Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven! Luke 19:38

When I was a child my family spent many weekends and holiday times traveling to visit my grandmother.  The trip really wasn’t very long – it usually took about two-and-a-half hours – unless of course the traffic was backed up on the Merritt Parkway or the New England Thruway. But with my sister and brother and me all sitting in the single back seat, it could often feel very long and boring.  And of course we would often ask, “Are we there yet?”  Classic; I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience.

Lent can be a little like that – a long haul, starting with Ash Wednesday.  And it was a long haul for Jesus, traveling from Galilee to the outskirts of Jerusalem – teaching, healing and praying as he went, gathering followers who were intrigued or moved or impassioned or just plain curious.

But the journey to Jerusalem was no family holiday or religious excursion – travel and accommodations had not been arranged by Solomon’s Temple Tours, Inc.  Jesus went to Jerusalem to fulfill his mission, to live out his vocation as the Messiah, God’s Anointed One, the One through whom God’s purposes for his people would be accomplished.

It was a long trip - spiritually and emotionally, as well as physically. Over the course of his public ministry the full awareness of who he was and what he was called to do grew and developed as Jesus renewed, healed, restored, fed, chastised and challenged the disciples who were the representative nucleus of God’s people.  And once Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem, and to the confrontation with the powers-that-be (political, religious, and ultimately spiritual), there was no turning back; there was only going on until the destination was reached.

Are we there yet?  Yes.  We are here.  We have traveled with Jesus, we have paused on the Mount of Olives as the donkey was found, we have made the descent down through the Kidron Valley and up the other side by the steep and rocky road to the gates of the city – cheering and acclaiming Jesus as King at every step of the way.  And we have arrived at the Temple.  God has come in person to claim, cleanse and restore his own at the very center of earthly and heavenly power. 

This is what the people have longed for since ancient times.  This is what we have longed for; remember our prayer back in Advent: Prepare the way of the Lord?  In the desert make a highway for our God?  Our Advent prayer comes to fruition in Jesus’ arrival at the Temple.  But there is no immediate coronation, no welcome and enthronement: “Hail, King Jesus!  Come right in, we will all step aside and let you have your rightful place as Sovereign and Lord.”  No one says: “We will gladly give up our power, our rule, and surrender to you what is truly yours.” 

Are we surprised?  We shouldn’t be. We have a hard enough time letting Jesus be in charge of us, even when we claim to be his followers.  How much more disdain and anger and furious resistance is there from the powers that are based on control, gain, violence and falsehood masquerading as truth? These powers were not limited to the first century, the Temple priesthood, the Roman government or the Judean aristocracy.  These are the powers that oppose God and God’s Kingdom and God’s Messiah in every age – including our own; they keep on taking different forms and shapes and hues, but they are the same powers.

And Jesus comes to meet them face on, not as they expect with full battle array, but with the power of humility – the humility that began with God being born as a vulnerable infant, living fully the life that we live.  Jesus comes into our lives, our neighborhoods, our Church, our Jerusalem and we acclaim him, we cheer him on: he is our King, God’s Anointed, Emmanuel –God-with-us.  But cheering by itself leaves us on the sidelines. 

If we welcome Jesus as King into the Temple of our hearts and our homes and our world, then we must be prepared to let him be King – a living Lord, and not a pretty plaster statue. And that means letting God have the last word, and not the powers-that-be.  Letting God have the last and best and true word about our values, our decision-making, our political commitments, our service to others, our care for creation – our whole lives and the life of the world.

Jesus is King. We have made the journey with him and we have arrived; we are there.

Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven! Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Palm Sunday: The Sunday of the Passion
March 24, 2013

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. John 12:3

  How close does someone have to be to you before you will “let your hair down,” before you will let your weaknesses and vulnerabilities show, before you can reveal your less-than-presentable parts?

This can be very difficult for us to do. So often we are told to lead with our strengths, to put a good face on things. And certainly a large sector of our economy is based on convincing us as consumers to buy products and services that will improve or camouflage our imperfections and short-comings, whether those goods be cosmetics or resumé-writing services.

So when we decide to confide in another person, to “let our hair down” with them, we generally want to be pretty sure that we can trust him or her with what we say, and who we are, and what we reveal about ourselves.

It can feel very risky to share who we truly are with another person. We see that in this morning’s Gospel – Mary anointing Jesus.

But first we need to get a couple of things clear. A version of this event appears in all four Gospels: Matthew’s and Mark’s version are pretty similar to each other; Luke situates the story much earlier in Jesus’ ministry and identifies the woman doing the anointing as a prostitute; Mark and Matthew don’t identify her at all.

