The Stones Would Shout Out

(This is a sermon I preached for my preaching practicum, inspired by the gospel passage for Palm Sunday, Luke 19:28-40, which directly follows.)

After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, "Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, 'Why are you untying it?' just say this, 'The Lord needs it.'"

So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, "Why are you untying the colt?" They said, "The Lord needs it." Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!"

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."

We all have stories. 

Some of us have our standard stories, the ones we tell when we’re first meeting people or the ones we tell over drinks or the ones we tell when we want to share our hard-won wisdom with others. But we all, each of us, have stories about our life that we hold dear, stories that, when we share them, explain to others who we are and why we do what we do. Stories are a vital part of our human lives, of the way that we live in community together, and we spend hours each day telling them and hearing them. We all have stories and stories matter. 

As a nanny for a two-and-a-half-year-old, I read a lot of stories. I read stories about cats in hats, about rainbow fish, about hippopotamuses and armadillos. I’ve read Where the Wild Things Are so many times, I can recite it from memory. “The night Max wore his wolf suit and mischief of one kind” [mime turning a page] “and another…” and on and on it goes. Charles and I read stories from everywhere and we read lot. We also read the Jesus Storybook Bible, or the “Yeesus book,” as he calls it (he’s not very good with j’s yet). He loves the rainbow story (Noah’s ark) and the storm story (Jesus calming the storm) and we always somehow end up reading the Abraham story, because it’s got the most stars in it. Charles and I both love stars. 

But there’s one story that I wasn’t prepared to tell him. See, there’s a little Catholic church just down the road from where Charles lives and we go there at least once a week to play on the playground. We can spend an hour on the swings, with a couple of breaks here and there for the slides. At the end of playtime, Charles wants to go to the church. He was baptized there, so I figure we’re allowed in, and once we’re inside, he does everything you think a two-year-old would do in a church: wanders up and down the pews, hands me missals to read, and plays hide-and-seek in the confession booths. 

It’s all good fun. Once, though, he ran up to the chancel area and I, as a nanny and a protestant, had to decide whether I was going to stop him before he made it up to the altar or risk the lightning bolt, or at least the anger of the priest, if he pulled off the altar cloth and went running down the aisles with it, pretending it’s a cape. I chose to chase him up there and walk with him as he explored and we ended up sitting together on the “comfy pillows” (kneeling pads) in front of the cross back up behind the altar. 

Well, actually, it isn’t a cross up on the wall. It’s a crucifix. Charles and I looked up at the crucified Jesus and I… had no idea what to say. How do you tell this story to a two-year-old? What do you say? I decided to let Charles guide the conversation.

“Yeesus has a boo-boo,” Charles said.
“Yes, he does,” I said. “He’s got a couple.”

“Kiss it, make it better?”

“That would be a nice thing to do, but he’s too high up for us to do that right now.”

“He’s sad.”
“Yes, he’s sad right now. His boo-boos hurt. And people were mean to him.”
“He will get better?”
“Yeah, he gets better! We talk about that on Easter!”
“He will get better.”
“Yes, he will.”

Then Charles noticed the sacristy and we were off again, but I’ve come back time and again to this moment in front of the cross. Why did I have such a difficult time telling that story? I can explain the effects of gravitational tidal forces outside the event horizon of a black hole to a third grader. Why couldn’t I explain Good Friday to a toddler?

The answer, of course, is that conversations about hatred, death, and loss are hard, especially with children. We want to save them from the evil and suffering in this world if we can, and Good Friday is a story of evil and suffering, even if it’s bookended by celebration on Palm Sunday and resurrection on Easter morning. We let the children wave palm branches in the air as we sang our hymns this morning, and we’ll dress them up in their Easter best and let them go hunting for eggs next Sunday, but we’ll leave them home with babysitters if we come to church on Friday. Let them be innocent for a while. Shield them from all the pain that’s in the world.

But I struggle with that. This story, the story of Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to Easter Sunday, this is our story, our story as Christians. Pain is a fundamental part of our story. Tragedy is a fundamental part of our story. We have spent centuries trying to explain why, trying to tell this tragic story in some way that makes sense. And even though we struggle, it’s still our story. We need to be able to tell it. And Charles is a baptized Christian. It’s his story too, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

Each of the Gospel writers sat down to tell this story, the Passion story, and found that the events leading up to Golgotha needed some background, some context. Mark’s gospel is breathless in its run up to the Passion, going non-stop from Jesus’ baptism through his ministry and teaching all the way up until the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where time starts to stand still and events are described in detail you don’t find anywhere else in the Gospel. Mark needs you to know this story.

