Crazy Extravagance – sermon by Lori Unger – March 17, 2013

March 20, 2013

Fifth Sunday of Lent
March 17, 2013

Crazy Extravagance: Shameless Foolishness that Makes all the Difference

by Lori Unger

Texts: Psalm 126, Isaiah 43:16-21, John 12:1-8

Likely you’ve already heard the story of a woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with costly perfume and wipes it away with her hair.

Well, maybe you know the story in Luke of the woman who bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears and wipes THEM away with her hair, and afterwards rubbing ointment into his feet. That woman was a sinner, a prostitute, and she interrupts a dinner hosted by Simon the Pharisee. In that story, Jesus forgives her sins and sends her on her way.

Or maybe you’ve heard the story, told by Matthew and Mark, of a woman who comes to the home of Simon the Leper in Bethany where Jesus is sharing a meal with his disciples. She pours costly ointment – 300 denarii worth of nard, according to Mark – on Jesus’ head and, just as in our text today, the disciples protest that the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor. As in our text for today, Jesus rebukes the disciples, saying, “the poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” In Matthew and Mark, he clearly suggests that her gift is in preparation for his burial, and declares that she will be remembered for her gift wherever the good news is proclaimed.

You might be surprised to notice, then, that the writer of the gospel of John chooses to place this event squarely within the narrative of Lazarus, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead. For John, the woman is none other than Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, the very same Mary who, earlier in the story, brings a crowd of people to witness the raising of her brother. This crowd that Mary brings, John tells us, is the very same crowd which multiplies into throngs of rejoicing people at Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Some among them, however, report Jesus to the Pharisees, and they begin to plan his demise.

At the time of the telling of our story, Jesus is a hunted man, laying low in Bethany at the home of his dear and trusted disciples Mary, Martha and Lazarus. A meal has been served in honour of Jesus, and Lazarus reclines at the table with the other disciples. As Martha serves the meal to her guests, Mary opens a bottle of pure nard, an expensive perfume and pours it on Jesus’ feet, overwhelming the household with its aroma. This time it is Judas who objects to her wastefulness, saying they could have sold the perfume for 300 denarii and given the money to the poor. (John is quick to point out that Judas, as keeper of the purse, is more interested in lining his own pocket than helping the poor). As in the other stories, Jesus rebukes him, saying the perfume was intended for his burial. As in the other stories, Jesus ends by saying, “the poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”

Clearly, the gospel writers, setting down their accounts some 30-40 years after the fact are retelling a story that has been told and retold in their various Christian communities. Each of them shapes the story in ways that help to tell a bigger story, and John is no different. He uses the story to foreshadow and foretell the events that will come later, the passion drama that ultimately leads to the cross. Where Lazarus’ rising is the culmination of a series of signs and wonders, the story of Mary’s anointing begins Jesus’ walk toward Jerusalem, and signals the inevitability of his death. And it’s shameless and over-the-top nature of Mary’s gift that highlights the very point John is trying to make.

No one can deny that Mary’s extravagance was completely unacceptable and inappropriate – that perfume cost approximately 10 months wages, (300 denarii, where 1 denarius represents a days’s wage!) That comes to just over $65,000 for someone who earns $80,000/year. An earlier text suggests that 300 denarii could feed 7500 men. And she wasted it on Jesus’ feet. The manner in which she offered it was utterly shameful – breaking every social moré in the book. A woman unbinding her hair in the presence of men not her husband, and with it doing the work that only slaves would be permitted to do. Presumably she had been a woman of some social standing. Why would she do that?

As I mentioned earlier, Mary’s wasteful anointing initiates the sequence of events that precedes the passion narrative. The meal foreshadows the last supper in the very next chapter, only this time it is Jesus who abases himself and washes the others’ feet. Judas, already disgraced at Jesus’ previous rebuke, reveals himself to be a traitor. But the point has yet to be made. Why such extravagance? Why such waste? Judas had a point – surely better, more faithful things could have been done with those resources that ointment represented than spilling it all over the floor and giving everyone present a headache from the pungent perfume.

I submit to you that Mary’s wasteful outpouring, set as it is in John’s story, prefigures an even greater offering, one that makes even less sense than Mary’s foolishness. Christ’s own death – the breaking of his body and the pouring out of his own life. The wasting of a life, the death of most powerful resource these Christian communities had. Jesus was to be the Messiah, the Saviour, the one to rescue them with shows of strength and power. And there he went, walking as a lamb to the slaughter, to hang on a tree, to die a criminal’s death. And yet we know what his disciples could not have known – that his death was not a waste. In his shameful death is our life. And his victory. Who could have known?

Mary’s shameful extravagance was anything but foolish or inappropriate. Rather it only began to reflect the extravagance of that which Christ would give. If anything, it was Mary who began to understand.

My observation is that we tend to be a measured people – We’re careful about most things – how we spend our time and our money, how we relate to other people, among other things. We want to be faithful. We take careful stock of risk factors, weighing everything according to what we think is best, what will have the most benefit with the least pain. We make these choices aided by the expectations and honour codes of our faith community, and often, as Aldred and Tim have both reminded us, we benefit from the cautions, checks and balances of the pain points of shame and guilt.

