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Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Sermon by The Rev. Wray MacKay
Lent 5, Year C
March 28, 2004
Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii…
In this morning's Gospel, things are not what they appear to be.
And we will discover a new meaning to sacrifice.
First of all, Judas appears to be right.
Jesus had been in ministry for three years
Everyone knew him to be on the side of the poor.
Mary's coming in with that expensive bottle of perfume,
and washing Jesus' feet with it and her hair,
is a bit like having Mother Theresa over for dinner
with your best china and silverware
and then serving her the most expensive caviar.
Judas was probably only saying what everyone else was thinking:
'How embarrassing! How out of place for Mary to do that for Jesus!'
Judas is right to say what he said. Or at least he appears to be.
It reminds me of one of the great episode's
from Garrison Keilor's Prairie Home Companion.
Pastor Enquist of Lake Woebegone Lutheran Church
is heading on a wonderful trip with his wife
from the frozen tundra of Minnesota in January
to the tropical setting of Orlando, Florida.
They are going for a rural pastor's continuing education event,
but it is also a trip of a lifetime.
Pastor Enquist has worked very hard for many years
for the people of Lake Woebegone Lutheran Church,
and he's never had a trip like this to spend with his wife.
They are all set to leave the next morning,
the morning after the monthly council meeting,
when long-time council person Val Tollefsen speaks up.
He notes that it is really a shame,
the pictures they have been seeing
of all those poor children suffering in the drought in Africa.
He wonders if there isn't something they could do for them.
Maybe they could find some extra money to send them,
some deadweight somewhere in the budget,
maybe travel or something like that.
Silence. After a long pause, Pastor Enquist says,
"Well, the Mrs. and I could always give up our trip to Orlando."
Again, there's a long pause,
with Pastor Enquist hoping and praying
that someone will jump in immediately and say,
"Oh no, Pastor Enquist, you and your wife deserve that trip!
You have worked so hard for us through all these years.
You've been there for us whenever we've needed you.
No, you deserve this trip."
But, instead, after a long pause, Val Tollefsen simply says,
"O.K., Pastor, if that's the way ya feel about it."
And that's how Pastor Enquist lost his trip to Orlando for he and "the Mrs."
On the surface, Val Tollefsen appears to be right.
That money would better be spent giving it to the poor, right?
But underneath the surface,
those of us who know the wonderful characters
of Garrison Keilor's imagination,
know that Val Tollefsen has always been a nemesis of Pastor Enquist.
He's probably been a nemesis for every pastor.
He's the kind of person that lives with a lot of resentment
and so tends to make life difficult for others.
No, Val Tollefsen didn't really speak up out of feelings of great charity.
Things are not what they appear to be on the surface.
Likewise, Judas. What he says seems right enough.
Of course John makes sure that we know his heart, too,
that things aren't what they appear to be on the surface.
Judas is a thief.
But there's something going on at an even deeper level, isn't there?
Because Jesus' response to Judas is absolutely off the wall.
First on their list of expected responses,
might have been something more like Pastor Enquist's capitulation,
'Yea, Mary, you'd better save the rest of that and do like Judas says.'
What Jesus does say is what I'm sure no one else in the room expected to hear,
not even Mary.
It's not that he defended Mary's actions -- which he did.
It's the reason that Jesus gives for defending them:
She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.
Even Mary's ears must have perked up at that point:
'I bought it for what?! For your burial?!'
The tender intimacy of the moment rose from Mary's passionate live and sacrifice.
Jesus saw that -- and more.
No, things aren't what they appear to be in this story.
For Jesus knows something.
Jesus knows something that no one else in the room knows.
Jesus knows that he himself
is about to give much more than three hundred denarii.
He is about to give himself.
Things are definitely not what they appear to be.
You know, in recent years, many biblical scholars
have questioned the idea that Jesus could knew such things,
that he could make such predictions about his death.
But to illustrate its truth, I'd like to lift up a time in our more recent history
when again things weren't quite what they appeared to be.
In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr.
whose heavenly birthday we commemorate next Sunday,
had already accomplished many things in his long battle for civil rights.
