe the slop off so he could put it in his mouth – in that moment, the son came to himself.  Up to that point, the son had been carried along from one event to the next, from feast to famine, but now the son had a moment of self-awareness, said to himself, “what the heck is this I’m doing.”:  even my father’s hired hands are eating well, while here I am ready to choke down pods garnished in pig slop.  I’ll go home, tell my father that after all I’ve done, I’m no longer worthy to be called his son, but can I go to work for you.  We’re left with questions about the son’s motivation – did he genuinely want to see his father again, or was he trying to get over on his father in order to survive?  Jesus left it an open question, and it’s likely the son’s motives were mixed.  But we remember what happened next – the father, seeing his son off in the distance, discards all fatherly dignity by running out to meet the son.  Now, if I were a father and my son came back to me in that condition, while I’d welcome him in, he’d likely get an earful from me on the need for personal responsibility, and I’d put him on a very short leash henceforth until he earned back his stripes in terms of demonstrating responsible behavior.  But instead, the father clothed him with a ring and the best robe, killed the fatted calf, and threw a banquet. 

At this point, we meet the elder brother, who had been working in the fields.  He heard party music and asked one of the hired hands what was going on….and when he heard the party was for his no-good brother, the elder son was livid.  “Your scumbag son comes wandering in, and  you throw a party.  I’ve worked my butt off for you all these years.  Where’s my party?  Party with your no-account son all you want, dad, but count me out.”  The father learns to his sorrow that both his sons were  lost, one to dissolute living in a far country, the other to bitterness and resentment under his own roof.  But the father goes out to him, as he had gone out to the  younger son, to invite him to the party.  He reminded the older son that he would always be his dad, and that after he was gone, all that his father owned would go to him.  But my younger son is still your brother, and on this day it’s as if he came back from the dead.  And here Jesus invites us to finish the story.  He never tells us whether the elder brother went in or not.

On the back of your bulletin insert I included a very bad reproduction of Rembrandt’s depiction of this story.  The original hangs in Russia.  Unfortunately, my crummy inkjet printer struggled and mostly failed to capture Rembrandt’s subtle shading and use of shadow and light…printing Rembrandt on an inkjet is a bit like trying to draw the Mona Lisa with crayons, or playing Brahms on a toddler’s toy keyboard.  Even so, there’s enough to convey the idea:  the younger son is kneeling before his father, down to his ragged undergarments, his head shaved,  his sandals crumbling off his feet, with only a small sword on his right hip to remind him that he had once known better days in his father’s home.  The father, grey not only from age but from his recent worry and grief, embraces the son with his timeworn hands the father’s arms and robe almost forming a kind of protective canopy over the son.  And at a distance, partly hidden in the shadows, stands the elder brother, looking so much like his father in his robe and beard, but behaving so differently, standing aloof….standing in judgment, we might say, his hands clasped over his chest – we might imagine him with his arms folded across his chest – silent, not saying anything, just observing.  In the background, in the shadows, barely visible, are the household servants. And yes, there’s a bit of artistic license in that Rembrandt’s picture brings the elder son in with the younger son and father, but the body language of all three major characters is just so striking, silently speaking volumes about the varying emotions of the moment.  I am hardly a skilled or observant interpreter of art, and so my comments come from Roman Catholic author Henri Nouwen’s book on this painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son.

Henri Nouwen’s book asks us, “Where do we find ourselves in the story?”   He describes society’s often-conditional love, in which society states that we will love and respect you as long as you are productive, as long as  you are attractive, but when that ends, so does our care for you.  Nouwen compares the search for love apart from God as addiction.  Nouwen writes: “I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.  Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere?  Why do I keep leaving home when I am called a child of God, the Beloved of my Father?”

 By contrast, the elder son is a figure of righteous resentment – perhaps a stand-in for the Pharisees who resent the riff-raff surrounding Jesus.  Speaking of this resentment in himself, which he sees as the shadow side of his good qualities, Nouwen writes: “It is … pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue.  Isn’t it good to be obedient, dutiful, law-abiding, hardworking, and self-sacrificing?  And still it seems that my resentments and complaints are mysteriously tied to such praiseworthy attitudes.  The connection often makes me despair.  At the very moment I want to speak or act out of my most generous self, I get caught in anger or resentment.  And it seems that just as I want to be most selfless, I find myself obsessed with being loved.  Just when I do my utmost to accomplish a task well, I find myself questioning why others do not give themselves as I do….It seems that wherever my virtuous self is, there also is the resentful complainer.”  Nouwen speaks of the need to let go of comparisons to others, and to focus on gratitude.

We may identify more with one or the other sons, the youngest with a scandalous past and a lifetime of regrets, or the elder son, frozen in righteous resentment and rage.  But Nouwen states that our spiritual task is to go beyond sonship, to, in Jesus’ words, “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.” Paul wrote that we are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, provided that we share his sufferings, so as to share his glory.  Nouwen comes to the startling conclusion that while it is far more comfortable to identify with one or the other of the sons, “The return to the Father is ultimately the challenge to become the Father.”  Nouwen writes: “The call to become the Father precludes any ‘soft’ interpretation of the story. I know how much I long to return and be held safe, but do I really want to be son and heir with all that implies?  Being in my Father’s house requires that I make my Father’s life my own and become transformed in his image.”

Clearly we cannot literally become God.  And yet we are made in God’s image, being transformed day by day into God’s likeness, if we allow it, if we can get ourselves out of God’s way.  Nouwen sees Jesus’ parable ultimately as a call and invitation to spiritual maturity, to leave behind the irresponsibility of childhood along with the scorekeeping and resentment of early adulthood, to be transformed by God and our life experience into God’s arms and hands in embracing and bringing healing to the brokenness that surrounds us. 

We are all sinners, in need of God’s grace.  And yet the grace we seek for ourselves may offend and scandalize us when extended toward others.  May we be compassionate as God is compassionate, God whose sun warms and rain waters both the just and the unjust.  May we return from the far country of dissolution and addiction, may we step out of the shadows of resentment, into the warm circle of God’s embracing love – and may we invite others to the banquet. Amen.