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Letting Your Hair Down

3/17/2013

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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
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Becoming God-sufficient

3/14/2011

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Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Matthew 4:8-10

Lent is the desert season – and that doesn’t mean that it’s time for us to pack up and go to Arizona, much as we might welcome the warmth and the dryness. Instead, it is the time in the Church year when we are called to step aside, to take a time out from all the business-as-usual of our lives, and examine our attitudes, our actions, our behavior, and especially our motivations – to see how well we are walking the walk of being Christians.

It is a desert time because the desert is a place where the landscape is clear, where there is not an abundance of lush vegetation to distract the eye, a place where one has to consider carefully the way to use such important resources as water, food, rest and shade. And during the forty days of Lent we attend in a particular way to our spiritual resources of prayer, fasting or abstinence, and alms-giving/charitable giving. During Lent we also pare back and restrain the sense of celebration in our worship – focusing on themes of sin and forgiveness, sacrifice, Jesus’ work on the Cross, and the quality of God’s mercy.

Throughout the Bible the desert stands as a metaphor for coming face to face with oneself, for stripping our psyches down to the point where our souls are bared; it is a place of struggle; it is also the place to meet God. Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden into the wilderness, Abraham and the generations of his family in their journeys, Moses meeting God in the burning bush, the Israelites escaping from Egypt and moving toward the Promised Land, John the Baptist preaching repentance for the coming of the God’s Kingdom, and now Jesus fasting and praying following his baptism: all of these took place in the desert, away from the centers of worldly power and control, away from the daily expectations of life.

Jesus’ time in the desert was an opportunity to meditate and pray and get clear about what he had heard at his baptism: the voice of God saying, “You are my Son, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.” It was a time of letting his identity sink in, become clear and real, so that he could then go out and begin his public ministry.

But after forty days of prayer and fasting, the devil came to Jesus to tempt him, to try his soul, to attempt to throw gravel in the gears of God’s plan. The devil tried twice to appeal to Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, the Messiah, the Anointed One: “If you really are the Son of God, then it will be so easy for you to turn these stones into bread, and you’ll be able to feed hundreds and thousands of hungry people, just like everyone has expected the Messiah to do” AND “If you are really the Son of God, prove it by throwing yourself off this skyscraper, because God’s not going to let anything happen to you!  Let’s see what all this Son of God stuff is all about.  What’s the matter – don’t you trust him?” When raising teasing questions about Jesus’ identity didn’t work, the devil tried to appeal to vanity and a naked desire for power: “Look Jesus, we can make a deal here, you can have all the power and glory and adulation you want – I’ll give you all of it.  And all I want in return is one little thing, for you to worship me.  That’s simple, that’s fair; is it a deal?”

In each instance Jesus responded by quoting the Hebrew Scriptures; he didn’t depend on his own resources, he didn’t try to tough it out all on his own. Those words from the Old Testament stand as sentinels in Jesus’ struggles with the tempter, they ground and connect Jesus’ spiritual wrestling with the long, long history of God’s relationship with his people. Jesus was reliving some of that history in his desert experience; he was connecting what had happened in the past and all the ways that God had been faithful to his people with own struggle over temptation.

But Jesus’ struggle wasn’t merely about whether or not to magically have something to eat at the end of his fast, or to make a dramatic and very public entrance on to the scene of first-century Jerusalem by throwing himself off of the pinnacle of the Temple in the sight of a capacity crowd. His temptation (as he was about to begin his public ministry and mission) was to go it alone, to fall back completely on his own resources, to be self-sufficient instead of God-sufficient – in short, to cut himself off from the true source of his power.

And we are in that same place – all the time, if we are really honest about it. We are always vulnerable to believing that we know better than God does, that we need only a little bit of help from God, that are sins and our shortcomings are something we can deal with on our own, that our lives only need tweaking, and not salvation.

We are always in danger of trying to be self-sufficient instead of God-sufficient.n And yet being in the desert of Lent forces us back onto our most basic and fundamental resources: God’s gift of life and God’s will for that life we have been given – neither of which we did anything to bring about so we can’t claim them as accomplishments.

And so in this season of Lent we are asked to embrace the desert, to face into what really is between God and us, to ask how it really is with our souls. Because the bottom line of Lent is about being dependent upon God – not merely about being good or moral or holy. To depend upon God means that we acknowledge that we are limited, fallible humans beings; that we have inherited some of Adam and Eve’s attitudes and behaviors; that sin and crossing the boundaries and missing the mark are not just things that happened in the past, but are with us all the time – part of what it means to be human.

To depend upon God means that we realize that God has been sustaining and directing the world for millions of centuries – and has done so quite nicely without our help before we ever appeared upon the scene; the world does not revolve around us and our wants and needs and desires.

Being dependent on God also means that we can’t assume that we are so sinful that God washes his hands of us, doesn’t want to have anything to do with us; we are not beyond God’s reach nor beyond redemption. God made us for a purpose – to be in relationship with him and to take our place in creation; for us to say that we are better than that, or lesser than that, is to question God and God’s purposes and judgment and will.

And so we struggle and we are tempted, just as Jesus was tempted, to close ourselves off from God, to act and live as though God didn’t exist. So in this Lenten time we are asked to withdraw into the desert, to meet ourselves face-to-face, to wrestle with the things that distract us, seduce us, take our attention from God. But we do so knowing that not only are we walking in Jesus’ footprints on that dry and scrubby desert ground, but that Jesus is here with us, hearing the words of our particular temptations, reaching out a hand to embrace and steady us, giving us the strength and the stamina to face what we need to face and do what we need to do, and the grace to know that there is redemption up ahead, and food for the journey at hand.

Let us pray.
Holy God, you are as close to us as our breath, yet we remove our eyes from your face and think that you have abandoned us.  Help us in this Lenten journey to know that “the eyes of all wait upon you, O LORD, and you give them their food in due season.  You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature” (Psalm 145). Walk with us, Jesus; be our bread, be our salvation, be our life.  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
First Sunday in Lent
March 13, 2011

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All Saints' Episcopal Church

 15 Basking Ridge Road, Millington NJ 07946    phone: (908) 647-0067    email: allstsmill@hotmail.com