Our
Gospel for today [John 12: 1-8] tells the story of a party where things went
horribly wrong. In this account, Jesus goes
to the house of Mary and Martha of Bethany, the sisters of Lazarus. Lazarus is the man Jesus raised from the
dead. His sisters have personalities remarkably
different from each other. In the most
well-known story [Luke 10: 38-42], Martha works slavishly in the kitchen while
Mary sits at Jesus’s feet and listens to his teaching. Surprisingly to many of
us, that encounter ends better for Mary than in does for Martha. Jesus says: “Martha, Martha, you are worried
and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen
the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” [Luke 10: 41] But that’s
another sermon.
In
today’s passage, Jesus is attending a dinner at the Bethany house when Mary,
seemingly for no reason at all, takes a jar of expensive ointment and uses it
to anoint his feet. The fragrance of the
perfume fills the room, but the smell does not quiet the attendant
passions. Judas—the zealot who will
ultimately betray Jesus—loses his temper. "Why was this perfume not sold
for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" Just as Jesus
had admonished Martha in the earlier story when she complained that Mary was
not helping her serve the meal, so in this moment Jesus steps in and chastises
Judas: "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the
day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have
me." Like the Smothers Brothers’ mom, Jesus always seems to like Mary
best.
Let’s
try to imagine the dysfunction of this dinner party. Martha is slaving away in the kitchen, her
sister Mary is anointing Jesus’s feet, and Judas is pitching a fit because he
disagrees with Mary’s fiscal priorities. Then the authority figure steps in and
sides with one of them against the other.
This is like the worst Thanksgiving dinner you can imagine. I get a
stomach ache every time I read this story.
Before you know it, the perfect evening has gone all to hell.
So
that’s one bad party. I want to talk now about another one where things went
even worse. It happened not in Bible times but in 1993 in the Park La Brea
section of Los Angeles. Adam Scott, a
27-year old man, had recently graduated from USC Law School and had just begun
work at a downtown law firm. He was at a
party at a friend’s house when the host invited a group of guests into his
bedroom to see his gun collection. The
host wanted to show off his new 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun, and he first
pointed it at another guest, saying it wasn’t loaded. Then he pointed the shotgun at Adam Scott. The gun went off. The young lawyer, hit once
in the head, died within minutes.
According
to witnesses, immediately before his shooting, Adam Scott had said “I don’t
even think I could fire a gun in self-defense.”[“Slayings Put Educator on
Crusade for Gun Control”, Los Angeles
Times, November 21, 1993]
I
didn’t know Adam Scott, but I did and still do know his parents, Jack and
Lacreta, quite well. At the time of his
son’s death, Jack was president of Pasadena City College, and the Scotts were
active, faithful members of All Saints Church in Pasadena, where I served at
the time of Adam’s death. Not long after the shooting, Jack resigned his college
job and committed the rest of his working life to curbing gun violence. He
spent the next 16 years in the California State Assembly and State Senate
working tirelessly in that effort.
The
events of the past year—the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora,
Colorado, the avalanche of daily killings in Chicago and elsewhere—have rightly
galvanized the faith community to speak and act in pastoral response to these
tragedies. People die daily in America
as a result of human malevolence. But today’s Gospel and the story of Adam
Scott point us toward another reality: people die not only because of evil
intentions. People die because we are
not always in control of our own behavior.
Despite our best efforts, we are always in danger of finding ourselves
at an event where things suddenly and tragically go wrong.
None of us is in
control of the actions of others. None
of us is entirely in control of our own actions. The problem is what our prayer
book calls “the unruly wills and affections of sinners”, and our prayer for
today asks that God not only bring order to that seemingly uncontrollable part
of us; it also pleads that God grant us grace to love what God commands and
desire what God promises.
I don’t know about
you, but I recognize myself in that prayer.
My wills and affections are unruly.
And though I may strive to obey God’s commands, I don’t always love them. And if that’s true for me, it’s probably true
for all of us. We’re like the guests at
the Bethany dinner with Jesus: we’re out
of control, selfish, and prone to make mistakes. In the words of the late Rodney King, “Can we
all just get along?”
Here
at Washington National Cathedral we have spent the last several days observing a
Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath Weekend.
We are doing this in collaboration with our partner organization, Faiths
United to Prevent Gun Violence and with over 200 faith communities across
America. Since Thursday night, we have
gathered to pray, reflect, listen, learn, and commit ourselves to action that
will help bring this epidemic to an end.
Taken
together, today’s Gospel and the story of Adam Scott sketch the outlines of gun
violence as a religious problem. Like
all violence, gun violence will plague us as long as the wills and affections
of sinners continue to be unruly. Mary and Martha and Judas turn a dinner with
Jesus into a family argument. A young
man goes to a party and ends up dead. These
things don’t happen only because of human ill-will. They happen because none of
us is, finally, in control of ourselves.
Our wills and affections are unruly.
We neither love what God commands nor desire what God promises. That is the human condition: we may think we’re in charge, but when we’re
honest with ourselves we know that much of the time we’re out of control both
personally and socially. In the
Christian tradition, we call that condition “sin”, and we give over the season
of Lent to lamenting it, examining it and working together to find new ways to
live with it even as we move, with Jesus, into God’s future.
Gun violence will
continue to be a religious problem as long as people like you and me are
sinners. When we say that we’re sinners,
we do not say that in a negative or judgmental way. We say it in recognition of the way things are.
I don’t always know what’s best for myself.
I want what I want, often regardless of the consequences. My judgment is limited and finite and
partial. Real spiritual and psychological health begins
with an acknowledgement of my situation. “All we like sheep have gone astray.”[Isaiah
53:6] That’s what the Bible means when it calls us sinners: not that we’re bad, merely that we’re
cosmically accident-prone. God doesn’t
love us in spite of our sinfulness. God
loves us in full knowledge of who we are and of what we are capable.
When Martha and Judas complain about Mary’s
contemplative attention to Jesus, they are not being evil, merely
mistaken. We need to work together to
lessen the occurrence of gun deaths not because people are evil but because
we’re neither as smart nor invulnerable as we like to think ourselves. We need each other to make our way through
life. That’s what society, that’s what
the church, is all about. And that's why we at Washington National Cathedral
are in this gun violence work for the long haul. We won't give up until our
streets and our schools and our children are safe. We owe at least that much to
our children, our neighbors, ourselves.
As perfect as we try to make them, our dinners,
our parties, all our efforts will always contain within them the possibility of
going horribly wrong. At first, that may sound like bad news. But there is good news, too. As dysfunctional
as our gatherings may be Jesus will still always manage to come to them. We may go astray, but we are not abandoned in
our confusion, our sinfulness, our vulnerability. Jesus is here among us now as we gather at
his table. He calls us not only to love
and forgive and accept ourselves and each other. He calls us also to help him make a world
where all God’s precious children will be safe from violence in all its
forms. All we like sheep have gone
astray, are going astray, will continue to go astray. But we do have a shepherd
in Jesus, and for that one’s loving gracious care for each and all of us we gather
at his table to give thanks. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment