Jesus' Eulogy

I preached the following sermon on March 13, 2016, the Fifth Sunday of Lent, at St. Paul's Within the Walls in Rome. To listen to the audio recording, click here.

 

The fabulous congregation of St. Paul's on the day of my sermon!

I am a firm believer that the Bible has a sense of humor. Sometimes you have to think about it. Sometimes you have to do a little theological double-take. Sometimes people even try to hide it or pretend that religion is all serious all the time. But if you take a moment to soak it all in, you will certainly find it. 

Today’s Gospel is a bit like that. When I sat down at first to write today’s sermon I genuinely laughed out loud the first few times I read it. 

Look at the end of the reading – the Pharisees get angry with Lazarus after Jesus raises him from the dead, because now more people are starting to believe in Jesus. So what genius plan do the Pharisees come up with?

“Let’s kill him!”

uhh…. Anybody see the flaw in that plan?  That’s the one guy you can’t kill!

“wait… let’s try this again”

Needless to say, their plan doesn’t seem to have worked out. 

 

It’s a good thing that the Scriptures give us a bit of humor, perhaps, because this passage also gives us one of the more troubling and difficult passages of Jesus’ ministry, at least in John’s Gospel.

The scene is set – Just after Jesus raises Lazarus to life again, the enormous buzz circulating around town (imagine the publicity if someone was literally raised from the dead in your neighborhood!) had alerted Jesus’ pursuers who were now hot on his trail trying to catch him. So he takes a break from the public gatherings and miracle working amongst the crowds to instead have dinner with some of the people he knows best – some of his closest friends. Mary, Martha and Lazarus were there, as was Judas, so perhaps some or all of the other eleven disciples were present too. Up to this point, Jesus has been virtually relentlessly professing his own imminent death at almost every possible opportunity. With the authorities in hot pursuit, perhaps it is not surprising that a sense of fear would have gripped everyone in the house – all of their lives could be in danger just for associating with Jesus.

And yet, instead of overwhelming trepidation, the dinner is marked by the extraordinarily profound act of affection that Mary displays for Jesus. Pouring an astounding 327 grams (as we are told in Luke’s Gospel) of costly and very strong perfume all over his feet, she famously washes them with her hair.

Imagine the intimacy of such an act. Imagine the smell – the power – the humility of it all.

Now put yourself in the body of an onlooker – a fellow guest at the dinner. What would you have thought, standing there watching such a display? Would you be captivated? Or amused? Or maybe even shocked or revolted?

Ten days from now, on Maundy Thursday, we will remember this event and the separate washing of Jesus’ disciples feet (although of course we will do it with towels and water rather than hair and perfume!), and I hope you will be here to join us.

This marvelously compelling occasion gives voice not only to the shockingly bold move on Mary’s part, but especially to Jesus’ remark when Judas slyly condemns her. The particularly clever Judas Iscariot cannily uses a question that actually makes a lot of sense.

“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”

Yes, Judas is a thief, but had the question come from say, Peter or another disciple, we probably would give him the benefit of the doubt, and in fact a lot of us might have asked the same if were in that position – I for one certainly might have. After all, Jesus has been preaching constantly about the need to serve the poor, and he’s told people in the past to sell their possessions to give the money to those most in need. So why should this case be any different?

I continually wrestle with Jesus’ response here, in words that hit me every time like a heavy punch in the chest. “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me”.

Both parts of that statement – every word of it – make me want to leap out of my seat and argue right back at Jesus. After all – isn’t this the same Jesus who calls us to work for justice and equality, and against the divisions of rich and poor that permeate our world? Isn’t this the same Jesus who upends the systems of segregation that divide the haves from the have-nots, and demands that we do the same? And for that matter, isn’t this the Jesus – the same Son of God and member of the eternal Trinity who promised to be with us until the end of time? Isn’t this the Jesus about whom we profess in our creeds every single Sunday that he is “co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit” and “whose kingdom will have no end”?

So how then should we accept that poverty will be with us forever and Jesus would not. In fact, my instincts would’ve argued, it should be the other way around!!

So what IS it that Jesus is saying here? What is a believer to do? Just give up on our work of fighting against the crushing poverty that causes boundless death and destruction in our world every single day? Are we to just throw up our hands and say ‘there’s nothing we can do’? Should we truly believe that without – or even with – the mystical presence of Jesus Christ, the son of God walking in our midst that we are powerless to keep people from starving for lack of food or freezing from lack of clothing and shelter on our very own streets?

These are some very hard questions, and I would be a liar if I told you I had all – or even some of the answers. The best I can do is to continue to struggle with you every day that God puts breath in this body.

As I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me for the very first time that perhaps this passage isn’t mostly about poverty at all. Poverty, after all, was just the herring that Judas throws up for his own benefit, for the purpose of stealing money from the poor in the first place. Maybe instead this passage is actually about mortality. What if really, Jesus is sitting there, with burial perfume on his feet, just talking one more time about death and new life.

This past week, I received word that Wes and Tiffane, two dear friends of mine and of my family who have not known each other in this life were in the very last days of their respective earthly journeys. Both reaching the ends of their longtime battles with cancer and other medical struggles, I was – and am – profoundly moved by the courage and grace with which both have faced the death of this mortal body and their final moments with family and friends on this earth.

“You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

The more I read it, the more I realize that Jesus is really preaching his own eulogy just a few days before taking his last breath on Calvary’s hill. It’s not just a swan-song, but the beginning of the mourning and moving forward to a new reality when he would no longer walk among us in this flesh-and-bones body anymore.

