Invitation to Transforming Mission

 Friends, we’re now in the second to last week of this sermon series I put together for the season of Lent, based on “Invitations of Jesus” by pastor and author Trevor Hudson. This week’s “invitation” that Hudson asks us to consider is Jesus inviting us to share in mission. 

Oof. Mission is one of those Church Words that makes me feel bad, because I always feel like no matter how I’m working at it, I’m doing it wrong. It’s also one of those Church Words that fills me, your pastor, with cold dread because I think “oh no, here come the charge conference forms.” But I’ll say more about that in a minute. 

Most of this is because of my own perspective. We don’t join Jesus in his mission by working hard at it. We get there by thinking and feeling like Jesus. Then it comes naturally. When I started ruminating on this, I was thinking of the Casting Crowns song “Jesus, Friend of Sinners”:

Jesus, friend of sinners, we have strayed so far away

We cut down people in Your name

But the sword was never ours to swing

Jesus, friend of sinners

The truth's become so hard to see

The world is on their way to You

But they're trippin' over me

Always lookin' around, but never lookin' up

I'm so double minded

A plank eyed saint with dirty hands

And a heart divided

Following the mission of Jesus, concisely put, means being a friend to both sinners and saints, and realizing that on any given day, we’re both. 

But the word “mission” rarely sounds so straight forward in our church circles. No way you could describe the mission of the Church in so few words. And then a church just like this one will reach its first and biggest stumbling block–our own selves–and we’ll get in our own way with all the usual culprits: committees, meetings, paperwork, and deadlines. And that’s not all our fault, we can blame the Powers that Be for some of that. But we tend to think that engaging in the mission of Jesus means grabbing half a dozen lay leaders and your pastor and hiding away in long meetings where we cultivate a brand new mission statement, one that will set us all on The Right Path, followed by a value statement, a vision statement, and a welcoming statement. Years of work will go into crafting all of that so that we can put some writing on the front of our bulletins that most folks won’t read, and we’ll feel no closer to the mark Jesus was pointing to, and we’ll be so confused as to why. Thomas Rainer and Eric Geiger unpack that confusion in a book titled Simple Church, and make people like me feel much better. Among the arguments they make in that work is that churches don’t need all that clutter to follow Jesus. In fact, when we busy ourselves up with that stuff, we set up big hurdles between ourselves and Jesus. In fact, they argue that a church needn’t have its own mission statement at all, Matthew 25: 35-36 is all the mission statement we’ll ever need. If anything, what we need to do, if we want to become a more mission-centric church, is do some inward searching, and figure out what holds us back from feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the sick and the imprisoned.

And that brings us to this morning’s lectionary-appointed Gospel passage, from John. Jesus is back at the home of siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. It’s really, really striking whenever we see Jesus talk to anyone but his disciples more than once, because, of all the hordes of people that crossed his path, many of them were never named, and very few got a second mention. By contrast, we have three stories of Jesus hanging out with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. He built such a strong bond with them after he gently guided Martha toward taking a moment to rest from her chores that he came back to their house and cried at Lazarus’s grave when he died. Then, because he’s Jesus and this is the Bible, he resurrected the man. I mean, after all that he really needed to keep in touch, so in this story he’s back, having dinner with the three people who may have been his closest friends aside from the disciples. 

This family has grown closer and closer to balance with every minute they’ve spent with Jesus, and they set excellent examples for us on how to get through this life while loving Jesus. Lesson One: how to share living quarters with your adult siblings without the situation turning into an episode of Jerry Springer. Y’all, I love my sisters very much, and you’ve spent quite a bit of time with one of them. I don’t want to live with them. Bert and Ernie have nothing on the patience these three have for one another. They teach us about sharing the load of our work, about learning from one another's strengths and weaknesses, about the stages of grief–and, in this story, how to welcome your best friend to dinner.

As we find our friends, Martha is serving food, but without stressing herself out with the minutiae. Mary is still at Jesus’ feet like she was when we first met her, but this time, she’s doing as much work as her sister. She’s found the biggest and most expensive bottle of Chanel No. 5. Maybe they were having a sale at Macy’s? And she’s on her hands and knees, cracking that bottle open and dumping it all over Jesus’ feet. Then, so he doesn’t turn the floor around him into a slip n slide, she wipes his feet dry with her hair. For the benefit of the folks here who may never have had long enough hair to do anything that Mary’s doing: that stuff’s never coming out. Especially in a society where you don’t bathe often, and high quality shampoos don’t exist. Mary and Jesus are sharing in a deep experience of mutual anointing that will stay in this house and in Mary’s hair for a very long time, and that will stay with Jesus until he dies. It’s a deeply holy, sacrificial moment no one has any right to step on.

Judas interrupts, of course, which is unsurprising considering how his story goes. “Ahem, don’t you think we should give that money to the poor instead?” I’m grateful that John, our evangelist, took a moment to break that criticism down, because otherwise it sounds like Judas is trying to uphold Matthew 25, and therefore, that his heart is in the right place. Judas doesn’t care about the poor. He dips his sticky fingers in the community purse to supplement his Judas Goes to Aruba fund. And, we may not like it, but we learn as much from Judas as we do from all of the other characters. Maybe more.

Anxiety about money halts mission work. Don’t let it.

A person who wants to get in the way of Jesus’ mission will stoke anxiety about money.

A person with a pure heart, like Mary’s, will accept a very loving gift with humility and gratitude.

Sometimes it’s ok to go overboard when the goal is right.

Mary pinched all her pennies together, and gave up ever again having normal smelling hair, so she could join her heart with Jesus’ in this moment. She will surely go on from this moment and love the people Jesus loves. She’s doing the right thing. She’s using her last opportunity to connect with Jesus. She’ll have the rest of her life to serve the poor, and a woman who will wipe feet with her hair will serve the poor quite nobly.

My guess is that what stands in our way of the mission of Jesus is some 21st Century version of the exact dynamics we saw in this story. We’re anxious about money, or we’re swayed by others who are anxious about money. We don’t know when it’s time to save up our resources, and when it’s time to dump them right out. We’re anxious to be as vulnerable as Mary and Martha, giving up our time, our homes, and our treasures. And despite knowing better, we tend to be more comfortable in the company of the greedy Judases, because we know them, than in the company of the poor, the hungry, the sick, the prisoner, and the stranger, because we don’t know them well.

But we’ll always have the poor among us, at least as long as capitalism lives. And every time we connect, even in small ways, we stretch out the heart of Jesus to another.

May it be so.

Amen.