5th Sunday in Lent

The Rev. Rob Fisher

St. Dunstan’s, Carmel Valley

Texts: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John: 12:1-8

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

We have now been living in Carmel Valley for two weeks and six days, not that anyone is counting.

I am enjoying finding my way into the rhythms of life here.  It’s a special place.

I have noticed that this is a good place for tuning in country music on the radio, just as well as NPR.  But when it comes to getting a reliable cell phone signal—as they say in New York—not so much!

There are less street lights, but a lot more stars.

I have also noticed that unlike a lot of other places, the four-wheel-drive cars here actually have mud and dirt on them.

Being new to this community—and here I mean specifically St. Dunstan’s—it has been an experience in grace.

Just one example is the experience we had of moving our stuff up here.  It was a two-day job.  The first day we loaded, with four volunteers who drove down early in the morning to Santa Barbara to load the truck with us.  That night we drove up—they with the truck and we in our car—so that the next day we could all unload the boxes into the rectory with even more volunteers from the church.

When we drove up, we left later than the truck, so we arrived very late.  It was just Sarah and I.

We were so excited when we arrived, putting our key into the door of our new home and opening it for the very first time in the dark, chilly night.  We had our overnight bags with us, and an inflatable for sleeping.  We even brought a Duraflame log and matches, so that we could sleep in the empty living room before a fire in the fireplace.  (Incidentally, we totally forgot to bring blankets.)

And then, when we walked into the house, we discovered a welcome card on the counter, a freshly baked pie next to it, and a fridge full of food, including some of it homemade.  There was even a picnic basket with plates and cutlery and all the basics needed to get by for a little while, not to mention a bag of ground coffee beans, and two bottles of wine.

We were recipients that night of quiet acts of grace and loving hospitality.

***

Our regular worldly lives take place in an economy is an economy built upon give and take.  You get what you pay for—and you pay for what you get.

God’s economy functions differently from ours.

God’s economy can confound us at times, but it can also astound us.  It is strange to us, as it was strange to the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day.

The story of Jesus in this morning’s gospel is a story of the economy grace.

As Jesus is on his way toward Jerusalem, and his time on earth is growing very short, Mary, Martha and Lazarus have him over to dinner in their home.  And then Mary takes a whole pound of costly perfume and uses it to anoint his feet.  She then wipes his feet with her hair.

It is a radical act of hospitality, and love.

It is an act of abandon.

It abandons customs, or even common sense to use up this perfume in such a way.  This perfume is worth an incredible amount of money, and she pours it all out on this poor man’s feet.

It is a crazy thing to do.

What act of love is not crazy?  What act of love is not filled with radical abandon?

What act of love is not marked by grace

It is an act of love to give when nothing is owed.

Acts of love oppose the ways of this world because they are built upon the economics of God.

***

In Carmel Valley, you don’t have to go far for evidence of the power of grace breaking into our world.  For example, go to Safeway early in the morning—not the front but the back loading docks—and you will see Nancy Costello loading groceries that can’t be sold, which she personally delivers to local farm worker families in need each week with tireless effort.  She’s only 92 years old, by the way.

Look at the Herald this weekend and you will read, on the front page of the religion section, all about the grace-filled actions taken over 27 years by St. Dunstan’s to support St. Andre’s school in Hinche, Haiti!  Over one million dollars have been donated, bit by bit over the years, to educate children and lift people’s lives.

And this is not all we do by a long shot.  These are only two examples.

It is something for us to be proud of as a church, but that is not what motivates these actions.

I can testify to the love that I have heard and seen expressed in the men and women who have chosen to be like Mary and offer love-filled acts of radical abandon for others.  I am proud of this small but growing church, and quite frankly I am inspired and humbled.

Thanks to these kinds of actions, God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

***

Miracles happen not only in the Bible.  They happen today.

I have shared this story with a small group of you once before, but I will share it again today.  It is told by a great Christian writer and pastor named Frederick Buechner.  He tells of speaking once with his Unitarian grandmother, who said to him:

“I never went in much for miracles.  Tell me, dear boy, what is a miracle?”

Miracles are, according to Buechner, when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, when “one plus one equals a thousand.”[1]

When we taste the Kingdom of God, when it breaks into our mundane, everyday world, our sense of value gets broken open.  In the presence of miracles, we realize that there is a greater system of value than the one we have known.

These are his words of Buechner writes, “Maybe it is a miracle that happens when you shake hands with your left hand instead of your right hand.”

“Right hand, left hand, what difference should it make except of course that it makes all the difference because right hands have long since forgotten how to clasp in any but a chit-chat way, and right hands touching do not often touch life into each other

“But the left hand has the advantage of inexperience. . . . To clasp left-handed is for a moment at least to clasp of all things another human hand, and one plus one is more than two.

God’s economy is strange.  It does not add up, and so we resort to calling it a miracle.

It is miraculous because it is built upon the foundation of grace, and it opens our eyes to get a peak at the value that God places on all things.

In the economy of God—just as in the economy of hospitality, outreach, or love—to give is to receive.

To lose one’s life is to gain one’s life.

As Paul says in today’s epistle, “I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.”

We will never know if Mary knew what she was really doing with that ointment, that she was anointing “the Christ”—the anointed one.

She was preparing his body just days before he would offer it to the world.

Jesus’ act on the cross brings heaven’s economy to earth.

At the cross, the earth at its very worst brings the best that heaven has to offer.

—Amen.

[1] From Buechner’s The Alphabet of Grace, (New York: HarperCollins, 1970), 59.

[2] Ibid., 60-61.