“I want to know Christ:” Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent (April 6, 2025)
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent (April 6, 2025) at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day.
Listen:
Like what you hear? You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Transcript
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
There's a technique that I learned I don't even know when, for grounding myself when I'm feeling anxious. Does anyone here ever feel like a teeny, tiny bit anxious? Oh, good. Okay. All right. So maybe you too have heard of this technique. It's the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 technique. Okay? So when my thoughts are racing or my heart is racing and I've just kind of levitated right out of my body and into the future, you start by saying, alright, what are five things that I can see? By the way, church is wonderful for this. Being in a church is wonderful for this. Did you know that St. James is open during daylight hours all the time? So you can come here, you can do this practice, but you can do it anywhere. Five things that I can see. And our worship does all of this for us. So the stained glass, the colors and the sunlight coming through it, the faces of the people around me, the intricate woodwork in the ceiling, the light on the wall, the rich red of this carpet.
And then I do four. All right? Four things that I can touch, four things that I can touch so I can touch. I can feel my body sitting on the cushion in the pew. I can touch the woodwork of the pew. I can feel the fabric of my garments. I can feel my feet on the ground. Three is three things I can hear. So I hear the creaking of the wood. I hear the sound of the cars on the wet road driving by. I hear that tiny little buzz that the speaker system makes. When I get to two, I'm thinking of two things I can smell. This one gets a little trickier.
I can smell the carpet powder that our sexton uses to clean the carpet in here. I can smell that church smell like the old wood and the old books and the old walls. And taste. Maybe I taste the coffee I had at breakfast just a few minutes ago. In my case, I always taste the cough drop that I happen to have in my mouth. And by the time I've done this, whatever it was that was carrying me away out of my body into the future or to rehash the past, those are my two favorite things to do. At least for a moment, I've received some relief for it.
And I've come to know that this is actually a form of prayer because after all, it's God who gave you life, who gave you this body in which you live and in which you engage those five senses, right? It's God who created and sustains and loves everything that I can hear and see and touch and smell and taste. And it's God who has given me this moment and wants to meet me here. It's God who has given you this moment, all of it, and wants to meet you here. So to be in our bodies, to inhabit, to enjoy, to delight in our senses and to be here is a prayer, and it's a gift and it's so easy to miss.
But this gospel reading today really brings it home. It's so sensual. Think about this scene, right? You can see and hear, you can especially smell it, right? There's a feast. There's this dinner, and Jesus is with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Lazarus whom he raised from the dead. With Martha who said, yes, Lord, I believe you are the son of God, the one who is coming into the world. With Mary, who ran up to Jesus and said, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And he's sitting with all of them with this man who has come back to life again and with his disciples.
And nobody seems to know it's just six days before Passover. Just like for us, we're in the last days before Holy Week, just the final stretch of Lent. We are so close and we've followed Jesus all this way, but we know what the Passover means for Jesus, right? He knows. He knows why he's in Jerusalem. He knows why he's headed there. He knows what it is that he has to do. But the disciples all along, every time he tries to tell them what it means for him to be the Messiah, they're like, oh Lord, that will never happen to you. God forbid it.
And so even though they've been with him all along, they aren't really fully with him. They don't fully, they have not fully accepted and embraced. They're not willing to be with him where he is at, which is preparing himself for his death, for his burial. But Mary is, she's with him. She takes this perfume, this burial perfume, which would've been like a year's salary, and she doesn't like if someone gives me a really nice tub of nice smelling lotion, I'll dab it out a little at a time. I don't use it. I save it for a nice day. Mary takes the whole thing, cracks it open, pours it all over Jesus.
And John says, the scent fills the whole house. So we're there in that scene, right? Our senses can take this all in; the smell, the sight of Mary using her hair to wipe this burial perfume, the touch of her hands on his feet, the sound of everyone in the room silent because they kind of can't believe what they are seeing. But Mary is present. Now Judas says, wait a minute, that's worth 300 denari. What is up with this waste? This prodigious, this prodigal. She shouldn't be wasting this all. She should have sold that and given the money to the poor. And I kind wish that John, St. John, he loves to put these little asides in. He likes to explain why. Somebody said what they said. He said, well, he was stealing from the purse. That's why he wanted the money. Okay, maybe, I don't know, but maybe he also speaks for all of us wondering, my God, there is so much work to be done.
There's so much need. There's so many ministries and services out there that we ought to be attending to. Like how dare you waste time enjoying the moment. How dare you spend money? How dare you be profligate and generous giving to someone? Everything you have. Ought she to have sold this and given it to the poor? And Jesus says, leave her alone because you don't always have me with you.
There's a translation that says where it translates him as saying, you people will always have the poor with you, which I take to mean it kind of opened my eyes up. He's saying, Judas, if you're going to be so ungenerous in this moment, this is exactly why there is poverty among you. It's the inability to be generous and to be kind and to enjoy and to be present. Maybe that creates the kind of world where so many people inside of it suffer. But that aside, he says, leave her alone. And one of you wonderful people this week made this beautiful connection another time that Jesus tells people to leave Mary alone because we all know about Mary and Martha, right? Remember the time that they're having Jesus over for dinner and Martha is doing all the laundry and all the dishes, and she's making the food. And what is Mary doing? Where is Mary?
She's at Jesus' feet. See the connection? There she is sitting at Jesus' feet. And what is she doing? She's listening to him. She's with him. And Martha says, oh, for heaven's sake, don't you see all the need? There's so much work to do. There's so much need. There's so much to be done. There's so many things to stand up for. What is she doing just sitting there? Jesus says, leave her alone. She's chosen the better part, Mary has chosen to be with Jesus. She has chosen to be with Jesus. She opens for us what St. Paul is saying when he says, I want to know Christ.
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and I will share in his suffering and in a death like His. If by it, I may come to know the reality of new life. I want to know him. And how do we know someone? We slow down and we actually spend time with them. And this is the model that Mary gives to us in these last days, these last days. As we prepare for Jesus’ burial, Mary and Jesus are saying to us, there is so much to do, so much to worry about, so many ministries to which we are called, so many acts of service that are needed. So many people reaching out their hands in need and all of that is good. All of that is part of our call. And we are not able to answer the call to love and to serve one another, not fully if we're not making time to know Christ, to be with him, to be quiet with him, to enjoy him, to be slow just for these moments. Because it is so easy to run from one service, one active ministry, one task to the next. But Jesus says, you will not always have me with you, not if you're not here now, because where I am is here, and now where I can be found is here and now. Even the acts of service that we do, the tasks that we perform for one another for our neighbors, they're worthwhile because they have brought us into relationship with one another.
God gave us the tasks, the work to do so that we could be in a relationship, so that we could know one another. And so that in knowing one another, we would know Christ. And in knowing Christ, we would know what life is really for. We would know the power of the resurrection. So we're always called to take that time to slow down in whatever it is that we're called to do, to make sure. Here I am, doing this task, but it's the person, the people before me, that's why I'm really here. It's to see the face of Christ in everyone that I meet, and that everyone I meet would see the face of Christ in me, and that God would give us a blessing in this. As we move toward Holy Week, we want to know Christ. It's out of that knowing and that loving and that enjoying of him that everything we do flows. It's what nourishes everything we do.
So I invite you and I pledge to do the same in these last days, to return to that practice that you took up at the beginning of Lent, to do it slowly with attention and with great love, and to keep this in your mind, I want to know Christ, to be with him, to love him, and in him to love the world he loves. That is why I am here, rooted and grounded in love. Amen.