The Rev. Rob Merola

Believe it or not, today is the last Sunday of Lent.  It’s also the last sermon in our series suggesting that  the secret of success  is the willingness to do what we don’t feel like doing, what we don’t like doing, what we don’t want to do.  We’ve suggested that perhaps the biggest thing people don’t want to do is face up to their problems, and we have seen how avoiding our problems is one of the greatest causes of misery in the world at large and in our own personal worlds. 

Finally, we have seen how we must be willing to confront our problems and suffer the pain of solving them if we are ever going to be the mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically healthy human beings that God created us to be, and that we long to be ourselves.    This sermon series has been a call to find the courage, both through the grace of God and the support of our church community, to work through our hurts and learn from them that we might offer greater happiness, health and wholeness to the world, alleviating misery instead of perpetuating and increasing it.   

It’s in that context that today we are going to talk about love—because love can be the most difficult thing of them all.  That’s because love requires us to reach out to another.  The problem is that there are powerful forces that push back, that keep us from putting ourselves out for another.  These are forces like fear, the inertia which comes from doing the same thing over and over again even though the thing we are doing may not be loving, weariness, and even plain ol’ laziness. 

Overcoming these forces means that love—real love—isn’t just a warm romantic feeling.  It’s work.  Hard work.  Scary work.  In fact, love is so difficult, so frightening, that most people won’t do it.  They’ll settle for superficiality, simply getting along, and swimming in the shallow of the relational pool instead.  They’ll talk about the weather, or sports, or give a rundown of the events of the day rather than talk deeply about what is going on in their hearts and minds and souls.

In this morning’s Gospel, we meet a woman who gives us a profound picture of what love looks like.  Frankly, I find it not a little bit disturbing. I don’t think I’m alone.  Did you know this is the first time you’ve heard this reading on Sunday in an Episcopal Church?  In fact, if as is fairly common in the Episcopal Church, the only Bible stories you hear are the ones that are read on Sunday morning, this may be the first time you’ve heard this story in your life.

That’s because the Episcopal Church recently switched to Revised Common Lectionary.  A lectionary is a collection of biblical passages assigning certain readings to certain Sundays.  This one is shared with several other denominations, and it is a move towards uniting Christ’s church into the one body it is meant to be.  It also has other advantages such as providing for more Scripture to be read, and to be read in order to give a better sense of context.

What makes this passage so disturbing?  We, first of all it’s incredibly sensual.  If you didn’t notice that, you probably weren’t paying attention.  A young single woman let’s down her long, beautiful hair.  She takes expensive, perfumed body oil.   Then she pours this oil on his feet and begins to use her hair to massage the oil in.    Wow!  What an incredibly intimate moment—to the point where I’m betting it makes a good many of us uncomfortable just hearing about it.

I think there is always meant to be a sensual component to love.  I’m not talking about love always being sexual, mind you—that is not what I’m saying at all.  But I am saying that a healthy part of love includes sharing pleasure together.

Think about that for a moment.  Think about how utilitarian our relationships come to be.  In a marriage, for instance, we do what we need to do to run a household and raise our kids.  Our relationship becomes functional, but somewhere along the line we stop making the time to do what we delight in doing together—the things that make us laugh “loud and long and clear,” that make us smile ear to ear, that cause our hearts to beat faster because of the sheer pleasure of what we are doing.

Or take being a parent.   I think when our kids are little we really do have fun with them, because having fun is what little kids do best.  That is one of their great gifts to us.  But as they get older, now our time with them is spent helping them with homework.  That isn’t quite so much fun for them or for us.  In fact, it is often downright frustrating.  Or it’s taking them all the places we think they need to go.   We come to feel like their chauffer, which has a way of getting old when you are making your fifth trip in the same day.  And then, of course, they can drive themselves and we just don’t see our kids much anymore.

But what about the delight we enjoyed together when our kids were little, when they squealed with laughter and we laughed right along with them, laughing so hard sometimes that it brought tears to our eyes?  What happened to that kind of time with our kids?

Or take friendships.  We live in a day where there is a move to push relationships more and more into the digital world.  We know each other through databases and profiles and one or two sentence snippets, and think that is being “friends.”    But friendship is really meant to be about taking whole evenings or days or even weekends to blow everything else off just for the sheer joy of being with a friend.

It’s been five months now since I’ve returned from Erie.  And you know what I miss most?  It’s not catching fish.  It’s not even being outside.  I think what I miss most is spending whole days with my friend Jim, doing what we both enjoy doing most in life. 

