Suscipe/Receive Monday of Holy Week 2022

Prayer of St Ignatius

RECEIVE

You have given all to me 

To you, Lord, I return it

Everything is yours

Do with it what you will

Give me only your love and your grace

That is enough for me

What Lingers in our Wake?*

5th Sunday of Lent  (Year C, RCL)

John 12:1-8

The Anointing at Bethany 

I’m curious

What do you think the other dinner party guests were talking about as they walked home from that dinner party?

 

This is an extremely sensual…maybe even disturbing, episode 

In the context of John’s unfolding narrative 

this episode offers us an almost impossible depth of richness

 

We have a bit of a problem from the get-go 

Because we have been reading from the Gospel of Luke

We have talked about Lucan themes and the Lucan Jesus

And PLOP

The lectionary switches to the Gospel of John!

 

So we need to take a look at where we are

We need to put on our John glasses

Today’s scene follows directly after the Raising of Lazarus story

It might even be considered a continuation of that story 

…the stories are meant to go together…they need each other

 

The Lazarus story begins by foreshadowing what Mary will do:

“Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, 
the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 
Mary WAS the one who anointed the Lord with perfume 
and wiped his feet with her hair”

 

So the narrator is identifying Mary by what she hasn’t yet done!

That’s a clue that it is really important…it is DEFINING

 

When Jesus went to Lazarus’s tomb and said “take away the stone”

Martha warns: “But Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days!”

 

Looking at the two episodes together

I am struck today by contrasts 

 

Let’s start with Mary and Judas

For Mary, the monetary analysis of her sacrifice never entered her thoughts

For Judas, everything is weighed and calculated…measurability is key

For Mary, extravagance and exuberance erupt naturally in the presence of Jesus

She only has eyes for him…

she is not navigating the concerns of others in the room…

she is utterly free and unencumbered…sitting at the feet of Jesus

 

Judas is attempting to manipulate the scene

He points a deriding finger at her…look at her…what a waste!

Who could ever condone such behavior!

Judas is corrupt…His motivations are corrosive. 

There is nothing likeable about Judas in John’s gospel.

The common purse is for the needs of the poor

He manages the common purse

He is a thief

Mary’s extravagance could have lined his own pocket

 

Mary does NOW what Jesus will ask his disciples to do in the next chapter

He will wash their feet

And instruct them “Do this in memory of me”

Mary becomes a model disciple NOW…intuitively and without instruction!

 

Judas corrupts discipleship…

Mary gets discipleship…

 

 

Then there is Life and Death

Lazarus is dead…and is resuscitated 

He is alive and continues to be present in the story

For John this is what propels the political and religious forces to coalesce against him

 

Mary’s anointing is in anticipation of Jesus’ death

She senses deeply the mission of Jesus and she responds in the moment

Without reserve

With abandon

She won’t get another chance

 

And then there is the assault on the senses

Aroma versus Stench

The aroma of Mary’s ointment counters the stench of Lazarus’ tomb…

the stench of death

 

This detail in the story seeped into my imagination

And it demanded my attention!

 

I googled “why are smells so evocative?”

The olfactory bulb sends its information directly to the amygdala – the memory bank for emotional experience.  There is no extra processing en-route, as there is for our other senses, so smell memories link to emotional memories in a raw state.

 

I sent out this prompt to 10-15 friends

Describe a smell that floods your mind with an arresting memory—person place or event:

 

There was a bit of overlap…but here are a few of the responses:

My mother’s perfume---Estee Lauder

My father’s pipe tobacco…it signaled: I’M HOME!

The Peonies that lined the driveway of my family home

The aroma of my mother frying chicken

The smell of coffee being ground…I remember my mother taking me the grocery when I was four or five and her getting a bag of freshly ground coffee

Perfume of a girl I made out with in High School…don’t use my name;)

The smell of lily of the Valley…the crisp fresh jasmine-like scent of a small bouquet I picked on the way to school to give to my favorite teacher Sr. Michelle…I was in the 1^st grade

 

But one shared memory really helped me understand this gospel story in a fresh way.

