Sunday, 13 March 2016 Luther Memorial Lutheran Church
+The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Series C Seattle, WA
Paul E. Hoffman, Pastor
I did not immediately warm up to the family’s idea that we baptize the baby at Rachel’s funeral. It had been a long five days walking this family’s matriarch through her final hours. I was exhausted. They were exhausted. And I just couldn’t quite see it, but the family pressed. Two-month old Bethany Rachel had been there with all of us at great-grandma’s deathbed. Wasn’t baptism the intersection of death and new life? Wasn’t a funeral? The only rationale I really had was that I’d just never seen it done before. So, I did not immediately warm up to the family’s idea that we baptize the baby at Rachel’s funeral.
The Gospel reading for today could have informed me. Because it’s sort of like a baptism at a funeral. It certainly has all the emotional weight and contradictions of such a blended event. This dinner party takes place at Mary and Martha’s house in Bethany, where just days before a crowd had gathered to mourn the death of their brother, Lazarus.
And now here he is, at the dinner party for Jesus. Lazarus is there. It had been said of him just a few days prior, “Lord, already there is a stench, because he has been dead four days.” And who knows – is he still smelly? Mary has the goods to take care of that – a pound of pure nard, an entire year’s worth of wages in value. But she doesn’t use the embalming oil for her brother. Instead she anoints the living Jesus. “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume,” the Scriptures report. There are more complications: Judas is there, the anti-Mary. She is dutiful and adoring. Judas is defiant and recalcitrant. In the presence of the life-sucking Judas and her recently raised-from-the-dead brother, Mary chooses life. She gives expensive, soothing oil and offers the life-giving intimacy of her own body, wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair. It was meant for embalming the dead, but instead she uses it to adore the Lord of life. Her kindness ignites a squabble about the poor between Judas and Jesus. There are so many contradictions in these eight short verses of John’s Gospel that it’s almost like watching a tennis match: Yes, no. Extravagance, poverty. The stench of death, the aroma of beauty. The recently raised and the about-to-be crucified. Adoring friend, betraying disciple. Desperation, hope. Death, life. It is what Annie Dillard might call “the eruption of the irrational into the world.”
It is kind of like a baptism at a funeral. Kind of like a dinner party with
previously-been dead and about-to-be-crucified guests sitting across the
table from each other. Kind of like life itself, I’d say.
Reflecting this past week on the current political climate in our country, I
heard a commentator whose name eludes me at the moment say that one of the things that has set up the atmosphere of the present campaign is that it is tapping into ALL the fear, all the anxiety, ALL the pain, ALL the loss of hope that we are presently feeling as a nation. “Somehow,” he said, “this season has reached deep into the soft underbelly of America and has released all its demons.” How true. We are spending the equivalent of a year’s wages in each of our schools to launch anti-bullying campaigns and then watch our candidates for the country’s highest office bully one another on national television. On a more personal level we crave health, yet we are eating and drinking ourselves into a national epidemic of diabetes and obesity. We long for economic security and spend on credit like there’s no tomorrow. We want to be loved and respected and find ourselves pushing others away. It’s kind of like a baptism at a funeral. Kind of like life itself. Real life. No veneer. No perfume. Just the real day-in, day-out, contradictory stuff.
In the end, I baptized Bethany Rachel at her great-grandmother’s funeral. We walked Rachel’s casket to the graveside in the sunshine of a Nebraska afternoon. Her sons and grandsons lowered her into the ground. They used ropes from the farm that were probably as old as the homestead where she had lived all her life. Where she’d raised her children. Read her Bible. Watched the seasons come and go. Went to church. Fought with the neighbors. Buried her husband. Rejoiced when she could. Cried when she couldn’t. Like generations before us, we shoveled dirt on top of the casket – this was old-school – and all the while, her first great-granddaughter and namesake Bethany Rachel cooed and cried in a blanket in her mother’s arms. Then we walked back into the church, poured the water into the font, and with the aroma of the funeral flowers wafting in the room proclaimed, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Right then and there we buried Bethany Rachel with Jesus in death and she was raised by Christ to new life.
It was the eruption of the irrational into the world. It was reaching into the soft underbelly of real life and releasing all its demons. It was yes and no. Extravagance and poverty. The stench of death, the aroma of beauty. Desperation, hope. Death, life. It was a dinner party at Bethany in the presence of the Risen Christ.
More to the point, it was – no it is – just exactly like the celebration of the Eucharist at a little congregation in North Seattle on a rainy, windy Sunday in Lent. Look at us. Just look at us. The rich and the poor; the hopeful and the desperate, the living and the dying – some of those contradictions contained within the same skin. We come with hands held out in hope, to receive what is offered us, the bread and the cup of the dying, living One. The aroma of costly nard is barely fragrant in the whiff of the wine, but the aroma of hope looms large. It is inescapable, pungent, real. We need it so desperately, that hope. We long for the eruption of the irrational into our world. And Jesus does not fail us.
It is on our breath that this aroma of hope will be carried into the world. We may be called silly. Naive. Simple-minded. Quaint. But trust me, what the world is doing isn’t working. The world needs us, and our strange ideas from Jesus about love and compassion. About giving to receive. Ideas about less being more. About dying to live. It all comes down to a baptism at a funeral, to a meal spread on top of that beautiful purple casket, a dinner of the dying offered to the living. The one whose feet have been anointed for the day of his burial is here to place in each of our hands the bread of life and to say, “this is my body given for you.” Jesus Christ who could not be held in the grip of the grave is risen from the tomb and promises us life in spite of the world’s prevailing stench of death. From this meal, against all odds and logic, we are the ones sent to a dying world immersed in the unmistakable aroma of life. You might as well call us the eruption of the irrational into the world.
In the name of the Father, and of the (+) Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.