Redolent

Sermon for Year C, The Fifth Sunday of Lent

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

March 17, 2013

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

John 12:1-8

“Redolent”

Let me ask you some questions to get your nose going, okay?

First: what does Christmas smell like?

To me, the smell of Christmas

  Is the smell of sweet rolls … pine … Scotch tape … plums … pie … cinnamon.

What about the Spring? What does springtime smell like?

To me, in my collection of memories,

  Spring smells like grass … chocolate … cleaning products, like window spray.

What are the smells of Summer?

  To me, it’s hot dogs … peanuts … lawnmower gasoline … watering hoses.

What does the Home where you grew up smell like in your mind?

  To me, that home smells like spaghetti sauce in a crockpot … fresh laundry …

    Overly chlorinated water … gun oil … and oddly enough, new carpet.

Every smell is pegged to a memory, or more likely a set of memories.

The more memories there are to reinforce it, the more strongly we can recall it.

Although one harsh memory can forever burn itself into us.

And on that count, since we are approaching the end of Lent,

  And a season of contemplating our mortality,

  I have to ask you this question too:
    What is the smell of death?

As someone who has spent some time in hospitals with dying people,

  I can tell you that a distinct smell arises from a person who is slowly, actively dying.

It’s a kind of sour burning you can taste on the back of your mouth,

  An intrusive and unwelcome smell.

In other deaths that take less time, there are still many smells to contend with:

  The antiseptic smell of hospitals, bad coffee, the cologne of undertakers at 3 a.m.,

    The well-oiled ambulance spilling exhaust, the rubbery tubes used by EMTs … gauze.

When the priest comes, he brings his own smells:

  Holy oil from a stock applied to the head of your deceased loved one,

    Sometimes the hands and the feet also.

Death has its smells.

And I don’t think I have to say this, but I will:

  A dead body has its own particular smells.

I do not say these things in order to turn you off.

I say them because this reading from John

  Is all about what happens in the nose when someone is dead.

Jesus’ friend Lazarus died.

Died for several days as you may recall.

Was in the tomb for four days by the time Jesus showed up:

  Dead long enough that Lazarus’ own sister Martha –

    Martha, you remember, like Martha Stewart, the Domestic Goddess

      Who had no time to sit and listen to Jesus like her sister Mary did –

    Martha warned Jesus that if he raised Lazarus the smell would be horrific.

(So I guess you could say Jesus raised a stink.)

But at any rate, raise him, he did –

  Prefiguring his own resurrection, yes.

And leading us to ponder the power and providence of God,

  That even this could happen.

Now the scene shifts to inside their house,

  And I think it only fair to imagine that the smell of death still hangs heavy on the air.

Lazarus is probably still gobsmacked from having died and been raised up,

  Pondering his good fortune in having Jesus for a friend:

  The one guy in all of history who could pull off bringing him back to life.

At dinner, in the house, the stench of a recently dead man.

Now comes the smell of anointing, and perfume, filling up the house.

In this almost inexplicable act of devotion and sorrow,

  Mary wipes Jesus’ feet with her own hair,

  Spreading the smell of one desiring to anoint Jesus’ body before its funeral.

What Mary cannot know at this moment

  Is that her grief, and the smell that it conveys in this perfume,

  Is actually the gateway to the single most important moment of history,

    Where all time converges and hangs,

    And the bedraggled and crucified Body of the Christ

      Emerges from its temporary earthly tomb, resurrected.

The grief-stricken perfume of anointing which she means to mark Jesus’ death

  Is nothing less than the perfume of life

    That cuts across the smell of death in the house

    Until, finally, there is no more death.

It’s an odd moment, a weird-family-dynamic moment,

  A moment complicated by personal histories and unseen arguments

  That only people who are siblings can really understand between themselves,

    And even then ...

Yet it’s also a small and beautiful moment,

  Heavy with scent and symbol,

  Effusive and intrusive aromas, competing fragrances.

Celebrating the raising of Lazarus.

Anticipating the raising of Jesus.

No tomb can hold them.

Do you know, my dear sisters and brothers,

  What happens in just one week?

It is Palm Sunday. Already, I know.