But there is something in us that resists this, that pushes against it.  Maybe we don’t think we deserve to be happy.  Maybe we’re afraid we’ll be disappointed or let down.  Maybe we’re afraid that the person we care about won’t love what we love, and that is almost too painful to bear.  Maybe it’s just that we are too lazy to make the effort to get out of our routines and have some fun.  Or maybe it’s that we work too hard and too long, and sheer joy, delight, pleasure no longer fit into the picture.  We simply don’t have time for it.

Mary is perceptive.  She’s been listening, paying attention.  She knows Jesus is heading for trouble, and won’t be with her much longer.   She knows how precious he is, and how precious the moment before them is.  And so she decides to enjoy it with Jesus for all it is worth.    Maybe it is time we do the same, friends.

Second, this story is subversive.  It absolutely shatters the status quo.  

Martha, Mary’s sister, is the picture of the traditional woman.  She cooks. She cleans.  She serves.  You remember the first time we met Mary?  She was sitting at the feet of Jesus learning while he taught.  Women were not permitted to learn.  Only men did that.

Mary lets her hair down in a room full of men, which an honorable woman would NEVER do.  She doesn’t help clear the table or wash the dishes like Martha was doing.  Instead, she takes the initiative in expressing friendship with a man.   Mary does not know her place—or, more to the point, she chooses to occupy a place different from the one her society, her religion, and even her family told her was the place she should be.    She is entering new and unfamiliar territory for a woman in that time and that culture and of that religious background.  It is a truly radical act, and again, if we miss that, we aren’t paying very close attention.

And again, I think love—real love—always requires us to enter into unfamiliar territory.  It always requires us to shatter the status quo.  Yes, there is definitely a vital and essential place for ritual and routine that provides a needed sense of safety and security.

But are any of us loving anyone as well as we’d like to love them?  If we are not, then love requires us to change, to do things differently than they’ve been done.  There are habits that will need to be broken.  There is time that will have to be spent differently.  There are unaccustomed activities that will have to be embraced.  In other words, we have to change.

And that only makes sense, doesn’t it?  You can’t love a teenager like a 10-year-old and you can’t love a 10-year-old like a toddler.   At age 51 after 23 years of marriage, I'd better not be loving my wife like I did when I was 30.  We are both different people at different places in our lives.   To love absolutely requires us to change.  It absolutely requires us to grow.

Precisely because growth takes us into unfamiliar territory, to places we’ve never been before, to be people we’ve never been before, it always entails courage and risk.    What if we fail?  What if we get hurt?  What if we are let down and disappointed or unappreciated?

But if we refuse risk, we refuse life itself.  We refuse all that makes life really alive, and all that makes life worthwhile.   We refuse marriage, children, friendship, and faith.

Mary takes a huge risk in loving Jesus as she does, to the point where doing what she does almost seems like a crazy thing to do.    Judas attacks her outright.  The other men could well have followed suit.  Jesus could have rebuffed her, been worried about his own image and what people would think.    And if we would love well, we too must risk doing sometimes seemingly crazy things, because real love is always at least a little bit crazy, and so it is sometimes only  seemingly crazy acts that fully capture it. 

Perhaps I can sum all this up with a final story.  A few years ago I did a wedding in Ocean City on Friday.  I brought my family with me, and as the wedding wasn’t until the evening, we all went to the beach Saturday afternoon.

At the beach, my kids really wanted me to come in with them and ride waves, but the water was VERY cold.  Standing in the surf just ankle deep put a chill in my feet that was quite daunting.  I wanted to go in, and knew we’d have fun if I did.  But there was also a new feeling present: Why should I endure such discomfort?  Was it really worth the trouble?

Though I kept trying to summon the will to do so, I just couldn't bring myself to go in.    There was a "settledness" that sat there enjoying the status quo, unwilling to be disturbed.  Somehow it had become more desirable to not venture forth, to do—nothing.

It was a settledness that fought against love; it fought against my love of life, of enjoying being out in the ocean, even if it was cold.  It fought against my love of my family, against frolicking with them in the water.

And so, crazy though it seemed to be, I went swimming.  I jumped right in, all at once, head under water in a big wave.  It was cold.  My breath was reduced to panting gasps.  My joints hurt.  But boy, was it great.  We caught some big waves, and rode them to the shore before heading right back out to do it all over again. 

That’s what Mary does in today’s Gospel.  She heads out into a wild and wooly ocean full of big waves.  She does so for love.  When she gets there she finds it is a place full of delight.   She finds it is worth the risk of leaving behind the masses settled into the warm comfort of their beach blankets.

And now she invites us to join her.

Will you?  Will I?

Amen.