But he knew there was still a long ways to go.
The poor and downtrodden of this world weren't going to go away tomorrow. There was still a long ways to go.
And, quite frankly, he was tired.
On Saturday night, April 3, 1968, he had arrived in Memphis, TN,
for another big showdown,
to fight for the rights of sanitation workers on strike in that city.
He was tired; he was even feeling under the weather.
So, at first, he decided to stay in the motel that night
and not go to the planned rally at Mason Temple.
But then he began listening to rally speaker Ralph Abernathy on the radio.
And as he listened to the overflow crowd
that had come out on this night despite severe storm warnings,
he changed his mind and moved over to the Temple.
When he finally took his turn, to the great delight of the crowd,
and with thunder and lightning crashing in the background,
he began by saying:
You know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of a general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" -- I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.
He went on to travel through time, pausing periodically to touch the refrain,
"But I wouldn't stop there." No, he wouldn't stop until:
Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding -- something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same -- "We want to be free."
And then Dr. King went on with what they needed to do there in Memphis.
But, as you would note if you had seen the tapes of that speech,
there was a different tone and demeanor,
a different look in his eyes.
Because after beginning his speech
about being glad he had been part of this time in history,
he ended his speech with a foreshadowing of his death.
He talked about the time in his life, years before, that a woman had stabbed him,
leaving the knife blade next to his aorta,
so that just a sneeze probably would have killed him.
No, he was glad to witness and be a part of
all the wonderful things that had happened since then.
And he ended his speech with these words:
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
The next morning, of course, April 4, 1968,
Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death by James Earl Ray.
Did he know?
Did Jesus know he was going to die?
More surely than even Martin Luther King, Jr.
And it's because Jesus knew something else.
He knew the truth about us.
He knew that things aren't what they appear to be with us.
He knew that our problems with sin run deeper than it appears on the surface.
He knew that for Val Tollefsen of Lake Woebegone and for the rest of us,
that we live with resentment toward others
in ways that need regular venting off somewhere.
And he knew that that process of venting off is represented in practices of sacrifice,
and that he himself would become a Lamb offered to us by God.
He knew what Caiaphas the high priest
had said a little earlier:
"It is better for one person to die than the whole nation."
In other words, instead of our resentments boiling over into a general bloodbath,
it's better to let it out on one person.
That's what the old form of sacrifice is all about.
Jesus sees a new, deeper sacrifice, offered for all, offered by all.
For things aren't what they appear to be with us, either,
and Jesus knew that the logic of sacrifice runs even deeper
than those occasional events of venting resentment,
important as they are.
Jesus knew that the logic of sacrifice
had woven its way into the very fabric of our societies.
We operate, for example, as if the poor will always be with us.
In fact, we count on it.
We count on the willing sacrifice of the poor.
We believe falsely that there isn't enough to go around,
so that somebody will always be left out.
I say falsely because we know today, for example,
that the Great Plains of Val Tollefsen all by themselves
produce enough grain to feed the whole world.
We know that.
But we persist in a politics of leaving someone out, of sacrificing someone.
So, things are not what they seem in our world of today.
We shop for bargains, but we pay no attention to the cost of what we buy.
Costco is the Mecca of savings.
And indeed we do pay fewer dollars there than most places.
But things are not what they seem.
The cost is more than the dollars we spend.
There is a sacrifice far costlier than the costly perfume of Mary.
There is the sacrifice of workers in the third world who labor at substandard wages
so that we can save our dollars at Costco.
And we moan about the cost of gas,
when in fact we have the cheapest gas in the world.
Well things are not what them seem there, either.
We pay a certain amount at the pump.
But there is a much greater cost
exacted by both our environment and by the people of other countries.
When it comes to the environment,
there are only a few folks who do not concede
that there is some form of global warming.
As a hiker I have seen it first hand in Glacier National Park
as valley after valley are either devoid of glaciers
or support only a fraction of what had been there.
The gas we burn in our cars creates an exhaust that goes -- where?
Our atmosphere.
