"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

The Children Were Right




 Lent 5, Year C



Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.


          Last week, the children read today’s Gospel story in Sunday School. As I moved back and forth between the classrooms, I heard a loud chorus of disgust about the smells evoked in this lesson.
          In one room, the 1st-3rd graders were choking over the homemade lavender-scented oil that Nissa had brought to illustrate the lesson. “Euwww! Yuck! It smells awful!” they howled, writhing in agony on the floor and covering their noses. (Remember?!)
          Down the hall, the 4th-6th graders were waxing indignant over Mary’s wild actions in the story. “Euww, she touched his stinky feet with her hair! How could she do that? Feet are nasty! I wouldn’t even touch my sister’s stinky feet. Ugh-and she’s going to have that smelly perfume stuck to her hair all day, too!”
          The children were right. Today’s Gospel blasts us with troubling smells. First, there’s Lazarus. Remember, he’s Jesus friend, freshly raised from four days of being dead in a tomb. The children forgot about him, but he probably stinks, too. Maybe like a mix between rotting skin and pond water. With some dirty clothes aroma thrown in. Can you imagine sitting at the dinner table with him beside you? Eating your food with fresh tomb-smells swirling around your nose? And now, can you imagine the powerful wave of perfume that fills the room when Mary pours her precious oil all over Jesus’ feet? Sweet, spicy, sticky, heavy scent—the smell of mourning, the smell of good-bye tears, reminding you of the pain of your grandma’s funeral? You’re just supposed to rub on a bit of it, Mary, not pour out the whole bottle. Whew, it’s overpowering!
          That’s the thing about smells, though. They easily overwhelm us. They take us where we would never think of going on our own. All it takes is a whiff of the ocean, and I’m a child again on Galveston beach. A whiff of a fresh mountain pine, and I’m a scraggly camper in the North Carolina woods. Some “Old Spice” soap, and my long-dead father is holding my hand. And then there’s my favorite story of driving through the industrial Ruhr Valley in Germany as a young adult living abroad: As the powerful oil refinery smell seeped through the car window, my friends coughed and spluttered. But I was filled with homesickness, rather than repulsion. That smell instantly brought me home, home to stinky, polluted Houston, and my eyes filled with longing tears.
          The power of smells is mysterious and beyond our control. It breaks down barriers of time and place … rather like the power of the Holy Spirit does. We’re just minding our business, and suddenly God comes down and moves us to speak up or to take some action that we never would have done on our own. We’re just handing out mouthfuls of bread and sips of wine, and suddenly time and place collapse, and we’re holding pieces of Christ in our hands. We’re absorbed in living ordinary lives, safe behind carefully constructed walls, and suddenly God is in there, too, turning reality upside down, and we’re never the same again. God seeps into our present reality, and before we know it, we’re transported and transformed.
Mary, in today’s reading, is acting like a prophet. She is filled with the Holy Spirit. Prophets do the unexpected to get our attention. They break down the barriers so that God can get in. Think of the prophet Isaiah walking around town naked to call attention to an approaching enemy attack. Or Jeremiah lying on his side for months on a downtown sidewalk to make his point. Or Jesus turning over the money changers’ tables in the Temple. Mary the Prophet takes precious, valuable oil and dumps the whole thing out on Jesus’ living feet.
In real-world terms, she is being purposefully wasteful.
In the real world, powerful men were supposed to put oil on the heads of other powerful men in order to anoint them king.
In the real world, the only time that women were supposed to use that oil was to embalm a corpse, and Jesus is still alive.
In the real world, women in her day only loosed their hair in the privacy of their bedrooms—not in a room full of men who were not their husbands.
 Mary’s prophetic act is completely crazy. But it works. The real world breaks down. Only Judas is left counting his pennies. Everyone else is swept away as powerfully as we are moved by our sense of smell. All of a sudden, the disciples find themselves in a new world. It is a world filled with the terrible presence of Jesus’ approaching death. It is filled too with the unfathomable power of a love so extravagant that the smell of it knocks your socks off. And it is filled with a preview of the loving humility that Jesus will soon teach them when he himself bends down to wash their own stinky feet at the Last Supper. “Love one another as I have loved you,” he commands us.
I just heard a story this week on NPR about the power of a similar modern day prophetic sign. Mr. Rogers, of the famed TV show, “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” was a quiet, unassuming man. How many of you have watched that show? He was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but he spent his days focused on very young children, quietly showing them God’s love and care. In the late 1960’s, in the midst of terrible racial strife in our country, he met a young black man named Francois Clemmons. He asked Clemmons if he would come work on his show, playing a kind neighborhood policeman. Clemmons, who knew real-life police only as club-swinging, hose-wielding racists, was not excited about portraying one on TV, but he accepted. One hot summer day, Mr. Rogers was soaking his bare feet in a baby pool on the show. On the air, he asked the officer to join him in cooling off in the pool. In this era when it was against the law for black bodies and white bodies to share the same swimming pools, the two men sat side by side and soaked their feet on national TV. Black feet and white feet together in the water—that just was not done. It was as shocking then as was a woman letting down her hair in public in Jesus’ day. The two men then sang a duet about how to show people that we love them. And then, as the officer got out, Mr. Rogers bent down and offered to dry his feet for him, patting them tenderly and reminding us—oh so subtly—of that Maundy Thursday commandment to love one another.[1]
When was the last time that you let yourself be swept away by compassion, carried away into the realm of God’s love? When was the last time that you got a whiff of God that turned your world upside down?
 If only we could walk down the hall to see a room of adults choking over the stench of poverty, rolling on the floor in desperation to pour themselves out in perfumed love for the needy. If only we could go down the hall to find another room of adults waxing indignant over the odor of injustice that fills the world, crying out over the way that it sticks to our clothes and even our hair. “Who could stand it?” they would cry aloud.
And Jesus would smile. And take a towel to dry our smelly feet.
Officer Clemmons and Mister Rogers, reprising their 1969 foot bath more than two decades later, during their final scene together in 1993.


[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/03/11/469846519/walking-the-beat-in-mr-rogers-neighborhood-where-a-new-day-began-together