St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, March 25, 2007

Scarcity and Abundance – Rev. David Mundy

Philippians 3:4b-14 John 12:1-8

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Have you ever bought a gift for someone which took your breath away because it seemed like such an impractical or even foolhardy thing to do? The scale of your generosity exceeded the practicality of the gift by a country kilometre, but somehow it just didn’t matter at the time. You decided it was what you wanted to do even though your bank account was screaming “Go back, you’ll be sorry!”

You may have noticed that the companies that sell diamonds like to appeal to the extravagant heart of a man who is in love. The idea is that only the very best rock is good enough for the woman a man will marry. For a while the ads suggested how many months of a guy’s pay cheque should go into the purchase of engagement and wedding rings but I don’t see them anymore. Little wonder. Saying I love you isn’t really a matter of “crunching the numbers” is it? Can you picture some poor schmo saying“Honey I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you! Here’s the ring and a handy chart to let you know that I’m well within the acceptable zone for what I should have spent.” It would be all over before it even started!

Of course there are other forms of gifts which don’t have anything to do with money. Through the years I have been deeply moved by the generosity of a caregiver for an ailing partner, or of a parent for a struggling child. If you asked them if they had calculated how many hours they had spent in this thankless task they would look at you as though you had lost your mind. In fact, when I have expressed my concern that they need to think more of their health and well-being the response is often to brush it away.

Often we decide on what we can afford, not in terms of dollars and cents, or minutes and hours but on the basis of our deep desire to reach out to the other in love. Generous love is not easily defined but most of us know it when we see it. It’s why tears well up in our eyes on Remembrance Day and Good Friday.

Today is the last Sunday of Lent before we plunge into the demanding and sorrowful events of Holy Week. And this morning we listened to a gospel story which like our gospel parable last week is about generosity and lavish love.

We are invited into the home of three people who may have been Jesus’ closest friends outside of the circle of his disciples. Lazarus and Martha and Mary, a brother and two sisters have a dinner party for Jesus and at least some of the twelve. We can imagine them reclining at the table in the fashion of the day when Mary does something outrageous. She takes a large quantity of expensive perfume and pours it over Jesus’ feet and then wipes them with her hair.

The action of Jesus’ friend, Mary, is lavish and some would say foolhardy. She obviously hadn’t heard that “no scent is good sense.” Where did she get such an expensive commodity and why would she be so brash in using it to anoint him? This is also a sensual picture with a woman overstepping the conventions of her culture to actually use her hair for this anointing of Jesus. The “pound” of perfume was actually twelve ounces rather than our sixteen, but if you have ever been around spilled perfume you know that it doesn’t take much to fill the air with the fragrance.

We aren’t told how the others in the room reacted except for one of the disciples, Judas. Here he is identified as the keeper of “the common purse” for Jesus followers, a job which couldn’t have been too complicated. But here he makes a “big deal” of the waste of Mary’s seemingly impulsive act. He gets out his calculator, figuratively speaking, and points out the value of the perfume was the equivalent of ten months wages for the average worker –300 denari.

Jesus tells Judas very directly to leave Mary alone. We should hear the sternness in Jesus’ voice. She has chosen to honour him and while there will always be the needs of the poor to address – who did that more lovingly than Jesus? – there are moments for lavish love.

This is not a time to focus on scarcity, Jesus says. Instead, live the abundance.

Where are we as the people of Christ? Do we see ourselves as Mary or Judas? Obviously none of us are going around pouring perfume on other people as acts of devotion. Still we need to ask ourselves whether we are living the story of abundance or scarcity.

It’s important for us to be able to answer these questions for the time we live in. We exist in this pocket of North American affluence which is unprecedented in world history. There has never been a time when so many people in a culture had so much. It’s not just our abundant material possessions. We are unlike any other generation in the freedom of choice about how we use our time.