 

My friend, Mary…of course it was a Mary…

Responded:

Lilac bushes lined one side and the back edge of our backyard where I grew up. Each Spring, when the lilacs bloomed, my Mother would send us kids out to make cuttings so that she could make bouquets for every room in the house. The bouquets were replenished for as long as the bushes provided. The fragrance filled the house!  Lilacs = Spring = Mom. When I was first married and we bought our first house, I brought transplants from my parents' yard to plant in my first home. I just couldn’t imagine spring without Lilacs to cut…without that fragrance in my home! 

 

I began to wonder about Jesus’ Mary 

About her rich and fragrant ointment

Mary is rubbing this on Jesus’ feet

She used enough for it to fill the house

And she takes her hair and wipes at the excess

Her hair is saturated 

 

Perhaps Jesus’ Mary… 

     Like my friend Mary and her essential Lilacs

Perhaps Jesus’ Mary

Wants to take the aroma of Jesus

The scent of Love with her

 

She saturates her hair

She wants a remnant of his presence

Something to carry with her

 

And perhaps Jesus takes her---

Her scent of devotion and love 

With him to his Passion

 

It is a scent of love

And Love always goes both ways

Giving and receiving 

LOVE always in relationship

 

 

This is rich imagery

But it’s true isn’t it?

Love does have a scent

 

Fear and corruption do too…

There are giveaways in our language:

We say that something “smells fishy”

Or from Shakespeare “There is something rotten in Denmark”

Or when some person or event “leaves a bad taste in our mouth”

 

 

On this fifth Sunday of Lent

As we prepare for Palm Sunday and Holy Week

I feel drawn to investigate the smell of my life

What is my life’s ratio of aroma to stench?

What lingers in the wake of my encounters with people and places and events?

 

If I can see corrosiveness trailing in my wake

Am I keen enough…honest enough… to investigate?

Does my Judas-like outrage against …just against

Overpower

My Mary-Like freely-spent…devotion and love?

 

What lingers after I pass by?

 

 

When I was working in the hospital…during my chaplain days

I was often with dying patients

And its true…death definitely has a stench

And it doesn’t magically go away

 

But the nurses taught me about an ointment that you could put 

Under your nose…above your upper lip

It doesn’t make the smell go away 

It just deals with it

 

We Christians don’t deny death

Holy week will take us through the cross to Easter

Not around it

Or under it or over it

Through it

 

 

 

Of the 10-15 people I polled

And I used the word smell deliberately

so that it could refer to the

pleasant as well as the unpleasant

All the responses were sweet memories 

even if tinged with loss and longing

 

John’s gospel is keen on abundance…a major theme starting with all that WINE (chapter 2)

Abundance

Be assured

there is plenty of fragrant love on offer

 

 

 

It seems to me that our discipleship challenge is to gather it up

The loving and being loved

Gather it up

Grace upon grace

…enough to saturate our hair…

 

What do we give off as we encounter people, places, and events?

Is it a love that lingers?

A love that leaves a scent?

Is it a love with a measure of momentum?

 

So that 

beyond us…it will take on ever new life?

 

LET IT BE SO!

 

On Craddock

Craddock’s point was that preaching should focus not on preacher, text, or sermon, but on the listener and on “gaining a hearing” for the gospel in a culture that thought it already knew what the gospel was about. He argued that the way to gain a hearing for the gospel is by communicating indirectly. The “something lacking” in a Christian land is “something one person cannot communicate directly to another.” Preachers were invited to shift from trying to prove a point to putting the listener in a dynamic conversation with the text. There was room for the preacher to ask questions—and room for the listener to draw his or her own conclusions.

From: 

"The people’s preaching class: Fred Craddock in retirement"            By William Brosend

Fully, Imaginatively, and in Living Color

 

At the Heart of the Liturgy, Conversations with Nathan D. Mitchell's "Amen Corners" 1991-2012

Edited by: Maxwell E. Johnson, Timothy P. O'Malley, and Demetrio S. Yocum; Forward by Mary Catherine Hilkert, OP

(screenshot from the original amen Corner, footnote 40: Burghardt, Long Have I Loved You, 335)

Dangerous Unselfishness

 

Monday of the Second Week of Lent

From: For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann. Copyright 1963, 1970, 1972, 1973, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press

