The Fifth Sunday of
Lent Year C
Transcribed from a
sermon given by
The Rev. Valerie Ann
Hart
At St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
Arroyo Grande,
California
In 2010
John 12:1-8
Philippians 3:4b-1
We read in the gospel today about this incredible act of
devotion where Mary takes a pound of expensive perfume, pure nard, worth a
year's pay for a workman and puts it on Jesus' feet. Then she wipes his feet
with her hair. Some of you will
understand that kind of devotion to Christ. But others of you might wonder,
"Why would she do that?" I’d
like you to hold that question gently in the back of your mind as I speak.
Now, imagine a boy who, when he's a young child, is given a
backpack. He wears the backpack all the time, and in it things begin to
accumulate. First his brother and sister
put some rocks in there just to make it heavy. His father loads it down with a
bunch of expectations. Then there's a gold star from his Sunday school teacher
and good grades from his third grade teacher. Of course there is that one F
from the sixth grade and the memory of what his father's face looked like when
he came home with that.
There was the bully at school so there are some old lunch
boxes that bully took sitting in the backpack. There are memories of his
scouting trips and an Eagle Scout badge in there. There's also some stuff that he picked up at
a convenience store and kind of slipped in there without paying for them. He didn't get
caught, but they are still rattling around in there. Then of course there's the time he did get
caught, and the memory of his mother's look on that day is burned in to that
backpack. There's his first love and his
first heartbreak. There's his diploma
from high school, and his rejection from college. There's the first job he had, and the first
job he was fired from. There are all the
joys and accomplishments, and all the self doubts. His army uniform is in there even though it
doesn't fit anymore, and the memory of his colleagues and companions that
didn't come home. It's all in there and
he carries it around all the time. As time has gone by it's gotten bigger, and
bigger, and heavier, and heavier, until he walks with a stoop and he drags this
huge bag behind him.
Now you would think if someone came up to him and said,
"Let me take that bag off of you," that he immediately would say,
"Oh thank you very much. I so
appreciate it." But often the
response is, "No. This is my
bag. I'm going to carry it for the rest
of my life."
One day I decided to sit down in front of the TV and find out
what was going on in the world so I turned on CNN. What came on was not the
news but somebody interviewing people who were on this new show about people
who hoard things. Now this is not about people
who keep all of their baseball cards from when they were kids and have a
basement full of stuff. It is about
people whose homes are so full you almost can't get in to their house and when
you open the door you have to push it and there's a narrow passage way to the
living room with boxes and stuff piled high on either side. These people live
in places where the stuff is falling over and you have to climb over it with
kitchens where you can't cook because there's so much stuff. They showed these amazing pictures of their homes,
and your response might be, "Well this is ‘reality’ TV and we know that
anything on ‘reality’ TV is probably not real."
Unfortunately, it is a very real disease. I had a
parishioner at my last church who wouldn't let me come over and visit her
house. It didn't take a long time for me to figure out why. The backseat of her
car was filled with papers and stuff, up to the top of the windows, up to the
windows, and the front seat was getting there, barely enough room for her to
get in to the car.
There was one parishioner that she trusted that had been in
her home and she had told me about her, but this woman didn't think anyone
knew. She was keeping it a secret so she
didn't want me to come and visit.
Finally, I came over and she wouldn't let me go in the house, even
though she acknowledged her situation. So we visited on the porch. She had no family except one sister who lived
in the Bay Area, about a 40 minute drive away. Of course she never invited her
sister to her house because she was too embarrassed to have her sister come
there, and her sister never invited her over to her house either. They very rarely communicated.
Then one day the young man delivering her newspaper
discovered in the morning that she was still sitting on her porch. She had died
during the night.
The parishioner who knew about her went with me to her
house. It was quite amazing to go inside.
You couldn't even get to the bedroom.
We knew we needed to tell her sister.
We had an address but no phone number. We didn't want the police to have
to go tell her sister. So this
parishioner and I went to the sister's house. When we knocked on the door the
sister came to the door and barely opened it to see who was there. When we told
her who we were and why we had come, with a bit of hesitancy she finally
invited us inside where there were boxes piled high everywhere. Their shame had kept them from understanding
and realizing they had the same problem, the same psychological disease.
The therapists that were on this TV show said that for a
person who hoards like that, every item has a purpose; it has a meaning. The pile of old newspapers in the corner,
they're intending to eventually read. The broken dish over here is going to be
fixed one day. The toys were picked up for their nieces and nephews, but never
given. There's a reason for everything.
