March 28, 2004 - Fifth Sunday in Lent
Please enter your E-mail address below and depress "Send" to receive this sermon via E-mail
March 28, 2004 - Fifth Sunday in Lent - Bishop Gethin B. Hughes
FIRST READING: Isaiah 43: 16-21
PSALM: 126
SECOND READING: Paul's Letter to the Philippians 3: 4b-14
GOSPEL: John 12: 1-8
Good morning! It is with mixed emotions I find myself at St. Paul's again. After 12 years, this will be my last visit as Bishop, and I just want to make some comments in the beginning. I will always take with me very fond memories of my relationship with this congregation. You have shown nothing to me except kindness, respect, and love, and I am profoundly grateful for that. You have a very, very dear clergy team. Vern Suter has been here since the beginning, and I am delighted to see Armand becoming a part of the life of, not just this Church, but the Diocese; and Fred, and all the others, but a special word of love for my friend, Andrew Green - what a remarkable clergyman in our Diocese and someone I have grown to know and love during my journey. He has served in almost every capacity in the Diocese, standing committee, corporation, and delegate to convention, etc. So, I will have great memories of the clergy here.
I remember most especially coming to dedicate this new building. How many of you were here when we dedicated this enlarged building? I see several hands and lots of new hands since then. A remarkable thing! A great deal of construction. Your Church was really quite small, but you retained something of its sweetness in the new configuration and, of course, added the offices and the walkway; and, just in time, because the desert grew fast after that. More people live here, and now we have a thriving congregation. My only complaint, then, as it is now, is it is too small. We should have been bigger than that! But, to Andrew and to the staff and to those who serve, I am profoundly grateful, and I would like you to join me in thanking them for being such fine inspiring servants of God. And last, important though the clergy are, it is Nathan and the music I really come for. (Don't tell anyone!).
Today, we are going to celebrate our commitment to God in Christ through discipleship. I will confirm, receive, and accept the re-affirmation of several persons who have been preparing for this special day, but, as you know, on these occasions, it is a chance for all of us to re-commit ourselves to discipleship. In fact, looking out in the congregation, I see lots of people I have confirmed during my 12 years as Bishop. It is a joy to see them still in Church!
Today, we have a special reading from the Scriptures - a reading we don't normally have, because you are using a revised form of the readings assigned for Sundays - and so the passage we have today from the 12th chapter of St. John isn't normally in our cycle. We read it during the weekdays, but it doesn't come as a Sunday lecture. It is a curious incident, a profound and memorable incident, how someone anointed Jesus' feet as He sat at supper. A woman who, in Mark's account, remains nameless, but, in John's account, is called Mary, the sister of Martha. In Matthew's account, they don't mention much about Judas' character, other than "the disciples grumbled at the waste of money pouring out this expensive ointment on Jesus' feet." John names Him as Judas Iscariot, the keeper of the money for the disciples. So, this reading is a good one for us as we center in on discipleship; because it has a setting, and it has a meaning, and I think you could find that it has an application to our every-day life of discipleship.
Look at the setting. It is a very tense time in Jesus' ministry. He has come to Jerusalem for Passover. In John's Gospel, that happens over and over - a cycle of Passover events of coming to Jerusalem. In the synoptic Gospels, Mark and Luke and Matthew, it just happens at the very end; and so, in Matthew, this is immediately before Jesus' last supper. He has come to Jerusalem, and there is a great deal of tension in the air. By this time, He is on the receiving end of a long antagonism from the Jewish authorities. It is obvious that they are going to take action. What sort of action and how extreme is not known, but something is going to happen. In John's account, it reads that the Jewish authorities were angry and seeking after Lazarus, as well, as though he was part of some scheme, some fake deal to build up the popularity of Jesus. "He didn't really raise him from the dead". And so it is, in the little house in Bethany, just on the outskirts of Jerusalem, that Jesus comes to visit his friends. No doubt they were delighted to see him. In just the previous chapter in John, we have the story of how Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, was raised from the dead, and so it is his first time to return since that incident. And they are delighted to see him. Martha was as busy as usual, setting up all the arrangements, and all the food, and all the accommodations. But Mary, the more pensive one, is deeply moved and troubled. She wants to show her love for God and her anxiety about what is going to happen next, but she doesn't know how to put that into action. She must have been overwhelmed with a sense of love and joy for Christ, who had raised her brother from the dead, who had taught her so much about God and about really living in God's Grace; and so, perhaps somewhat impetuously, or maybe she had planned it for some time, she went to get the only precious thing she had, the very expensive jar of ointment, of perfume. She just tipped it up and poured it over Jesus' feet and massaged His feet. The reaction from the disciples was as you would imagine, but, in the words of Judas Iscariot, "What a waste! That is an expensive product. We could have sold that and done so much good. We could have fed 5,000 and helped all sorts of people." But Jesus says, "Leave her alone, for she has done something very important. She is recognizing that I am not here always. The poor you can help all the time, and you should; but I am only here for a short time. She has, without knowing it, anointed me for my burial." This act of love, anointing, as you realize, was an important part of the Old Covenant. Kings were anointed, and pouring oil on their head was a sign of God's favor upon them. We read that in the Psalm we all know - Psalm 23 - "Thou annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over." It means that, when we anoint somebody, we are bestowing God's favor upon them. Please notice this morning that I will anoint all the candidates for confirmation, reception, and re-affirmation, and I will remind them how precious they are to God and that God's favor rests on all of them.
So, Mary anointed Jesus. Not his head - she felt she was not worthy of that - but his feet, and she wiped them with her hair. Jewish women usually bound up their hair. They bound it up at betrothal time. Teenagers would wear it long, but, at betrothal time, they bound it up; and they only unbound it in the privacy of their rooms, with just their husbands present. But Mary didn't care about the social niceties. She just unbound her hair and used it as a sort of towel.
