THE KIRK OF KILDAIRE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

CARY, NC

www.kirkofkildaire.org

A sermon preached by Cathy Church Norman

A Little Dab Will Do Ya?

John 12:1-11

March 25, 2007

Here’s what I want you to do: set aside every story about Jesus being anointed you’ve ever heard; there is a story in each of the Gospels. We have a tendency to mix Bible stories into one big composite story, and in doing so, we might miss the particular witness that this author wants to give.

Also, put aside any impressions you have about any women named Mary in the New Testament. This passage is not about Mary, the mother of Jesus or Mary Magdalene. This is not the Mary of Jesus Christ Superstar, who seemed to have romantic feelings for Jesus. And by the way, there is no woman in the Bible named Mary who was a prostitute.

Our passage is about Mary, the sister of Martha and the sister of Lazarus. In the previous chapter of John, Lazarus died after Mary and Martha appealed to Jesus to come and heal him. Jesus waited to come, and by the time Jesus arrived Lazarus had been dead and in the tomb for four days. The King James version of the Bible says that “he stinketh.”

Martha went out to meet Jesus but Mary was at home grieving with “the crowds.” When Jesus called for Mary to come to the tomb she went quickly, and an intimate scene took place between the two of them. Mary confronted Jesus with her grief, saying, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” She and her friends began to weep, and Jesus saw her pain. He was so moved, that he wept, too. Jesus was disturbed as he went to the tomb but he told Martha to “take away the stone” and ordered Lazarus “to come out.” Then, Lazarus, the dead man, came out.

With this miracle, many of the Jews who came from the house with Mary began to believe in Jesus but others began to be afraid that the Romans would feel threatened by Jesus and disrupt their way of life. So, they started making plans to kill Jesus (and Lazarus since he was a walking testimony to Jesus’ power). Things were really heating up, Jesus had to watch where he spoke; he had to go underground for a little while. But those who wanted to harm him knew he’d resurface around Jerusalem at the time of Passover, and that’s when they’d make their move against him. The road to the cross was being prepared.

Our story begins the week of Passover just days before Jesus’ death. Put yourself in the room with Jesus and Mary, with Lazarus, with Martha and with Judas. Listen for the Word of God from John’s Gospel.

John 12:1-11

12Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him.

3Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

4But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 6(He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.)

7Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

9When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 10So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, 11since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

In the events surrounding Lazarus’ resurrection and the path leading to Jesus’ death, there are a variety of reactions to Jesus. Some around him are filled with wonder, some with fear, some with questions, some with doubts, and some with seeds of betrayal. Mary is filled with gratitude and love.

In our passage Mary can be seen as a model, perhaps the model, of discipleship. Mary’s actions anticipate what Jesus tells his closest disciples on the night before his death, and her actions anticipate what he will ask of them. When Jesus’ disciples all gather with him to share their last meal, Jesus will tell them about his death, and he will ask them to love one another and to serve one another by washing one another’s feet. He has given the example of how to love (and will give the ultimate example on the cross), and he has shown them how to serve one another by washing their feet. And Mary has given them a strong example, too.

Mary also gives us a strong model of how to follow Christ. There are four characteristics of her discipleship that stand out most—openness, gratitude, love, and humility. These are all qualities we can pray that God will develop in us and that we should work on developing. Let’s look closer at them..

1. Mary is open. She opened herself to the possibility that Jesus was who he said he was, that there really was something amazing, miraculous even, about him. This was not just a head exercise for her. She believed in him, that he could prevent her brother from dying, that he had the ability to heal.

I’ve shared this story with some of you before, so if you’ve heard it, I hope you will enjoy it again. There was a woman named Carol in the previous congregation I served in Durham. She was a kind, middle-aged woman with Type-one diabetes. She moved to Durham about 20 years earlier so that she could be close to Duke Hospital. Carol suffered from serious nerve pain, and her eye sight was fading. Road signs were starting to be a big blur even with her glasses on.