But none of that resembles the shameless and extravagant expenditure of Christ’s work on the cross. My question is this: when is it time to throw caution to the wind and break all the rules, for the sake of something larger than our own comfort, our own social standing, our own carefully constructed worldview? What extravagant perfume do we have stashed away, waiting to fill the house with fragrance as we lavish it shamelessly toward some larger purpose at the risk of our place in the world?

A story about crazy, extravagant faithfulness, related by Joe Wiebe, one of the Canadian MB leaders who travelled to Columbia with Tim Schmucker over the last three weeks to meet with Colombian MB leaders there:

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Every morning a group of us pile into a van that drives us to the MCC office. Every morning people laugh in disbelief at the way traffic flows: steadily moving bumper to bumper through streets with paved lines that act, at most,
as suggestions. A Colombian woman describes this movement as guided by relationships rather than as organized by rules. In Colombia, relationships are not mediated by law. I know this from reading articles, but in the van I feel it churning my stomach.

My stomach is knotted again going to Cazucá, a shantytown in Soacha, on the outskirts of Bogotá. We have been invited by David and his wife Marina to visit them at their Mennonite Brethren church. Other churches and NGOs are active in and around Cazucá, but only David and Marina live there. We wait at the bottom of the hill for David to accompany us for the last quarter mile. The weather is comfortable and the church is close but we wait without explanation. Later we are told that the neighbourhood is dissected by invisible lines that mark gang territories, the results of crossing which are unclear. Presently, the silence is thick – enough to know that things here are serious.

The entrance to the church opens onto a patio teeming with playing children. They are gorgeous. The tin roof vibrates with their animation and we revel in it, basking in their laughter. They play with broken toys. One child scales the ground doing an army crawl. He pretends he´s playing with an object that explodes in his hands. We’re told these are the younger kids; the older ones play later so they “don’t hit” the younger ones. This, of course, is common to all children. But here it feels like a long shadow; I know the statistics of how these children will end up, and I’m terrified.

David guides us through the labyrinthine structure to the sanctuary. There are several levels we go through that contain various rooms for different projects: a sewing room for women to make clothes; schoolrooms for the children; one room has a few computers and a keyboard. David tells us how they came to be in Cazucá for the past ten years. It all centers on a local woman whose body was riddled with cancer; her husband abandoned her in fear of catching it. David read the bible with her, and her neighbours started noticing his recurring presence. No other pastors come here, and they are perplexed. They tell him he’s crazy. Everyone tells him and Marina they’re crazy. David retorts, “It’s by being crazy we built all of this.”

The craziness of Colombia itself is palpable, but difficult to describe – hence we tell stories. David tells us about the presence of the paramilitaries (paras) that brings both violence and protection; Marina informs us about the women whose husbands have been killed (most likely by the paras) and must work from 3AM – 10PM, leaving their children either on the streets to be recruited by gangs or locked in their houses getting so hungry they eat toothpaste. It is only because of the paras´ protection that the church can function, but the law they bring is through selective assassinations that David is trying to stop.

When one of the MCC SEED workers describes the violence – rape, murder, thieving, drug trafficking – David shrugs and shakes his head. It’s crazy. And yet David does not have the world-weariness you see in pastors burnt out by tiresome demands of fickle congregations in Canada. He is tenacious and, well, attractive – both his laughter and his tears are infectious. The source of his virtues is his particular incarnation of Colombian craziness – I might put it more theologically by calling it the Holy Spirit(which it is), but that doesn’t explain anything beyond the stories he tells.

The difficulty is that we often say something is crazy as a gasp of exasperation, a release of tension that is supposed to lead to an explanation, an order or underlying reason for the way things are. Reason fails in Colombia; its reality is contained in the fraught silence of the potential violence that everyone knows is hovering invisibly overhead waiting to be given bodily form. Our tour of Cazucá can be given a sequential order: the hanging tree where people are executed, the brown door behind which drugs are trafficked, the rose garden, the dogs barking, the blood splattered in the dirt, the resourceful families, the smiles and greetings, the man with scars on his face, the woman whose stew David describes as “finger licking good.”

What I can say is that David and Marina have embraced the insanity by refusing to despair in a world in which communal life is not organized by laws. He does not turn to the government or to violence to make sense of life or enforce order; instead he forms relationships that exceed all social (and legal?) boundaries. In the silence and irrationality that marks reality in Colombia, David and Marina are immersed in a profound inter-involvement with both marginal and powerful lives. David informs us that people in the community do not go to him and Marina out of guilt or shame but because they are looking for a new life, an encounter with God.

As a Canadian irrevocably involved in an economy that enables the poverty Cazucá is mired in, the temptation to react to these horrific stories is one of guilt and shame. Indeed, during our time together there is a confession followed by tears.

But to feel only guilt and shame would not recognize, and therefore forestall participation in, the complex craziness that built an MB church in a place all others flee after sunset. It would give our transgressions the last word. Like Colombia, we are free from the law, which gives both love and hate incomprehensible fertility.

And so David and Marina say that while resources are needed, what is of utmost importance is that we pray for them. Their lives and mission are sustained in part by our encounters with God, by a continual search for a new life radically present to our community. This is not sentimental or simplistic; it should make our stomachs churn. For if our churches are not organized by laws (rules that tell us who our friends are, who we can worship with, who we listen to) then they are guided by relationships with our communities, which is crazy.