Matthew takes Mark’s gospel and adapts it for Jewish Christians, putting a different lens on the Passion story so that his audience would hear it more clearly and better understand the “why” of it all. Luke does the same, but for Gentile Christians, like us.

John’s gospel, which we read from last week, is an explanation from front to back about why Jesus died and rose again. It has its turning point in chapter 12 and then goes on for another nine chapters, all of which have to do with Passion Week and the teachings Jesus shared as he said goodbye to his disciples. For all of our gospel writers, the passion is the center of why they write. Their wrestling with the reality of the crucifixion gives us four different but beautiful retellings of the events that led Jesus to Golgotha. 

Every three years, we go through this cycle of telling the different passion stories, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Matthew, Mark, Luke, hearing each of these different voices try to make sense of what happened to Jesus. Every Holy Week, we hear John’s side of things. We have spent all of Lent preparing ourselves for this week, to encounter again the story that leads us through Good Friday to Easter Sunday but today, all that preparation leads us only to a question. 

Why? 

Why did Jesus die? 

Was it all a part of God’s plan? John certainly seems to think so. 

Was it because of the leaders in Jerusalem? All the gospels point some blame that way too, with sometimes tragic consequences. We have a history of antisemitism in the church, and much of it sprouts from how John’s gospel treats “the Jews,” as if Jesus himself isn’t Jewish. 

Was it the crowd’s fault? The gospels surely don’t think they’re innocent in all of this. 

Is it our fault? Well… that’s what I learned when I was a kid. 

And maybe that’s the reason I struggled to tell the Passion Story to Charles. I learned as a kid that Jesus’ death was all my fault and I spent years carrying that shame around. But in the years since, I’ve learned so many other ways to tell this story. I’ve learned to always pair Good Friday with Easter Sunday, to believe as we Christians believe that with every death, there’s a resurrection, because of this Resurrection. I’ve learned to pay attention to the backstory, to study how Jesus lived his life and find new life for myself in his teachings. I’ve learned so much about the world Jesus lived in and the world I live in and how much humanity has always struggled with goodness, every single one of us, in many different ways. I’ve learned that we’ve always longed for community and have built up communities and will act out when it seems like someone is threatening our community, or our way of doing things, and Jesus was certainly doing a new thing. 

I’ve learned to tell this story as a story of God’s great love for us, that out of goodness and compassion, the Word of God came to Earth, incarnated in a human body, and lived a human life and died a human death and even though pain and death are parts of our story that we cannot walk away from, we also know that a light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it, even if it feels that way sometimes. 

When I tell the Passion Story, that’s the story that I want to tell. I want to tell the story where God loves us so deeply that God couldn’t stay away from us, even though God knew it would probably hurt. I want to tell the story where even though we hurt God, God loves us with an extravagant love and showed us that there is nothing we can do that will separate us from God. I want to tell the story where hurt and pain matters, and is real, and is powerful, but never gets the final word. I want to tell the story that ends in love. 

We all have our stories and our stories matter. We all have our own way of telling this Christian story of ours. Maybe my Passion Story is not your Passion Story. Maybe you’re not sure how to tell it. That’s okay. It’s not an easy story to tell. But as we listen to Luke’s Passion later in this service, and as we go throughout this Holy Week, I want you to think about the story, about what matters, and about how you would tell it. Because, as Christians, the passion story is our story. It is our story of life and death, the story that leads to Resurrection. If we don’t tell it, who will? 

Perfume

Editor's note: Sometimes you preach a sermon to yourself. This one I preached at Salem UMC on Sunday, April 7. The main scripture for the sermon is John 12:1-8, but I also retell the events of John 11. You can find the Sunday's other scriptures here. 

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There are so many beautiful promises in our scriptures for this week. In Isaiah, we hear of the dry riverbeds in the desert being filled with water, and a way being made where there was no way before. In the psalm, which we read together as the call to worship, we hear of the LORD restoring the fortunes of Zion. In the passage from Philippians, Paul counts everything in this world as nothing compared to the promised wonders we'll receive in Christ. There is new life everywhere in our scriptures, and it's right around the corner.

Except for our Gospel Lesson. There's something strange happening there. It's a short lesson from John, first off, and we've been traveling with Luke all this Lent so far. On top of that, there's no context of what's happened before or what's about to happen and we have no idea of why Mary does what she does. We've been preparing ourselves for a new creation this Lent, and it's not at all clear how this story fits into that narrative.

