Wine Before Breakfast

So I was asked by my *favourite* professor Brian Walsh to preach at Wine Before Breakfast, an alternative morning Eucharist Service that he coordinates at Wycliffe College every Tuesday morning at 7:22am. It's the most amazingly creative, intelligent, musically gifted, justice-seeking and Jesus-loving community that I've ever been a part of. It's liturgical and ancient-feeling, yet on any given week the band (which is phenomenal) is playing U2, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, or Alexi Murdoch, and sometimes Taize, hymns, and worship choruses. The litanies are all written by members of the community. And there's Eucharist each time, a common cup and loaf passed around as we serve each other. It completely nurtures my soul.

And so naturally I was *terrified* when Brian asked me to preach. It was in December, the day after my oral exam in his Theology of Culture class, and he emailed me to say that he was making a pastoral suggestion - that I should be preaching at Wine Before Breakfast. I was overwhelmed with both fear and joy, mostly because I completely adore this brilliant man, and also because the last time I preached, I well, had to say that I was "sharing" because that church didn't believe that women should preach. Also, everyone who had preached so far at Wine Before Breakfast was uber creative, intelligent, and all getting their PhD's or already had them, and I felt totally inadequate. But, with hesitation, I agreed. And then prayed a lot, and started prepping early. The passage he gave me was Mark 14:1-11, the anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany. It could not have been a more perfect passage for me - there is SO much in this on issues I'm passionate about, like women, poverty, and worship; I could have written a book! But alas, I wrote an 11 minute (exactly) sermon, and here is, for your reading pleasure:


In Memory of Her
Mark 14:1-11 (click here for the text - it will help, trust me!)


On my first day at Wine Before Breakfast back in the fall, I saw a familiar face. It was the beautiful face of my old roommate from my undergrad at Queen’s University, whom you all know as Amy Fisher [a member of our community]. We hadn’t seen nor talked to each other in 6 years, and the first thing that I knew I had to do was apologize to her. You see, back in those days, Amy was on her was to being a Salvation Army Officer, aka pastor, and back then I was under the impression that this was just plain wrong. The multiple churches that I had be raised in, all conservative, mainline Evangelical – the longest denomination that we had belonged to being Baptist – all had the policy that only men could be pastors, elders, and deacons. This was, I was told the natural order of God, and it was all I had ever known, so for me, the fact that men were the leaders was as normal as the fact that only women could give birth – it was their God-given responsibility – it was just the way it was. For, I was told, first God created Adam, than Eve. Men were the head, women were the body. Men were rational, and thus natural decision-makers, and women were emotional and sensual, and thus better suited for nurturing, helping roles. Jesus chose 12 disciples – all male – and thus established an apostolic succession that only included men.

I don’t have time today to address the various problematic hermeneutics that are used in every one of those passages to come to the conclusions that my former churches did. However, the scene that Mark portrays in the reading today clearly shows that Jesus didn’t care much about what was considered to be the “normal” social structure of the day – the patriarchal society in which men occupied all the positions of power and authority, and women were treated as little more that cattle – property to be owned, objects to gain pleasure from, machines to produce an heir. This is not how Yahweh had intended things to be.

For in deliberate and heightened contrast to the (male) scribes and chief priests who were conspiring to have Jesus killed at the beginning of today’s passage, and the (male) disciple Judas who betrayed him for a sack of coins at the end of the passage, Mark tells the story of a woman whose symbolic action would cut to the heart of what it means to be a true disciple of Christ and an heir to his coming Kingdom.

It was Passion week, the beginning of the end. And just as Jesus had finished describing the destruction of the seemingly-permanent Temple – as Andrew Asbil so beautifully explained to us last week, Jesus now seeks to tell his followers that this very thing would also happen to him. He was the temple that was about to be destroyed. Jesus would soon embody what he has been teaching his followers about discipleship all along – self-sacrifice, self-denial, “taking up the cross” – losing your life to find it – all of this would be epitomized in Jesus’ act of surrendering his life at Calvary.

Jesus chose for the Passover and the Feast of the Unleavened Bread to be the scene in which this final conflict will take place – here we are “plunged into the deepest heart of Jewish symbolic life” - these feasts were a reminder of Israel’s liberation from slavery and oppression in Egypt, through the wilderness towards the freedom of the Promised Land. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright notes that Jesus had been acting as the new Moses, doing striking things that were signs of the coming freedom (healing the sick, casting out demons, giving sight to the blind, and elevating the marginalized). And in this story it is no different – Jesus was eating at the home of a leper, once again not caring about the “normal” social barriers of the day.

Enter a woman, Mary of Bethany, who boldly disrupts the gathering of the men, and with one exorbitant act of extravagant, uninhibited worship, broke a jar of fragrant, costly oil and intimately pours in over Jesus’ head.

