St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
April 6, 2025
Year C: The Fifth Sunday in Lent
Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
Anointing Jesus
Let us pray.
Loving God, in a time of fear and uncertainty, help us to be as generous and loving as Mary of Bethany.
Inspire us today to anoint and love Jesus by abundantly serving and loving our poor brothers and sisters.
Amen.
Well, our recent big announcement that Amelia will be staying on with us as our Assistant Rector has got me thinking about my first “call,” my first job as a priest.
I served as the curate (pretty much the same thing as assistant rector) at Grace Church in Madison, New Jersey – a really wonderful church, a church that’s like St. Thomas’ in some important ways.
It’s vibrant church with lots of great ministries, including a heart for outreach.
There’s an excellent choir and music program.
And Grace Church is in the suburbs, but not too far from the city.
It was the perfect place to begin my ordained ministry, working as a “partner in ministry” with the church’s rector and my mentor and friend, the Rev. Lauren Ackland.
And now my hope is to offer that same gift of a great start to Amelia.
Anyway, as curate, one of my responsibilities was organizing the Youth Mission Trip.
Back then, the youth and their adult leaders would go on a mission trip, usually to a foreign country, every other summer. During the alternating summers they went on a pilgrimage that was more focused on spirituality.
It was a great combination – and, hopefully, as we continue our rebuild and renewal here, we’ll get to the point when we here at St. Thomas’ can sponsor a mission trip again, and, who knows, maybe a pilgrimage, too.
So, one year (it was 2009, actually), when I started thinking about the mission trip, I came up with something different.
Instead of flying to a foreign country, I said how about we drive an hour or so down the New Jersey Turnpike and have our mission trip in…Camden?
You may know that Camden is an old industrial port city just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.
Camden is a city that has been burdened by the closing of factories, the flight of people to the suburbs, racism, a poisoned environment, corruption, crime, the scourge of drugs…you know the story.
I suggested that we spend a week at the Romero Center, a retreat center named for Oscar Romero, the El Salvadoran archbishop who had defended the poor and advocated for peace.
Archbishop Romero was assassinated in 1980, martyred by a right-wing death squad as he celebrated Mass.
In Camden, the Romero Center offers what it calls the Urban Challenge.
During the day, the participants, usually students and church members, fan out to different service providers in the city – volunteering at schools, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, day care centers for children and for adults – and then, and this is crucial, everybody gathers together again at the end of the day to share and reflect on what they had seen and done, what they had experienced.
In one particularly memorable exercise, we were divided up into “families” and we all went to what was Camden’s lone supermarket to purchase food for our “family,” but we were limited to the amount of money a family received through food stamps.
There was a lot of white bread and mac ‘n cheese that night.
As you might guess, some of the church parents and kids were disappointed by, and frankly unhappy about, my Camden idea – too different from the foreign adventures that older kids had experienced and just too dangerous.
But others were excited about it and jumped right in.
It wasn’t a perfect week, but it’s still one of the most memorable events of my priesthood – and I know that at least some of the kids and adults who participated were deeply affected by what they saw and did during those days in Camden.
At the Romero Center, in the common room where we would pray together and reflect on our experiences, there’s a phrase painted in bold letters on the wall.
It’s a quote from the Peruvian priest and liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez:
“So you say you love the poor…NAME THEM.”
“So you say you love the poor…NAME THEM.”
Well, it has been a very difficult week, a time of much fear and uncertainty, but I still remember last Sunday, our joyful and rose-colored Laetare Sunday.
In her excellent sermon, Amelia offered us a profound reflection on the Parable of the Prodigal Son – or, rather, excuse me, the Parable of the Misunderstood Father.
And now in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and all that awaits him there.
For his friends at least, it was a time of much fear and uncertainty.
Along the way, Jesus and his disciples stop in Bethany, at the home of Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.
Lazarus’ sisters are there, acting very much in character. Martha busily serves dinner to the guests while her sister Mary, in an extraordinarily tender act, anoints Jesus’ feet with very expensive perfume and dries them with her hair.
We’re told that the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
Even now, Mary’s intimate act of love and devotion – preparing Jesus for his death -unsettles us, so we can imagine how shocking it must have been for Jesus’ disciples.
Judas, of course, objects to the great expense.
He says, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
A denarius, by the way, was about a day’s wage – so three hundred denarii would have been a lot of money.
John tells us that Judas was a thief and didn’t really care about the poor.
OK, fine.
But I’m pretty sure that if I had been there in Bethany that night and seen and smelled all that expensive perfume poured out onto Jesus’ feet, I may have kept my mouth shut but I would’ve thought the exact same thing: what a waste!
And I’ve gotten to know you well enough to know that many of you would be right there with Judas and me!
Well, Jesus responds to Judas with words that have been often misunderstood:
Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
These are problematic words.
I mean, yes, Jesus is not present for us the same way he was for everyone gathered around the table in Bethany two thousand years ago.
But Jesus’ declaration that we will always have the poor with us sounds kind of fatalistic, doesn’t it?
It’s certainly been interpreted that way.
Faced with so much poverty and suffering, many Christians have sort of shrugged:
“What are you going to do? After all, Jesus said, there will always be poor people. That’s just how it is.”
But we know Jesus better than that.
So, I think that Jesus really means that if we’re going to be his disciples, if we’re going to be his church, if we’re going to take up our cross and follow him, then, just as Jesus was always close to the poor, we must always be close to the poor.
If we’re really Christians, then the poor will always be with us.
We are meant to be so close to the poor that we know them – that we know their names.
“So you say you love the poor…NAME THEM.”
And when we know and serve and love the poor, we are anointing Jesus himself as surely as Mary anointed Jesus with her expensive perfume two thousand years ago.
This was the lesson that we learned at the Romero Center all those years ago.
And this is why our abundantly generous ministries like Owls First and our hospitality for Afghan refugees are so important and beautiful.
This work brings us, keeps us, close to the children at Owings Mills Elementary School, close to our Afghan friends.
Close enough that we know each other’s names.
Close enough that we truly love one another.
Two thousand years ago, in a time of fear and uncertainty, Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus with expensive perfume.
Today, in our time of fear and uncertainty, may we anoint Jesus with overflowing and costly love.
May we anoint and love Jesus by abundantly serving and loving and knowing our poor sisters and brothers.
Amen.