21 April 2019
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church,
Easter Day
 
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciple,
“I have seen the Lord.” (John 20)
 
            The truth of the matter is, the Resurrection is no big deal—not biblically speaking. In the Bible, people rise from the dead all the time. Jesus himself raised Lazarus (the brother of Mary and Martha), and he also raised the daughter of a man named Jairus. Even in the Old Testament, Elijah the prophet raised a widow’s son. No, rising from the dead was no big deal.
            I had never realized that, until one day at Morning Prayer it hit me over the head, as we read Matthew’s account of Jesus’ death. There it says that when Jesus died, “the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs … they went into the holy city and appeared to many” (Mt. 27:52-3). There were dead people walking around everywhere!
            Yet not much is made in scripture of all these other resurrections—maybe that’s why we overlook them. Once Lazarus comes out of the tomb, for instance, we hear nothing more about him. Jairus’ daughter is likewise forgotten, and even all those saints wandering around Jerusalem simply drop out of the story. So simply being raised from the dead wasn’t enough to attract much attention—not at least, in the biblical mindset. Perhaps it was a bit like those near-death experiences we hear of from time to time in our own day: they are modestly interesting to us, but not really life-changing.
            So we are left with the question: what was it about Jesus’ resurrection that made such an intense impression on the disciples, so much so that—well, so that we are here today still celebrating it after all this time? There must have been something very different in his case from all those other resurrections!
            We read today from the gospel of John, leaving off at the point where Mary Magdalene announces to the disciples that she has seen the Lord. If we had pushed on and read a bit further, we would have come to the account of the disciples’ own encounter with the risen Jesus. They are in a room together, behind locked doors, huddling in fear because of all that has happened. And suddenly, Jesus comes among them, and as his first words to them he says, “Peace. Peace be with you.”
            The staging of this scene gives us unmistakable clues about what’s going on: the last time the disciples were together was in the Upper Room for the Last Supper. There, Jesus had given them a new commandment: that they should love one another, as he loved them. Yet from that moment, the disciples fall further and further away: they gradually scatter as Jesus is arrested, tried, and crucified. So now, gathered together again after his death, they have every reason to be bitter, angry at themselves, and afraid of seeing him. But suddenly, here is Jesus standing among them, and rather than rebuking them, he begins to reknit the fellowship that he had begun to create among them in that Upper Room. “Peace be with you.”
            Over time, the disciples come to realize that what the risen Jesus offered to them was a new vision of what human life can be. In his peaceableness, his forgiveness, his love, they catch a glimpse of how they too might live. They realize that in following him, they can be better people than they ever imagined possible. No longer trapped in the violent, manipulative patterns of corrupt society, they discover that they are capable of living honestly, forthrightly, lovingly. They find that they can live not for themselves, but for others; that they can craft their life around a pattern of self-giving, rather than self-interest. So it was not just Jesus who was resurrected, but also the community of love which he had called into being through his life, and which had itself also become a casualty of the cross.
            Up there, in the icon banner, you see an image of what this new creation means. There is the resurrected Jesus, reaching down into the place of the dead to draw from it none other than Adam and Eve, our mythical progenitors. Having lost the first creation through their own fault, Jesus now invites them—no, pulls them really—into the new creation. It is as if he says to them (to quote an ancient 4th century write),
​
O sleeper, awake! I did not create you to be held a prisoner by death. Come, rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated. [We are the new creation.]
 