The disciples and the other men were shocked, for the symbolism would have been clear- everyone in the room would have understood what she was doing. Ched Meyers notes in his commentary on Mark Binding the Strong Man that she was anointing him as King – for this was an illusion to the stories in 1 Samuel 10 and 16, the anointing of Saul and David by Samuel the prophet. In her act of love and adoration, not only was she declaring Jesus King, but also she was assuming the office of a prophet – one who speaks and acts for God. A woman – speaking and acting for God.

The men in the room were indignant – Who does she think she is? And so they reacted with fake piety, pretending to care for the poor. And Jesus rebukes them, telling them to leave her alone, that she has done a beautiful thing to him, and “the poor you will always have with you.” Now, this line has been used by many Christians to justify their apathy towards the continued existence of poverty, but their interpretation is a rather a horrid twist on what he is really saying. Bryant Myers, VP of World Vision, notes in his article "The Poor Always With Us?" that Jesus is mirroring the statement in Deut. 15:4 – “there shall be NO poor among you, for the Lord will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, IF ONLY you will strictly obey the voice of the Lord your God.” But they DIDN’T obey God, which is why there ARE poor among them now. Poverty was NEVER God’s intention, there had always been more than enough resources to go around, if only they had been faithful to their covenantal promises, of Jubilee, not hoarding their daily bread, and other commandments of mercy, hospitality, and justice. But they weren’t faithful, and so Jesus is SHAMING them by saying that there will always be poor because they’ll never fully hold to their covenantal promises. Which is the very reason that Jesus needed to come for them at all, and be anointed by this woman as King.

With her action, she had understood not only that he was King, but that he was a good King –one that would die for the ones he loves– as she was also, as Jesus pointed out - preparing his body for burial.

She understood that he was unlike all the Kings that Israel had ever known – he would not rule by control, manipulation, domination, or brute power – but he was a servant king, a suffering king, a self-sacrificing, loving, compassionate King – and thus, she understood what all of the (male) disciples could not – their Messiah was going to die.

And thus, he was worthy of such an elaborate sacrifice on her behalf – over a year’s wages it cost – it would have likely been kept aside and sold by her family in time of need – it was her savings, her family’s only security in case of a crisis.

In lavishing it on Jesus, she was releasing her grip on her very security – like us withdrawing all the money in our savings account, or liquidating our assets, cashing in our RRSPS, selling the family jewelry, or precious heirlooms that have been passed down through the generations – and giving it all to Jesus in worship, adoration, and declaration of his Kingship.

THIS is the true nature of discipleship. Not arguing over who would be first or who would have the most authority like James and John, and certainly not giving into cowardice for monetary gain like Judas, or for fear of the crowds, like Peter. True discipleship was embodied by this woman in a costly, extravagant, beautiful, fragrant love for Jesus, a love that beckoned her to relinquish all that which made her feel secure. This over-the-top display caused the anger of those in the room. But she didn’t care – her act came out of her deep insight into WHO Jesus truly was, and out of her abundance of love for him. She abandoned all that was so precious to her and poured it over his head, in an act that declared him the true King over Israel, and the true King over her life, and a King that could be TRUSTED because he was GOOD.

My friends, today I am not that woman. In fact, these days I find myself feeling rather uncomfortable, or even embarrassed, when someone seems to know or worship Jesus in a way that I consider to be over-the-top, extravagant, or even slightly emotional. Perhaps it’s the aversion I have to not being labeled an “emotional woman,” or aversion to the theology and politics that tend to come out of some of the churches that solely encourage a personal, intimate relationship with Jesus, and seem to forget that he also came to bring good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, and justice to the oppressed. I feel that these days, I resonate more with the disciples who wanted the woman to just go away, and were rather angry with her exorbitant act of devotion. I tend to want people who talk about or worship Jesus in a way that seems too intimate, too unnecessarily demonstrative to just be quiet, stop it or put those hands down already, you’re embarrassing yourself! Or me.

But I haven’t always been this way. I remember once being a slight resemblance of that woman, back in the days when Amy Fisher was my roommate. For despite all the things that now irk me about those churches I used to go to, one thing they taught me was how to intimately love Jesus and worship him with all of my being, despite what was going on in my life, despite the depression or the confusion or the lack of direction, or lack of faith. To lay all that I am, all of my security and my insecurity, all of my broken SELF, at his feet.

For despite how over-the-top that woman’s actions must have seemed, Jesus was so moved by the beauty of her “embarrassing” extravagance, that he promised that wherever the gospel would be proclaimed in the whole world, what she had done would be told in memory of her. Yet, sadly, she has not been remembered, for the story has been overlooked as merely a nice thing done by an unimportant woman, rather than a powerful act that cut to the very heart of discipleship when all the “important” others missed the point. May I then suggest, my friends, that every time we eat the bread and drink the wine together in memory of him, that we also give our fragrant, lavish, self-abandoning adoration of Jesus - in memory of her.