Fifth Sunday in Lent (C)
April 7, 2019
Philippians 3:4b-14 Press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
John 12:1-8 You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.
O God of gratitude and hope, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
In my nearly two decades of preaching, I have ranted many times about the story we just heard our deacon Bob read from the Gospel of John. My chief complaint is about the way the lectionary and Sunday School lessons privilege the story of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair, rather than the older (and I think truer) story of an unnamed uppity woman anointing Jesus’ head with costly perfume, the way a prophet anoints a king. If you haven’t heard my rant, or want to hear it again, speak with me at coffee hour![1] I have also ranted many times about the Church’s misuse of Jesus’ response to the complaint about extravagance that “you always have the poor with you.” When a complaint about extravagance comes out of the mouth of one who is stealing from the common purse, we know to suspect that the complaint is not legitimate and Jesus’ response is not about ignoring those who are poor whether he is with them a little while or not. It’s just the opposite.
Since you might not have time for coffee hour today, I’ll just remind you of this: Jesus’ response that “the poor will always be with you” is a direct quote of the Torah, Deuteronomy 15, in which Moses explains that God has provided plenty enough for everyone to have what they need. (That is still true, by the way.) Here’s the passage: “if there is a needy person among you in your community, in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbors. Rather you must open your hand and lend them sufficient for whatever they need…Give to them readily and have no regrets when you do so, for…there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy in your land…bear in mind that you were slaves in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you, therefore I enjoin this commandment upon you today.” In the Bible there is no shame in being needy, no shame in living in Bethany, which literally means – poor house. The shame is upon those who are unwilling to give extravagantly, or lend extravagantly, unwilling to expect nothing in return – unwilling because of hard hearts or tight fists or fear (mostly fear I think). I imagine fear was causing Judas’ downward spiral. For me, the antidote to fear is always gratitude, and deep gratitude always leads me to generosity. I start with the question, “what is good here?” Sometimes my answer starts with something as basic as “I am breathing without assistance.” And “When I turn on a faucet, drinkable water comes out.” And “I am immersed in a most amazing community of love that is Emmanuel Church and I’m not struggling alone.”
On Sundays in Lent this year at Emmanuel Church, the psalms have been the spiritual focus and the interpretive lenses for our music and our preaching. Through the psalms, we have been “feeling our way to the cross,” in the words of Dr. Ellen Davis. Our Lenten psalms have been poetic prayers for protection, prayers of praise, prayers of longing, prayers of penitence, and now prayers of gratitude and hope in the midst of so much despair. I love most of the psalms, but the psalm appointed for today is my favorite. I identify closely with those who dream, with memories and promises of mouths filled with laughter and tongues (that is, languages) shouting with joy; with those of whom it is said that Love has done great things; with those who acknowledge the great things love has done, and yes, also with those who have sown with tears, who have carried seeds on paths watered with weeping with the hope of returning bearing bundles of the harvested fruits of their labor.
In 2007 when I was preparing to travel to Palestine and Israel the first time, my mentor Rabbi Lawrence Kushner had this instruction for me: write down the words to Psalm 126 and carry the paper in your pocket. When you approach Jerusalem, get out of whatever vehicle you’re riding in and walk up into the city reciting the words of this song of ascents, like countless pilgrims have done before. He was urging me to join the choir of voices ringing through the millennia, climbing and chanting, panting and parched, anticipating an encounter with the Divine. (I did as I was told.)
Psalm 126 is right in the middle of the fifteen psalms marked as songs of ascents, of going up. These fifteen psalms have been called the songbook for pilgrimages. According to Ezekiel, there were fifteen steps up to the entrance of the Temple in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem is on top of a mountain. Going up is the only way to get to Jerusalem. In ancient Hebrew, to “go up” was the technical term for pilgrimage – aliyah – and it means going up both in altitude and in spirit, getting closer to the Holy One, getting on higher ground, taking the high road, literally and metaphorically. Pilgrimage also carries with it the idea of liminality – of in-between places – no longer where we were, and of transformation – going home by another way, forever changed by our encounter. Pilgrimage anticipates making an effort and most religious pilgrimage anticipates finding or returning home. All of that meaning comes before the poem that we label Psalm 126 even begins.
One of the things I love about Psalm 126 is that the verb tenses are all mixed up in terms of past, future, and ongoing action. The fluid verb tenses make the psalm somewhat difficult to translate. Some translations begin, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,” or “When the Lord brought back those that returned to Zion,” and others indicate a future state, “When the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion.” Then we will see it as a dream; then we should be like dreamers; then we are veritable dreamers;[2] then were we like those who dream. Like a dream, the boundary lines of past, present, and future are blurry. Dreams are where people and places are not limited by our rules of physics, of time and space, or by our rules of logic. Dreams are where possibilities are endless.
Moments of restoration have and do and will fill our mouths with laughter and our language with shouts of joy. But laughter and joy are often unwelcome guests in Lent (actually, in some churches all year round). I read the most discouraging Facebook thread this past week of clergy weighing in about whether to permit Church weddings during Lent (the majority said no) and I thought, “Oy. no wonder so many churches are in decline.” As Isaac Everett preached last week in his beautiful sermon about sin, confession, God’s forgiveness, and penance, our Lenten disciplines are meant to lead us to restoration, to reunion with God (or Love), not to widen the gaps. Our penitential practices are therapeutic interventions and corrective actions aimed at reconciliation with self and others. The seasonally assigned opening of our Eucharistic Prayer during Lent addresses the Divine saying, “You bid your faithful people cleanse their hearts, and prepare with joy for the paschal feast; that fervent in prayer and in works of mercy, and renewed by your Word and Sacraments, they may come to the fullness of grace which you have prepared for those who love you.”[3]
Psalm 126 doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that the way has been watered with tears, and the hope it expresses is no shallow optimism that things always work out. They don’t. The seeds of hope for justice and peace have been sown with weeping. It’s not unlike James Weldon Johnson’s beautiful poetry in “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” that bravely names the grief and continues to name the devastation: “we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” It’s not unlike what I quoted from Miguel De La Torre’s book Embracing Hopelessness in my Easter letter to you. “To be hopeless is a desperation refusing to give up, a recognition that even if carrying the cross leads to crucifixion, the struggle for justice is what defines the present and could plant seeds that might blossom in the future…[the] pursuit [of justice] is what makes life worth living in the present – and maybe, just maybe, this is what it means to hope against all hope.”[4] Or as Jesuit priest, Gregory Boyle teaches: Hope is about a confidence that purpose and luminous meaning can be found….no matter how things work out.[5]
Last Thursday evening in our Lent supper conversation, one person in the group shared with us that she takes time whenever she enters this sanctuary, to pray big prayers because it’s a big space. The size of her prayers here, she told us, is much larger than her daily prayers during the week. How beautiful. Big prayers in this big place. My big prayer today is that, as we continue to proclaim that violence must be rejected, rather than glorified, our collaborative work with the Giver of Good will be all about compassionate justice and freedom for those who are oppressed. Our religious words and rituals, our practices, must reject the racism, misogyny, economic exploitation, and militarism which collude to impede abundant life for all people. My big prayer in this big place is that the Redeeming Spirit of God, which we call the Christ, will urge us all on, with what one colleague has called streams of “gully washing grace,” like the watercourses of the Negev desert when the rains come. My big prayer is that, as Isaiah promises, Love is about to do a new thing; even now it is springing forth. Do you not perceive it? I pray that we look for it, and live as if it is true, because it is.