Palm Sunday, when we welcome Jesus into Jerusalem with great pomp

  And then almost before we know it,

    We are completely caught up with the crowd

      Yelling for Barabbas to be released

    And for Jesus’ blood to be spilled:

      Longing for a scapegoat upon which to heap all our sins.

There is a strong sense, in that service,

  That we are somehow to blame –

    We who were not alive then.

Perhaps we like to think we might’ve done better,

  Warned him off or at least been more loyal than Jesus’ scattered disciples and deniers.

The arc of history and everything we know about mob psychology suggest

  That we need to remain humble.

Soon enough all the smells of Holy Week will be upon us:

  The palms, the oil, the candles, the wine, the bread, the water, the incense and the lilies.

Soon.

But not quite yet.

For now we are in the house with Lazarus,

  Seated between a man who died and a man who will die,

  With the bouquet of the perfume of life heavy in our noses.

We are about to walk a perilous journey.

As we walk it, then,

  Let us remember, as Paul reminds us in Romans, that nothing in all of creation –

    Hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword …

    Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers …

      Things present, things to come, powers or height or depth …

    Not even the ugly specter of our own grisly desire for a scapegoat …

  That there is nothing that will be able to separate us

    From the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Unbullied

Sermon for Year C, The Feast of the Epiphany

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

January 6, 2013

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

Matthew 2:1-12

“Unbullied”

So here’s how it is.

Herod tells the wise guys to go and look for this child Jesus

  Who is threatening his power and his standing,

  Only he doesn’t say Jesus is a threat;

    He just says he wants to worship the child, like they want to.

But the wise guys aren’t called wise for nothing;

  They know baloney when they hear it.

The wise guys follow the star, not Herod;

  They find Jesus, worship him, give him their gifts,

  (In other words, they acknowledge the one who is the real king),

    And then they depart.

They return home “by another road.”

They go back a different way,

  So as not to meet up with Herod’s men.

Again, they aren’t called wise for nothing.

They see the situation for what it is; they don’t want to be arrested, tried, executed.

You might call this strategy thoughtful avoidance.

Really, in a funny way, it’s one way to stand up against bullies.

The Bible actually contains a number of strategies for dealing with bullies.

First to come to mind is David, standing up against Goliath.

David takes five smooth rocks out of a ravine,

  Puts one in a sling,

  And fells the giant in one quick stroke.

Call it the Direct Approach.

He doesn’t have much, but what he does have, he uses effectively.

Never blame your equipment.

And what else? Well, there’s Pharoah the bully.

Israel crossing the deep water when fleeing from the Egyptians.

God tells Moses to stretch out his hand,

    That the waters will part,

  And everyone on his side will cross over in safety on dry ground.

Lo and behold, the Israelites do stay dry

  And the Egyptians are drowned in the sea.

This is the Do Very Little and Allow God to Work strategy.

There’s quite a lot of this in Scripture.

It’s a message you’ve heard me put words to before from this pulpit:

  The humble, those in the place of danger, …

    The isolated, the marginal, the small and insignificant and weak ones …

  These are the ones who often have the direct experience of divine favor,

    And always in the moment when it’s most desperately needed.

This is one of the great themes of all the themes in the Bible:

    That it’s not just enough to say you love someone, to say God loves you –

        Talk is cheap:

    It needs to be shown, instead, in a concrete way at precisely the right time.

Make no mistake.

Most of us live in a world where power dynamics are constantly in flux,

  And sometimes we’re on the powerful side,

    And sometimes we’re on the not-so-powerful side.

Sometimes out of a lack of power in one area of our lives,

  We create a small, maybe unhealthy place in the rest of our lives

  Where we can be power-full.

Sometimes, when that power is hoarded up and used to exploit people,

  You can have a bully.

But now Jesus is what you call a game-changer.

And right here in this very Gospel of Matthew,

  He speaks with an almost alarming level of knowledge about bullying.

I have gathered some of his wisdom from here in Matthew:

  Listen to his words, and see if you can get a feel for the overall ideas.

… You have heard that it was said,

   “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.”

    But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

… Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you

    And utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

    Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.

… In everything do to others as you would have them do to you;

    For this is the law and the prophets.

… Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.

    For with the judgement you make you will be judged,

      And the measure you give will be the measure you get.

Jesus’ attack on bullying in Matthew is two-pronged.

You just heard the first one:

  It’s more passive, gentle, nonjudgmental,

    And it contains some of the hardest advice there is to follow in all the Bible.

