SERMON NOTES FOR 3.21.10
Let me draw a picture for you. This is a picture of Harry and Sally. They live in our area, they have a reasonably stable marriage, they have a couple of children, they own their own home. Their income is roughly 5 times Arizona’s state average, so they are rich, but they don’t feel rich, because a lot of their money has gone to buy a nice house, two cars, nice furniture, electronics, travel etc. So they are sometimes anxious about money, but they are in no danger of starving. They’ve never been in trouble with the law other than a speeding ticket, their work and family life is proceeding more or less according to the expectations their parents had for them, they are doing what they are supposed to do. There’s not a lot of spare time in their schedule– they are very busy with work and family commitments. But when they can find the time, they do spend time thinking about God. They wonder how God looks at the world, they wonder whether there is some deeper meaning and purpose to their lives, they hope that the fact that they are doing the best they can with their lives counts with God & is appreciated.
If this picture of Harry and Sally sounds like you or someone you know, there’s a good reason for that – according to demographic data, this is a picture of the average family in our surrounding area. And for people who fit this profile, our scriptures today have a lot to say.
Let’s begin with Paul, who writes our letter to the Christians in Philippi today. I always get a kick out of Paul, because he says stuff like, “If anyone has reason to boast, I have more!” Paul says that even before he knew anything about Christ – his life was proceeding very well. he was a law-abiding citizen, very well-educated, respected by everyone, a good church-goer who had everything he needed or expected to have. And yet – he met Christ and decided that the one thing worth more in his life than anything else was the power of Christ’s resurrection. For the hope of Christ’s kingdom and Christ’s resurrection, Paul counted everything else in his life, everything he had to be proud of, as rubbish. He devoted his life to making Christ his own, because Christ made Paul his own. It’s an impressive commitment by a man who already had everything.
Isaiah gives us a more interesting view of what God might say to Harry and Sally. And to understand what Isaiah is saying, you need a little background. Two experiences of exile and homecoming formed the foundations of Israel. The first was their experience as slaves in Egypt – starving, beaten, oppressed, humiliated, murdered – God heard their cry and sent Moses to deliver them. Moses led them through wilderness for 40 years, they came to Promised Land. This Exodus experience took a ragtag bunch of slaves and made them a people.
Less well-known is the second experience, much later after Israel was established as a kingdom – Babylon invaded and carted off much of the leadership of Israel to Babylon. Now this Exile experience was much different than the slavery in Egypt. The people taken to Babylon were the educated leaders – they were not slaves – they had opportunities to do well in Babylon, to get education, to work – some of them rose to high and powerful positions in the new land. For them, the most powerful temptation of Exile was not despair, starvation, torture as it was for the suffering slaves in Egypt. For them, the risk was assimilation – that the comforts and opportunities of Babylon might make them forget who they were as the people of God; that they might adopt Babylon ways, Babylon values, Babylon gods – and give up their heritage as the children of God’s covenant.
Babylon understood something important: the way to kill a people is not to enslave them and make them suffer, but to take away their identity, to rob them of their dream, to replace God’s vision for them with another vision that is comfortable but small, dark and confining.
And if this seems long ago and far away, think of Harry and Sally – busy and comfortable and respected – yet tempted by busy schedules and comfortable homes and by a society that has very little interest in following God – to forget their own heritage as children of God and assimilate to the ways of the kingdom around us, the kingdom that tempts us to think that a comfortable lifestyle and a rewarding career are all we need to aspire to, and that God can be a convenient add-on when we have the time.
To a people in tempting, comfortable Exile, a people whose best opportunities for the future seem to lie in forgetting their own identity as God’s children, the prophet Isaiah says this: remember how those slaves were brought out of Egypt, across the Red Sea where Pharaoh’s horses and chariots drowned? Remember how God gave them hope and formed them as a people? Remember the miracles God can do? Remember those things! – and now forget them! Because that’s not all God can do! God has more to say that God hasn’t yet said, and God’s rescue of suffering slaves is not the only thing God is about! God is about to do a new thing! And forget the old thing, the slavery thing, because God can do something that is so transformative, so life-changing, that even a people in Exile among the comforts of Babylon can understand that it is worth giving up everything to be a part of this transformation.
