Sermon for Fifth Sunday in Lent, "Extravagant Cost"

Sermon 3/21/10, John 12:1-8, Philippians 3:4b-14

Extravagant Cost

I can hardly believe it, but today is the last Sunday in Lent before Holy Week begins. Next week we celebrate Palm/Passion Sunday, and then spend the week remembering the events in Jesus’ life that led him from being celebrated and praised by the crowds to be being jeered as he suffered and died. And then, just two weeks from today, we celebrate Easter. How can we be here already? At least from my perspective, this journey of Lent has gone quickly. We’ve been talking about extravagance. The over-the-top abundance of God that we’re trying to make room for, by getting rid of some of the empty extravagances we’ve filled up on instead. We talked about God’s extravagant grace, as we heard Jesus speak of Jerusalem like a mother hen to her baby chicks. We talked about the Extravagant Feast, as we heard Isaiah’s call to feast on that which satisfies. We pondered God’s extravagant love and forgiveness, as we heard about the Prodigal Son and the Cranky Older Brother. Today, before we step into Holy Week and the frantic pace of the last leg between here and Easter, it’s time to stop and consider one more aspect of our journey, and of God’s extravagance: cost. What is the cost of this journey that we’re on, and are we willing to bear the cost? Pay the price? What’s the cost of all God’s extravagance?

What things cost is actually at the center of our gospel lesson today, as we read of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume. This story of Jesus being anointed appears in all four gospels in some form, though there are significant differences in all the tellings of it. In Mark and in Matthew, Jesus is said to be dining at the home of Simon the leper when an unidentified woman anoints his head. All the disciples in Matthew’s account, and just ‘some’ who were there in Mark’s telling complain about her extravagant actions. In Luke’s account, Jesus is eating with Pharisees, when a woman called ‘a sinner’ comes into the house and weeping, wipes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. There is no mention in Luke of the cost of the ointment the woman uses, and Jesus responds to criticism from the Pharisees with a parable about hospitality and forgiveness.

But here in John’s gospel, in the version of the story we study today, we find some different, interesting details. Here, we read that Jesus is visiting with Lazarus in Bethany just before the Passover, just before Jesus entered triumphantly into Jerusalem. In other words, this occurs on the brink of what we have come to call Holy Week, just where we are now. Lazarus has already been raised by Jesus from the dead – just raised, in fact, in the previous chapter of John’s gospel. John clearly shows Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha as people with whom Jesus is very close. They are dear friends. Martha is preparing dinner, and while Jesus and Lazarus talk, Mary takes a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, and anoints Jesus’ feet. She wipes them with her hair, and we read that the whole house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. In John’s account, it is Judas who raises a fuss. We’re told that this is because he was the treasurer of the disciples, and was looking to steal money from their common purse. He criticizes Mary’s actions – “why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” Jesus answers: “Leave her alone. She bought it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

In Jesus’ day washing your feet and anointing them was a common practice, as common as hand-washing today. People traveled on hot and dusty roads, and washing and anointing sore and dirty feet was just part of daily custom. A host would provide hot water and sometimes ointment and oil for arriving guests. But the guests would wash their own feet. The only one who would wash someone else’s feet was a slave. So for a person to voluntarily wash and anoint another’s feet would communicate a message that they were devoted enough to the person to act as the person’s slave. That’s what Mary is communicating to Jesus – extreme, complete devotion and commitment to Jesus, putting her life in Jesus’ hands. (1) Otherwise, we can make no sense of her actions – for a woman to touch a man in this way in public, for a woman to let down her hair in public, for a woman to engage in what would have been considered inappropriately sensual – Mary must have had a strong motivation to act this way. And she did – her motivation was showing her complete commitment to serving Jesus.

And then we have Judas. Judas has always been the most intriguing disciple to me, stemming, I’ll admit to you, from my longtime love of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and the crush I had in junior high on the actor who played Judas in the Salt City Playhouse production. Ever since then, I’ve always wondered exactly what made Judas do what he did – what were his motivations? And I’ve always felt that we better pay attention to Judas, because we’re not always so far from taking actions to betray God ourselves. The gospel writer John, however, doesn’t share my sympathetic look at Judas. For John, Judas is just the betrayer, plain and simple. But even from John’s straightforward presentation, we can learn something about ourselves. In this text, John sets up Judas and Mary to clearly illustrate two paths. Mary and Judas are symbolic of two paths we can choose. Mary shows her complete devotion to following Jesus. Judas, on the other hand, shows self-interest in the guise of caring about the poor. His argument sounds good – Mary’s act of devotion is quite extravagant – she spends a year’s salary on perfume for a man’s feet. But John lets us know what he sees in Judas’ heart.

