Mark 14:3-9
While he was at Bethany
in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came
with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke
open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there
who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this
way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred
denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. But
Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed
a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you
can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always
have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body
beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is
proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in
remembrance of her.’
SERMON
TEACHABLE
CHRISTIANS
You
know the disciples and other people that were criticizing the woman were
correct on one thing. Her
gift of perfume was a very extravagant gift.
If she had given Jesus the cash equivalent of this alabaster jar
of ointment of nard, it would have gone to feed many hungry people.
It could have done some good in the world.
They were correct on that point.
But, Jesus told them that they were not right to criticize her.
Why?
Jesus saw something in a woman’s action that the disciples
didn’t see. Jesus saw that
she had come to a breakthrough; that she had arrived at an understanding
that nobody else, up to that point, had arrived at yet.
The disciples believed that Jesus was the Son of God.
And they were his followers and therefore, they had sort of a
general idea their purpose was to do good in the world; bringing about
God’s kingdom by deeds of mercy and justice, such as giving to the
poor. They believed
themselves to be a more or less permanent organization existing for that
purpose. And they were
not completely wrong in believing this.
And yet they were missing out on something that the woman
grasped.
The woman had actually been listening to what Jesus had been
saying about himself in recent days.
And she had come to the understanding of who he was, and what he
was about to do. She knew
that Jesus, the Eternal Son of God, incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth,
Jesus, God, was about to deliver himself up to his enemies in order to
be killed by them. And she
responded out of fullness of her heart with the only gesture that she
could think of; that seemed in anyway appropriate to this reality.
While the other disciples were thinking in a self-satisfied way
about all the future good they would do as the company of Jesus’
followers on earth; and not thinking about the hard things Jesus had
been telling them. She was
realizing that something very grievous was about to happen; and so she
anointed Jesus with perfume, as for his burial.
She committed an impractical but deeply devoted act. And
in doing so, she did something that got something very practical and
important started in the world. Jesus,
as he praised the woman for anointing him for his burial, said that from
now on, whenever the Gospel is told, whenever the good news is told to
the world, people will remember what this woman has done.
Well, it isn’t true that every time we talk about salvation, we
tell the story of the woman and the jar of perfume.
But it is true, that when we think about the heart of the Gospel:
Jesus giving up his life for us; when we think about this, and focus on
this, and allow our minds and our hearts to engage with this truth, then
we are repeating within ourselves the same action that the woman was
performing as she anointed Jesus, and in this sense we are remembering
her. We are bringing
her back to life. We are
bringing her to this present moment whenever tears well up in our eyes.
On Good Friday, or Maundy Thursday, or at the beginning of the
service on Easter Morning, whenever we reflect on the heart of the
Gospel; we are doing what this woman did first.
You could say that breaking open the jar of perfume and anointing
Jesus on the head was the first fully completed act of Christian
discipleship. Others were
called the disciples of Jesus; but she, in this moment, was the true
disciple of Jesus.
What was it about this woman that made her able to see something
the disciples couldn’t see? What
was the quality that she had? That
made her the one who could do the act that Jesus wanted to have done at
that moment? Rather than all
of those others who had been with Jesus so much more than she had?
I think that quality was “teachability”.
The woman was teachable. The
disciples, in that particular moment at least, were not very teachable.
Jesus presumably made them teachable by what he said, but going
into that moment, they were not; and she was teachable.
Being teachable means not thinking that you’ve already got it
all figured out. Being
teachable means not having your ideas so firmly lodged into place that
they cannot encounter something important that’s being told to you in
the here and now.
Anybody who’s ever been involved with school: teachers,
students; anybody who’s ever been engaged in that encounter in a way
that seems important to you now will know the difference between a
student who is teachable and a student who is not.
And we know what a joy it is to have a teachable class.
A large part of my life has been teaching over the past year.
I’ve taught classes at O.C.C. and LeMoyne, and at
Colgate-Rochester-Crosier
Divinity
School
since last summer. And as I
reflect on this recent teaching experience of mine, I noticed something
that kind of startled me when I first realized it.
I noticed that my most teachable students were the ones at O.C.C.
and LeMoyne. My least
teachable students were the ones in seminary; the ones who are going
into ministry. They were the
ones who were not teachable. Where
as all those eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds taking Western
Civilization even though they didn’t want to; it was required that
they take it, and therefore they were doing so; they were the ones who
had teachable moments more than my future ministers that I was teaching.
That was a discouraging thing to reflect on at first.
And then I thought about it further and realized that it’s
understandable. When you go
into the ministry, you usually don’t do so because you think it sounds
like a fun career. You do so
because you’ve had some sort of spiritual experience; something that
moves your heart and it seems really important in your life.
And then you go into the ministry, you go to seminary so that you
can be trained to share that experience, in your leadership, with
others. They feel then, that
they’ve already had their teachable moment.
They feel that experience of encountering Jesus Christ has
already taken place in their lives.
They don’t expect to encounter this same kind of depth in their
classroom work in seminary. They
look upon that as training, practical skills that they can use in
running a church in the future. So
they’re looking for tips on how to do things better.
But they feel that their teachable moment, as I’ve said, has
already occurred. It’s
understandable then, that they would not be very teachable in class.
