“Jars,” by Ronda Broatch.
For many years after my mother’s death, the smell of lilies reminded me of a funeral home on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. We all went there in late June of 1996 to see my mother. In my memory, this Minnesota funeral home really went for it on the funeral flowers, marking coffins at head and foot with giant arrangements of lilies and gladiolus.
But lilies go further back for me. They reliably remind me of Easter morning. And the feeling associated with my childhood Easter mornings, and with all those lilies, is excitement. I caught the magic back then: my church knew how to do Easter, and those early years of following the drama of Holy Week were my earliest formation for the vocation I have now. Lilies were always there.
(Sidebar about lilies: my husband Andrew isn’t wild about them as an Easter flower. “But they’re the Easter Day flower!” I once protested. “So they are,” I remember him saying, “but … I don’t know. They’re fine, I guess. The Stargazer lilies are pretty. But they have to be forced to blossom that early in the spring,” he said. “Well why would they do that?” I asked. “Why would they force them to be the Easter flower?” He said, “You tell me,” reminding me in three words that I’m the crazy church guy, not him.)
This year at Grace Church, I hope we have lilies. (No pressure, Team Flower! You should do whatever you like, truly!) But I do hope we have them. (Okay, that’s a little pressure.) Tradition here is to create an Easter Garden, over there, around the Walker Hall fireplace, on Maundy Thursday. Folks come in shifts from Thursday after the stripping of the altar until Friday noon, keeping watch at the Altar of Repose. This is an ancient practice: as Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane asked his followers to stay awake with him in his agony, some of the faithful down the ages have stayed awake on Thursday night in the Easter garden, keeping watch with the bread and wine, the outward and visible signs of the inward, spiritual presence of Christ among us. My hope is that as they keep watch, they will be ravished by the fragrance of the lilies.
We Christians perfume death. Lilies, incense, or an expensive jar of pure nard: we respond to death with powerful, intoxicating fragrance. This (like most of our practices) is grounded in something practical: death does not smell nice. (And neither do farmers in the medieval era who troop into church for mass: incense historically has not only been a symbol of prayer.) But our funeral homes are pungent with floral smells even when we view embalmed bodies, and our loved ones’ ashes are benign. What’s more, when Mary anoints Jesus today with her priceless balm, Jesus is still very much alive.
And so, in turn, we Christians perfume life, too. On Holy Saturday, Team Flower will move the Easter garden from Walker Hall to around this altar, where we will sing songs of thanksgiving for the Resurrection of Christ, and we will add additional prayers of thanksgiving for the newly baptized (and wildly alive) foursome who have been signs of life and hope for us throughout this Lent. Fragrant flowers and fragrant chrism oil will gladden that feast.
So it might be better to say it this way: we Christians perfume the border of death and life. We cultivate powerful fragrances from the earth, using flowers and tree resin, to raise our prayers, to titillate our senses, to heighten our awareness, to pull ourselves up to an alert and standing position so that we might contemplate properly this awful yet holy border where life submits to death, only to rise up again.
Death and life are alike in a few ways. One of those ways is the fact that life also doesn’t always smell nice. We are sometimes smelly. Our feet can stink, especially centuries ago when muddy roads trodden by beasts of burden made feet especially fetid. We may like to imagine that Jesus’s feet smelled sweet, but if we say he was “like us in every way,” well, then he sometimes stank, too. Imagine, then, the astonishment caused by Mary, who does this lavish, extravagant thing, pouring ointment over those feet and “wiping them with her hair”! Filthy feet are glorified — in Jesus but also in Mary, the human person rises gloriously from the dung and the dirt, gleaming with fragrant oil.
It can be easy to envy Mary’s intimacy, and also her courage, her un-self-conscious desire, her willingness to commune with God in a sensual — and yes, even sexual — act of adoration. I could imagine feeling left out or unimportant if I were merely a bystander. All four evangelists close the door firmly on Judas Iscariot, but I feel for him: following Jesus all this time, he is missing out on the intimacy, even as he is scandalized by the unseemly profligacy of it. I can see my lesser self in his closed-minded complaint. Is he a thief? Maybe. But like many thieves he steals out of an anxious sense of existential need. I want to be a pastor for him.
But maybe we envy Jesus, too, the recipient of this holy pedicure, the one who enjoys this vivid, perfumed gesture of embrace, of compassion, of oneness. Imagine being so beautifully loved, with breathtaking intimacy! But let’s not envy him too quickly: remember, we Christians perfume the border of life and death, as Jesus readily testifies: this anointing is about his looming death. “She bought the [perfume] so that she might keep it for the day of my burial,” he said.
He is about to die. And Lazarus, who just recently had been dead himself, is sitting right there at the table, in the house so full of fragrance.
So, Death looms. Death: one of the two Powers of the evil one, Sin’s twin. Death haunts the human spirit. If we are not careful, we may assume that because we know so well the border of life and death, and because death is so terrible, life and death are equals. That is all too easy to believe. I have seen death. Many of you have, too. It is fearsome. It breaks my heart.
Death stinks.
But even though life can be smelly (and fearsome, and heartbreaking), the Good News we proclaim in Christ Jesus is that life rises up so high that death is puny by comparison. Mary’s burial perfume filled the house with its fragrance, in the presence of the living Jesus. And the flowers we arrange around the remains of our beloved dead aren’t a hundredth as powerful as their living legacies. The witnesses of their lives redound today, around and within us. The dead are alive in the presence of God, alive and conscious, and they also are gathered with us here in that great cloud of witnesses that draws near whenever we break bread at this Table.
Life rises up.
War is hell, as the saying goes, but the courage and skill of the Ukrainians has inspired the world, Russian forces are retreating from around Kyiv, and their leaders are being held accountable for acts of atrocity. There is cause for authentic hope.
The Covid-19 virus has killed millions, but we have consistently seen throughout that catastrophe the majesty of the human spirit in the work of healthcare workers, public-health officials, and scientists. There is cause for authentic hope.
Our planet’s climate is in peril, but Greta Thunberg is a 19-year-old Swedish activist who inspires millions to take up the cause, and Bill McKibben is a Christian 61-year-old journalist who motivates people of faith around the globe to advocate for climate justice. They are not jaded; they have not given up; they know that life rises up. There is cause for authentic hope.
Author Heather McGhee hasn’t given up, either. She writes about how systemic racism damages everyone economically, and how we can come together to rebuild the economy to benefit every living person. There is cause for authentic hope.
Today St. Paul encourages us, saying, “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” Paul says this in the face of imprisonment, shipwreck, starvation, persecution, frustrated ambition, and bitter grief. He will ultimately be executed in Rome. But he knows that in Christ, life crushes stinking death.
Do not despair. Let the fragrance of God’s resurrecting power fill this room, fill your imagination, fill your heart. Gather in the coming days and weeks with your friends in this garden, where life rises up, for us, but even more for all who are even more acquainted with death than we are.
I plan to be among the lilies, crossing fragrant oil on the foreheads of the baptized. What might you do, when you step into God’s garden of abundant life?
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Preached on the Fifth Sunday in Lent (Year C), April 3, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8