That is the setting. Now, what is the meaning? Well, Jesus explains that she is aware of the preciousness of Jesus' time - He wouldn't be there forever, at least not in His mortal ministry - and that His death had been prefigured. And it is a story of extravagant love. Curiously, the Church, in the form of the disciples, saw it as a sort of wasteful thing. They mistook the value. But, what this woman did was priceless. It was the example of extravagant love that knows no bounds. So that is the application for us. The question, we say, as we gather in this lovely Church on this Sunday morning - the question God brings before us from this remarkable incident in the Gospel of John - is this: How do we - you and me - how do we show our extravagant love of God? How do we demonstrate it? I know you love God. You wouldn't be here if you didn't love God. I know that you love God with all your heart and your mind and your strength. The question is, how do you show it? What extravagant form does that take? In your wonderful statement that you begin the service with, you list some of the mission of this Parish Church of St. Paul the Hermit. You say that the abundant love of God will be shown in this Church of St. Paul's in Palm Springs by the way you worship and the way you serve. Now, that is your answer. The best way we show forth our abundant love of God is to worship and serve.
We come to worship, not so we can feel good, although that has become sort of normative in our self-centered culture. I hear people, all the time, saying, "I didn't know that hymn; or I didn't get anything out of that sermon". Well, it is not about you, I'm sorry. It is about God. We are here to love and worship God, to kneel before Him and to praise God with energy and enthusiasm. A few weeks ago, I went to a meeting in Julian for our teenage kids, junior high kids, a weekend called New Beginnings, and all of these junior high kids in this critical part of life - where they are not sure who they are or if their parents love them or what is going to become of them - they were pouring out their love of God in Jesus. They were singing hymns in a room something like this, and they were mostly Cursillo hymns; but they sent forth such images. They closed their eyes and were singing:
I love You, Lord, and I lift my voice, to worship You, may my soul rejoice.
They really meant it. It was an extravagant expression of their love for God. Perhaps charismatic music isn't your thing. It is not always mine, though I love it from time to time. Perhaps you like thinks like John Highland's hymn, which we should sing (maybe sometime in this service):
I saw His love alone; my Savior's love for me; love to the loveless shown, that may my love only be.
Fabulous language! Beautiful tune! Extravagance in its praise and love. But, if you think about it, all the music and all the arts and all the architecture that the people have created over the centuries are extravagant expressions of God's love to God's glory. Somehow, our worship has to reflect an inner desire to adore and praise God, to express our love for God. That is why the promise we make in the Baptismal Covenant to worship and to come to Church isn't because we are signing on to an institutional form of life, where membership requires attendance. It is because we have a need to receive and to respond to the love of God, as wonderfully and as openly and as generously as we can. Worship God with all your heart.
But there is more to it. As your statement at the beginning of the service indicates, in addition to worshipping and praising God, we say that statement that we are going to serve God. It is quite simple, but one of the best ways to show you really love God in return is to love the people God loves. And God loves everyone, but God has a special place in His heart for people who are lonely, or hurt, or injured, or ill, or bewildered, or lost, or very young, or very old - the more vulnerable in society. God loves them so deeply, and He always, always wants His people to be His agents in responding to those people's condition. If you love God, then love those whom God loves.
I will give you a simple, but somewhat silly, illustration. When I was a priest in Santa Barbara, I did some general pastoral work for a nice family that happened to be very wealthy; and, afterwards, the man kept coming to me, saying, "What can I do for you. That was so kind what you did for our family during my mother's death", etc. And I tried to explain, as Armand and Vern and Andrew would, that this is part of pastoral work. We don't expect anything special. But he kept bugging me, "What I can get you. I have to do something to show how grateful I am." For a while, I thought, "Well, new clubs would be nice", but no. Then I said, "You know what. If you could do something for my little girl, Margaret . . . ", who then was about 12 years old. So, what he did was get a limousine and Margaret picked out five other kids, and he took them all in the limousine to Disneyland for the day. Nothing could have made my heart gladder than doing something for a little girl I loved.
But, if that is true for me in this very finite, unrealistic way as a human being, how much more does God's heart get touched and turned when we love the people God wants us to love - when we really are extravagant in our caring concern for others? This Parish is a loving Church, a loving Parish. You include everyone in your love. God bless you. You serve people in this community, regardless of where their religious hearts are. You have a real passion for people in need. That isn't just a nice thing for a Church to do or an option that St. Paul's chooses to do; it is an integral part of demonstrating that you really love God. And it comes with the territory.
So, for those being confirmed and received, and for all of you reaffirming your commitment to Christ, we have before us today a picture of one little incident of somebody coming to Jesus and pouring out an outward expression of her love for her Lord. It challenges us to think how, in the week ahead, we will do that. What specific, generous, extravagant examples of loving will come our way? And will we do them?
And, one last thought - maybe this is my last sermon as your Bishop, so there is one thing I really want you to remember, and I have told you before. After all these years, I have discovered the real heart of discipleship is this:
It is not: Be good, and God will love you.
It is: God loves you, so be good.
What motivated Mary wasn't that she was such a wonderful person, but that she had been touched by God's love - so profoundly touched by God's love, in the raising of her brother, in teaching her real life, in exposing her to the real God she could adore - and everything she did was in a response - a deep, heart-warming response to what she had received from God. It isn't really a question of how we show our love for God, it is a question of how we bounce back the love that God has so unconditionally shown for us. With that, we can respond with joy and extravagance, because our love, no matter how great, can never out-match the love of our Savior for us.
AMENReturn to sermons list
