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March 28, 2004
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture
Scripture text: Isaiah 43:16-21, Philippians 3:7-11, John 12:1-8
"Holy Waste: We Are the Poor, the Poor Are
Us"
Reflecting further on Karen Dammann and the Wolf Pack last week, I
found myself wishing I had thought to say, some "winners" make
winners of us all. This week I offer, for the Wolf Pack and with Holy
Week fast approaching, even some "losers" make winners of us
all. We learned to say as Cubs’ fans, Wait till next year! Amen. Not
the real Amen, just amen.
Saints and martyrs, even bishops bring out God’s humor and grace.
No way this steady, stolid, cautious, conservative bishop of his home
diocese, so respectful of church authority, so unquestioningly obedient
to church structure, would, once appointed archbishop of El Salvador,
become the "voice for the voiceless!"
-- denounced, as Jesus is, by fellow bishops and religious
leaders!
-- hated, as Jesus is, by the rich and powerful few in control
of the interests of both church and state!
-- targeted, as Jesus is, for assassination lest too many
disenfranchised and disinherited take it to heart they are
children beloved of a loving God!
-- on March 24, 1980, the Monday of Holy Week, shot down saying
mass in a hospital chapel, first bishop slain at the altar since
Thomas Becket in the 12th century!
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, martyr of the Americas, converted by the very people, by
the very church, he was appointed to lead.
Romero speaks to us in the voice of "liberation theology,"
( www.landreform.org/boff2.htm) -- grown in the "Basic Christian Community" movement of mostly preliterate poor meeting weekly in
homes to hear the Bible in their own vernacular for the first time in
their history, engaging by the integrity of their piety in what has been
called the "most biblical of revolutions." "You have to
be critical and see the world and persons with your own judgment,"
Romero encourages us, "and Christians must learn to sharpen their
distinctive Christian judgment!" He is not giving us the familiar
"judge not, lest ye be judged," but calls us to ask what makes
our judgment uniquely Christian judgment. Where is Christ? So identified
with the poor that even these few nights before his death his disciples,
Judas only the most adamant among them, argue over wasting on him
precious oil they could sell in behalf of the poor! Even as they are
always chastising their master for wasting so much time and attention on
"children!" (Wait till next Sunday!)
Romero goes on to say, both as our pastor and as our prophet, in
concern as much about our souls as about those of the poor, "The
rich must be critical amid their own surroundings of affluence: why are
they wealthy and why next door are there so many poor. A wealthy
Christian will find there the beginning of conversion, in a personal
questioning: Why am I rich and all around me so many that hunger?"
Romero’s own conversion to the masses of people who quietly, patiently
make up the base of the church begins when devoted priests and good
friends of his "disappeared," tortured, executed, -- for
organizing Bible-study groups, for training lay pastoral workers, for
promoting peasant cooperatives to feed and sustain their own families
and villages! Sounds like John Wesley to me! Romero finds himself
confessing, "I rejoice, brothers and sisters, that our church is
persecuted precisely for its preferential option for the poor. . . . How
sad it would be in a country where such horrible murders are being
committed if there were no priests among the victims."
Does this not sound vaguely reminiscent of the Palestine Jesus
inhabits? Where the disciples of Jesus, too, become so "incarnate
in the interests of the poor?" Would it not be sad, in a land where
Roman occupiers order the public, political deaths by crucifixion of
some 250,000 Jews, if the one we call "Child of God" and
"Human One" were not among them? To show them, to show us,
that even wholesale death does not own the last word about life? I love
how Jim Wallis ( www.sojo.net) of Sojourners
Community points out, if we were to clip from our Bibles all the
references to sexual identity and practice, we would not even notice
them gone. But if we were to do the same with all references to the poor
and to social/ economic health and well-being for all, our Bibles would
begin to fall apart! Yet I acknowledge I get, in this congregation, more
challenging responses when I preach about the "poor," for
instance, than when I preach about the "gay." I respect this
congregation, among many other things, for getting and keeping its
biblical priorities "straight!"
What happens, I know, is stuff about "guilt," and guilt is
not what I’m after. Conscience, yes, consciousness, yes, compassion
and solidarity, yes, -- capacity to absorb as much of the pain and
suffering of this world and this earth as we can stand, yes! But not
guilt. Not shame. Not hurt or angry pride in who we are, in what we have
accomplished, or even in what has been given to us. Not paralysis of
analysis. Not petrifaction of response. It does not help me when folks
go away mad or unfed. When preaching becomes the issue, not the text
preached.
Here is Jesus, six days before Passover, national/ tribal feast of
the Jews, -- remembering our oppression and exploitation as slaves in
Egypt, the wild intervention of God our Creator for us, our deliverance
and our liberation, plus the covenant and the instruction never to
forget where we come from. Never forget where we come from, sisters and
brothers! For we have been slaves in Egypt! Slaves even to sin and to
death! And we have been rescued, saved and set free! And the very same
compassion and solidarity God shows for us we are, by faith, to pass on
to all others in need. "You will always have the poor with
you," Jesus admonishes us, staying undercover in Bethany with
trusted friends, his base community, the night before he heads,
scandalously, on a donkey of justice and peace, up to Jerusalem, seat of
all "powers that be," to confront them!
