John 12.1-8
+ If you know me for any period of
time, you know this fact about me. At some point I am going to ask you one
particular question: What are your funeral arrangements?
I think sometimes that I should’ve
been a funeral director. I mean, let’s face it: I do a lot of funerals. A lot. And
I often have to do funerals for people who have never made any plans for their
funerals.
So, when I ask, don’t think it’s
morbid or weird (though it is kind of morbid and weird). I ask because it’s an
important question to ask. And it’s important to think about. Because, let me
tell you, if you don’t make them, those left behind will. And sometimes, they are
not in the best frame of mind to plan a service.
I always encourage people—especially
parishioners: Make those plans in advance. And not just plans for the funeral service. But plans for the disposition of your remains.
And just so you think I’m not some
hypocrite up here preaching (I hope you never think I’m a hypocrite up here
preaching), yes, I have my own arrangements made. They’re in my in my will, and I express my
wishes quite often to people. I am of the frame of mind that believes that the body,
whether buried or cremated, should be treated with a certain level of respect
and care and should be properly buried or disposed of in some way. These
bodies, these vessels we have been given, are important and are wonderful gifts
to us from God, and we should treat them with some level of respect.
In today’s Gospel, we find Mary
doing something that sort of encompasses this view of the sacredness of the
body. We find her coming
before Jesus and doing a very unusual thing: she anoints his feet. And Jesus,
even more strangely, reprimands Judas by saying that Mary is doing nothing more
than anointing his body for burial. She is,
in a sense, anointing him for burial.
As we near Holy Week—that final week
of Jesus’ life before the cross—our thoughts are now turning more and more to
these “last things.” Yes,
it’s all starting to sound a little morbid. And no doubt, poor Judas was also thinking
Jesus was getting weirdly morbid himself.
But, Jesus is reminding us, yet
again, that even the simplest acts of devotion have deeper meaning and are
meant to put us in mind of what is about to ultimately happen. Mary sees in
Jesus something even his disciples don’t.
She sees—and maybe doesn’t fully comprehend, though she certainly intuitively
guesses—that Jesus is different, that God is working through Jesus in some very
wonderful and unique way. And
she sees that God is working through the very flesh and blood of Jesus.
For us, as Christians we do know
that issues of the flesh are important. And
not in some self-deprecating way, either. You will not hear me preaching much
about the “sins of the flesh.” (Don’t think I’m encouraging them either,
though) For us, flesh is important in a good way in our understanding of our
relationship with God.
What we celebrate here every Sunday and
Wednesday at the Eucharist is reminder to us how important issues like physical
matter are. We worship not only in
spirit and in spiritual things. We
worship in physical things as well.
Bread and wine.
Candles and bells.
And, at Wednesday mass, incense.
These things remind us that we have
senses, given to us by God. And these senses can be used in our full worship of
that God. And that God that we worship
is concerned with our matter as well. God accepts our worship with all our
senses. God actually gets down in the muck of the matter of our lives.
One of my all-time favorite quotes
is from one of the early Church Father, John of Damascus. John wrote a truly remarkable thing
while defending the veneration of icons—or holy images of Christ and the
saints. There was a time in the church
when people felt there should be no images
like this because it violated the commandment to make no graven images. John wrote in defense of icons:
“I do not worship matter, I worship
the God of matter, who became matter for my sake and deigned to inhabit matter,
who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that
matter which works for my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God."
I love that quote!
“I will not cease from honoring that
matter which works for my salvation.”
Why so many Christians view matter
or the flesh as such a horrible, sinful thing baffles me. And as we all know, there are
Christians who believe that. There are
Christians who believe that these bodies of ours are sinful and should be
treated as wild, uncontrollable things that must be mastered and disciplined
and ultimately defeated. Why we as Christians get so caught up with this awful
ridiculous view that the flesh is this terrible, sin-filled thing we carry
around is frustrating for me. In fact,
the belief that the flesh is bad and the spirit all-good is a very early church
heresy, which was condemned by the early Christian Church.
We have all known Christians who do
think that flesh is a horrible, sinful thing—who think all we should do is
concentrate only with the spiritual.
For those of us in the know—even for those of who have suffered from physical
illness and suffering ourselves in this flesh—we know that the flesh and the
spirit truly are connected.
We cannot separate the two while we are still alive and walking on the earth.
Still, I do always love the quote
from one of my personal heroes, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, from his incredible book The
Phenomenon of Man:
“We are not human beings having a
spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
I think we could just as easily say
that we are spiritual beings having a material
experience. I, of course,
don’t see that as a downplaying our flesh.
Rather, I see it as truly the spirit making the material holy. Our flesh is sacred because God
makes it sacred.
And if we have trouble remembering
that our flesh is sacred, that God cares about us not just spiritually but
physically, we have no further place to look than what we do here at this
altar, in the Eucharist. Here,
God truly does feed our flesh, as well as our spirits. And, we can even go so far as
to say that by feeding our flesh, God becomes one with us physically as well as
spiritually. That is what
Holy Communion is all about.
This is part of the reason why I
think that even following our death we should honor what remains of this flesh
because it is sacred. We
shouldn’t just toss it away or in any other way disrespect it. We should be respectful to our
ashes and those of our loved ones, for truly God has worked through the flesh
of all the people we have known in our lives and, by doing so, has made them
each uniquely holy and special.
Next week, on Palm Sunday, we will
begin our liturgy with joy and end it on a solemn note as we head into Holy
Week. Next Sunday, we will
also get palms. Now, every year you hear me say: save those palms. First of
all, they are blessed palms. We will bless them at the beginning of the Mass. I say fold them, display them, let them dry
out. Because next winter, right before Ash Wednesday, I will ask you to bring
them back to church. Those green and beautiful palms that we wave next Sunday,
will be burned and made into the ashes we use on Ash Wednesday, when we are
reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
We are kind of like those palms. One
day, we too will be ashes. But our ashes will still be important.
There is a strange and wonderful
circle happening in all of this. We see it all comes around. And that God does
really work through all of this in our lives as Christians. Yes, even in the
ashes, and matter of our lives.
Holy Week is a time for us to be
thinking about these last things—yes, our spiritual last things, but also our
physical last things as well.
As we make our way through Holy Week, we will see Jesus as he endures
physically and spiritually, from a spirit so wracked with pain that he sweats
blood, to the terror and torment of being tortured, whipped and nailed to a
cross. As we journey
through these last days of Lent, let us do so pondering how God has worked
through our flesh and the flesh of our loved ones.
Yes, we truly are spiritual beings
enjoying a physical experience.
We are spiritual beings enjoying an incredible and wonderful pilgrimage through
matter. So, enjoy it. Exult in it. Truly
partake in this material experience. Let
us rejoice in this material experience God has allowed us. Let us be grateful
for all the joys we have received through this matter in which we dwell and
experience each other. And
let this joy be the anointment for our flesh as we ponder our own end and the
wonderful new beginning that starts with that end.
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