Last weekend when I was driving back from Iowa, I entertained myself by catching up on podcasts of On Being. On Being, if you’re not familiar, is a radio program where host Krista Tippett interviews a variety of guests about spirituality and what it means to be human. It’s on Michigan Radio on Sunday mornings at 7 am, but I always listen to it on podcast so I can listen to the unedited cuts. The episode I was listening to was a three-way conversation between Tippett, Dr. Robert Ross, and Patrisse Cullors. Dr. Ross is a pediatrician and the executive director of a foundation in California that funds public health initiatives, and Cullors is the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was an amazing conversation, I highly recommend listening to it. I’ll post a link to the episode at the end of this sermon. But one part of the conversation especially struck me, and I thought, I have to share this in a sermon sometime.
So at one, Tippett raised a question about the role of anger in activism, anger being one of the main critiques of the Black Lives Matter movement. Dr. Ross responded that activism is by its very nature a form of strategic outrage, and activists are always criticized as being outrageous. In fact, Dr. Ross remarked, if activism is not making people uncomfortable, it is probably not activism. Cullors highlighted in several stories how strategic outrage is in fact not rooted in anger but in love, it is loving the community so much that you demand better from it, better for it. And then, and here’s the part I found fascinating and beautiful. Ross, remember, is a pediatrician and runs a foundation that works to improve public health. So there’s all sorts of research about trauma and the long-term, physical effects trauma has on our bodies. People who live under high degrees of stress for long periods of time experience a whole host of physical ailments. There is much less research on the resiliency side, but the limited research there is, Dr. Ross shared, seems to suggest that activism, that civic engagement, is actually healthy for people. There is a wellness, a wholeness that comes with civic engagement, it somehow acts as a immunizing force that helps people heal from the trauma they have experienced. I could not get the beautiful balance of that idea out of my head, that somehow we have been created in such a way that the way to recover from the things that hurt us is actually to work so that those things do not hurt other people. That we actually heal ourselves by healing others.
So in our Gospel reading for this morning, we join Jesus at a dinner party in his honor, at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Just the chapter before, this family had experienced unspeakable trauma, as their brother Lazarus became deathly ill and Jesus, who they knew could save him, showed up too late, four days after Lazarus’ death. But then, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Thus, this celebratory dinner party. And certainly, Lazarus sitting among them is a reason to celebrate. But one can imagine even as they rejoice, everyone is still pretty shaken from the events of the days before. You don’t just get over a trauma like that. So they’re sitting there in the uncomfortable awkwardness of not exactly knowing how to feel. When suddenly, Mary did something dramatic. She got up, took a pound of costly perfume, pure nard the scripture tells us, worth about a year’s wages for a day laborer, and poured it all over Jesus’ feet, wiping his feet with her hair. There is something so uncomfortable, so disturbing intimate about this scene, even as readers we find ourselves kind of wanting to look away, like there’s something happening between Mary and Jesus that we shouldn’t be watching. But we cannot look away, we cannot not notice what is happening here. The scripture tells us the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. I don’t have an experience of spilling a pound of nard, but commentaries assure me it is not the sort of smell you can miss. It would be overwhelming, so thick you could almost feel it. In the chapter before, when Lazarus was dead and Jesus requested that the stone over the mouth of the tomb be rolled away, Martha protested, “Lord, it has been four days and already there is a stench.” This is one of the few times where I think the King James Version gets it better, “Lord, he stinketh.” But now that stinketh, that stench of death, has been physically overwhelmed by the overpowering aroma of love and devotion demonstrated by Mary’s costly show of service.
But that’s not the only thing that’s going on here. Mary’s action was not just an undoing of Lazarus’ death; it was also a foretelling of Jesus’. We are told that this dinner happened “six days before the Passover, a reminder that in just six days Jesus will be dead, and because of the holiday, the women will be unable to anoint his body. Mary understood what none of the other disciples did yet, that Jesus was going to Jerusalem to die, and these were among the last few precious moments that she would have to serve him in the flesh. Yes, it was an outrageous action, an action that makes us, and the others around the table, uncomfortable, but love is outrageous, and if it is not a little bit uncomfortable, it is probably not love.
