April 6, 2025
John 12.1-8
+ If you have spent anytime with me, you will hear me say a fairly
regular round of platitudes or favorite quotes.
Yes, we know I love quoting about chickens and roosting, which are
words I am, at this moment, eating as we sit here watching our financial world
crumble around us.
Sorry. You hired a priest, not a prophet.
But one of the ones I use quote often also is this one:
“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 next 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 are the things that are important to us as loud and proud
liturgical Christians—Christians for whom liturgy and liturgical expressions of
our faith and worship of God are important.
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 on 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.
Which bring sus back to our good quote at the beginning of this
sermon.
What are we?
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 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.
So much so that God’s very Word came to us and became incarnate in
the person of Jesus.
The Incarnation + (“In the flesh” is what Incarnation means)
That is also what Holy Communion is all about.
I think often about the unknown and abandoned ashes we have buried
in our memorial garden.
One of our ministries here is providing a final resting place for
the ashes of people we will never know.
At least not on this side of the veil.
These ashes were often discarded.
No one came to claim them.
Some of them sat unclaimed for 60 or so years.
Whoever survived that person, their lives went on.
And it’s easy to do that.
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.
Even our matter matters to God.
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 these material things
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, let us enjoy it.
Let us exult in it.
Let us 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.
