April 9, 2006 - In remembrance of her
Palm/Passion Sunday
9 April 2006
Mark 14.1-9
In remembrance of her
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
My favorite movie from last year is Me and you and everyone we know. Miranda July wrote it, directed it and played the female lead. (One way to save money on your first release must be to do most of the work yourself.)
In many ways, the story is populated by very ordinary people, in some ways less than ordinary. July plays Christine Jesperson, a quirky artist whose day job is transporting elderly people from the nursing home to shopping centers, appointments and wherever. She meets John Hawkes, played by Richard Swersey, in the shoe department of a low end department store, where she’s taken an old man to buy walking shoes.
Christine seems to like John, and John seems to like Christine, which seems to freeze them in each other’s headlights. They sort of talk about the prospect of seeing each other, and then John takes Christine’s phone number. She waits for a phone call. John mostly doesn’t get around to calling. He has other matters to attend to, like taking care of his two young sons when it’s his turn to keep them. John’s wife has left him, apparently due to boredom. Christine has no other love interest, apparently due to a general lack of curiosity among all nearby males.
The chief attribute of these two might be their awkwardness. Every situation seems to have too many ways to go wrong, and both of them have a knack for the most agonizing way to move things. When John’s wife is packing up boxes of his stuff, so he can move the heck out, he looks on with something between bewilderment and disbelief. We all watch with our own disbelief a couple of minutes later, as John walks around the outside the house by the bedroom where his sons are playing on the computer. He dowses his hand with lighter fluid, lights it, and then pounds the lawn with it to make the flames go out.
What we find out later is that he was trying to repeat a favorite trick of his uncle’s, who would dowse his hand with alcohol and then light it. I guess it doesn’t burn your hand to do it that way, though I haven’t yet been curious enough to find out. In any event, what we do find out is that John just wants there to be something interesting to show for the few cubit feet of space he takes up on this planet. He wants his sons to see him as a meaningful entity in the universe. He’s willing to do anything to show he’s alive. It’s just that whenever he takes a determined action, it’s so awkward we want to look away. We shake our heads. We just want it to stop.
So that’s the problem with that woman barging in while Jesus’ friends are trying to have a quiet dinner him. It’s terribly awkward, and they want it to stop. To begin with, the woman has no sense of propriety. She has no sense of proportion, either. She has bought—who knows how?—the Chanel of fragrant oils. She rips off the seal, pulls the stopper, and drains the flask over Jesus’ head. Every last drop. What is she thinking?
“Jiminy Christmas!” someone with a little good sense says. “You could feed Easter dinner to a thousand homeless people for what that bottle must have cost! Somebody cut up that woman’s VISA card till she learns how to be responsible with it.”
People are angry at the woman, and you get the feeling it isn’t really about the money. You also get the feeling the poor are not exactly uppermost in their mind. The problem is that some irrational drive has overcome this woman, and she’s upsetting the fragile peace they’re trying to maintain at the house of Simon the leper. They’re afraid the peace is unraveling, given the tensions building out among the rabbis and the rabble. Nobody’s up for emotional demonstrations. It’s all so awkward, already, without the ridiculous excess of this silly woman.
But Jesus is okay with it all. “You guys leave the woman alone,” he scolds. “I promise, the soup kitchen customer base isn’t drying up any time soon. You’ve got plenty of time for that. Besides, I like what she did, and I won’t be around to enjoy these things forever. You might want to enjoy life yourselves a little more, while I’m here to enjoy it with.”
Jesus likes passion in people. He likes it when you hear an idea for a more beautiful truth and feel such passion that you drop your fishing nets and follow the teller of the truth wherever he goes. He likes it when you want so passionately to live such an authentic, honest to God life that you’ll sell everything you have and give away every dollar you’ve got and go live it.
Jesus likes it when you realize how much living you’ve put off for the sake of stocking your life with comforts and then embrace the discomfort of living boldly every moment with just the little you really need. He likes it when you follow exactly and only the thought you came to that possessed and energized you, even though it offends the sensible, wastes the valuable, and values the whimsical.
Jesus likes it when you for the moment forget your 401(k) investments, tuck away your plans for worldly gain, and invest your credit limit in something and someone you love. He likes it when, now and then, your passion eclipses correctness and collapses good sense. He likes it when you quit taking even your church duties so doggone seriously and waste a little time just hanging out with God—preferably at great expense.
You don’t have all the time you think you have, and Jesus seems to think you’re forgetting that fact.
The reason your passion matters so much is that there are just a few days of Jesus-as-we-know-him left. Whatever the church affirms about the resurrection and the real body of Christ in the sacrament and in his real body as the church, Jesus affirms something about what his friends experience of him now which they will never get to experience again. “You will not,” he warns everybody, “always have me.” There is something about this moment that cannot be replaced, restored, resumed or made up for at any other time in any other way.
One woman in the whole world seems to get it. If she didn’t have her awkward passion, we would never have known. Jesus’ belief in the value of the moment would have been a secret forever, as far as we can tell. No wonder he tells everyone that wherever the gospel is proclaimed, what she’s done will be told in remembrance of her. Life and faith wouldn’t be the same without her.
What I loved about John and Christine in Me and you and everyone we know was their refusal to accept doing life the right and comfortable way, if it meant costing them their passion. If art was a waste of time, then it was a waste of time, but Christine was going to spend her energies, her wealth and her soul on the art she believed in. If, for John, doing what felt alive was awkward—and igniting his hand was just the start of it—doing and saying the life-giving thing was the choice he’d live with. Lighting his hand on fire was a stupid thing to do, but he found out over the course of the story a little more about why he did it. When John unwraps the bandage at the end, his suffering has taught him that the world of risk, disappointment, confusion, and sorrow becomes through frail hope and stubborn passion a place of healing, truth, love and life.
If John and Christine had been around during dinner with Jesus at Simon the leper’s, there’s no doubt in my mind they’d have had a flask of pure nard with them. (I’d just hope nobody left any matches lying around.)
None of this is to say that passion is easy to come by. Peter was always trying to have it, but often it turned out badly. It sounds passionate when he gets furious with Jesus for saying he was going to be arrested and killed, but that was really panic, not passion. It sounds passionate when he lops off the ear of a soldier in the garden where Jesus is being arrested, but that is really rage, not passion. It sounds passionate when Peter insists that he will die with Jesus before he would abandon him, but that is really either pride or grief or wishful thinking, not passion.
No, passion is hard to come by. It comes out of love, and the love it comes from is not the famous agape love that Christian writers are so fond of. It comes from eros love—love that stirs the soul, love the raises the pulse, love that lights a fire. Now, our society has become so transfixed by sex that sex is all we think about when we talk about eros love, but eros love is simply that love by which the heart leaps out with passion for the goodness and enjoyment of the beloved. Monks and nuns and mystics have loved God with such love. An artist loves a seascape with such love. A singer loves an aria with such love.
Agape love is different. It’s that detached, indifferent love which does not discriminate and does not change with the moment or the person or the place or the reason, and it is, therefore, a good and wonderful love. For agape gives us the care to put coins in boxes and checks in envelopes for One Great Hour of Sharing, which supports water projects and other good things among people we don’t know and in places we’ll never see. But eros love grabs us, holds us, delights us and drives us to acts of unaccountable extravagance. Eros love is a great ship steaming for a tropical island of beauty, grace and joy.
Personally, I think I see deeply spiritual eros love like that of this unnamed woman in every kind of person. Even the most stayed and proper, even the most controlled and deliberate, now and then surrender their will to a passion for something that matters more, they realize, than all their propriety and all their willpower. The place in life where that surrender occurs is what we call vocation, which Frederick Buechner has famously said is “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [Wishful thinking, p. 95]
Whenever Ruth Rusie tells about some adult she’s been teaching to read in the literacy program, her face shines. She is glad, and the world’s hunger is met with just a little more nourishment. That is passion. When Chris Young plays that charming little Ralph Vaughan Williams prelude [Rhosymedre] we heard this morning, the gladness of the composer comes alive again in the gladness of the player, and some deep hunger in me is satisfied in the luminous, ruminant flow of tones and chords. That is passion.
You know it is not passion when you’re roiling with energy because the hunger is in you. That is avarice. When someone on TV gushes over the passion of some tycoon, rock star, or sports celebrity, as often as not, it’s avarice they’re really talking about. Passion, rather, is the fulfillment of your joy at the point where the life of the world is strengthened, illumined, unbound, and renewed.
This singular week out of the year we call Holy Week is unique for two reasons. One, grief deepens with each day while God dies and the world goes to pieces. Two, passionate love for the life of Christ swells wider in the heart than ever any of us thought we had the heart to hold.
I suspect we most of us come here to worship God, as we are supposed to do, but I also think we come hear for another reason we won’t say, even to ourselves, which is that we hope something will happen just now, such that in the coming days there will reach out before us a new life. We have already done everything we can think of to make the former life new, and the former life of longing, trying, approaching and occasionally just missing joy and faith seems determined to hold out against our best efforts. We come here because maybe God will this time make the thing happen that will set us free, make us happy, and renew our strength, that we may mount up with wings like eagles.
If you are coming not only to worship God, as you are supposed to do, but also because you want to feel the wind under your wings, then let your waiting end. What you need from God is already done: You are alive, though you had fallen ill with fear and soul-sickness; healed, though your strength only comes back with agonizing slowness; restored, though your spirit is yet beset with the decay of your former demons; and loved, though self-doubt remains an ache that reminds you of the lonely wanderings you made before you gave in to Christ’s relentless passion for you. All that is done, because of God.
What is left to do is for you to undertake. It is a small thing, hardly anything at all. Some certain passion awaits your grace to release it. This passion has been growing in you, and there is something out in the world, possibly the person next to you—next to you here, or somewhere in your daily life—for which or for whom your passion is meant to ignite. When it does, then you will be fully alive, even if only as long as it takes to drain a flask of oil over someone’s head.
Releasing this passion does not make the grief of the world go away, if we Christians with our Holy Week rightly understand about the way things are, but the grief of the world does not deter you. The grief of the world does not destroy what you love but only reminds you of how dear to you the genuine treasures of this life truly are. The grief of the world withers before your passionate love for Christ which you manifest in the extravagant passion of your living.
Spend some fleeting moment this week, therefore, in lavish love for Jesus’ sake, so that when you in some far off moment realize you will never have it back, you will rejoice with Jesus that, because of your passion, the love remains. Amen.
9 April 2006
Mark 14.1-9
In remembrance of her
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
My favorite movie from last year is Me and you and everyone we know. Miranda July wrote it, directed it and played the female lead. (One way to save money on your first release must be to do most of the work yourself.)
In many ways, the story is populated by very ordinary people, in some ways less than ordinary. July plays Christine Jesperson, a quirky artist whose day job is transporting elderly people from the nursing home to shopping centers, appointments and wherever. She meets John Hawkes, played by Richard Swersey, in the shoe department of a low end department store, where she’s taken an old man to buy walking shoes.
Christine seems to like John, and John seems to like Christine, which seems to freeze them in each other’s headlights. They sort of talk about the prospect of seeing each other, and then John takes Christine’s phone number. She waits for a phone call. John mostly doesn’t get around to calling. He has other matters to attend to, like taking care of his two young sons when it’s his turn to keep them. John’s wife has left him, apparently due to boredom. Christine has no other love interest, apparently due to a general lack of curiosity among all nearby males.
The chief attribute of these two might be their awkwardness. Every situation seems to have too many ways to go wrong, and both of them have a knack for the most agonizing way to move things. When John’s wife is packing up boxes of his stuff, so he can move the heck out, he looks on with something between bewilderment and disbelief. We all watch with our own disbelief a couple of minutes later, as John walks around the outside the house by the bedroom where his sons are playing on the computer. He dowses his hand with lighter fluid, lights it, and then pounds the lawn with it to make the flames go out.
What we find out later is that he was trying to repeat a favorite trick of his uncle’s, who would dowse his hand with alcohol and then light it. I guess it doesn’t burn your hand to do it that way, though I haven’t yet been curious enough to find out. In any event, what we do find out is that John just wants there to be something interesting to show for the few cubit feet of space he takes up on this planet. He wants his sons to see him as a meaningful entity in the universe. He’s willing to do anything to show he’s alive. It’s just that whenever he takes a determined action, it’s so awkward we want to look away. We shake our heads. We just want it to stop.