What God has done in the past is only a small measure of what God can do in the future, because our God is the God of surprises, our God can lead us through the wilderness, bring water out of the desert, fulfillment out of emptiness, resurrection out of death itself. And nothing in our lives is worth as much as that prize, the prize of being part of the covenant people of God.
Which brings us to Mary and her crazy, extravagant gesture in our gospel today. Just a few days earlier, Mary had buried her brother Lazarus, and after Lazarus was buried for four days in the tomb, Jesus finally came, and called Lazarus forth from the darkness of death into the sunshine of life. All of Jesus’ miracles in John’s gospel are extravagant gestures, but calling Lazarus from death into life is the most extravagant miracle of all, the one that demonstrates Jesus’ power over death itself, the one that convinces Mary that Jesus is not just a miracle worker but someone who carries the power of God, the creative power of calling forth life.
Hearing about this impossible miracle, the rulers in Jerusalem decide that such power cannot be tolerated – God is the ultimate threat to their own power. So they begin to plot to kill Jesus – meaning Jesus will trade his own life for Lazarus’ – an extravagant outpouring of blood, flesh and spirit that is the new and stunning thing that God is doing through him.
Our gospel writer, John, tells us that this dinner party happens 6 days before the Passover, and John also tells us that Jesus died on Passover. So make note – this is the Saturday before Good Friday. The very next day will be Palm Sunday, and Jesus plans an extravagant gesture, entering into Jerusalem. He’s not planning to slip into Jerusalem through back alleys – he’s going to ride a donkey down the main street with people cheering and acclaiming him king. It’s a calculated gesture, planned to get the attention of the authorities, and Jesus knows exactly how it will turn out, with the even more extravagant gesture of pouring out his blood and his life on the cross.
Everyone else there also knows what is going to happen. They are all scared. Mary knows what is coming, and responds with an extravagant gesture of her own – anointing Jesus with oil worth whole year’s wages. If you think of that tax return you just filed, or are about to file, and you think of that income number at the bottom of page one, and you imagine breaking something worth that much money in honor of a guest, you will understand how extravagant this gesture is.
Judas, the thief, responds with more sensible ideas for how it could be used, but Jesus is adamant that the Son of Man has come, not just to give a small amount of money to the poor, but to bring the extravagant outpouring of the kingdom of God to life in this world, light into darkness, life into death – and therefore everything we have is not too much to pour into dream of God. It is the dream that makes us who we are, the dream that forms our identity as children of God, the dream that surprises us constantly with newness of life.
Don’t remember the things of old, says God! I am about to do a new thing!
If we think that God has already done everything that God ever intends to do; if we think that God has stopped speaking to us, that the scriptures are long ago, far away descriptions of the lives of a few strange old-fashioned people; if we think that God might have had much to say to people mired in slavery 3,000 years ago but not much to say to our comfortable world now - our scriptures tell us differently. Our scriptures tell us that God is constantly calling us forth into the extravagant kingdom of an extravagant God who poured out everything he had for us. Our scriptures tell us that the comfortable lives we create for ourselves are nothing compared to the immeasurable value of the prize God has waiting for us. Our scriptures tell us that God’s dream for ourselves and our community is new and fresh and surprising in every era.
And if Harry and Sally can begin to understand the dream God has for them, they can begin to know the hope that resurrection brings to their own lives, and their lives will be transformed. This is our mission at Church of the Nativity – not a mission to create a loving community or to build a beautiful building or to provide lovely worship, though all of these things are important and all of them will happen. Our mission is to reach into our community and find Harry and Sally, to help them dream God’s dream for their lives, to let them know how deeply they are loved. To transform their lives with the knowledge of the extravagant dream of the extravagant God who gave his own life for each of us.
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