Through John’s eyes, from his perspective, we see that Judas is good at being a fake-follower of Jesus. Think about it. For years, Judas followed Jesus, heard him preaching, was sent out by Jesus to be in ministry himself with the other disciples, and no one suspected him to be any different than any of the other disciples. We can guess that Jesus saw into his true heart, but nowhere else do we find the other disciples questioning him or wondering what he is doing among the twelve. He blends right in. And yet we know what John tells us: Judas’ motivations are all wrong. He’s looking out for himself and his own interests. Mary is the true follower. (2) Mary and Judas here are symbolic of the two paths we can choose, as they both look at what following Jesus will cost them, and what they are or are not willing to pay.

What does it cost to follow Jesus? The gospel lesson ties right in with our text from Isaiah a couple weeks ago. You remember that Isaiah asked us, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” And we talked about the conundrum, the human predicament that has us longing for that which satisfies, that living water, that rich food, that which truly fills us, but constantly choosing things that leave us empty instead, because we’re not ready to make the turned-inside-out changes that actually following Jesus brings to our life. And now, we find ourselves facing another dilemma, as we take a close look at the cost of discipleship, and asking ourselves: just what are these turned-inside-out changes that Jesus is talking about? What is required to follow Jesus? On the one hand, we know that grace is free. God’s love is offered to us without price. That’s a promise God makes to us, and keeps. But on the other hand, discipleship is also costly. Jesus says, “take up the cross,” that instrument of my death, and follow me. That’s a costly path he’s calling us to take. So while grace is free, we’re also talking about costs today, and trying to figure out how it all fits together.

Mary sees that following Jesus will cost her everything, and she’s willing, ready, to pay that price because Jesus offers life, real, abundant life in return. She’s seen this gift of real life with her own eyes when her own brother Lazarus was raised by Jesus, and when Jesus told her sister Martha that he was the resurrection and the life – not for later, at some distant time, but for here and now. Judas, however, represents someone who sees how much discipleship costs and is not willing to carry his discipleship to its conclusion. Jesus and his ministry – they are leading down a road that Judas is not ready to go. He sees the cost of discipleship as being too high, and so he tries to pretend, to slide by, to masquerade as someone ready to go the distance, but who doesn’t actually, in the end, change his life after all. Are we like Mary, willing to pay whatever it costs to be a disciple, or are we like Judas, pretending, masquerading as disciples? This is the difference John wants to point out between Mary and Judas. They might both want the same things – to experience the life that Jesus talks about. But only one of them is willing to pay the price to get it.

As people of faith, we know that the gift of God’s love and grace is free, offered to us without price. At least I hope that by now we know that. It wouldn’t really be a gift if it wasn’t free to us, offered freely by God. But everything in our Christian faith is filled with paradox – the kinds of things Jesus talked about all the time – the first being last, the humble being exalted. The same paradox holds true in our journey of discipleship. You know the saying that the best things in life are free? That’s true of course – love is a free gift we share with one another. But at the same time, love is very costly. If we truly love someone, that love will cost us a lot – patience, courage, commitment, strength. So it is with grace – it is a free gift offered to us by God. But our response to this gift will cost us something – perhaps all that we have.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this strange paradox in his most famous work The Cost of Discipleship. “Cheap grace,” he writes, “is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of [one] will gladly go and sell all that he [or she] has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all [her] goods. It is the . . . call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows [Jesus].”

The apostle Paul uses this same kind of language – this language of paradox in our reading from Philippians today. “Whatever gains I had,” he writes, “I have come to regard as loss because of Christ . . . I press on toward the goal for the prize of the . . . call of God in Christ Jesus.” This season of Lent, we are pressing on toward the goal – the prize – that we find in the Easter resurrection. We are so close to reaching the end of our journey. Now is the time, now is your chance to stop and ask yourself: What will it cost you to be a disciple? Will you pay?

For each of us, that price, that cost, is both totally unique and totally the same. What changes have to take place in your life for you to actually, really, 100% follow Jesus? Each of us would answer differently. But how much Jesus wants of us? The cost of discipleship is our whole lives, our whole selves, offered to God, a response to the extravagant grace we’ve been given. The cost is high – extravagant. But it’s worth every penny. Are you willing to pay the price?