What you seen happening in that picture says to us that the bedrock meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is nothing less than the remaking of humanity itself. The same Spirit that hovered over the deep and brought life out of nothing in the first creation, now hovers over us, bringing new life out of our spiritual death. Looking at that icon, we are encouraged to see that the way things happen to be now, is not the way they have to be—there is in Christ a new opportunity. That’s why (as one theologian put it), “Christians go on being rather tiresome, constantly saying, ‘It could be that human beings can live into a bigger space, a higher vocation, a greater glory’” (Rowan Williams, The Sign and the Sacrifice). Perhaps that’s why the fire at Notre Dame this week touched many people so deeply: it was an architectural emblem of God’s vision of how much more noble human life can be than we often allow it to be. Losing the cathedral, we also lost something of our confidence in ourselves.
            But Jesus doesn’t just pull Adam and Eve up into this new creation, only to leave them once again to their own devices. John’s gospel records that on that first Easter day, having extended his peace to the disciples, Jesus also breathed on them his Spirit, empowering them to live the new life he was offering to them. Over time, the disciples came to realize that whenever they lived life following his ways, they felt strangely strengthened to do so, sustained by this Spirit, far beyond what their own capacities might be.
            They discovered, in other words, that the experience of living the life in Christ is indeed as if one had been made new, recreated. And so they remembered that on the night before he died, Jesus had promised that whenever they broke bread together in his name, and to remember what he had said and done, he would be there at table to encourage and inspire them—which is of course exactly what we are doing here today, and what we do every Sunday of the year. It is the experience, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, of God “eastering in us,” shaping us into a new way of being.
            So look around you. Look at the community gathered in this room. Here is the community that is the true fruit and meaning of Jesus’ resurrection. Here in this room, and wherever Christians are gathered on this holy day, is the community that is his risen life. So here, too, is our true human destiny as God’s new creation. Amen.

​14 April 2019
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Palm Sunday
 
 
“Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23)
 
            At every celebration of the Eucharist during Lent, we say the words, “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.” They echo the words of John the Baptist, who when he first saw Jesus coming to be baptized shouted out, “Behold, the lamb of God.” But what do they really mean?
            To get ahold of that, we have to turn back to the Old Testament, in the 16th chapter of the book of Leviticus. There God give Moses and Aaron explicit instructions that to deal with the sins of the people, a live goat shall be presented in the tent of meeting, and Aaron is to lay his hands upon the head of the goat and confess over him “all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, and all their sins,” as the text puts it. “He shall put them upon the head of the goat, and then send him away into the wilderness.” The animal that takes away sins, in other words, is at its most literal level a goat that symbolically has the sins themselves placed upon his back, and then is banished to die in the desert. He is a scapegoat—blamed for the faults of others, and made to pay the price for their sins. And so Jesus, the “lamb of God,” has been interpreted in that framework. But there’s a lot more going on in this idea of scapegoating than that.
            It is, for instance, not merely an archaic form of sacrificial religion. We human beings engage in scapegoating all the time. Whenever we are confronted by our own unresolved problems, or unfulfilled desires, our tendency is to blame someone else for our own faults, and then to make them pay for it—what the theologian James Alison calls the scapegoat mechanism. Scapegoating is therefore driven by our own irrational emotions, instead of coherent fact. And rather than the guilt of those who are its victims, all scapegoating really demonstrates is the hollowness and anxiety of those who engage in it. And not only that, but the scapegoat has to be someone sufficiently like us to be recognizable, yet sufficiently different to be expendable.
            So think of how Nazi Germany treated the Jews. Or how the Jim Crow south segregated the blacks. Or how the rightwing in today’s Poland calls for bans against gays. Or how immigrants in today’s America are labeled as the enemy. Or even how a family learns to ostracize its proverbial “black sheep.” We always find it easier to scapegoat (to blame) someone else, than to take responsibility for own deficiencies. “If only it weren’t for ‘those kind of people,’” we tell ourselves (whoever that might be), “then all would be well.” As Dwight Eisenhower once remarked, “The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all human hunting expeditions.”
            Palm Sunday is a day when the dynamics of scapegoating are on full display. At first, the people welcome Jesus as their king, “All glory, laud and honor.” But then, in the part of the story that we don’t get today—what comes between his entry into Jerusalem and the people turning against him—Jesus starts to confront them with what is wrong. They have confused their loyalties to God and Caesar; they have let the temple lapse into a house of corruption; they rely on religious sophistry, rather than true conversion of spirit. No wonder they turn against him! And they make him the scapegoat for these, their own shortcomings, project their own sins onto t his innocent person by shouting “crucify him, crucify him!”
            The cross, however, is where God intervenes to unveil the hypocrisy and self-deception that are at the heart of the human rush to scapegoat. When Jesus pleads from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing,” he names scapegoating for what it is: an irrational reliance on violence and exclusion to try to resolve the human conflict that is the fruit of our rivalry and desire. 
            And naming it as such, Jesus simply absorbs it, judging it by giving in to it as one who is nevertheless innocent of its claims. And then, just when we would expect him to return in judgment and indignation, Jesus debunks this predilection to self-righteous violence as having nothing to do with God. In the resurrection, the victim becomes the healer; the accused becomes the reconciler. Jesus returns to reknit the community that had disintegrated through his trial and death. He shows us that God is not about blame. God is not about violence, and has no interest in it. God does not scapegoat, projecting onto Jesus the guilt of our own fault, and making him pay the price.
            Rather, through Jesus God calls us out of and beyond all that, into a new way of being in the beloved community. Having voluntarily stood in the place of the victim, in the place of the one who is excluded, the resurrected Jesus goes about reconstituting humanity instead as a place where “everyone’s in.” In this new creation, there will be no scapegoats, no distinctions based on difference. So rather than the cross being a necessary act of violence that somehow satisfies God’s anger at our sin (as we have sometimes been taught), Jesus shows us through the cross that God’s real interest is to reveal the uselessness of violence and to lead us toward a better way.
            The challenge, then, is for us to become the sort of people who can let each other in without fear. No matter how strong the temptation is for us to behave as if we can solve our problems by all agreeing on who the bad people are, and then banding against them—we are called by Jesus to be a people of wholeness. Or, to use a word that we explored in last week’s forum, we are called to be “catholic,” in the sense that to be catholic is to undo all the forms of separation or differentiation over and against someone else that allow scapegoating to occur.
            Of course, it is difficult to do this. To receive and welcome someone whom we usually regard as a strange or fearful Other involves growing beyond the limitations of our own self-identity, actually to become someone more than who we now are. In short, we are called to become a new sort of “we,” refusing to let difference become determinative. And that’s the frightening thing about being a catholic church, a church where “everyone’s in” (as we claim to be): the defense and reception of the Other doesn’t mean a whole lot of different groups of separate people who merely get along. It means we, the holy common people of God, the entire people of God, the reconciled people of God. Palm Sunday, the Sunday of the Passion, is a day to discover God’s vision for that depth of solidarity among the whole human family. No more scapegoating—not in the kingdom of God! Amen.

