EXTRAVAGANCE

March 16, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

"Then Mary took a whole pint of a very expensive perfume made of pure

nard, poured it on Jesus' feet,... Judas Iscariot...said, 'Why wasn't
this perfume sold for three hundred dollars and the money given to the
poor?!" --John 12:3-5 (TEV)

Scripture
John 12:1-8

May I pose a personal and potentially embarrassing question? Have
you ever been so overcome with love that you threw your normal reserve
and prudence to the wind and did something foolishly extravagant?

Have you ever been so moved by passion for a cause that you opened
your checkbook and gave away money you couldn't afford to give away?
If you have not, it's too bad, because there is a sense in which you
have not loved fully until you have been made to feel a little
foolish. Which means that surely all of us have, on occasion at
least, bought a dozen roses when one would have been sufficient; or
written a silly love-note that still makes us blush to recall it even
though it was in fifth grade; or even tried our hand at poetry; or
allowed the emotion to well up in us and tears to come at the pure
passionate beauty of a piece of music; or shouted "I love you God" in
a night sky full of stars, or prayed it or wrote it in a diary; or
even in a cocktail party conversation turning suddenly racist felt
ourselves edging out over the border of the socially accepted
stereotypes and heard our own voice saying a word about justice and
equality and human rights of all things because of the love for God
and all his children which burns deeply in your heart.

Though it may have been a very long time ago, and though it is
far too embarrassing to discuss publically, I think we do know what it
means to be a fool for love and thus we do know this woman who is so
foolishly extravagant.

It is a fascinating and embarrassingly intimate incident. One
almost wants to look the other way while it is happening. It is
important enough that all four Gospel accounts include it. The scene
is set for this particular incident earlier, at a high-level political
conference in the Jerusalem palace of Ciaphas, the high priest, a
puppet ecclisastic actually. The year is 33 A.D., springtime, near
Passover. "Jesus must go" the movers and shakers decide. "Enough is
enough. He comes to our city, insults us, breaks the law and seems to
flaunt it, causes trouble in the Temple, worse yet the people love it.
They're even saying he raised a man from the dead. He must go.
Regretable, but necessary, obviously."

With that terrible dye cast the scene shifts to Bethany, a
Suburb of Jerusalem, where he is staying with his dear friends, Mary,
Martha, Lazarus. It's evening, meal time, and Martha is serving. The
men - Jesus, his good friend Lazarus, some disciples and other friends,
are sitting on the dirt floor, cross-legged, eating supper out of a
common bowl, probably dipping chunks of bread into oil. It's good and
pleasant to eat together and they're laughing, I think reminiscing a
bit - about the time he walked into the Temple and the look on the
Pharisees' faces when he turned the tables over and the pigeons got
loose and the fat salesman tripped over the lambs and fell into the
next booth where the calves were. That was some day! Without a word
she penetrates that clubroom and walks to where Jesus is sitting, and
looks at him intensely, knowing that this festivity is prelude to
tragedy, and catching him extended, dipping his bread in the olive
oil, pours out on him - his head and feet - the expensive perfume in
the alabaster jar she had been treasuring for years, given to her by
her mother when she became a woman.

She could not have acted more inappropriately. But then she did the
unthinkable. She loosed her hair publicaily and wiped his feet. The
moment, frozen in time, is powerful. Shocking, provocative, awkward, he
Sat paralyzed by this peculiar honor, rich aromatic perfume running down
his neck, soaking into his shirt, and she, kneeling at his feet - so
foolishly extravagant, and her vulnerability is punctuated by the gasp from
the other side of the circle. "What a shameful thing to do. Who does she
think she is, coming in here like that? What an appalling waste!" If she
had just given that to us, we could have sold it and fed a lot of hungry
people."

It is grossly inappropriate to use what he said next as a position
paper on poverty. "The poor you always have with you, but you do not
always have me." Jesus spent most of his time with poor people. He was
one of them. He was their advocate. At least part of what is going on in
the New Testament is the perennial conflict between the powerful and the
powerless, the haves and the have nots, the privileged and the
underprivileged. "The common people heard him gladly." Translates that
"poor people, powerless people." He said what he said about them here to
protect Mary, this woman, in her foolish extravagance. He even tried black
comedy. Like a critically ill person who reaches out in love to reduce the
awkwardness of the visitors in the hospital by joking about the funeral,
Jesus tried a joke about her anointing him for burial, because the other
thing people get anointed for in Israel is coronation.

It's a vulnerable feeling to have acted foolishly for love, like
a three-year old bringing the prize begonia, plucked and clutched
tightly in his hand to his mother as an act of love. It's hard to he
the recipient of love sometimes. Jesus, the lover, loves this woman,
protects and honors the woman, by ignoring all that is prudent and
Sensible and economically viable. "Leave her alone" he tells her
detractors. In other versions of the story he says: "What she has
done is beautiful. She will be remembered forever."