John, however, tells the story very differently. Jesus is at the home of his friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus in Bethany, outside of Jerusalem.  Some days before this Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead – he was four days in the tomb – and restored him to sisters.

This family of siblings were probably Jesus’ closest friends, in addition to the Twelve. Mary was the one who wanted to sit and listen to Jesus’ teachings when he came to dinner; Martha was concerned to treat her guest right by making sure the meal was getting served on time – and yet even before Lazarus had been resuscitated, she professed her faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

At some point during this dinner party, as John tells it, Mary took very expensive perfume – it would have cost a year’s wages – and poured it over Jesus’ feet. And then she took off her head covering, unbound her long hair, and began to dry his feet.

What an intimate moment this is: Mary literally letting her hair down with Jesus, which in those days was not done outside of the family, and using her hair in place of the servant’s towel – the servant who would have already washed the feet of the dinner guests.

Judas protests at the waste and the expense; the Gospel writer wants us to see Judas as a greedy embezzler. But Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’

Mary was anointing Jesus for burial, anticipating his death.  Somehow she heard and understood in what Jesus had been saying and doing that it would come to this – that he would die, and that this was probably the last time she would be able to share a moment like this with him; the very next day would see Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey to the acclamation of the crowds, and all that would come after it.

By contrast Peter – just five days later – refuses to let Jesus wash his feet, when Jesus takes up the servant’s towel and basin at the Last Supper. Jesus tells Peter: “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.” Now this being the Gospel of John, that statement has meaning on several different levels, but one of those meanings is that unless Peter can accept the intimacy and humility of Jesus taking on a servant’s role for those who follow him, he won’t really have gotten who and what Jesus is all about.

But Mary had gotten it – she understood that her friend Jesus was also her Lord, the one who was going to suffer and die for her – and the truest and best response was to serve him, to act as servant in the way that she could do. As a disciple, she became a servant, and in her service she acted prophetically – by anticipating Jesus’ death and by recognizing his kingship; anointing with oil carried both those connotations in the ancient world, and healing, as well. The closer Mary drew to Jesus, the more willing she was to be vulnerable, the more truth she saw and understood, and the more real her service was. The truth that Mary saw was difficult and painful; we can’t kid ourselves about that. But it shaped her response to Jesus, even in the face of Judas’ criticism; it allowed her to be a truer disciple.

As we have been walking through Lent our purpose has been to draw closer to Jesus, to put aside the habits and attitudes and predilections that keep us from intimacy with God. And if you are like me, you start with very good intentions – and even a good plan – only to have it pushed aside by events, unforeseen circumstances, inertia, or just plain tiredness; and we let ourselves down.

But when this happens, it’s an opportunity to come closer to God – to be honest, to acknowledge to ourselves and to God who we really are, and what is the nature of our short-comings and failures (particularly when we know that it is a pattern or a character trait with us). The gift of recognizing and owning our sin is not that it can be extracted from us, like having a bad tooth pulled; but rather that our whole self will be available to God, and that God can then use even the things that cause us so much trouble – usually in ways we could never have anticipated.

But that won’t happen unless we can let our hair down with the Lord, unless we are willing to be vulnerable with Jesus and sometimes with others. Staying and facing the truth about ourselves - rather than running away from what we don’t want to see – makes us much better disciples, much better servants of the Lord.

In these last days of Lent learn from Mary: sit at Jesus’ feet; let your hair down; be willing to give God your all; and know intimacy with Christ.

Let us pray.

O Lord, who has taught us that to gain the whole world and to lose our souls is great folly, grant us the grace so to lose ourselves so that we may truly find ourselves anew in the life of grace, and so to forget ourselves that we may be remembered in your kingdom.  Amen.                                                                                           ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Fifth Sunday of Lent
March 17, 2013

When the younger son was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. Luke 15:20

“You can’t go home again” – so says the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, published in 1940. It’s about the experiences of a fictional writer who draws on the life and characters of his home town.  The man achieves great success as an author, but then finds that his former neighbors and relatives are angry and resentful at the way they have been portrayed in his books.

And that phrase – “You can’t go home again” – has come into our everyday language as a way to talk about the experience of out-growing small-town communities when you’ve once lived in the supposed bright lights and glamour of the big city.

It rings true in other ways, as well.  Who among us has not had the experience of returning home after having been away at college, or military service, or just living on your own  and managing very well at being a grown-up, only to find yourself and your siblings falling right back into well-worn patterns of teasing, bickering, rough-housing or some other form of adolescent behavior? It can be irresistible.