Here’s the other prong of Jesus’ attack against bullies in Matthew:

  He stands up and he speaks out and with great love and compassion;

  He speaks directly and clearly to those who do the bullying;

    He tells them, in so many words, to stop it – to repent.

And he calls into question any system that allows bullying to become commonplace.

As uncomfortable as it may make us to say this,

  He does all this using forms of political speech and political demonstration.

He is not unaffiliated.

He cleanses the Temple, and he goes to great lengths

  To excoriate and lampoon all the religious and political bullies he sees.

He says,

… It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer,”

     But you are making it a den of robbers.

… Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

     For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven.

     For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.

… Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

     For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate,

     But inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

Jesus speaks the truth, see, and it costs him everything.

For now he is small and timid and speechless, adored by men of wisdom.

All that changes pretty quickly on our calendar:

  Next Sunday in our lessons, he is a man who changes water into wine,

  And the week after that, he announces good news to those who’ve been bullied,

  And the week after that, the people will try to bully him off a cliff,

    And the week after that, he will be transfigured before Peter, James and John.

And then it will be Ash Wednesday.

So it’s conveniently easy to miss this one invitation from the wise guys

  To consider how they stand up to corrupt power in their own small way,

  By worshipping the one true God and by shucking the dust of Herod –

    In effect telling Herod he’s not the big man he thinks he is.

There’s one more prong, though, to consider,

  When it comes to how Jesus dealt with bullies.

An idea so revolutionary that if we took it seriously it would absolutely change the world,

  And yes, I am naïve enough to think that,

    For to do otherwise would just be a cop-out.

That idea is simple and straightforward.

  He welcomed everyone who came into his orbit.

He sat and ate and talked most especially with society’s outsiders –

  With prostitutes and tax-collectors, lepers and Gentiles

    And at least by the day’s standard, every other sort of unclean situation

      You can possibly imagine.

He welcomed them all,

  Took them into himself,

  And offered them the absolute best of his own substance,

    His healing power, his wisdom.

So it is no light thing, no triviality,

  For us as a church to decide to live by this same standard.

Downstairs on the bulletin board,

  And starting very soon in many places,

  You’ll see a draft statement of Vision, Mission, Values, and Goals for St. Thomas.

That little document doesn’t use a lot of words,

  But it tries to put what we believe and who we are and what we do

  All into a very plain format.

It was something I wrote a few months ago after thinking on it for a few years,

  And took around to every Senior Warden I’d worked with since I got here,

  And took to the Vestry for their counsel.

Some added a thought here or there,

  And all affirmed it – I hope not out of some duty to please me,

  But I hope and pray because it seemed to both represent St. Thomas

    And, at the same time, to show something which,

    If we were only a little more aware of it, we might aspire to.

It affirms the following Vision:

  “We gather together as One in Christ.”

Have you seen that phrase before? Does that sound vaguely familiar?

“We gather together as One in Christ.”

It’s on the banner at the back of the sanctuary!

And it’s my profound hope that we might use it as a rallying cry and a vision

  And a whole way of seeing ourselves –

  A statement that will find its way onto everything that goes out of this church

    Not because it sounds good from a marketing perspective,

    But because it’s true. Patently true. “We gather together as One in Christ.”

Our oneness as the gathered people of Christ exceeds everything else.

Our oneness means that each new person who walks in

  Is warmly greeted as one more part of the One:

  That this is a circle that always has room to expand.

This is all confirmed in the statement of Mission, which opens up by saying

  That “Inclusion – welcoming all people” – is a key ingredient of who we are.

Now, this is, as I say, both an affirmation of what we do well

  And a challenge to do it better.

But I can’t think of a better way to deal with bullying

  Than to show the world that there’s at least one place and one people

  Where it doesn’t matter who you are:

    That you are, and that you can be, loved beyond reason.

By God, by other people, maybe even by your self.

And listen – when it’s understood that this is the case at St. Thomas,

  Then the people in Siouxland who are spiritually starving will get the word,

  And things will progress at a rate that may boggle our minds and our hearts.

And all that, if we can just live in a little more fully to what we already are.

God will truly be praised.

Now, to him who is the Morning Star and the incarnation of divine light,

  To this one be all honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.