The place we call home

• Isaiah 43:16-21
• Philippians 3:4b-14
• John 12:1-8
• Psalm 126

On Thursday I went to the home of a neighbor here in Petaluma, where I’d been invited for lunch.  A smiling woman met me at the door and showed me into her beautiful home which was painted in warm primary colors and decorated with Mexican folk art.  There were two other people already there, and two soon more soon arrived.  They were a couple of young community organizers from Santa Rosa, and a fellow I’d met before from the Unitarian Universalists, a folks from St. Vincent’s Catholic parish, and me, and we ate squash soup and bread and salad, and talked about the critical shortage of affordable housing in Petaluma, and what our faith communities might come together to do. 

You don’t have to look outside of this room to find persons of low- or moderate-income who are at the mercy of rising rents and vacancy rates that are vanishingly low.  Several of our members have already had to move, some of them out of Petaluma, because a home was sold out from under them and the new owner jacked up the rent, or because they wanted to buy a house and found that they could not afford to do so in their home town.  And I get regular calls in the parish office from people asking for help, who’d been just scraping by until a lay-off, or an illness, or a car crash, brought them to the brink of homelessness. 

So this is a problem that concerns me professionally and pastorally, but also personally.  It wounds my conscience.  So much insecurity about something as basic as having a home can’t be what God intends for her people, and something needs to be done.  And yet I didn’t go to that meeting on Thursday feeling certain that I know what that “something” is.   Which I found to be a great relief.  So often in my daily work I feel like I’m the one who’s expected to know what we’re all supposed to do.  But at this meeting I could sit back and listen to the conversation and learn about who these people were, and what they’re passionate about, and what they see happening in Petaluma, and what they’d like to see.

Which was kind of the same thing we were talking about doing in the meeting, only on a wider scale.  As I understand it, what was being proposed was to select a couple of precincts in town where there are a high density of renters, and voter turnout is low.  And the participating churches would divide up those neighborhoods and send out volunteers in pairs, each with at least one Spanish and English bilingual member, to go door to door.  And affordable housing might be a good place to start a conversation, one that might come around in time to the upcoming election and whether folks were eligible and planning to vote.  But the focus wouldn’t be to convince them to adopt an opinion, or to promote a candidate or political party.  It would be to ask questions and to listen, to what is on the minds of our neighbors.  It would be to build relationships of common interest and concern.

But when we got to the end of our meeting on Thursday, and it came time to plan the next one, I had to say that I couldn’t commit to being there.  With everything else I’m already engaged, the Russian River Deanery, and the College for Congregational Development, the Living Legacy Storytelling Events, the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative and the Interfaith Springtime Fellowship gathering that’s coming up on Trinity Sunday, I just don’t have the “bandwidth”, as they say, to be out in front of an effort like this, so if St. John’s is going to get involved it will depend on other folks in the congregation.  If you’re interested, speak to me later.

Of course it’s likely you don’t have the extra time and energy either.  We still have our hands full developing our capacities in basic areas of congregational life, like liturgy and music, and inviting and welcoming newcomers, and stewardship of our buildings and grounds, and teaching our tradition to the children.  But I like the idea of doing this voter engagement.  I’m intrigued by the possibility of receiving training from experienced community organizers, and joining in the effort with other congregations in a discrete project with a set timeline and a modest goal.  I like to think that within with this supportive context some of us could take a step toward acquiring new skills and confidence in the art of engaging strangers in conversation, and listening for common ground, of building relationships across the barriers of culture and language, and religion and class. 

And it’s fun to imagine that one day I’ll the time for this kind of thing.  It’s not that what we’re already doing isn’t worthwhile.  As I left that meeting on Thursday, our host told me that she’d attended labyrinth walks at our church and said how much she loves what we’re doing at St. John’s.  But as I drove away I reflected on how good it had been to have a brief break from doing the work of the church, to be able to break out briefly of my ceaseless thinking and working and praying only about what I can do to strengthen this congregation, and care for its members, to spend an hour as one citizen among other citizens talking about the welfare of the place where we all live—it was refreshing, and it made me wish for more.