In her final social media message, Tiffane wrote just a few days ago “I saw the handwriting on the wall. It is confirmed today and all is well with my soul”. Wes, a longtime Episcopal priest, penned a powerful final sermon for all those he would soon leave behind. “It is now that I must pass the cross!” he said “Just as Jesus needed help to carry the cross in his final test, I too need your help. I need your LOVE & HOPE!”.

Not all of us will have the fortune, or the wisdom, to know in advance when our time is coming, or to anticipate our impending mortality. And not all of us will get to write our final farewells to our dearest loved ones in this world.

Friends, while we may not be looking consciously toward the impending end of our fleshly walk, we live in a world of constant changes and transitions. For some, that means going home to the place that stirs your heart, but leaving dear friends along the way. For some it means being stirred, perhaps abruptly or even violently out of old thought processes or ways of life. For others, it’s adjusting to new rhythms, new situations, and leaving behind the old all-too-comfortable but unhealthy well-trodden paths.

Whatever those transitions may be – whatever deaths we must die so that new lives can be gained – we are called to love and look after those in our midst. We are compelled by Christ’s Gospel to continue to serve the poor and the needy around us, even though our eternal sinfulness means that inequality will persist as long as humanity persists.

Yet like Jesus and like Lazarus – like Tiffane and like Wes – we must die our deaths, mourn our mourning, and sometimes give our own eulogies if we want to be raised to new life and new creation. The Chief Priests of our ugliest vices cannot kill what God continues to raise up.

Evangelism & Conversion

my fellow YASC missionaries and I at our training in July 2015

“Do you see conversion as necessary [to Evangelism]?

 

A few weeks ago, a dear friend & fellow YASC missionary in the Episcopal Church asked me this question. Admittedly it’s a question I’ve not considered all too often. As it happened, I received her message while sitting on atop a stellar mountain vista in the town of Orvieto during my brief mini-vacation, about which I wrote my last post. It was a very good time to ask such a question, as I had just the time, space and clarity of mind that one would need to consider such a deep and important musing.

Typing out as thoughtful a message as I could from the keys of my tiny cell phone keyboard, I responded a few minutes later as best I could:

“long story short, yes “conversion” is a necessary result, but not “conversion to Christianity” as is often assumed. In true evangelism, we’re not convincing anyone that ‘my religion is right & yours is wrong’. Instead evangelism is a process by which all of us are changed by God and one another”.

The original question, I think, fundamentally revolves around how one defines “evangelism” and “conversion”. According to its strict definition” my friend posited “[evangelism] is the proclamation of the Gospel with the intent to convert people to Christianity”. My fellow missionary asked me to say a bit more about “what [evangelism] means to you and why it’s important”, particularly in light of my well-known and oft-expressed fondness for the zealous evangelical message of our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry.

So I continued: “At our refugee center here, most of our refugees are Muslims. I don’t ever try to get them to become Christian nor do they try to make me Muslim. But we all evangelize and spread God’s Love (the Gospel) even when we’re not doing anything directly to do with religion”.

Are you saying that you see loving others as a form of Evangelism? And if so, why call it Evangelism when for most people it implies conversion?

My hands nearly leapt from the keyboard with energy.

“I see loving others as the ONLY form of evangelism! Anything else is self-important sectarianism masquerading as evangelism. Progressive Christians need to lead the charge to redefine “evangelism” and “conversion” in popular imagination. To continue to define those terms in the ways that others have often done in hurtful ways is a huge mistake we’ve too often made.”

My friend and I continued, and for the sake of brevity I won’t share the entire conversation here on this blog. Part of what made this conversation so fascinating to me is what it revealed about the mission of serving God in this world. I proudly identify as an “Evangelical Episcopalian” and I unabashedly claim evangelism – which I would define as “sharing God’s love with others” to be the most important thing the Church could possibly do. I cheered vociferously to hear Bishop Curry’s stated mission to be the Episcopal Church’s “chief evangelism officer” in addition to its “chief executive officer”.

Yet I was reminded that to others, that word “Evangelism” has been warped and twisted in ugly ways that have caused generations of irreparable damage to countless people and souls along the way. The philosophy that insists that “winning souls” is the Christian’s true mission fueled the brutal colonization of Africa and virtually every continent on the globe by Europeans. It gave strength to racist theologies that promoted “civilization” and “Christianization” as the whitewashing of non-white cultures, and used the story of Lot’s sons in Genesis to espouse segregation as a noble cause. This ugly “evangelism” to this day continues to give birth to vitriol, discrimination and even violence against LGBT people and others in the name of Jesus Christ.

While I and other progressive Christians use “Evangelism” to denote an open-minded and loving outreach as we believe the Gospel calls us to do, so many others hear in that word the exact opposite – pain, brutality and death. While I am inclined to take that word and fight even harder to redefine it in the minds of popular imagination, I am given pause, quite reasonably, of concern for those to whom that word has only been a harbinger of destruction.

Friends, I earnestly do not know what the “solution” if there is any, would be. But I am reminded of the mission statement of Canterbury Cathedral, the mother church of our Anglican Communion: “the mission of Canterbury Cathedral is to show people Jesus.” Period. Full stop. I have said often before and I will say again – I think that needs to be the mission of every Christian and every Christian institution. Whether we call that “Evangelism” or not – and what we say about “conversion” are questions we will continue to discern together as the people of God.

What I do know, is that God will be there reaching with open outstretched arms toward us every step of the way. May we always have the grace and courage to do the same for one another.