...Christianity is not reconciliation with death.  It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life.  Christ is this Life.  And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely the enemy to be destroyed, and not a ‘mystery’ to be explained.  Religion and secularism, by explaining death, give it a ‘status,’ a rationale, make it ‘normal.’  Only Christianity proclaims it to be abnormal and, therefore, truly horrible.  At the grave of Lazarus Christ wept, and when His own hour to die approached, ‘he began to be sore amazed and very heavy.’  In the light of Christ, thisworld, this life are lost and beyond mere ‘help,’ not because there is fear of death in them, but because they have accepted and normalized death.  To accept God’s world as a cosmic cemetery which is to be abolished and replaced by an ‘other world’ which looks like a cemetery (‘eternal rest’) and to call this religion, to live in a cosmic cemetery and to 

‘dispose’ every day of thousands of corpses and to get excited about a ‘just society’ and to be happy! – this is the fall of man.  It is not the immorality or the crimes of man that reveal him as a fallen being; it is his ‘positive idea’ – religious or secular – and his satisfaction with this ideal.  This fall, however, can be truly revealed only by Christ, because only in Christ is the fullness of life revealed to us, and death, therefore, becomes ‘awful,’ the very fall from life, the enemy.  It is this world (and not any ‘other world’), it is this life (and not some ‘other life’) that were given to man to be a sacrament of the divine presence, given as communion with God, and it is only through this world, this life, by ‘transforming’ them into communion with God that man was to be.  The horror of death is, therefore, not in its being the ‘end’ and not in physical destruction.  By being separation from the world and life, it is separation from God.  The dead cannot glorify God.  It is, in other words, when Christ reveals Life to us that we can hear the Christian message about death as the enemy of God.  It is when Life weeps at the grave of the friend, when it contemplates the horror of death, that the victory over death begins.   

Toward Hen-Likeness*

 Second Sunday of Lent
Eastminster Presbyterian Church, Evansville IN

Year C (Revised Common Lectionary)

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Luke 13:31-35

Cindy Bernardin, DMin

We can thank the lectionary for offering us plenty of trouble today

 

On this 2nd Sunday of Lent

We have complaining patriarchs

animals sliced in two

and Smoking fire pots

 

Added to that we have

An almost desperately lamenting Jesus

An aggressive Herod

And foxes and hens…

Remember the saying:

“There is a fox guarding the henhouse”

This is not a good thing

 

But in the end…

I think today…especially today 

The lectionary offers us a Word

a Gospel Word that speaks into our “Now”

 

Our Genesis text narrates the enactment of a covenant ritual

Bloody and completely foreign to our sensibilities

But funny thing…

There is a linguistic remnant…even today 

You know how we say…“to cut a deal”
nothing actually gets cut…it’s a remnant;)

3 chapters ago…in Genesis 12 

God makes his covenant with Abram

And there are a lot of big promises made

God says “GO”

And Abram picks up everything and leaves the security of his home and tribe

10 years pass and lots of stuff happens

But…not everything God promised

 

Now it is Chapter 15

And Abram at the age of 85

is getting…well a bit whiney

This is an honest lament to God…

by a tired, but up to this point, faithful, old man

 

“I’m trying to hold on Lord

But you haven’t kept your promise

about an heir

Eliezer just won’t do!”

 

It seems to Abram that time is darn near up.

There’s trouble.

 

We have trouble in the Gospel too

Again, we need to zoom out to see some context

The first thing to notice, as we zoom out, is that we are in Luke

 

In this liturgical year…elegantly called Year C

We are reading from the Gospel of Luke

And seeing Jesus from Luke’s vantage point

We are seeing him from the lens of that community’s needs and concerns.

This means that certain Lucan themes and characteristics

are woven throughout the unfolding gospel story

 

Two of these are at work in today’s short passage. 

 

The first is Jerusalem

Jerusalem is mentioned in Luke’s gospel 23 times

About as many times as all of the other Gospels combined

 

The Gospel starts in Jerusalem and ends in Jerusalem

For Luke, Jerusalem is both a place and a character…

He gets angry at Jerusalem and weeps over Jerusalem.

 

Midway through Luke’s narrative Jesus “sets his face toward Jerusalem”

And from then on it is like a constant drumbeat…toward Jerusalem

And that drumbeat is foretelling the cross

 

The -salem part is SHALOM…peace

Jerusalem…The city of Peace

Which, then as now,

Can seem like a bad joke

 

Jerusalem

The center, the heartbeat, of Jesus’ world

Full of fickle crowds 

Fox-like kings

Corrupt leaders

Fomenting revolutionaries

and occupying soldiers

It is a combustible hotbed 

 

The 2^nd theme is found in the consistent use of a gathering and scattering motif. 