But I think there’s another reason why they aren’t very
teachable; and that reason moves beyond seminary students to the general
climate of our society today. I
think because we are a country that is so religiously diverse, and also
so religiously conflicted, we all have a tendency to make religion more
and more of a private matter; related to our own personal tastes: “the
God I know”, or “what’s true for me” is the kind of language we
use when we talk about our religious convictions, our religious
experiences. And in this
spirit a lot of people; lay people in the pews of churches as well as
future ministers who are going to be the focus
of churches; a lot of people lock into some key ideas about their faith
without wondering what’s true for me, my Christianity, my
spirituality. They lock into
those ideas before they get active in church.
And then, when they go to church, they try to find one that will
fit in with those ideas and that will maybe add some tidbits here and
there so that they can extend their ideas without essentially changing
them.
In religious faith we are so anxious not to have our ideas seem
like a threat to others, and so protective of our ideas against possible
threat from others, that we lock into these simple ideas rather early in
our faith story, and then we come to church not in a very teachable
spirit. We come to church in
order to have our pre-existing ideas reinforced by what we hear.
In order to have our beliefs stated over and over again.
So that we can be reaffirmed in the fact that this is what we
believe, this is “my faith”. And
so, on all different edges and points of the spectrum: liberal,
conservative, and everything in between; you find people who are not
very teachable in their religious faith.
So seminarians are not unique, seminarians are representing, I
think, a general, spiritual weakness that you find among many people
today. The remedy for the
weakness, I don’t think, is to force a particular frame of religious
belief onto all of society. The
remedy rather, I think, is for the church to discover that teaching
voice inside us; the voice of Christianity itself, the voice of Christ
speaking to us through Christianity.
By the voice of Christ, I’m not referring to the religion
section at Barnes and Noble; where you’re likely to find some very
good works along side some very sketchy works that are based upon the
latest fad in religious studies. Religious
study as an academic field and religion as a topic in other academic
fields is very prone to faddish treatment; to being regarded through the
spectacles of the present moment.
And so you’ll find a lot of books that are suggesting
that Jesus has been totally misunderstood for two thousand years; the
church has gotten it all wrong; Christianity didn’t even exist for
hundreds of years until after Christ.
All kinds of wild conglomerations of teaching come down through
books that have a picture by a Renaissance painter on the cover, so it
looks Christian enough on the outside.
But when you get inside, it’s presenting a totally different
picture of Christianity; that’s the teaching voice of society.
But I don’t think that’s the voice that Christians need to be
teachable in regard to. I
think what we need is a strong dose of the teaching voice of ancient and
present Christianity that exists in the ongoing life of the church
through the presence of Jesus in all the work of the church: in the
sacraments, in the sermons, in the reading of the scripture, and in the
things that we do, acts of mercy and kindness and witness in the world
around us. That’s the
teachable voice that we need to listen to; and right in the heart of
that voice, we don’t hear many different new versions of Christianity
following different fads; right at the heart of that voice, we hear one
true theme: the one great thing I know, that delights and stirs me so,
Jesus Christ, the Crucified. That’s
what we hear, right at the heart of the teaching voice of the Christian
faith. That God became one
of us so that he could die for all of us.
To be teachable in regard to that truth is, I think, the ongoing
business of the church. And
being encountered by that truth in a way that leaves us open to being
probed by it, and pushed by it, and pierced by it in different ways each
Sunday. Or at moments as
we’re driving the car, pushing a mop across the floor of our kitchen
or opening the pages of the newspaper.
Being probed and pierced by that truth at any other point in our
lives is being teachable in the way that woman who broke the jar of
perfume and poured it over Jesus’ head was teachable.
The Christian faith is not something that we are taught so that
we have mastered it and we do not need to think about it anymore because
we have already covered that material.
The Christian faith is something that presents itself to us even
in this very simple formula I’ve given:
God became one of us so that he could die for all of us.
The Christian faith presents itself to us afresh – moment after
moment after moment; and our proper attitude is to be open to whatever
that truth has to teach us in this present moment.
This is how faith Christians have been acting for two thousand
years; it’s not the way the general society necessarily thinks about
religious matters or spirituality. That’s
alright; general society is under no compulsion to be Christian.
But it is how the people who call themselves Christian, the
people who believe they are part of the covenant community formed by
Jesus Christ and led by the apostles on into the future and that future
still continues in the living reality that is called the church.
Those of us who are Christians do need to be teachable in just
this way; which leads me to ask myself how teachable I sometimes am.
In order to be genuinely teachable, I don’t believe that I need
to be buying into books at Barnes and Noble, or the TV specials they
have on the History Channel. But
I do need to be sure that I’m not just stating verbal formulas and
taking that as a sign of the faith that’s in my heart.
It’s one thing to say that God became one of us so that he
could die for all of us; that’s a nice way of putting it into words.
But if it becomes just words, through repetition, through
familiarity, through the ongoing nature of my work, then I’m done for.
And not merely in terms of my relationship with God, but in terms
of my effectiveness with you.
I, too, need to be continually taught, so that I am ready to
break open whatever alabaster jars I might have, to anoint Jesus with
them, not neglecting at the same time to care for the poor.
I need to be teachable, and if I’m not, for goodness’ sake I
hope you will call me on it. Because
I need to be made teachable whenever I cease to teach.
I’ve found you, in my conversations with you and my encounters
with you thus far over these weeks that I’ve been your pastor; I’ve
found you to be not only a personally appreciative, but teachable
congregation. I think
maybe you can help me as we worship together, as we study the Bible
together, as we work together to make decisions on the life of the
church together. You can
help me, you can be my teachers; because all of us have the one teacher
who’s continually presenting that one true thing, that one great thing
to us. Please help me, and
help me to help you so that we never cease to be teachable Christians.
Amen.
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