This sermon was originally preached on 4/3/2022 at Oak Grove Lutheran Church in Richfield, MN. The service may be viewed here.

Fifth Sunday in Lent Lectionary Texts: 
Isaiah 43:16-21 | Psalm 126 | Philippians 3:4b-14
Gospel Text (included below ):  John 12:1-8 

Hope is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear. 

Alice Walker, acclaimed poet and author of The Color Purple, wrote that, in a poem by the same title about an Iraqi mother of five who lost everything during the US invasion -- everything, Walker writes, except her kids. 

Hope is a Woman who has lost her fear
Along with her home, her employment, her parents,
​her olive trees, her grapes. The peace of independence;
the reassuring noises of ordinary neighbors.

And yet, Walker continues,

Hope rises, She always does, 
did we fail to notice this in all the stories we’ve tried to suppress?
Hope rises
and she puts on her same  
unfashionable threadbare cloak 
and, penniless, flings herself
against the cold, polished, protective chain mail
of the very powerful...

Hope is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear. 

When I read this poem, I cannot help but think of Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha, and of the dead-and-raised and probably still stinking Lazarus.

Mary and her sister are disciples of Jesus, so close with him that in the story of Lazarus’s death immediately preceding this scene, both of the sisters, full of grief, confront Jesus’s lateness and wail that had he just come sooner, their brother would still live. And Jesus loved them so much that, in the shortest and arguably most powerful verse in all of Scripture, Jesus wept. And then, proclaiming that he, himself, is the resurrection and the life, he raised Lazarus from the dead. 

That is the context of today’s text: Mary is a woman who has witnessed death, grieved it wholly, and seen it defeated in her own blood. Her hope is now unassailable, itself immortal in a way, and it has made her a woman without fear, brazen in her boldness at this celebration where Jesus is feted among his closest friends and chosen family. As Lazarus feasts and Martha serves the meal, Mary gets down on her hands and knees, breaks open a jar of pure nard worth an entire year’s wages, and dumps it on Jesus’s bare feet as he reclines at the table. 

Now, I would love to get into the significance of this pure nard, but it is best saved for its own lesson, so I will just say this: The only other place in Scripture where pure nard is specifically named is in the Song of Songs, where it is spent by the lover on her beloved. I am not suggesting nor do I want to entertain any conspiracy theories about Mary and Jesus being married; it is just to say, Mary’s anointing of Jesus is not only extreme economically; it is profoundly, awkwardly intimate. 

Hope is a woman who has lost her fear. ​

This song was written for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten Season and the day we remember the words of God to Adam in Genesis 3:19, and of Qoheleth to his readers in Ecclesiastes 3:20 - 
Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. 

I am moved by how frail we are as humans, how ill-equipped we are to walk through grief and loss, or to feel our biggest feelings. This feels especially true among European Christians, which seems ironic since our faith is founded on a profound loss and the resurrection of hope. Yet we do not know what to do with death and dying, and so we pretend it has not happened; we sweep pain away with meaningless (vain) platitudes and spiritual bypassing. 

But I believe there is great hope and Life in recognizing that the patterns of life and death, the evolution of ash to ash, dust to stardust, is itself a kind of perpetual resurrection. We come from dust and return thereto, and so become the particles of whatever new life rises. We are literally made of stardust, our bodies composed of long-dead, but resurrected cells. 

It is one of the most beautiful truths I've come to understand: 
I am, in this body, eternity.
What I do with my limited time in this body matters.
The seeds I plant and tend will grow and give life -- or cause death -- long after I've returned to dust. 

And so I pray to Mother God:

What to do with death and dying
How to tell the truth when liars lie
How to breathe lament and sighing 
Will you gather up and hold us
Like a mother will you show us
What to do with death and dying 

In your waters baptize us 
Let your death to life remind us
You have hallowed us for life eternal
And in this one may we lay the seeds
for justice and for peace
In your waters baptize us 

Mother

Ash to ash and dust to stardust
From a billion years of life we are us
The resurrection of what came before us
Made of dirt and of divine 
We are great love come to life
In the gardens that we tend
May we grow a medicine 
When consecrated back to earth
May it be another birth from
Ash to ash and dust to stardust

Mother, Mother, Mother

​MOTHER (ash to ash)
(c) 2022 Amy Courts Music