But Ehrich, in our sermon series book The Gift of New Creation, pauses over this story. He notices what Jesus says to Mary and he says that we should pay attention to what happens here. So that's what I want to do in the sermon this morning. I think that this story holds encouragement for us, if we look at it right. But before we venture into Bethany and the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, would you pray with me?

God of life and death, thank you for bringing us to this time and place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Amen. So in this story, we have Jesus attending a dinner in Bethany at the home of some people that we're probably familiar with from other stories in scripture: Mary and Martha, those famous sisters who have different ideas about cleaning, and their brother Lazarus, who recently died.

He got better.

This story, the story of Mary anointing Jesus, actually comes right after the raising of Lazarus from the dead. That happens in chapter 11 and this is chapter 12. And it's important to remember that story before we read this one. Jesus had been preaching somewhere else on the other side of the Jordan, when he hears that Lazarus is sick. We're told that Jesus loves Lazarus and his family, but he still waits two days before he heads his way. Now, we don't know why Jesus waited, but we do know what the disciples think about the reason behind his waiting: Lazarus lives in Judea and there are people in Judea who want to kill Jesus. When Jesus finally does decide to go, Thomas (of Doubting Thomas fame) says to his fellow disciples, “Let's go with him, that we may die with him.”

It's with this attitude that they go to Bethany to wake up brother Lazarus: ready for a fight. But when they get there, there no fight for the disciples to get into. Instead of an angry mob, they’re greeted by Martha. She goes up to Jesus and she says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” It's a bold move from a woman, and one that may have put the disciples back on edge. But then she says, “But I know that even now, God will give you anything you ask.”

Jesus and Martha talk about resurrection and Jesus reminds us all the he is the Resurrection and the Life. Then Martha, comforted by her belief, goes to get Mary.

Now Mary did not go out to see Jesus when he arrived. She mourned deeply over the loss of her brother. But when Martha comes to get her and tells her the Teacher wants to see her, she gets up and runs to him, with a crowd of mourners running after her, thinking she's gone off to go weep at the tomb. When she sees Jesus, she falls at his feet weeping, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

There's no theological discussion this time, no talk of resurrection. All Jesus can say in response to Mary's grief is, “Where have you laid him?”

And everyone else says to him the very thing he said to his disciples when he called them, three years ago by the Lake of Galilee. They say, “Come and see.”

And Jesus weeps.

Now, John's gospel is not a gospel for this kind of behavior from Jesus. In John's gospel, Jesus knows it all. Jesus is rock solid, using signs and miracles to reveal himself to be the Son of God. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus is eating and drinking and reacting all over the place, but in John, does nothing so human.

So when Jesus weeps in John's gospel, you know something serious is happening. He goes to the tomb and he asks for the stone to be rolled away and Martha, ever practical, says, “But Lord, the smell. He's been there four days.”

Jesus doesn't care. The stone is rolled away and he prays and then calls for Lazarus to come out and out Lazarus comes.

When Jesus weeps, something serious happens.

And once word gets out about Lazarus, people start turning to Jesus. The leaders in Jerusalem actually wonder if there's any containing Jesus at this point. They're worried about an uprising, which would bring the full force of Rome to their doorstep. They decide that Jesus should die.

Jesus, hearing this, retreats to the wilderness near Ephraim and he stays there, even as people are headed to Jerusalem to get ready for the Passover. And everyone in Jerusalem is looking for him, wondering if he'll be so bold show up in Jerusalem at the Passover.

This is the backdrop to our story for this morning. What happens in our story this morning is the turning point of the gospel of John, when events have reached a fever pitch and everything starts to happen at once. Against this background, dinner at Mary, Martha, and Lazarus’ starts to look pretty significant indeed.

Who knows what the conversation was at dinner that night. Maybe Jesus taught some more, reflecting on his recent time in the wilderness. Maybe Lazarus spent the evening turning to people and saying, “Boo!” Maybe Martha tosses in some of her ideas in between bringing out food and passing plates around. Maybe the disciples discussed whether or not they would go to Jerusalem for the festival, all amid the hustle and bustle of a big, busy dinner. Whatever they talked about, though, all of that discussion and laughter and noise stops when Mary comes into the room with perfume.

Here, I started to walk down from the pulpit to the lectern, which is on the floor near the first few pews of the church. 

Imagine what it would be like to be there in this moment. Imagine the sound dying down and heads turning as Mary walks up to Jesus with this bottle of perfume in her hands. She kneels in front of him (here I knelt down) and there’s a small crash as she breaks the jar open. The smell of the perfume spreads throughout the house and maybe the mutters start then. The text tells us that the perfume is pure nard, which comes from a plant grown in the Himalayas. It had to be traded for and it was very costly—Judas thinks that it could be sold for a year’s wages. The costliness is the beginning of the scandal. Mary has spent an exorbitant amount of money on the perfume that she now uses to anoint Jesus.

