Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

John 12:1-8

A few weeks ago, we saw “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Guthrie. I usually read the plot of Shakespeare before we go. They require cognitive work to see, so being reminded of the plot helps me follow the story, and frankly, sometimes, keep my eyes open. After reading just scene 1, I was overwhelmed. Can that much happen in such a short amount of time? I was already a little lost, and I knew that I would need the intermission to get resituated for another block of iambic pentameter, the poetic style of Shakespeare.

At the beginning the production, one of the actors who played Helena, walked out on stage with a ukelele and talked to the audience. Since the play was about love, perhaps even written for a pair of newlyweds, she asked who was married for 20 years, then 30, then 40. Finally, she focused on one couple in the fourth row who had been married for 50 years. The woman said that after their first date, she called her best friend and said, “When I saw his smile, I knew he was the man I was going to marry.” When the actor asked the husband what he shrugged and said, “She was cool.” Their first date was at the Como Zoo. Their advice for those getting married or staying in marriage was, “Just hang in there.” Everyone clapped for them, and the show began.

As it turned out, I really didn’t need to read the plot. I’m sure I missed a lot of the beautiful Shakespearean poetry, but the actors, with their hearts on the sleeves of gorgeous costumes, the live musician with wild hair off to the side, even the movement and lighting told the story at a level that was behind the written language. They almost didn’t need the words. I knew, from the flowers sewn up and down Puck’s coat, that love would win the day.

Apparently, there was more going on behind the play than I knew. Helena, whose real name was Royer Bokus, was backstage five minutes here, six minutes there, writing a song for that couple in the fourth row. Just before Puck’s final blessing, she interrupted again to come to the center of the stage. Another actor unrolled a scroll, and she sang an amazing song about the story of that couple’s love. She included every detail they mentioned, even connecting it to the sloth at the Como Zoo, ending with the sweetest advice for every single one in the room, “Just hang in there.”

I was broken open.

I almost sobbed out loud. Tears clouded my eyes. Snot dripped out of my nose. That kind of weeping. With no handkerchief and with no hair to wipe up the extravagance of that moment, I used my sleeve. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do when the depth opens, the floodgates pour out, and you are immersed in something more than you knew, especially given the plot lines you had just been reading in the day’s newspaper, or in your life of comedy and tragedy.

The gospel of John makes a turn in chapter twelve. In the next chapter, which we will not hear until Holy Week, Jesus speaks his final words to his friends. It’s the end of the story that many had been writing for him. Yet he wanted his friends to know that there was more going on than they would know when the police came to take him away. He wanted them to know the story he had been carrying in his body, the story that is behind everything. “There is no greater love than this: to give one’s life for one’s friends. Love one another as I have loved you.”

Of course, those words went right over their heads, Or maybe they had another awareness about them because they could still smell the anointment that Mary had poured over him the night before. A pound of pure nard is so much that that the neighbors down the street would have known something was going on in Lazarus’ house. Without showers or bathtubs, Jesus would not have been able to get the smell off him. Every time he sweated, it would probably have stirred it all up again. Imagine what sweating blood would do from the cross!

Aidan Kavanagh, in describing the fragrance of the anointment used in baptism says, that is God “olfactorily present.[1]”

Mary breaks open, not just a jar of expensive perfume, but the whole story so that we can smell the story behind the story, written outside our awareness so often, yet our story and God’s story somehow poured out together. Our stories usually aren’t being as elegantly written as a Shakespearean play, but with they have the same level of complexity, comedy and tragedy: our struggles, wounds, trauma, addictions, sadness, grief, even what we’ve been reading on the pages of the news or in obituaries we hadn’t expected to see—all broken open and met by a love that is so extravagant it cannot be understood, only trusted and treasured. Blood and water, dying and rising.

When things are broken or dying, even nations, God is at work. There is already a story being written behind the story that is more generous, open, and powerful than we suspect.

Despite all the words I pour over you every time I stand here, I cannot tell you how extravagantly God loves you and makes a place for you in the many rooms of God’s mercy. I cannot craft an adequate to name what God is doing right now behind the scenes. All we can do is get together and break it all open this book, this word, this table, pour it out and pray that it capture us. And then pray that we, too, smell like THAT kind of love and grace when we head out the door.

Easter morning is really that. Truth be told, at Gloria Dei, it IS over the top: too much, too big, too many people; so extravagant, time consuming, even costly, that we can only really do it one Sunday a year. It is our opportunity to let everyone see, hear, and even smell both that day in Bethany, and “first day of the week at early dawn.”

One quick word before I get off the stage: The line about the poor is tough. I think it means this: we have a choice, which feel prescient right now. There is the plot line of Judas, which uses all the right language about care, justice, even theology, and then steals the wealth, the agency, and everything else from the very people it claimes to want to help. And there is the plot line of Mary of Bethany, which is to pour out love on the poor, the ones right in front of her. The poor are always with us. Until the last day, there will be opportunities to give it all away, to live with such generosity that the world is re-enchanted by grace, to be outrageous in love that no system can stand in the way of love. Even now, there are those standing at the edge of the stage, or our rallies, just waiting–waiting for this smelly body, this assembly, to write the song that will leave every single one of us in a big puddle of on the floor around the font: redeemed, raised up in all the ways we need to be raised.

I asked ChatGPT for the last sentence in my sermon in the iambic pentameter. Here we go:

Were it not weight too great for mortal hearts,
I’d cry the A-word loud—the word of light—
The Easter cry that breaks the tomb in twain—
But hush… I wait. Praise be the Lord on high.
But for this hour alone, I bid thee thus:
Hold fast. Endure. Yea—hang in there, dear soul.

[1] Aidan Kavanagh OSB., “Baptism in the Fourth Century,” Text first published in Liturgy 70, vol. 8 no. 8 (1977)