Amen.

(1) Exegetical notes from Brian Stoffregen, http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/john12x1.htm

(2) Ibid.

Sermon for Fourth Sunday in Lent, "Extravagant Love"

Sermon 3/14/10, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Extravagant Love

I told folks at our Ash Wednesday Service this year about the reason I chose “Extravagance” as our Lenten theme, and now I will share it with all of you: When I met with my clergy friends to some Lenten worship planning a few weeks ago, we were talking about today’s gospel lesson: the famous parable of the Prodigal Son. I dazzled my colleagues with my wisdom, sharing with them that though we usually think of “Prodigal” as meaning “lost,” it actually means “extravagant.” Over time we’ve come to think of it as meaning wandering and lost, because in the parable the prodigal son is the wayward younger child who squanders his fortune and has to come, begging for forgiveness, back home. But the word “prodigal” actually refers to his extravagant behavior – he burns through his money, he squanders his inheritance – he does nothing in moderation. And that behavior is prodigal behavior – extravagant behavior. After I dazzled them with my wisdom, one of my colleagues noticed that you could interpret many of our texts for Lent with the key word “extravagance.” And so as we looked at the texts for the season, we began to focus in on how each text talks about extravagance. That’s how we came to our theme for Lent this year.

But actually, I think calling this parable The Parable of the Prodigal Son shows that we’re already missing the point Jesus is trying to make with us. Whenever we read the gospels, hear Jesus’ teaching, I think we should assume that Jesus is talking to us, preaching to us. So we have to see ourselves in the story. But sometimes, I think we put ourselves in the wrong role in the story. When Jesus tells this parable, the first verses of our passage tell us that he told this parable, and the ones that are in between put not part of today’s lesson, in response to the Pharisees, because they were grumbling about Jesus’ dining habits. He spent a lot of time eating with tax collectors and sinners, and the Pharisees couldn’t believe a holy man would spend his free time with such low-class people. It is in response to the Pharisees’ comments that Jesus tells this parable. He’s talking to them. And so, this parable isn’t so much about the younger brother as it is about the older brother, and what he does. But we, over the years, can’t seem to help but see ourselves in the dramatic role of the wayward younger child. We’ve been lost, we’ve wandered away from God, and God has welcomed us back. That’s good – that we feel that way, welcomed by God. But here’s the thing: for most of us, for those of us that have been in the faith for years, maybe even for most or all of our lives, we’re much more in danger of being the older brother than the younger. That’s the behavior Jesus is really warning against in this parable. And so, I think, we should probably think of this as The Parable of the Cranky Older Brother instead of The Prodigal Son.

Let’s review the story. Jesus tells the Pharisees and scribes a story of a man who has two sons. The younger asks for his share of the family property, a request that would be akin to saying something like, “I wish you’d hurry up and die, Dad.” But the father makes no remarks – just does as he’s asked, and the younger son leaves home, and immediately sets about squandering his money in “dissolute living.” When it’s all gone, a famine strikes the land, and the young man finds himself literally wishing he could at least eat the food of the pigs he’s feeding. He decides that he’d be better off back at home, at least working as a servant for his father. So he heads home. But his father sees him “while he [is] still far off,” and runs to him – something that an elder Jewish man simply would not do, and accepts a brief apology, something else also not typical or expected, and proceeds to shower his lost-but-found son with welcome and forgiveness. But the older son is resentful. He’s been at home, pulling his weight, living a good life all this time, and he can’t believe the younger son is getting off so easy. He tells his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you,” which I can only imagine is hurtful language to the father, and continues to point out that he’s never been thrown a good party, yet the bad son gets welcomed with gifts. The father explains that the son has it wrong, or has missed the point: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours,” but your brother was lost, and now is found, and so we celebrate. (1)

Just this past week I was talking to a couple of people in the congregation about how different my siblings and I are from each other, how different we were growing up, and how amazing it is that children brought up in the same family can have such vastly different experiences. By the time I was in high school, I was already planning on heading to seminary after college, and I was, well, a bit of a goody-goody two-shoes. I can probably count the times I got in any sort of trouble on one hand. My brother Todd, who thankfully is not here to defend himself, was another story. Todd, although graduating third in his class from high school, almost had to go to summer school before graduating so he could make up all the gym classes he’d missed from essentially choosing to spend his days sleeping in rather than getting up and going to school on time. And the number of times he was sent to his room, or banned from phone or computer use, or generally grounded, well, who can count that high?