One Pentecost Sunday the other pastor and I decided to do something different in the time with children. We wanted to get the children more involved and “teach” them that they had gifts to share. So, we decided that we would ask the kids to walk around the sanctuary. They were to stop at a few pre-selected people and ask them for a prayer request. Then, we would lay hands on that person and pray for them.

Carol was one of our pre-selected people. When we asked here how we could pray for her, she said that we could pray for her eyes, that God would help her see. So, we laid lots of tiny hands on her and prayed for her.

I have a confession to make: I wasn’t really expecting anything miraculous out of those prayers. That God would heal someone in the middle of our Presbyterian worship didn’t even enter my mind. I just wanted the kids to feel valuable, like God could use them in the church. It was a teaching lesson. . . But I was the one who was taught.

A little while later I was talking to Carol after a Bible study, and she told me what happened to her after the Pentecost day. She said that we prayed for her eyes, and God did a miracle in her.

I think I probably looked a little surprised, so Carol said, “God didn’t give me my physical sight back, but God has given me spiritual eyes.” She went on to say that God had given her a voracious appetite for Scripture; she wanted to read it all the time (and this had never been the case before.) Carol said that once she was reading the book of Exodus and had to take a break to vacuum. Then, almost immediately, she put the vacuum down because she had to know what happened next to the Israelites.

Miracles really happen, even in the main-line. When we open ourselves up to a wonder-working Jesus, we just might be amazed. God has amazing things in store for us. We have to be open to believe and then we can receive

2. Mary is grateful. Mary is overcome with gratitude for all that Jesus had done for her and her family. Like the prodigal son, her brother was lost to her but now is found. He has returned home again. Mary thought that Jesus had come too late, that she’d never see Lazarus again this side of heaven. Imagine Mary’s joy at having a second chance with her brother. So, she and her siblings host a dinner to thank Jesus, and her gratitude pours forth from her.

In Pretty Good Person, author Lewis Smedes, after realizing that he had survived a very serious illness, writes, “I was seized with a frenzy of gratitude. Possessed! My arms rose straight up by themselves, a hundred-pound weight could not have held them at my side. My hands open, my fingers spread, waving, twisting, while I blessed the Lord above for the almost unbearable goodness of being alive on this good earth in this good body at this present time.

I was flying outside of myself, high, held in weightless lightness, as if my earthly existence needed no ground to rest in, but was hung in space with only love to keep it aloft.

It was then I learned that gratitude is the best feeling I would ever have, the ultimate joy of living. . . It was better than winning a lottery, better than watching your daughter graduate from college, better and deeper than any other feeling; it is perhaps, the genesis of all other really good feelings in the human repertoire. I am sure that nothing in life can ever match the feeling of being held in being by the gracious energy percolating from the abyss where beats the loving heart of God.” (Space for God, p. 61)

Trappist monk Thomas Merton writes in Thoughts in Solitude, “Gratitude, is more than a mental exercise, more than a formula of words. We cannot be satisfied to make a mental note of things which God has done for us and then perfunctorily thank Him for favors received.

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything he has given us—and he has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For this grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. . . Gratitude. . . is at the heart of the Christian life.” (Space for God, 62)

“Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive.” Mary takes nothing for granted. Her brother’s life and new life were gifts from God, that Jesus heard her and took account of her was a gift from God. And Mary responds with a grand gesture of gratitude and love.

3. Mary loves big. She has a costly, extravagant love for Jesus. Mary spent about a year’s worth of the average worker’s wages on the perfume she pours on his feet, and she doesn’t just use a dab. Unlike the old Brylcreem ads that said, “a little dab will do ya,” Mary needed to show her big love, so she uses the whole jar.

Judas in the story seems to be saying that you either love Jesus or you love the poor, but Mary’s faith doesn’t need to pit the poor against Jesus. She shows devotion to Jesus, and God uses that devotion as part of Jesus’ sacrifice for us. With Mary’s loving act, she unwittingly prepares Jesus for his burial.