So that’s the problem with that woman barging in while Jesus’ friends are trying to have a quiet dinner him. It’s terribly awkward, and they want it to stop. To begin with, the woman has no sense of propriety. She has no sense of proportion, either. She has bought—who knows how?—the Chanel of fragrant oils. She rips off the seal, pulls the stopper, and drains the flask over Jesus’ head. Every last drop. What is she thinking?
“Jiminy Christmas!” someone with a little good sense says. “You could feed Easter dinner to a thousand homeless people for what that bottle must have cost! Somebody cut up that woman’s VISA card till she learns how to be responsible with it.”
People are angry at the woman, and you get the feeling it isn’t really about the money. You also get the feeling the poor are not exactly uppermost in their mind. The problem is that some irrational drive has overcome this woman, and she’s upsetting the fragile peace they’re trying to maintain at the house of Simon the leper. They’re afraid the peace is unraveling, given the tensions building out among the rabbis and the rabble. Nobody’s up for emotional demonstrations. It’s all so awkward, already, without the ridiculous excess of this silly woman.
But Jesus is okay with it all. “You guys leave the woman alone,” he scolds. “I promise, the soup kitchen customer base isn’t drying up any time soon. You’ve got plenty of time for that. Besides, I like what she did, and I won’t be around to enjoy these things forever. You might want to enjoy life yourselves a little more, while I’m here to enjoy it with.”
Jesus likes passion in people. He likes it when you hear an idea for a more beautiful truth and feel such passion that you drop your fishing nets and follow the teller of the truth wherever he goes. He likes it when you want so passionately to live such an authentic, honest to God life that you’ll sell everything you have and give away every dollar you’ve got and go live it.
Jesus likes it when you realize how much living you’ve put off for the sake of stocking your life with comforts and then embrace the discomfort of living boldly every moment with just the little you really need. He likes it when you follow exactly and only the thought you came to that possessed and energized you, even though it offends the sensible, wastes the valuable, and values the whimsical.
Jesus likes it when you for the moment forget your 401(k) investments, tuck away your plans for worldly gain, and invest your credit limit in something and someone you love. He likes it when, now and then, your passion eclipses correctness and collapses good sense. He likes it when you quit taking even your church duties so doggone seriously and waste a little time just hanging out with God—preferably at great expense.
You don’t have all the time you think you have, and Jesus seems to think you’re forgetting that fact.
The reason your passion matters so much is that there are just a few days of Jesus-as-we-know-him left. Whatever the church affirms about the resurrection and the real body of Christ in the sacrament and in his real body as the church, Jesus affirms something about what his friends experience of him now which they will never get to experience again. “You will not,” he warns everybody, “always have me.” There is something about this moment that cannot be replaced, restored, resumed or made up for at any other time in any other way.
One woman in the whole world seems to get it. If she didn’t have her awkward passion, we would never have known. Jesus’ belief in the value of the moment would have been a secret forever, as far as we can tell. No wonder he tells everyone that wherever the gospel is proclaimed, what she’s done will be told in remembrance of her. Life and faith wouldn’t be the same without her.
What I loved about John and Christine in Me and you and everyone we know was their refusal to accept doing life the right and comfortable way, if it meant costing them their passion. If art was a waste of time, then it was a waste of time, but Christine was going to spend her energies, her wealth and her soul on the art she believed in. If, for John, doing what felt alive was awkward—and igniting his hand was just the start of it—doing and saying the life-giving thing was the choice he’d live with. Lighting his hand on fire was a stupid thing to do, but he found out over the course of the story a little more about why he did it. When John unwraps the bandage at the end, his suffering has taught him that the world of risk, disappointment, confusion, and sorrow becomes through frail hope and stubborn passion a place of healing, truth, love and life.
If John and Christine had been around during dinner with Jesus at Simon the leper’s, there’s no doubt in my mind they’d have had a flask of pure nard with them. (I’d just hope nobody left any matches lying around.)
None of this is to say that passion is easy to come by. Peter was always trying to have it, but often it turned out badly. It sounds passionate when he gets furious with Jesus for saying he was going to be arrested and killed, but that was really panic, not passion. It sounds passionate when he lops off the ear of a soldier in the garden where Jesus is being arrested, but that is really rage, not passion. It sounds passionate when Peter insists that he will die with Jesus before he would abandon him, but that is really either pride or grief or wishful thinking, not passion.