​Warm baked apple pie and freshly cut grass. This is a smell that I will forever associate with my childhood. The human body truly is a wonderous creation. It continues to amaze me how senses are instruments which can so intimately draw us into the present moment yet are capable of time travel. Our sense of smell relates closely to how we experience life and recall significant memories. I smell the aroma of baked apples or the scent of freshly cut grass and suddenly I am back in rural Virginia. But not just Virginia, I’ve returned to the kitchen of my childhood home. Standing barefoot, just barely able to look over the kitchen counter and watching my mom delicately align the crust on her apple pie. And 28 years later, I can still feel the intensity and love of that experience. I will always carry this memory with me as it profoundly impacts how I feel about my relationship with my mom today. Who here can smell that apple pie and freshly cut grass right now? Most people have experienced a smell that can take you back to a different time in your life. Smell is so closely tied to emotion and memory, and our emotions bind us in close, intimate relationships.
 
In our Gospel today, we hear about the anointing of Jesus’s feet by Mary of Bethany with pure nard. Passover is near and so is Jesus’s hour. Jesus is at table with Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and Judas. The significance of this is that this moment follows the revival of Lazarus. This is a pivotal moment because this is the sign that calls many to believe in Jesus, to love and worship him. It is also the moment that pushes some to plot his death. And in today’s passage, Jesus acknowledges his own burial which confirms that his death is coming. Without saying it, the depth of her action is illustrated in using the nard to anoint his feet at table rather than use for it for its intended purpose of his actual burial. She acknowledges the nearness of Jesus’s death with this intimate gesture. She could have anointed his head, but she did not do that.  When she moved toward him, she dropped to her knees instead and poured the perfume on his feet: the ultimate act of servitude. "Leave her alone," Jesus said to Judas, and let her finish delivering the message. When Jesus looks at Mary and asks Judas to be quiet, he meets Mary with an unjudging love and understanding.
 
When reflecting on today’s lesson, I read other sermons and interpretations of this passage to see what spoke to other people. Some of the points I came across explored the extravagance of Mary’s gift and the hypocrisy in Judas’ command to serve the poor; or even the shocking and profound intimacy of wiping Jesus’s feet with her hair. The message I invite you to consider is one that overwhelms our senses and offers a glimpse into the power of God’s extravagant mercy and unjudging love. The vividly aromatic nature of this passage invites us to think about the Gospel by engaging our senses beyond sound, beyond words. It is as if Grace and mercy have a fragrance. Mary’s gift of nard emits an aroma that saturates the house and the minds of everyone in it. Can you imagine what a significant memory this must have made? Not only the strong aroma but the significance of Mary’s gesture and the significance of the interaction between Judas and Jesus.
 