There is for a person who hoards a sense of security in the things they have
around. When they are surrounded by all
their stuff they somehow feel safe. Anytime anybody criticizes them for the
condition of their house, they will pull back even more to the safety and
comfort of all their stuff, even though every morning they wake up with the intention
of cleaning things up. The stuff gives
them security. So when someone comes
along and says, "Oh, I'll clean it all out. You just go over to an apartment; you go to a
hotel for a couple of days. We'll clean
it all out." They don't want that kind
of help. It would terrify them. They can be helped through therapy, where
they are encouraged with the help of someone else to take it a little bit at a
time, start in a corner and go through it.
Now, you may wonder what that has to do with us. You may look at those people and say,
"How can they do that? I don't
understand?" But each one of us
keeps a lot of stuff stored in our brain.
We keep a lot of memories of hurts from decades ago, and we carry around
our accomplishments. Who are you? Who are you if you were sitting in a desert
and had no name, and no degrees, and no history? Who would you be? Paul talks about this. He talks about how he had it all, how he was
born a Hebrew, how he was trained as a Pharisee, how he went to the best
schools, and how he had the best teachers. I am sure if they had SAT scores
back then he would have had the highest scores, and he would have gone to
Harvard. He had degrees.
He was righteous. He knew all the rules, and all the laws,
and he followed them all the time. He was such a righteous man. And he was also
a self-righteous man, a man who judged others. He was a person who was ready to
persecute those who didn't believe the way he did. He had a lot of baggage, and he had a lot to
feel good about, yet he could write in our reading today, "Yet whatever
gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss
because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… I regard them as rubbish." The Greek word translated as rubbish means
"stinking garbage”. It's all
stinking garbage. Everything wonderful
he ever accomplished, and everything he ever did wrong. Rubbish.
Throw it away. Leave it behind. Nothing compares to Christ.
So much of what we carry around is either guilt for not
living up to someone's standards or the stuff that we've done to try and make
ourselves lovable, but it all changes when we have that meeting with Christ
where we come to know that we are loved, loved for who we are, and not for what
we've done, and accomplished. When we
come to know that we are forgiven and loved in spite of all that we've done,
when all the past is irrelevant to God through Christ - it's all been wiped
away, when we come to really know that, we feel the freedom and release of
having all that baggage taken off. We
come to know a new life. Everything is
new. As Isaiah said, "Do not
remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing." A new thing - today from this moment forward
everything in the past is rubbish - the good, the bad, the ugly - rubbish,
because you are loved by Christ right now. As long as you hold on to those old
resentments, hold on to that old guilt, as long as you hoard your
righteousness, you can't receive the great gift of God's love.
I know there are people sitting here today that understand
what Mary did. They understand there was
a moment in their life when they accepted forgiveness. There was a moment in their life when
everything from the past was set aside.
There was a moment in which they felt God's love. If you're in a 12 step program you may have
had a moment like that. Some of you may have had such a moment at church, or at
a time when you received Christ. A time when you threw away all that old
stuff. For others of us it might have
taken a little longer. It might have
been a process of letting go of one thing and feeling a little better, and then
realizing you have the power to let go of something more. It may be an ongoing
process of letting go. If you've let go
and know the love of Christ you may have experienced a time when you were so
thankful, when you were so incredibly thankful and full of love, that you wanted
to do something to show it. And if Jesus had been standing in front of you, you
would have run up to him with tears and wiped his feet because you know what it
means to be forgiven and to have a new life.
Here we are. It's a
week before Holy Week. We've been
traveling the journey of Lent. We are
getting ready for Holy Week, for Passion Sunday, and for Good Friday. In the
reading today Jesus says that the nard is for my burial, it's right there. Jesus is about to be crucified. He is about to die because of his love for
each one of us. If you don't understand
why Mary anointed Jesus' feet, if you've never felt that incredible release of
knowing God's love, if you can't imagine how someone could so passionately want
to do something, anything, a small thing in her mind, compared to what she
received from Christ. If you haven't
known that yet, I invite you to open yourself to that possibility.
I invite you today to think about what it is that is holding
you back, what it is you're carrying around, whether it's guilt, or resentment,
or self-righteousness, or an image of yourself, or a title, or whatever it is,
I invite you to offer it to God and let Christ take it. If he doesn't take it all today, you have a
couple of really good weeks to work on letting go.
We're going to switch the order of the service a little
bit. We're going to do the confession
now, but first we're going to have a couple of minutes of silence. I want you
to think about what it is you need to let go of so that you can know the love,
and freedom, and the joy that comes with Christ. If you are a visual person,
imagine putting it on the altar, or throwing it in the garbage. If you are an auditory person, think in your
mind what you might say. Take a moment
to offer it to God, and then we'll do the confession that is in the bulletin on
page four.
[End of Audio]
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