Because even as we are making a mighty effort to rebuild the internal fabric of this church community, powerful economic, technological, and ideological forces are tearing the wider community around us apart.  Our national politics display, to a frightening degree, the breakdown of civility and mutual respect, or any pretense of concern for the common good; but the same thing is happening on the local scale as well.  The eviction of elderly renters is a symptom of the same progressive, potentially terminal disease.  And it is not only the poor and marginal who are suffering.  As Mother Teresa of Kolkata said, forty years ago, in a famous interview:

“You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is.  What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”

And I think we all know that when we are estranged from each other, when we are trapped in structures of social interaction that pit us against each other and make us vie competitively for our own narrow self-interest or that of our group, we aren’t really free in relation to God.  When Mary of Bethany takes a pound of perfume worth a working man’s pay for a year and anoints Jesus with it, she is acknowledging the supreme value of that living relationship.  Judas complains about the waste and indulgence, but Jesus affirms the gesture that Mary has made.  When he says, “you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,” he is not saying to be indifferent to the plight of the less fortunate, or fatalistic about their prospects for relief.  He is pointing to the essential work that he has come to do, of breaking down the barriers we put between ourselves and each other, which are really barriers to God.  He is saying that without this work, we are all in poverty, a poverty that is absolute.

The energy of Jesus’ work is reconciling love.  Without it, we are like Judas, whose appeal on behalf of the poor is just another self-serving scheme.   With it, we dare hope that God can open every prison of separation that keeps us bound, even the prison of death.  Mary of Bethany has seen Jesus free her brother Lazarus from that prison, for love of her family, and she repays him her own extravagant gesture of love.  The fragrance of her outpouring fills whole house.

But she is, as Jesus says, anointing him for his burial.  She pours her perfume on his feet, the feet that will carry him away from her and the intimate circle of her family home, away to complete the work he came to do.  They will carry him into the city, to the temple in the midst of the Passover crowds.  They will carry him to the place of public execution, and there the soldiers will drive a spike through the feet that Mary caressed with her hair.  Because the reconciling love of God isn’t for Jesus’ particular friends.  It isn’t for the rich, and it isn’t for the poor, for sinners or for the righteous.  It’s for us all.  

Positively-charged

Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

In the season of Lent 1987, I joined a group of pilgrims walking across Massachusetts, from Pittsfield in the West, to Boston in the East.  The purpose of our two-week journey was to make visible the human cost of our government’s involvement in the civil wars in Central America.   We were hosted along the way by churches, temples, and monasteries of many different traditions, who fed us, or let us stop in to use the bathroom and have a drink, or invited us for worship, or gave us a place to sleep.  The name that had been given to the pilgrimage was Via Crucis, the Way of the Cross, and as we walked we carried white wooden crosses, painted with the names of victims of the violence.

The entire experience was a momentous one for me, and I’ve been mining it for sermons as long as I’ve been preaching.  This morning I’m thinking about the first warm day of spring, when we had come down into the Connecticut River Valley after close to a week of cold, wet walking through the highlands of Western Massachusetts.  We arrived that evening at the Episcopal Church in Amherst, where we entered a spacious fellowship hall full of friendly people.  There were red and white checked tablecloths laid with real salad (the kind that doesn’t contain jello, or pasta, or Miracle Whip™), and spaghetti marinara and red wine.  After supper we went across the square to the Congregational Church, which was full to overflowing, for one of the most powerful, spirit-filled worship services I can remember, and then, finally, we made our way to the Presbyterian Church where we would spend the night.

And when we got there, it was announced that a team of massage therapists had arrived, who had volunteered to rub our feet.  They were people I knew, friends and neighbors of the intentional spiritual community east of Amherst where I was living at the time.  I got my foot-massage from a French woman named Brigitte, who lived with some other folks in a house across the road from our commune.  She was several years older than me, sophisticated, vivacious, and attractive, and while I’d met her several times, I’m not sure that we had exchanged more than a dozen words.  But as Brigitte was rubbing my feet we got to talking, and I was surprised by the sudden warmth and interest I felt coming from a person I’d thought existed on a different plane.   It seemed that my participation in the Via Crucis pilgrimage had caused her see me in a different light.  Or maybe it had made me see myself differently, and Brigitte recognized the change.