But what she did next must have caused even more of a stir. Instead of anointing his head, as one might do with a king or someone else chosen by God, she stays kneeling and anoints his feet. She wipes them not with a cloth but with her hair. Imagine what looks Mary and Jesus exchanged after she had done this intimate and powerful thing for him. Imagine the rumors that began to swell around the room because of what she had done.

(I stood back up here and preached the rest of the sermon from the lectern.)

Judas is the first one to object out loud and he’s silenced by Jesus right away, because, Jesus tells us, Mary understands something that no one else has caught onto yet. Jesus is going to die, and soon. That expensive perfume would last for at least another week, through his entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, through his last Passover with his disciples, and through his trial, execution and burial. She had this perfume so that she might keep it for the day of his burial and, seeing the writing on the wall about Jesus’ conflict with the rulers in Jerusalem and knowing the type of death that Jesus was likely to die, Mary took the only chance she thought she would have to anoint Jesus’ body for burial.

See Mary, in the midst of all of the hustle and bustle of the Passover preparations, amidst all of the excitement of Jesus’ ministry and prophecy and miracles, in the middle of the continued celebrations of  and gratitude for Lazarus’ new life, sees what no one else sees. She sees her last days with someone she loves deeply. No matter what it costs, no matter what people may say, she is going to mourn him, show her love for him, and care for him however she can.

And Jesus is moved by this. Because of what Mary did, this house, which so recently smelled of death, now smells of perfume. Where before Mary had bathed his feet with tears when she thought he abandoned her brother to death, she now anoints his feet with deep humility and care because she knows the sacrifice he’s about to make. It’s a bold move for a woman to make and scripture tells us that Jesus loves Lazarus and his bold sisters. What Mary does has such an impact on Jesus that he’ll repeat her scandal at the only other dinner recorded in John’s gospel—the Last Supper, where he’ll kneel before his disciples and wash their feet and dry them with a towel, just as Mary had dried his with her hair.

So, we know what Jesus did with this story about Mary, but what do we do?

Well, I think we mourn.

Sometimes, our lives bring us to the same place Mary is. We can be overwhelmed by grief and loss, no matter what joy gets mixed in, and we need to name that grief and allow ourselves to feel it, no matter what else is going on in our lives. Mary took time to mourn Jesus on the eve of a potential political uprising—the stakes couldn’t have been higher. And she is praised for her act by none other than Jesus. It is vital, then, that we, no matter our circumstances, allow ourselves to grieve.

Because it’s that grieving that allows for new life to enter in. Next week, we’ll wave our palms at the beginning of the service and remember the Passion story at the end. We will mourn that loss as we do every year, because mourning what we’ve lost on Good Friday makes us ready to welcome in the new life that comes on Easter Sunday. We repeat this pattern over and over again, year after year, because we need to be given permission and space to grieve in this and every season of our lives.

This story that we read is so emotionally dense when you think about the characters in it. John’s gospel is full of stories about characters that feel real to us doing extraordinary things. And here, the person being praised is not the person with the most practical solution, the person focused on the mission and the goals. It’s the person who’s paying attention to the people around her and herself, the person who is caring for emotional needs that we may not even notice on first read. Mary is aware of how overwhelmed she is and the grief that is ahead of her, as well as of Jesus’ vulnerable position, and she does this extravagant thing to honor these things.

As we go throughout this week and next, let’s allow ourselves room for grief. Let’s allow ourselves time to feel our emotions and to look out for the emotions of others. We hope and pray for new life, always, but let us with Mary mourn the pain in our lives. It might not seem like it right now, but if we do it right, our mourning will fill our lives with new sweetness, like perfume poured on the feet of the Savior.

Amen.

Mara's Story

But Ruth said,

“Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—
there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!”

When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.

So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them; and the women said, “Is this Naomi?” She said to them,

“Call me no longer Naomi,
call me Mara,
for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.
I went away full,
but the LORD has brought me back empty;
why call me Naomi
when the LORD has dealt harshly with me,
and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?”

So Naomi returned together with Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, who came back with her from the country of Moab. They came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.