No, passion is hard to come by. It comes out of love, and the love it comes from is not the famous agape love that Christian writers are so fond of. It comes from eros love—love that stirs the soul, love the raises the pulse, love that lights a fire. Now, our society has become so transfixed by sex that sex is all we think about when we talk about eros love, but eros love is simply that love by which the heart leaps out with passion for the goodness and enjoyment of the beloved. Monks and nuns and mystics have loved God with such love. An artist loves a seascape with such love. A singer loves an aria with such love.
Agape love is different. It’s that detached, indifferent love which does not discriminate and does not change with the moment or the person or the place or the reason, and it is, therefore, a good and wonderful love. For agape gives us the care to put coins in boxes and checks in envelopes for One Great Hour of Sharing, which supports water projects and other good things among people we don’t know and in places we’ll never see. But eros love grabs us, holds us, delights us and drives us to acts of unaccountable extravagance. Eros love is a great ship steaming for a tropical island of beauty, grace and joy.
Personally, I think I see deeply spiritual eros love like that of this unnamed woman in every kind of person. Even the most stayed and proper, even the most controlled and deliberate, now and then surrender their will to a passion for something that matters more, they realize, than all their propriety and all their willpower. The place in life where that surrender occurs is what we call vocation, which Frederick Buechner has famously said is “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [Wishful thinking, p. 95]
Whenever Ruth Rusie tells about some adult she’s been teaching to read in the literacy program, her face shines. She is glad, and the world’s hunger is met with just a little more nourishment. That is passion. When Chris Young plays that charming little Ralph Vaughan Williams prelude [Rhosymedre] we heard this morning, the gladness of the composer comes alive again in the gladness of the player, and some deep hunger in me is satisfied in the luminous, ruminant flow of tones and chords. That is passion.
You know it is not passion when you’re roiling with energy because the hunger is in you. That is avarice. When someone on TV gushes over the passion of some tycoon, rock star, or sports celebrity, as often as not, it’s avarice they’re really talking about. Passion, rather, is the fulfillment of your joy at the point where the life of the world is strengthened, illumined, unbound, and renewed.
This singular week out of the year we call Holy Week is unique for two reasons. One, grief deepens with each day while God dies and the world goes to pieces. Two, passionate love for the life of Christ swells wider in the heart than ever any of us thought we had the heart to hold.
I suspect we most of us come here to worship God, as we are supposed to do, but I also think we come hear for another reason we won’t say, even to ourselves, which is that we hope something will happen just now, such that in the coming days there will reach out before us a new life. We have already done everything we can think of to make the former life new, and the former life of longing, trying, approaching and occasionally just missing joy and faith seems determined to hold out against our best efforts. We come here because maybe God will this time make the thing happen that will set us free, make us happy, and renew our strength, that we may mount up with wings like eagles.
If you are coming not only to worship God, as you are supposed to do, but also because you want to feel the wind under your wings, then let your waiting end. What you need from God is already done: You are alive, though you had fallen ill with fear and soul-sickness; healed, though your strength only comes back with agonizing slowness; restored, though your spirit is yet beset with the decay of your former demons; and loved, though self-doubt remains an ache that reminds you of the lonely wanderings you made before you gave in to Christ’s relentless passion for you. All that is done, because of God.
What is left to do is for you to undertake. It is a small thing, hardly anything at all. Some certain passion awaits your grace to release it. This passion has been growing in you, and there is something out in the world, possibly the person next to you—next to you here, or somewhere in your daily life—for which or for whom your passion is meant to ignite. When it does, then you will be fully alive, even if only as long as it takes to drain a flask of oil over someone’s head.
Releasing this passion does not make the grief of the world go away, if we Christians with our Holy Week rightly understand about the way things are, but the grief of the world does not deter you. The grief of the world does not destroy what you love but only reminds you of how dear to you the genuine treasures of this life truly are. The grief of the world withers before your passionate love for Christ which you manifest in the extravagant passion of your living.
Spend some fleeting moment this week, therefore, in lavish love for Jesus’ sake, so that when you in some far off moment realize you will never have it back, you will rejoice with Jesus that, because of your passion, the love remains. Amen.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
4:49 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home