It is an emphasis unique to Luke…a few examples:

 

-He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud… (1:51)

-His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat…3:17

-Whoever does not gather with me, scatters. (11:23)

 

And while not the exact same word,but with the same root…

this motif is echoed in the “Lost and Found” parables of Luke 15, 

the coin, the sheep, the prodigal son… scattering and gathering, lost and found.

 

Scattering is what foxes do

This is Herod’s style of wielding power. 

 

So…the trouble in the Gospel is kinda plain to see

 

 

But there is Grace too

In fact

To borrow some words from St Paul

Where sin abounds

Grace abounds all the more

 

The grace in our Genesis text

Is revealed in a quiet little detail

A deep sleep fell upon Abram…well, he was 85

He can be excused for a couple daily naps 

(And he did just spend 10 years walking 1000 miles!)

 

He is in a deep sleep

When the ritual is actualized

When the covenant is sealed…Abram is asleep

 

It is God alone who enacts it

It’s not like us “cutting” a deal with a handshake between equals

This is not that kind of partnership

God takes on all the heavy lifting!

 

If God doesn’t fulfill God’s promises

Well…He will be like those animals…cut in half…smoking fire pot!!!!

God is quite confident though

We will fall asleep

God won’t

We will forget

God won’t 

I want this God as a covenant partner;)

 

 

The grace in our Gospel text is a bit harder to discern

 

Jesus may be frustrated with Jerusalem

…angry even

But there is no denying

The palpable tenderness…The love and the concern

that Jesus communicates

Through the image of the mother hen

 

My guess is that there are many here

…maybe even most of us

Who, at one time or another,

have loved someone that they couldn’t protect

Try calling that to mind

 

Calling that to mind 

Can help us feel the anguish in Jesus’ lament

 

The fox scatters…by stealth and trickery

The hen gathers in love and protection

gathering and scattering

 

The hen gathers her brood

She shelters them in her out-stretched wings

Just doing it physically…try it…

…arms back, chest open and vulnerable

This is not a very subtle allusion to the cross!

This IS the cross!

 

The mother hen would rather die than

Let the fox get at her chicks

The fox’s hunger WILL be satisfied

by the hen…

The chicks have a chance

 

 

If we have been baptized into Christ

Into his likeness

And called to live a life of discipleship

In imitation of Jesus

Then…well…

It’s a hen-likeness that we are after

Not a lion, a tiger or a bear;)

 

 

All this week

Like most everyone around the world

I have been pre-occupied by the Russian invasion of Ukraine

 

I am no expert on foreign affairs

But I see in the President of Ukraine

An example of Hen-likeness

He didn’t scatter for his own safety

He stayed

And gathered the brood

And spread his wings

And it may very well cost him his life

 

And Putin…that fox

Whose true character is unfolding daily 

in the trauma and tragedy and brutality of this war

 

I catch myself daydreaming about what I would do if I lived in Ukraine.

And then I think… 

The better question is… 

How am I doing here

In my own community? In my own family?

What does my hen-likeness look like?

 

What kind of gathering do I promote?

With my life?

With the way I walk, and talk and act in the world

 

And in the spirit of Lent

Can I name how I contribute to scattering?

Can I name it and ask for healing?

 

 

Here we are today

Gathered together in this space…sacred space

Gathered from our scattered households

To remember who we are

And whose we are

 

This physical gathering isn’t just important

It is vital

We human beings need to tell our story together

So that we can help each other find our place in it

…just like the patriarchs, 

the prophets of old, 

and the ever-growing communion of saints  

 

This unfolding love story of God and God’s people 

That we call the Bible

Is our story…

it belongs to each of us individually

and all of us comunally

 

 

We call on the power of the Holy Spirit

Present as promised

And alive in this gathering

to change us, heal us, and re-new us

toward whatever hen-likeness might look like for each of us,

and for this congregation as a community

 

And, my friends, 

I believe

it is no exaggeration 

to say that we do this

for the very life of the world!

 

Thanks be to God!