An event like the Via Crucis creates a field of energy that is positively charged.  When people undertake something out of love and concern for others, something that requires some risk and effort and privation from the participants and that makes them rely on the generosity and hospitality of others who share their love and concern, it has a multiplying effect.  In walking across Massachusetts, I could do something for the people of Central America that Brigitte could not, but she could do something for them, too, by doing something for me.  And our relationship of mutual indifference changed in a moment, to one infused with something more like love. 

The gospel lesson today teaches us about the transcendent power of this kind of positive energy field.  It is John’s version of a story that appears in different forms in all four gospels.  But while the others never tell us the name of the woman who anoints Jesus on the eve of his final journey to Jerusalem, John identifies her as Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus.  She is part of a family with whom Jesus has an especially close and loving relationship, and she has more reason than most to be devoted to him, even to the point of lavishing a gift on him worth a whole year’s pay—in the chapter before this one, he brought her brother Lazarus back to life, after four days in his tomb. 

So you could say that Mary’s extravagance is her attempt to make a gesture that in some small measure, proportionate to the immensity of Jesus’ gift to her.  But perhaps because she is a woman, and he is a man, her action is charged with something more than just gratitude and humble service.  In that part of the world, then as now, a woman’s hair was a potent symbol of her erotic power.  For her to uncover her head before a man not her husband, and let it down and wipe his feet with it, was an act of unseemly intimacy.  Yet the love that she quite literally pours out is not for him alone.  The fragrance of the oil, the gospel says, filled the whole house.  And the ministry of Jesus, which began at a wedding feast, in an embarrassing superfluity of wine, approaches its climax a house transformed into a bridal chamber, and the pleasure of love is shared by all.   

This shows how well Mary understands Jesus’ ministry.  For it was, and is, a project driven by love—not love in the abstract, but real physical pleasure in the presence of other people.  To befriend Jesus is to open one’s heart to the desire to connect.  It is to enter a positive feedback loop where my generosity inspires yours, where your compassion evokes mine, where we draw strength from one another’s touch, and give solace to each other’s pain.  To follow Jesus is to act on the faith that love is a power that really can, and really will, transform the world.  And it will do this by continually widening the circle of our mutual belonging.  Mary loves Jesus, body and soul, but she does not seek to possess him.  Maybe that’s why she anoints his feet and not his head.  She takes her precious bottle of pure nard and pours it on the feet that have carried the good news of God’s all-embracing love along the roads of Galilee, and through the villages of Samaria and Judea, and are about to make one last trip to Jerusalem.

Judas doesn’t understand, because for him love is an abstraction.  He is like all of us who talk about “the poor” as if we know that they need better than they do, we who are always ready to make public policy proposals and set up programs, and are always anxious about the efficient delivery of services, and the avoidance of moral hazards, and it is all ultimately self-serving and humorless and cold.  Because there is something the poor need even more than money and the rich need it, too.  It is to be in a field of energy charged with love that seeks the flourishing of all.  All of us, poor and rich, need a story that connects us, and gives us a context for coming together.  We all need permission and encouragement to touch the lives of others in a way that brings pleasure and lessens pain.  We all need to know that the service we give and receive flows through us and through others in a positive feedback loop of faith, hope, and love.  And we need these things because the powers of cynicism, and selfishness, and discord are so strong.  

Love demands more than clever ideas and the dutiful allocation of funds.  It demands daily acts of courage and faithfulness.  If I ever spoke to Brigitte again after the night of my foot-rub, I don’t remember it.  A moment of warmth ends, and the cold returns.  We do what we can for each other, but the lasting gifts—peace, justice, eternal life—are the ones that only God can give.  Yet what other assurance do we have of God’s promises than the gifts we give, and the risks we take, and the pain we suffer, and the sorrows we bear for each other?  I imagine that when Jesus set off for Jerusalem in the morning, the fragrance of nard still rose from his feet with the dust, and the memory of Mary was a comfort to him.  So, in a way, was the knowledge that she had kept back some of the oil to anoint his body for burial.   His tomb would be filled with the fragrance of the bridal chamber through the long darkness, when there was not yet even the faintest scent of the garden in the morning on the first day of the week.