He may have overstated that a bit. She is, in point of fact,
not one of the personalities we remember much, nor is this incident

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one of the more popular stories in the tradition. I think the reason
is that what she did is peculiar and unlikely and extravagant. We
don't do things like that and the prudent pragmatist in each of us can
hear our own voice expressing the scandal about this shameful
wastfefulness. We would have said something like that.

The late Paul Tillich wrote a brief homily on this incident
that is simple and exquisite. Professor Tillich wrote:

"The history of humankind is the history of men and women who
wasted themselves and were not afraid to do so. They did not fear the
waste of themselves... in the service of a new creation. They were
justified, for they wasted all this out of the fullness of their
hearts." [The New Being, pp. 47-48]

Since January 28 we have had to deal, without interuption, with
the tragedy and waste of the Challenger disaster, and the loss, in
full blosom, of those seven astronauts. I found Tillich's words
consoling and helpful. "The history of humankind is the history of
men and women who wasted themselves — out of the fullness of their
hearts."

Tillich went on to lament that we have neglected the "grace of
wasteful self-surrender." He asked, "Are we not in danger of a
religious and moral utilitaranism which asks for a reasonable purpose
- the same questions as the disciples in Bethany? There is no
creativity, divine or human, without the holy waste which comes out of
the creative abundance of the heart."

We are inclined, I believe, to be - as Professor Tillich
suggested - religious and moral utilitarians.

We are inclined to define value in terms of funcion. What is
valuable is what functions efficiently, is productive, effective. One
of the great debates of our civilization has to do with the value of a
liberal arts education, precisely because it doesn't train people to
be productive: to make things. In fact, art is not productively
functional. Money spent on form could be spent on efficient function.
But there is human value to beauty which transcends even the
immediacies of hunger and every artist knows that, thank God. If they
didn't there would be no art. If function defines value, VanGogh
would not have been so shamelessly extravagant.

Money spent to keep the church beautiful in the city could be
buying food. But there is a hunger assumed and addressed by beauty
and our love for it that may illuminate - not replace - but illuminate
and energize our commitment to deal with human need. Episcopal Bishop
John Shelby Spong, of Newark, New Jersey, wrote an excellent article
in the Christian Century on urban church which is very helpful.

Bishop Spong observes:

“Urban life is not beautiful. Garbage collection is generally poor.
Trash litters the streets. Many homes are in poor repair, and some are
abandoned bits of dilapidation. Many city people are so depressed that

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they deliberately fill their lives with ugliness, as an unconscious
commentary on the way they feel valued by others. Consequently, it is
especially important that city churches be places of beauty... Money spent
to beautify urban houses of worship is not wasted, for beauty is a gift.
Urban church structures need to shine as centers of beauty, as symbols of

hope, as signs of the Kingdom. They need to be living parables of God's
caring."

Our God is a God of justice, a God who hears the cries of the
poor, who favors the underdogs, and who clearly holds us responsible
for one another. The issue which will command the future and with
which those of us in the First World, the privileged world, the rich
world, must come to terms is the issue of economic justice and how to
stop the widening gap between the rich and poor and to begin to close
it. There is no issue, save nuclear proliferation, which is more
fundamental to the future existence of our society, or even the world.
It is a misreading of the text and a terrible misreading of the entire
Biblical witness to conclude that proverty is anything but the major
item on the agenda.

That having been said, may I submit that economic justice and
extravagant love are not mutually exclusive? In fact, somewhere in
the Good News there is an invitation to love and to be loved so much
that we know what it means to be carried away, and to love so
thoroughly we are willing to be foolishly extravagant.

There is a healthy tension in the Bible between a commitment to
justice and an appreciation of beauty: between simplicity and
extravagance. There is a more immediate tension between a Lord who
Said so simply one time, “Where your treasure is, there your heart
will be also," and a culture which responds: "When E. F. Hutton
Speaks, everybody listens." It is tension between treasures of the
heart and treasures in the bank.

God's word comes in disguise sometimes. I find it regularly so
in those delightful Wall Street Journal features which simply hold up
for investigative inspection, a slice of contemporary American life.
Some time.ago an article appeared on "Yuppie Love - Detroit Auto
Makers Try to Increase Sales To Young Professionals." Yuppies, “young
urban professionals," are having an enormous impact on politics and
commerce and are already acknowledged as our culture's next "taste
makers." Yuppies are defined variously as "people who listen to
National Public Radio while jogging," or typically, "a childless
couple, mid-30's, who live in a condo, work hard, do aerobic
exercises, canoe in the wilderness and drive a $25,000 Saab." "We
are," one of them told the reporter, "very into value."