-Ruth 1:16-22

I don't think that God sends calamity. I'm not always sure where the blame lies or if we can even talk about blame when disaster and disease and death strike, but I know I don't blame God. God wants life for us, life abundant, and God opposes those things that bring pain and illness and death. I don't know that that brings me all that much comfort, but I do know that it calls me to action. If I can oppose those things that bring pain and illness and death, I know that I'm doing something right and I want so deeply to be doing something right. A little shift in responsibility, a little bit of pneumatology, a dash of a revealed-but-not-yet-realized eschatology, and I've got the closest thing to an answer that I think I'm going to get about what to do about evil. 

None of that is Naomi's concern, though. She is hurting and a debate about the origin of her hurt is not what she's here for. She's lost her husband and both of her sons in a famine. Her whole world was taken from her and now she's left wandering back home with this lost puppy of a daughter-in-law. Even better, they're headed from this place of famine and disaster to a town whose name literally means "House of Bread". It's בֵּית לֶחֶם or Bet Lehem, which we know as Bethlehem. So yeah, if I had just suffered some terrible losses because of a famine and came back home to the House of Bread, just at the time of the harvest, and got greeted with "Oh, hey, Naomi, is that you?" I'd sass off too. Naomi means pleasant and Mara means bitter, so her response to these people who are greeting her is, "I am so far from Pleasant, you may as well call me Bitter. And you know why? Because God is a vindictive fuck."

And I think that's great.

Like I said before, I don't think God causes calamity. I think that humans do enough of that on our own and so we have some power, in some, maybe many, situations, to mitigate that calamity, but Naomi isn't in a place the challenge systemic injustice that leads to man-made famines. She's hurting and she's angry and she feels zero need to hide it. I love it.

I love it because it's honest, but I also love it because that's where I'm at right now. I am bitter and I don't want anyone telling me to be pleasant. I have, over the course of my life, spent copious amounts of time pretending to be Naomi when my real name was Mara and I am over that. I will feel how I feel, thank you very much, and you don't get a say in it. I will not smile when you tell me to smile. I will not dance if I don't feel like dancing. I will mourn when I need to mourn and you do not get to take this away from me.

But bless your heart for trying.

I think that, as a good southern woman who's also an overachieving people-pleasing middle child who found herself on the road to pastoral ministry, I'm not really allowed to be bitter. I should end any bout of mourning or even complaining with a "But I know it'll all be alright!" because anything less is displaying distrust. Distrust of the system, distrust of "the way things are," or distrust of God, they're all the same thing in some circles, and they're dangerous.

But see, I've always thought the system was a little wonky, from the moment that my pastor told me to be quiet and stop talking about things I didn't understand when I challenged unfair dress codes at youth group, and probably before then too. I've always had that idea needling at the back of my brain that things aren't the way they should be and that we should be trying to fix it, not cover it up. Sadness unmourned is sadness perpetuated. Pain demands to be felt. And so when Mara comes to town and demands to be seen as herself, I want to stand up and applaud. At least we've named what's happened.

I never imagined that this is where I would be as I went into my last month of seminary. I never in a thousand years would have thought that I would allow myself to feel this much pain, to acknowledge this much pain in my life. My names mean happiness in two different languages and my blood type is B+. Naming pain is not something that's in my nature. And yet, I've found it to be the most important thing I could have learned over these past three years. Let Naomi be Mara because Mara is what life has made her. Pain demands to be felt and it will be, whether we name it now or ten years from now. The important thing is to be where you are and not where someone else thinks you should be.

But, what I'm seeing, as I go on with life, is that while pain is real and shouldn't be ignored or set aside, pain is also not the whole story. And maybe that's what people have saying all along and I just missed the message, but there's something much more profound about having lived with your monsters and deciding that yes, in fact, there is something more than that. The Gospel, in the full light of our electric suns, turns into so many platitudes, but when you've been plunged into darkness, you realize it was the light you needed all along.

The book of Ruth isn't really about Ruth's story. Sure, Ruth makes this promise, and Ruth travels to a land that is foreign to her, and Ruth does the work of gathering food and gathering a husband, but the person who's redeemed at the end of the story is Naomi. She's the one who holds the baby Obed, whose life has been restored to her at the end of all this struggle. And I find it beautiful that this story that we've wrapped up in romantic love, that we read at weddings and quote to each other in moments of devotion, has nothing really to do with romance. It has to do with restoration. It has to do with naming the bitterness we feel and, at the end of the ordeal, naming the new life that has come out of our struggles.

Now, I'm not there yet. I'm still bitter and any restoration in my spirit is a work in progress. But I have to tell myself that that's okay, because it is. It's not a moral failing and it's not something to hide. I might not be pleasant, but at least I'm me.

And that's something beautiful, and something worth sticking around for.