What happens, though, is that we can see ourselves as impoverished rather than wealthy. Someone else always has more toys, and so we hunger for more. We complain that we are “pinched” for time because we cram our lives so full of activity that it seems as though we are on a treadmill that never stops running. If we are not aware that we can get caught in these traps, we are tempted to horde our resources and to live in a way that is anxious and frantic and even greedy.

Allowing ourselves to enter into Christ’s presence and experience his freeing love is not always as straightforward as we want it to be. Walter Brueggeman, a biblical scholar points out that we are often torn by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of that story of scarcity. He encourages us to us to choose our story carefully.

The conflict between the narratives of abundance and scarcity is the defining problem confronting us [today.] The gospel story of abundance asserts that we originated in the magnificent, inexplicable love of a God who loved the world into generous being . . . The power of the future lies in the hands not of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God’s abundance.

I don’t know whether you have noticed, but there has been a rash of books on the subject of happiness in the past couple of years. It occurs to me that this is because there are a lot of us who are unhappy, and trying to figure out how to find something that is so attractive and yet so elusive, even for Christians.

My experience in ministry is that there are always people who not only see their cups half full, they are sure that they are gushing out over the brim. It’s not that they have a great deal of material wealth or that they never have difficult moments in their lives. Yet they live abundance rather than scarcity. A few days ago my wife, Ruth, commented on a member of this congregation, that this person radiates warmth and the depth of her faith.

Part of this must be willpower, the conscious choice to find the best in life, whatever comes along. From what I can see it is also relationship. It is nurturing the relationship with Christ which goes far beyond our movement toward him. He comes to us and invites us into a deep and meaningful relationship of love.

At the same time we probably all know those who seem to have been granted so much and yet grasp everything close to themselves.

Somehow Judas lived with Jesus for three years and never really “got” what Jesus was saying or saw the transformation in the encounters he had with common people, or felt the extraordinary nature of his being. He knew it was important to respond to the needs of the poor but his reaction was not one of abundant living.

Mary did. She got it, at least a taste of it, and so she does this lavish, radical thing. We really don’t have any idea how Mary’s family got to know Jesus so well, but they develop an intimacy which is truly life-changing. She has embraced generous living. Kennon Callahan is convinced that we are not miserly by nature. We learn to be reluctant and suspicious about living generously. He puts it this way.

We have a spirit of generosity because of Whose we are not because of who we are. God’s nature reflects amazing grace and generosity with us. When we live forward to our best true selves, we are living forward to the image and likeness in which God created us. When we do not live forward to our best true selves, we may behave in stingy and selfish ways.

There are probably a number of reasons that this gospel story is told on this Sunday of Lent, so close to Easter. There are obvious parallels between Mary’s anointing of Jesus and the anointing of his body after his crucifixion and death. Somehow, in this wildly generous, loving act Mary demonstrated her Easter faith before Jesus had suffered and died.

There is another story of a meal coming soon in which Jesus washes the feet of his followers, then shares himself with them and with all of us, not just for that moment but for eternity. Jesus takes bread and breaks it, and there is enough for everyone, the way there was plenty to go around, and leftovers, when Jesus shared bread and fish on a hillside. Even as the moment of his greatest trial and likely his greatest fear approaches he models generous love: “This is my body broken for you . . . this is my blood shed for you.”

During the next two weeks we will have the image of Jesus on the cross before us. It will hardly seem like Good News because of the picture of suffering and agony, the smell of acrid sweat hanging in the air heated by the midday sun. At the same time there is another odour, the world-pervading fragrance of resurrection hope. Surely when Mary poured out the perfume that fragrance didn’t just fill the house. It would have wafted into the neighbourhood and all those around would have wondered what was happening at the party where Jesus was present.

Which story will be your story in the days ahead? Are you ready to open the purse strings of your heart? I encourage you to find your way more fully into the relationship with Christ which frees us and makes us whole. The gospel message carries us forward to Easter abundance and resurrection hope.