And yet…going home – home-coming; there’s a tug and a longing, a spiritual desire, to be home in that emotional and psychological place where there is safety and belonging and a loving embrace.

The Gospel reading today is all about leaving home and returning, and what that does to this family of a father and his two adult children.  It is, of course, the story we know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son – a very, very familiar story.  In fact it may be so familiar that it is hard for us to listen to it without thinking: “Oh right, the Prodigal Son; got that” and then not really pay attention to what we are hearing.  And so the version of the parable we’ve heard today is not what is printed in the lectionary insert.  The version we heard is from The Message, a translation of the Bible that tries to make the English as dynamic and street-friendly as the Greek of the New Testament was in its own day.

Right away we should be aware of what the younger son is asking: he wants his share of his father’s estate now; that means selling land and herds, liquidating assets so that the share of the property that would come to the younger son at the time of his father’s death could be paid to him in cash.  In effect he says to his father “I wish you were dead.”

When the son has run through all his money he is left without resources, and is only able to find work as an indentured servant to a Gentile farmer where he didn’t get enough to eat.  To add insult to injury, this Jewish son’s job is to feed pigs; he couldn’t get any lower.

And then, Jesus says, the younger son “came to his senses” and realized that, at the very least, the hired hands on his father’s farm had plenty to eat.  We don’t know if the son was truly sorry for the way he had treated his father, or if the speech he rehearsed was just a ploy.  What we do know is that this was a matter of survival; the man was desperate.

In the meantime, the father, the patriarch, the head of the clan, the pater familias, had not ceased to look for and hope for his son’s return.  In fact, the father saw the son way down the road long before the son came within speaking distance.  And the father acted in a way that no dignified land-owning head of a family at that time would have acted.  He ran down the road to meet his son and welcomed him with open arms – literally.  He then pushed aside his son’s speech about returning as an employee and ordered the household staff to prepare a home-coming banquet, a celebration.

And Jesus told this parable in response to some of the most religiously observant people and the religion scholars complaining that Jesus, this rabbi, was hanging around with questionable people.  Jesus told this parable, to show God’s character, and God’s attitude toward his people – as depicted by the father in the story.

Of course, the passage doesn’t end there.  The older son – the good, dutiful, responsible son – arrives at the house after a long day of work to find the party in full swing, and when he learns that the festivities are for his ne‘er-do-well brother, who had written off the whole family, he goes ballistic. And he has every reason to be angry – it’s as though his good and faithful service has been ignored, perhaps even insulted, by his father’s generous welcome of the younger son.

But the father stands his ground and says: “Son, you don’t understand. You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours—but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!”

If we are really open to hearing what Jesus has to say we may well find ourselves in this story, several times.  Each one of us, in different ways and at different times, may have been the younger son or the older son or the father.  We all have had times when we have been selfish and reckless with our closest relationships, and have hurt those we love.  We also probably had the experience of being the good one, of soldiering on, without a lot of splashy recognition or reward; and when someone else gets the appreciation and love that we deserve, we can be resentful.  And perhaps we can identify with the father who has had to let a child go, much against our better judgment, hoping and praying that one day he or she will return – and without being too beaten-up by life.

The thing to remember here is that the father, God, has more than enough love for both the sons; this is not a zero-sum game where whatever one gets is taken away from the other.  This is not about God being fair or giving rewards, but about God’s being merciful and restoring us to wholeness, restoring the family to wholeness – because the older son had lost his brother, as much as the father had lost a son.  It is in God’s character and nature to want to make us whole, to redeem families and communities, as much as individuals.

This parable is about coming home – coming home to God and to our true place in the family of God.  And in the process of doing that we are all changed; we bring our wounds, and our shame, and our anger and frustration, as well as our joy and relief at being restored and welcomed home.

It’s fitting that we should be hearing this passage on this particular Sunday – Mid-Lent, sometimes called Refreshment Sunday, Mothering Sunday in England.  It’s a day in which the rigors of Lent are lightened somewhat – in some churches the purple hangings and vestments and changed out for rose-colored ones, the psalm ends with words of rejoicing and in our second hymn this morning we even snuck in a little ‘hallelujah.’  It’s all a reminder that Easter is coming, that the repentance and starkness of Lent is not an end in itself but a preparation for the joy of knowing anew the Risen Lord and feasting at Christ’s banqueting table.

As Paul said in his letter to the Christians in Corinth: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

When we come home to God, when we come home to Christ, we are made new – each and every one of us, all of us held together by the generous love and embrace of God – and that is something to celebrate!  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 10, 2013