5 Lent

 

April 3, 2022

 

John 12.1-8

 

+ Occasionally when I get up into this pulpit I like to quote other thinkers and believers and saints.

 

And one of that I quote or reference quite often is one my heroes:

 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

 

Chardin, as you many remember, was a truly remarkable person.

 

He was a French Jesuit priest, but he was also a scientist. More specifically he was a paleontologist.

 

He was one of the team that discovered the “Peking Man’ 100 years aho.

 

And because he was, and because he knew that’s such things as evolution were a reality, he often was at odds with the Roman Catholic Church.

 

Something many of us here have struggled with a few times in our lives as well.

 

There’s a lot of former Roman Catholics at St. Stephen’s.

 

And Fr. Teilhard would no doubt feel very at home here with us.

 

Well, Teilhard once made a fascinating comment that has meant so much to me in my life.

 

The actual quote comes 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.”

 

And I have found that to be true in my own life as well.

 

We are spirits essentially experiencing this very human, very physical, very matter-filled pilgrimage toward God.

 

And we as spirits must deal with all the joys and sorrows, all the beauties and pains of having these physical bodies.

 

I think most Christians think that being a Christian means we only deal with the spiritual aspects of life.

 

But that’s not so.

 

The physical bodies we are given are also very important of our spiritual journey.

 

Even 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 jealous Judas by saying that Mary is doing nothing more than anointing his body 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.

 

The altar.

 

The wooden cross.

 

Bread and wine.

 

Candles and bells.

 

Paraments and vestments and icons and stained glass.

 

And, on Wednesdays, 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.

 

And for us, it also kind of defiant.

 

So many Christians view physical things or the flesh as such a horrible, sinful things.

 

That baffles me.  

 

And as we all know, there are Christians who truly believe that.

 

The flesh is bad.

 

The spirit is good.

 

 

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 that we are imprisoned within 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.  

 

20 years ago at this time I was dealing with cancer in my life.

 

It was awful.

 

We cannot separate the two while we are still alive and walking on the earth.

 

Which bring sus back to our good Jesuit Paleontologist friend, Teilhard

 

What are we?

 

We are “spiritual beings having a human experience.”

 

I think we could just as easily say (and Teilhard would wholly agree) that we are spiritual beings having a material experience.  

 

I, of course, don’t see that as a downplaying of 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.  

 

The Incarnation + (“In the flesh” is what Incarnation means)

 

That is what Holy Communion is all about.

 

A week from Tuesday, of course, we will be celebrating the Requiem Mass for and burying the ashes of someone we will never know.

 

At least not on this side of the veil.

 

These ashes were discarded.

 

No one came to claim them.

 

There they sat for 60 or so years.

 

Whoever survived that person, their lives went on.

 

Now it’s easy to do.

 

It’s easy to just let ashes be ashes.

 

It’s easy to just say, “they’re just ashes.”

 

But for any of us who have lost people we truly love, that is not the case.

 

They’re not “just ashes.”

 

Those ashes are what remains of someone who lived and loved and longed for something more than this world often gives.

 

Those ashes were remains of someone who lived like we did and died like we will die.

 

Those ashes are us, to some extent.

 

Because we are interconnected.

 

We all matter to God.

 

(Geesh, I don’t want to give away my homily for that Requiem Mass).

 

But it is for this reason that we do what we do here at St. Stephen’s.

 

It is for this reason that we inter what others consider “just ashes.”

 

For us, these are not “just ashes.”

 

These are our ashes.

 

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.

 

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 pain 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.