When my husband Bart and I were in seminary, we had about six weeks off before we started summer Greek. So, we packed up our stuff in our two-door Honda Civic hatchback (our big car at the time) and hit the open road. Our goal was to see as much of the country as we could on as little money as possible. We wanted to see all of Highway 40 from Wilmington to Barstow, California. We saw our majestic NC mountains and the mountains of Tennessee. We paid homage to Elvis at Graceland and stopped on the banks of the mighty Mississippi.

But somewhere along the way, maybe about Arkansas, there stops being much to visit or much to see. All there is, is road, lots of nondescript, sleep-inducing road. Just past Oklahoma, we got to the panhandle of Texas expecting to see nothing, but about 20 miles outside of Amarillo we saw something off in the distance. It looked like a really big telephone pole. As we got closer, that pole began to dwarf everything in site—telephone poles and even water towers. It began to take shape. It was a humongous cross. In fact, at 19 stories tall, the cross stood as the biggest cross in the Western Hemisphere.

We started seeing signs for “the biggest cross in the Western Hemisphere,” and I joked around about the person who must have built that enormous thing. Who would do such a thing and why? It seemed like a joke or at least a waste of something.

I didn’t stop to think then that that colossal cross may have been someone’s act of devotion to God. Bizarre and audacious for sure, it turns out, the cross was a real act of love, too. I later heard the builder’s story on NPR’s This American Life. The builder of that cross, Steve Thomas, got tired of seeing only strip clubs from the highway. He wanted to have some kind of billboard to direct people away from the strip clubs and toward Jesus. Steve’s ideas got bigger and bigger and a half a million dollars, eight months, and hundreds of steel workers later, his cross was built. The builder opened himself up to serious mockery, but his act of devotion has unwittingly led that giant billboard to become more like a church for wearied travelers, cancer patients commuting for treatment, and truck drivers in need of prayer. They now have staff at the foot of the cross to pray with and assist people 24 hours a day. I can offer, however, no explanation for the World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Kansas.

4. I’m going to pair Mary’s last characteristic with an unlikely mate. Mary is humble and added to her humility was a healthy dose of assertiveness. Not aggression but assertiveness. I’ll qualify. Being humble (or being open to God) did not mean that Mary was without questions. When she first saw Jesus after Lazarus died, she confronted him, saying that Lazarus wouldn’t have died if Jesus had been there. And, she asked Jesus to come. She invited him to heal and invited him to her home. She put herself again and again in the path of Jesus. In this way, Mary seems a lot like the bleeding woman who just wanted to touch the hem of Jesus’ robe so that she might be healed or like the friends who tore off the roof of a house where Jesus was speaking and lowered their paralyzed friend so that Jesus might heal him. Mary is not afraid to ask for what she needs.

It was customary for a host to wash the feet of a guest when they came for a meal, and often times women were not allowed to eat with the male guests. But Mary comes to wash Jesus’ feet. In humility we don’t hear her say a word. She takes the jar of perfume and anoints Jesus feet. And then she goes way beyond what is ordinary. She puts her face near his road-worn feet and wipes his feet with her hair. She risks all kinds of embarrassment to do what is humble. But for Mary there is nothing more important than the humble service of Jesus and nothing shameful about it.

We are in our last week of Lent and like our text today, the cross is rapidly approaching. We’re getting closer and closer to it, more able to make out how big God’s love is for us, that Jesus would get up on that cross and descend to the lowest depths in order to bring us to God.

Lent is given to us as a time to examine our own discipleship and to allow God to do new things in us. First we must be open to believing in the one who still works wonders among us. Then, Mary has shown us how to be grateful. Realizing what God has done for us and being actively grateful allow us to love beyond convention the one who loves us beyond measure. When we truly are grateful that our big God has loved and sacrificed for little ole us, love and humility naturally flow forth. With openness and gratitude you may find that you’ll do just about anything for God—you may even wind up in a room where you don’t belong (except that you belong to God), washing someone’s feet.

Reflecting this week on the quality of your discipleship will not be a waste. Your time will be well worth it. Stay in God’s presence this final week of Lent. Amen.