Why will we always have the poor with us, Jesus? Because, Jesus says
in effect, we are the poor, and the poor are us! We have no choice but
be with one another. Whether we are addressed as the "poor in
spirit" by Matthew or just as the plain "poor" by Luke,
Jesus irrevocably and irreversibly identifies his life and work with the
poor and with those most in need of connection and of support. The poor
are with us because, where else are the poor to go? If not to those who
follow this Jesus? Who else, as our bishops put it, will not only offer
charity but also will enter "Community with Children and the
Poor?" ( www.umc.org/initiative/Statement.html) Who else will discover the gifts of the poor for the body
of Christ? As we may discover the gifts of so many others so long
excluded – people of color, women, GLBTQ people, ex-offenders, people
with so many kinds of special needs, mental, physical; spiritual? Who
else but Jesus teaches us such indiscriminate "holy waste," as
Mary offers him here?
Paul Tillich says
such examples as Mary’s call us not only to be "reasonable"
in our relation to God, -- we are so, I am so, given to
"reason" anyway! -- but also be to "ecstatic" in our
relation to God! A little more of a challenge! Tillich says the early
church knows "without the abundance of the heart nothing great can
happen!" "Calculating love is not love at all!" We are
called to waste all we can out of the very fullness of our hearts, to be
as champions of the abundance of God’s love, not as protectors of God’s
scarcity. For look at how God "wastes" every day of creation
on us! Tillich says, "We know that lack of love in our early years
is mentally destructive. But do we know that the lack of occasions to
waste ourselves is equally dangerous? In many people there has been an
abundance of the heart."
"But laws, conventions, and a rigid self-control have repressed
our abundance, and it has died! We people are sick not only because we
have not received love, but also because we are not allowed to give
love, to waste ourselves." And Tillich says Jesus here points to
the ultimate paradox of his life for us all: "The Messiah, the
Anointed One, must waste Himself in order to become the Christ!"
Mary’s wastefulness sends Jesus to his own wastefulness, -- to his own
extravagant, outrageous love of life for the world and for all the
earth.
This scene exudes love of life, love of the incarnation, the
earthenness, the embodiedness, the sensuality and the intimacy of life
together with loved ones in faith. Imagine the table of foods prepared,
as always, with such art and care by Martha, much as she rails against
all Mary’s "wastefulness." Imagine the odors of foods alone,
not to mention the fragrance of the perfume as it fills the air. Imagine
the gentle caressing of Mary’s hair over Jesus’ bare feet. Imagine
that Jesus imagines, in that moment, that he will pass on this loving of
feet, -- of all parts of the body to love in that time and place! – to
his disciples when he partakes his last supper with them, -- as part of
what is commanded by, "Love one another, as I have loved you."
What a send-off this is for Jesus! What a moment of absolute calm before
the storm, what a last taste of "desert," of what Isaiah calls
"river in the desert," before all the chaos of the
"city!"
Imagine the company of such friends as Jesus may be fully relaxed and
fully himself with, on the very verge of his own betrayal, denial,
abandonment, forsakenness, and painful death. These are, literally,
moments of Jesus’ plotting the entry into Jerusalem, the attack on the
Temple’s own oppression and exploitation of the poor, the preparation
for the Passover Meal. Jesus knows already what price is on his head,
what orders are out to arrest him, to charge him with treason, with
blasphemy, -- to give him a public, political death, a plain and simple,
anonymous and ignominious execution, state-and-church-sanctioned murder,
-- a death no different in kind from the obscured one in Carson City
Friday night, while I, among many others was watching the ball game!
Just like Good Friday! -- for his pastoral and his prophetic life and
work, -- like Archbishop Romero, like Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, King, and so
many we can name, as well as countless of others who may never be named
but who die, in faith, loving life!
Imagine, at last, how Jesus so matter of factly sits here at table
with this "Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead!"
Speaking of whom had been smelling so badly just a few short days
before! And whose resurrection, -- For resurrection is not just
something that happens to us after death! Resurrection is something we
do in the midst of life! In the midst of all life we raise the dead, --
the lost, the rejected, the poor, the excluded – to life! To hope! To
relationship! To restoration of place in community! – Lazarus whose
resurrection seals the deal against Jesus, once and for all! Once word
of it spreads to the leaders of both church and state, who bewail, John
11, "What are we to do?! This man is performing many signs! If we
let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him! And the Romans
will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation." "So
from that day on," for his bold love of all life, "they
planned to put Jesus to death."
Imagine ourselves in the place of this Lazarus now, sitting down here
to eat with Jesus. Jesus who stands between him and eternal death.
Lazarus who was dead a few days ago. Lazarus, whose loving sisters
anguished over him and even railed against Jesus for not coming sooner!
Lazarus, for whom the whole village turns out to mourn. Lazarus, for
whom Jesus weeps! Even as Jesus weeps for Jerusalem. Lazarus, all
wrapped and bound in the shrouds of death! Lazarus, four days and nights
in the tomb! Will you be Lazarus with me now?
Can we even begin to imagine what kind of relief, what kind of
release, what kind of renewal of life Lazarus is feeling here? What kind
of value, what preciousness, he comes to attach to each and every last
moment of life? To each and every last person of life? Every
relationship? Every event? In this gift of "new life" he
receives? Sisters and brothers, our living, and loving, abundantly,
wastefully, extravagantly, outrageously, begins with living and loving
each moment of life as freely, as fully, as ever we can!
To be willing to die, to waste ourselves, with Lazarus and with
Jesus, with Mary and with Paul, with Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, Romero, and
King, with martyrs, with children, and with the poor, -- that we might
also rise with them! – is not fearing death or denying death. It is
accepting, respecting, engaging, embracing death as that radical
limitation which makes all our life worth living! All of our life worth
living. Welcome to Holy Week, and, for real, Amen!
Rev. John Auer
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