But let’s look at what is so profoundly intimate about this moment between Mary and Jesus. Mary rubbed his feet with perfume so valuable that it could have fed a family in need for an entire year. But it’s not about the expensive perfume. Instead, it’s the intent behind the gesture and the vulnerability of Mary letting her hair down in room with men present. The love that Mary models, to everyone in that room, and even to us, is a love marked by extravagance. Mary loved Jesus so much that she exemplified humility and intimacy in wiping clean his feet with her hair. Barbara Brown Taylor writes that in Jesus, the extravagance of God's love is made flesh.  In Jesus, the excessiveness of God's mercy is made manifest. The focus of the extravagance isn’t in the perfume or anything that money could buy, but in this radical, unjudging love. By pouring this very expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, Mary is inviting all of us to love Jesus in the same extravagant way; to give not necessarily the best of what we own, but the best of ourselves to him. Mary teaches us what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. And in true reciprocal and unconditional form, when we love Jesus, Jesus gives the best of himself to us by way of God’s mercy.
And what do I mean by mercy, especially because I’ve mentioned it quite a bit in this sermon? How is mercy related to this intimate moment at the table? Cynthia Bourgeault writes in Mystical Hope that mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God—and the light by which we know it. She highlights that Thomas Merton offers an impactful understanding in his essay, The Good Samaritan. He writes that the word translated as “mercy” in English actually means “a fierce, bonding love.” Merton argues that Mercy is not about pity but is actually about passion. Mary’s anointment of Jesus’ feet demonstrates this kind of passion. Merton writes that it is ultimate and unfailing because Mercy is the unconditional power that binds one person to another in a covenant of hearts. That when we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. If Mary’s anointing of Jesus’s feet does not represent mercy, I don’t know what does. Or if receiving 55 immigrants (as our congregation did this week) to care for them and relieve their distress does not represent mercy, I don’t know what does.
The moment at the table reveals a love so powerful, that like our senses, it pulls us into the present moment by drawing us into a closer relationship with God. I cannot imagine what that experience must have been like for Mary knowing the impact that apple pie and fresh cut grass bears in the relationship with my mom. I know that when my mother is no longer living, that memory will bring me into her presence and suddenly I will remember how she smells, the sound of her voice, and how it feels to be hugged by her. Perhaps our relationship with God works in the same way. In Mystical Hope, Cynthia Bourgeault goes on to tell the story of a woman who dies from a ten-year struggle with breast cancer from the perspective of one of her sons. She writes: “Before she lost her voice, she called all her boys around her and told us to keep our eyes open after she died, because although she would be gone from her body, she said she would still exist in smaller things, and she hoped we would recognize them. Although these smaller things don’t always jump out at me, when they come back to mind, I realize she was right…she is there.” Bourgeault adds that, the mother’s greatest gift to her sons was the insistence that they did not need to lead their lives looking backward. But by keeping their eyes and hearts open, they would encounter her love for them in the smallest of ways as long as live. Extravagant love can exist in small ways. By giving the best of ourselves Mercy is what remains.
This moment of intimacy between Mary and Jesus is not about the extravagance in her gesture but about the extravagance in her unjudging love. Feeling, through her senses, Jesus’s facial expressions and cues, and energetically, perhaps, sensing the death that awaits him; even before Jesus acknowledges to the group the death that awaits him in the ultimate act of unjudging love for all of humanity present and yet to be born. This is a powerful passage and one that draws us in deeply through our senses. When I think of my mom and challenges, I have encountered in my relationship with her, what remains is our unjudging love. When Mary anointed Jesus’ feet, the room smelled of nard: natural, warm, sweet, spicy, and musky. It causes the room to be filled with a fragrance of Christ so that ALL present will remember the power of God’s love and mercy. We will smell the smell of that nard as Jesus enters Jerusalem. We will smell it as he washes the feet of his disciples and when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, and again as he carries his cross to Golgotha. Perhaps even before the stone rolls away and the tomb is empty, we will smell Christ’s presence on Easter morning.