Market researchers in the steel and glass towers of Detroit now
know that Yuppies and all of us influenced by that image "prefer cars
that befit their new affluence, reflect their desire to be socially
responsible and don't remind them of their parents." Auto makers have
invested more than one billion dollars in the Yuppie cars. The
Journal's moral and subtly sermonic conclusion was in this
observation...

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"Yuppies' fondness for gadgets has revived the turbo charger
industry and given rise to the $3,000 car radio. Affixed to a turbo-
charged Saab seen recently in Detroit was a bumper sticker that read,
'de Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins."

Well if we ever got around to understanding and remembering what
this extravagant woman did for Jesus one time, we might be saved by a
truth deeper than that bumper sticker. Jesus taught that the most
love wins; that is, the most grace, and giving, and extravagance, and .
occasional foolishness.

The church as institution, must calculate and evaluate and
allocate its precious resources. But somewhere in the grim landscape
of ecclesastical stewardship schemes there ought to be an extravagant
beautiful flower blooming. One of the important tasks of the church
in the city is to show that everything does not have to be efficient:
that some time and some space can be wasted - or used extravagantly.
Somewhere in our personal stewardship we ought to be urging one
another, not to increase our giving at least by the increase in the
cost of living index, which is so prudent and calculated, but to give
sometimes on the basis of the full hearted, extravagance of Jesus’
friend, Mary. Somewhere in our exercise of responsibility for the
institution there has to be a deep, emotionally authentic, passionate
love. Douglas John Hall says that without it, "without deep and
profound love for the world for which God offered up the only begotten
Son, no amount of beating the drum for God and for money will make the
least difference." [The Steward: a Biblical Symbol Come of Age, p.58]

The danger to the modern American church, I would submit, is not
from irresponsible extravagance so much as the dullness and dryness
that conservative prudence often becomes. Frederick Buechner suggests
that: ‘The church is destroyed by people who are afraid to be human,
brave and loving, and to take chances," and that the church lives when
"for Christ's sake we are willing to look like fools: when we
understand that without simplicity and passion and outlandishness no
church is worth ten cents." [A Room Called Remember, p.125]

That's true about churches. And it is true about individuals.
We know now that irreparable damage may be done to an infant who
receives no love, who is deprived of the touch of a loving parent. One
of the most tangible acts of life-giving service there is happens
when volunteers from this church go to Cook County Hospital and simply
hold the babies who have no one to give them the love they desparately
need. We know that human beings do not do well - if they are not
loved - early on. We do no better if we are deprived of the
opportunity to love - later. That's an intriguing thought. I think
we know it intuitively. We need to love in order to be healthy.
Professor Tillich brought that into focus for me. "People are sick,"
he said, "not only because they have not received love, but also
because they are not allowed to give love, to waste themselves. Do
not suppress in yourselves or others the abundant heart, the waste of
self-surrender, the Spirit who trespasses all reason. Do not greedily
preserve your time and your strength for what is useful and

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reasonable." [p. 48]

We are missing something important, something integral to our
humanity if we are not loving extravagantly. We are missing something
glorious if we are spending our time - our lives - waiting for someone
to love us, or if ours is the calculated, brokerage approach of loving
only in response to love received. We're missing something important
if we have forgotten how to say "I love you" to one another, to show
our affection, to buy the extravagant gifts, to write poems or to make
beautiful but foolish gestures. We're missing part of God's wonderful
gift if our careful prudence keeps us from caring profoundly, or if our

cultivated reserve keeps us from expressing the depth of love that is
in our hearts.

The impulse, built into creation by a God whose very being is
love, is to live thoroughly by loving, extravagantly.

This is the Fifth Sunday in Lent. It used to be called Passion
Sunday. The cross on which Jesus died now looms directly ahead in
clear focus. Soon there will be no turning back. Soon he will decide
that the meaning of his life is to love without reservation, without
cautious prudence. Soon he will decide that the only way you and I
will learn to be human by loving, is to witness extravagant love
giving away even life itself.

The cross of Jesus Christ is God's extravagant love. The death
of Jesus is, at least, foolish extravagance. It is also an invitation
to a fullness of life which is free to show love. The Gospel of Jesus
Christ on Passion Sunday is an invitation to tears of joy at God's
love for us, and a passion for the life of the world in God's love.
it is an invitation to music and laughter and the grace on occasion to
be so overwhelmed that - even we risk becoming foolishly extravagant -
for the love of Christ.

The old hymn catches the extravagance...

"Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small:
Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my ali."

Praise be to you, Lord God for the extravagant gife of life, for
an abundant world, for joy and laughter and the goodness of human
Love,

Praise be to you for the impulse to love, for the emptiness
inside us when we keep our love under wraps, in the bank,
unexpressed...

Praise be to you, Lord God, for your extravagance, the foolish
extravagance of Jesus on the cross. Amen.

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