Dinner Drama
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 19, 2023
Dinner Drama – John 12: 1-8
Imagine this scene. Dinner is finishing up. Martha is clearing away the dishes. Lazarus, freshly raised from the dead, is sharing a laugh with Jesus. The other disciples are debating something amongst themselves when Mary walks into the room. She doesn’t say anything to anyone, but there are tears streaming down her face as she sits in front of Jesus, unwraps a pound of costly, high quality perfumed oil, and begins to use her hair to anoint Jesus’s feet. The fragrance fills the house along with, I imagine, the sounds of Mary’s muffled sobs.
We have Judas’s words here but I imagine he is not the only disciple whose face is a mask of disgust, and who rises up in a pose of protest. Whatever Mary is doing, it is expensive and intense and vulnerable and probably seems all too much to more than one guest at the meal. I imagine this, because it seems all too much to me, too. If I really imagine it, there is at least a part of me who finds the whole scene overwhelming and uncomfortable. But maybe that’s because there is still a part of me–and maybe a part of many of you–who finds the whole idea of grace overwhelmingly vulnerable and uncomfortable, too.
In the Church of the Brethren, we practice feetwashing and handwashing at Maundy Thursday Love Feast just as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples in the very next chapter of the Gospel of John. And just as it made Peter uncomfortable in that story, it still makes many of us uncomfortable today. For many of us, it’s not so much washing someone else’s feet or hands that makes us uncomfortable. Service is an act that often makes us feel good and worthy. More often it’s the act of letting someone else wash our hands and feet that gets to us. Do we really deserve such an act of kindness? Can we really let ourselves be vulnerable enough to receive that gift? If we let it, it can get to us. It can challenge all we think we know about who deserves what. It can remind us that grace is by definition unearned mercy and compassion.
One of my favorite stories about grace comes from a colleague who as a young adult borrowed her father’s car without telling him. It was late when she crashed the car that night, but in a small town word still traveled fast. She saw his broad shoulders getting out of a friend’s pick-up truck at the scene of the crash. She walked up to him in tears, awaiting the inevitable harsh words and the consequences to her actions. Instead, to her surprise he gathered her into a bear hug and told her he was just so glad she was alright.
That, she explains, is her understanding of grace and unearned mercy.
There are probably parts of all of us who feel entitled to certain privileges in our lives but there are also probably parts of all of us who aren’t sure we really deserve any mercy we have not earned. Feet washing is an opportunity to humble ourselves and to accept a grace we need not earn.
In today’s story, Mary wasn’t washing Jesus’s feet though, she was anointing them. It’s a distinction with a difference.
We wash feet in the Church of the Brethren, and we also anoint. We allow our heads to be marked with oil to call upon the presence of God when we are most in need of the sure knowledge of that holy presence with us, doing so often at points of challenge or change in our lives.
Mary had been mesmerized by Jesus’s teaching. She had seen him miraculously raise her brother from the dead. She saw the presence of God in him as the Messiah. She seemed even to be aware of how the confluence of such power and such love would put him at risk of the kind of harm that would soon come his way. So, she marked it. She anointed him with the most precious things she could find–that costly perfume and her very own hair. It seems to me that, even if it comes with tears, anointing is an act of gratitude and celebration as much as it is anything else.
In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes about one helpful friend who visited him during the depths of a bout with clinical depression. He didn’t try to talk Parker out of the depression or fix him. He rarely spoke to Parker at all. What he did was ask permission to stop by Parker’s home every day and massage his feet for half an hour. This deep act of respect and care helped him feel that he was still loved and seen. It helped him to endure until he could reconnect with his own deep sense of the holy relatedness that he writes, “is the lifeline of all living beings.”
I might see it as an act of anointing or of marking the enduring presence of God even when that presence is not readily evident.
In today’s scripture, Judas protests the expense of what Mary has done, to which Jesus replies, “Leave her alone…You will always have the poor with you but you will not always have me.”
I don’t think that Jesus didn’t care about the poor. I don’t think that the spirit of the risen Christ isn’t with us now either.
I do think that Jesus took on this mortal human form for a limited number of precious days. I believe that although the part of us that is made of love will endure, we too have a limited number of precious days in this life. I do believe that followers of Jesus are called to care for each other and the needs of the world. But I don’t believe that means we need only know pain or deny the reality of our limitations to fix all the wrong around us.
In Sabbath in the Suburbs, MaryAnn McKibben Dana writes about her family’s experiment with keeping a sabbath day for one year. She writes about the challenge and joy of clearing her schedule, putting down her phone, and engaging with her family. She quotes Thomas Merton who writes, “to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.” And, she coins the term “holy scarcity.” Rather than a theology of abundance–the belief that there is always enough, “I have found it much more liberating to embrace the idea of holy scarcity,” she writes. With respect to sabbath “...there isn’t ever enough time. Even when we strip away all the inessentials–even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world–there is still not enough time. But our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.”
Being followers of Jesus doesn’t require us to be perfect or to give ourselves away without limit. Being followers of Jesus means being free to accept grace for ourselves and to extend grace to others.
When we accept the limitations of this life and practice that flow of grace, we may find ourselves more aware of the sparkle of holy scarcity that shines throughout our precious, numbered days. We may find that the spirit of the risen Christ is among us every time we wake or breathe or sit to eat. And that may become all. too. much. not to celebrate with at least a quiet sigh and a word of grateful prayer.
This Lent, whether we find ourselves at a table or not, may we find holy, sustaining grace enough for each day.
May it be so. Amen.