Add to what our cars burn the exhaust of our thousands of factories,
and it is no wonder that this planet, this Island Earth, is in mortal danger.
But the cost is born also by people we never see.
In October of last year charges were brought
on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorians and campesinos,
against a giant in the world of oil production and refining: Chevron Texaco,
the world's second largest energy company.
The Ecuadorians had been forced to live alongside the toxic remains
of that oil company's operations in the rainforests of the Oriente,
as the Ecuadorian Amazon is known.
Chevron Texaco had been ordered by the 2nd Court of Appeals in New York
to submit to the laws of Ecuador and with the court's commitment
to enforce any judgment for damages leveled in Ecuador.
As short as thirty years ago the Oriente had been a pristine zone
harboring some of the greatest diversity of plant and animal life in the world. With the advent of Texaco in the early 70s, the indigenous groups --
the Cofan, Secoya, Sinoa, Huaorni and Quichua --
and the environment they depended on,
was pushed to the brink of collapse.
This was done by the abandonment of toxic waste waters
rather than the more expensive task of re-injecting them into the subsoil. Texaco chose to dump the dangerous brew,
including benzene, toluene, arsenic, lead, mercury and cadmium directly into the local streams and tributaries.
The payoff was more than 4.5 billion.
Our payoff?
Lower costs and ignorance of the consequences of our benefits.
The sacrifice woven into the fabric of our societoy,
is born by people we never meet, never know,
Mary anointed Jesus' feet with a costly perfume.
Her sacrifice was vivid.
What sacrifices can we make?
Fewer cars? Purchasing goods where the real cost is visible?
Buying organic, local?
Taking desperately seriously the environment we have been given?
If we want to be good stewards of this earth,
as we pray each and every Sunday,
we have to push ourselves, yes push ourselves
to become more and more aware of the real cost of what we buy.
St. Paul's got an award last year that lists a heartening, brave list
of things that we have done and are doing to earn the title: a greening parish.
This banner is an emblem of hat award.
They include:
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Establishing the corner as a green space;
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Developing the Bolster Memorial Garden;
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Eliminating -- or diminishing greatly --
the use of paper and Styrofoam and using instead napkins and china.
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Establishing a comprehensive recycling program;
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Evaluating our energy use and seeking funding for more efficient lighting;
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Using shade-grown, fair-traded organic coffee during coffee hour;
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Developing a green space in the bulletin and in the narthex.
That's a heartening and brave list that we are beginning to earn.
No, the problem of the world runs much deeper
than whether Pastor Enquist gives up his trip to Orlando or not.
It begins with each of us having a conversion to trust in the God of Jesus,
a God who provides even when
there's only apparently five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand.
Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in that same God of Jesus.
He was a disciple.
And that's how he could believe in someday seeing the promised land,
even though he could very well see the sacrificial darkness of present things. He knew that that darkness was no longer what it appeared to be, either.
Yes, he had come to know the darkness of things like systemic racism and poverty. But he had also come to know the grace of Jesus Christ,
the beginning of a new creation.
Just when a person sees deeper into the darkness,
in what we who normally sit in the darkness
don't even perceive as darkness,
we learn to also see the far surpassing light and life of Jesus Christ.
Sort of like the light that dawns our of the darkness of our Vigil.
Things are not what they appear to be.
We come to see the light which shines in the darkness
and will not be overcome by it.
We now once again travel that road in the coming week,
entering into the darkness of our Lord's Passion,
only to come on the other side with the bright light of Easter at Vigil.
Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii…
Why because we can be disciples like Mary,
who see beyond the truth that seems so obvious
to the exuberant sacrifice of our lives in Christ
with the costly perfume of our lives
and all that means for the stewardship of our lives,
and for the trust of our sacred earth which has been given us,
faithful in our worship of the one who came to give us light and life.
Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii…
So that by the sacrifice of Christ
and the willing sacrifice of our lives in his,
we understand a new meaning in sacrifice.
By living in Christ's new sacrifical lives,
we can rise with him to new and more abundant life
for ourselves and the whole human family.
Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii…
Because of the new sacrifice of love.
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