The word the writer of John used for “dinner” at the beginning of this passage shows up one other time in John’s Gospel, at the dinner that Jesus held with his disciples on the night before he was betrayed. When he gathered them together in an upper room and washed their feet, wiping, also the same word, wiping them dry with a towel draped around his waist. He would then command them to love each other as he had loved them. That the way to live after he was gone, the way to continue to walk in the way he had instructed them, was to love, to serve, each other. Discipleship in the days after the death of Jesus would be about living a life of service and love for the world. “By this, they will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus would tell them, “if you have love for one another.” The model of discipleship as healing ourselves and the world through love and service that Mary demonstrated by service Jesus will be expanded from Jesus to the world in Jesus’ last days.
Mary’s outrageous act of devotion was too uncomfortable for Judas Iscariot. “But why was this perfume not sold and the money given to the poor?” he asked. The scriptures tell us that this is a loaded question. Judas, we are told, is a thief who is known to steal from the common purse, selling the perfume then would put more money in his pocket. Jesus response is at first confusing. “Leave her alone... You always have the poor among you, but you do not always have me.” Some have used these words of Jesus to ask the question of if we are to serve the poor then, or are we to serve Jesus? I think Jesus’ actions at the last supper demonstrate that the answer to that question is yes, that it is not an either/or question, we in fact serve Jesus by serving the poor. I don’t think this is a comment that systemic poverty is an impossible problem that is not worth working on, I think it is more a commentary on the human experience, that there will always be someone in need up help, always someone who has fallen on hard times, been in an accident, experienced a disaster, who is sick or hurt or depressed, there will always be “poor.” But more than that, I think this is not even the question Jesus was answering when he addressed Judas. “Leave her alone,” Jesus told Judas, this is none of your business. This is her act of service, her work of healing, her journey back to wholeness. Her work is none of your business; you keep track of your own healing, and leave her to hers. And Judas will, in a most backwards way. In just a few chapters we will be told how the devil entered Judas and he betrayed Jesus to the authorities, a move that set into motion the unstoppable chain of events that led to Jesus defeating death by dying, and in doing so, bringing salvation and healing to the entire world. Judas in fact became an essential cog in Jesus’ carefully constructed Rub Goldberg machine to redeem creation. A machine set in motion when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, pushing over the first domino, an miracle that led Mary to express her love in an act of gratuitous devotion, which enraged Judas to question the action, which led Jesus to teach his disciples to serve each other, which pushed Judas to betray him, which led to Jesus death, his resurrection, and the power of this love propelling his disciples out into the world to remake creation in the love Christ had taught them. Even Judas could not escape being caught up in God’s great miracle of redemption.
At the end of the interview with Ross and Cullors, an Episcopal priest from a small church in Los Angeles got up and asked what the first, best step would be for a small church wanting to engage in this work of healing and wholeness with the oppressed in their community. Patrisse Cullors’ answer was so beautifully simple. Have conversations. Get out, get to know people, ask questions, how is this current moment affecting you, what are you concerned about, what are you hopeful for? Dr. Ross took it a step further, urging the audience to understand the meta, the systems in place that have led to the injustice, the brokenness, the trauma of the world. And then, with these two pieces in place, with conversation and with understanding, congregations can truly be about the work that we have literally been created for, to heal ourselves by healing the world. Because, as Jesus promised the disciples in a dinner party so long ago, there will always be an opportunity for healing for us, because there will always be someone who needs to be healed. And so creatively, so wonderfully, were we formed by our God, that healing the world is literally the work that heals us. By being God’s people in the world, we experience God’s presence in our lives. Thanks be to God. Amen.
To hear On Being episode, click the link below. In the unedited version, Dr. Ross talks about the effects of activism at 36:10 and the question from the Episcopal priest occurs at 1:15:00.
http://www.onbeing.org/program/patrisse-cullors-and-robert-ross-the-resilient-world-were-building-now/8425
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