And sibling rivalry – that’s something that doesn’t really go away just because you get older. When Todd was in college, my mother was buying a new car, and she decided to give the old car to Todd. After all, the rest of us all had vehicles, and after struggling financially for a long time, my mom was finally in a place where she could afford to give Todd the car rather than trade it in. But the rest of us weren’t too happy – sure, we all had cars. But no one gave us the car – we had to buy our own! And here was Todd, trouble-maker of the family, with a car handed to him for free. I think my mom was shocked that we complained about Todd getting the car. For some reason she thought that the rest of us being well into our twenties would put us past any such complaining. But I’ve tried to explain to her: you are never too old for sibling rivalry. Joking aside, though, none of us actually think, or would want to believe even, that our mother loved any of us more than the others. She’s always given everything she has to her kids. And sometimes she has more to give than other times, true. But we never doubt that she wants to give us everything.

If you’ve never experienced sibling rivalry though, here’s another story for you. One of my favorite camp stories growing up was always the story of the warm fuzzies and the cold pricklies. The story goes like this: a village of people lived in a warm and loving community where everybody got along, where there was kindness and compassion and justice. And every villager had a special bag, and inside it were warm fuzzies. Warm fuzzies were cottony little puffs that just made you feel good. And every time villagers would meet, they would give each other warm fuzzies. Until, one day, a sorcerer came to town, and he started telling all the villagers that they should be careful about giving away their warm fuzzies so easily, because they might run out. They should be more careful about who they were giving them to – maybe only for special people, favorite people, on special occasions. Instead, they could give out cold pricklies, which would never run out. Only the cold pricklies just made people feel sad. But sure enough, once the sorcerer gave everyone the idea that their warm fuzzies would run out, people stopped giving them out, and would only give out cold pricklies, which no one really wanted. This went on until one day the princess of the land came to the village. The first villager she saw tried to give her a cold prickly, which she wouldn’t accept. Instead, she gave the villager a warm fuzzy, and he was so surprised that she would give him something so valuable! The villager said, “Why should we give away all of our warm fuzzies? Shouldn’t we keep them for ourselves?” But the princess said, “Every time you give away a warm fuzzy a new one is created in your own bag. Don’t you see? The more you give away, the more you will have.” Slowly, the villagers started trying what the princess said, and gave away warm fuzzies again. And sure enough, their bags never seemed to be empty.

God talks to us, Jesus teaches us, about loving our neighbors. And somewhere in that statement – that command – we forget about the loving part, but focus in on our neighbors nonetheless, and spend a lot of time worrying about our neighbors’ relationship with God, our neighbors’ actions, our neighbors’ choices, even when we don’t get nearly as much energy to our own relationship with God. Somehow, when we’ve been a part of the community of faith, we run the risk of becoming gatekeepers, monitoring what everyone else is doing, who is coming and going and how. And I think that we must be worried, somehow, at the core, that God’s extravagant love and forgiveness has some sort of limit, some fixed quantity, and can be used up on people who haven’t worked hard enough, in our minds, to get it. And so we watch, making sure no one else is getting too much of God, so that there’s not enough left for us, the faithful, the patient, the enduring disciples.

But we’re missing out, missing the best part. In the parable, the father says to the older son, “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” That’s the gift given to those who have been long-faithful – that we’ve always been with God, always known the richness of God’s gifts, always understood that we were loved and forgiven and given grace. But God’s love, forgiveness, mercy when we’re sinful – that’s limitless. No end. No running out. And thanks be to God – because if mercy and forgiveness is only given when it is deserved, we’re all in trouble. There’s no quota on God’s forgiveness, no “while supplies last.” The kind of love Jesus calls us to calls us to rejoice, not begrudge, when one more person experiences God’s welcoming arms, even if that person didn’t find God’s arms in the same way we did.

"Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, 'This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.'" So Jesus told them this story, about two sons, both loved by their father. A story about you and me, loved by God. A story about the people in the pews and the people outside these walls, loved by God. Whether we’ve wandered far off, and have lost our way, or whether we’ve stayed on course, but have lost heart, God is waiting to welcome us home. Amen.

(1) Notes here are from Chris Haslam, http://www.montreal.anglican.org/comments, for Lent 4C gospel text.