In Memory of Her

We call Jesus “Messiah,” “Christ,” what do those words mean?  They mean “the anointed one.”  And who anointed Jesus?  The Holy Spirit, no doubt, at his baptism.  But the only human who ever anointed Jesus was this woman in Mark's gospel. She did it exactly the way a priest or a prophet should anoint a king in ancient Israel, by pouring oil over his head. And we don’t even know her name. Her story has been hidden behind the forgiven woman with the provocative hair in Luke's gospel.  Maybe her story was not told because mostly men told the stories, men who could not picture a woman as a priest or a prophet. 

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is a feminist theologian at Harvard Divinity School.  She wrote a book called In Memory of Her. In it, she lifted up the untold stories of women in the New Testament who were apostles, prophets, preachers and teachers, leaders of churches. It’s one of those annoyingly technical seminary books, but it had to be, to be taken seriously by the people who control and interpret our sacred stories. I needed to hear those stories of women who followed Jesus.  In the church of my childhood, there was no place for a woman preacher. I needed to know I was not alone. 

Savor the irony in the title of that book, In Memory of Her. After nineteen centuries, what Jesus said would happen, finally started to happen.  Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

This anointing woman saw what others did not see, did not want to see.  That’s why I call her a prophet. What she did was not understood; she was criticized.  These things I saw as soon as she was lifted to my attention.  But in 2018, I find myself identifying with a different facet of her story.  Knowing that she was powerless to stop the ugly events to come, this anointing woman did not hide in fear or denial.  She did not rant in anger.  She did a beautiful thing, a loving and respectful thing, if misunderstood. I need that reminder to face the world we live in now, and to find ways to act with beauty, love and respect.

Brea Congregational United Church of Christ

March 25, 2018

Untold Stories

Mark 14:1-10   It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him;  2 for they said, “Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.”

            3   While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.  4 But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way?  5 For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.  6 But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me.  7 For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me.  8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial.  9 Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

            10   Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.

It’s Palm Sunday, and we didn’t read the bible story for Palm Sunday.  Some of us have heard it almost every year since infancy. On Palm Sunday Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, with the crowd waving palms.  The fickle crowd, who on Good Friday will be shouting for his crucifixion. Other stories seldom told: the people who don’t fit so easily into the standard narrative. This morning, a woman prophet crashing a dinner party. Do you know her story?  I didn’t.

When I was in my late twenties, living in Minnesota and working as a chemist at 3M, I did a year-long cover-to-cover bible study (well, almost cover-to-cover). I took my science brain, and my hungry heart, and I dived in. A vast collection of stories. Stories of peoples’ encounters with the sacred, and peoples’ efforts to live in a way that honors the sacred. Hundreds of stories and vignettes. Some of these bible stories are windows to God, and some of them are mirrors of human failings. 

With my science brain, full of curiosity, checking vigilantly for inconsistencies, I collected all kinds of juicy tidbits.  What I learned made it clear I hadn’t been getting the whole story on Sunday morning.  (You’re not getting the whole story either.  There just isn’t time.  But I do try to provide some juicy tidbits.). The apostle Peter was married. That was a big deal to a Catholic. None of the New Testament writers ever calls Jesus God. The less Jewish they are, the closer they come, though. And women were apostles, led churches, and paid the bills for Jesus’ ministry. So many other details that got my mind spinning.

With my hungry heart, wanting to connect with the sacred and to follow Jesus, I found myself in some of those stories.  I identified with Doubting Thomas, and the Samaritan woman at the well, and Balaam (do you know Balaam? He did not make the assigned readings of the lectionary.  We’ll talk about him this summer.) I identified with prophets who see things other people don’t want to see.

During that transformative year of bible study, I started seeing a spiritual director, Priscilla Braun. When we sat down together for the first time, I told her how I had been studying the bible in depth, and didn’t want to lose this connections I was making to the sacred.  Hearing my experience, she said something that stuck with me. “Your story is sacred scripture.”  Seriously? I thought, how can that be? “There is the scripture from long ago, gathered into this book we call the Bible, and there is the scripture that you and God are writing today, in your life.” Whoa.

God is still speaking, and one of the ways God is speaking is to you, and through you.  Your story is sacred scripture. Can you believe that? Do you have the nerve to tell your story that way? Courage might be required. Humility might be required. A good listener might be required. What is your sacred story? I’d love to have that conversation with you.

Tucked into our official scriptures are countless characters whose sacred stories are largely untold; ignored or misunderstood by interpreters, sometimes even by the writers of scripture.  The anointing woman of today’s reading is one of these. What do you usually remember about the anointing woman?  Was she a sinner at Jesus’ feet, wiping them with her hair?  That’s memorable.  But that’s Luke’s story, and it came after Mark’s.  Mark’s anointing woman only gets noticed for wasting expensive perfume. 

I’ll begin by refreshing your memory about this anointing woman, because otherwise we will be thinking of the other three anointing women– there’s one in each of the four gospel.  First, the setting.  It’s already past Palm Sunday. Jesus has been in Jerusalem during the day, causing trouble, so it is not safe for him to sleep there.  He goes each night to the small town of Bethany, and that is where we find him at a dinner party. The Last Supper is only a day or two away. Things are getting intense. And what do we know about this woman?  Next to nothing. We don’t know her name. We know she crashed a dinner party, and she broke open an expensive bottle of fragrant oil, and she poured it over Jesus’ head.  That is a really strange thing to do.  In the etiquette of first century dinner parties, it is normal to wash someone’s feet.  In a well-off home, at the beginning of the party a servant would wash your feet and anoint them with oil because they got dry and dusty from the road.  Admittedly, wiping a person’s feet with your hair, as Luke tells the story, is over the top, but anointing someone’s feet is normal.  Anointing someone’s head is not normal. The dinner guests are outraged by this.  They want to know: why is this expensive oil being wasted?  They don’t understand what the heck she’s doing.  But Jesus defends her action, and he says an amazing thing.  He says “Wherever the Gospel is preached, throughout the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.” Which clearly did not happen. So it was a big deal what she did, and it was forgotten.  We never told her story.

Jesus tells us what her action means.  He says, “She has done a beautiful thing.  She has anointed my body beforehand for burial.”  That’s heavy.  Jesus had been trying to tell his disciples what was coming: that he was going to Jerusalem, and he was going to do some really dangerous things, and he probably was going to get killed.  But in Mark’s Gospel, his disciples never understood what he was telling them. It was too hard.  It was not how they thought the story should be told. This woman somehow was in the inner circle.  She heard Jesus talking about his impending death and she got this hard truth: she understood that he was going to die.

We don’t know the circumstances in which she heard that, or anything that leads up to this little vignette, but here’s how I imagine it.  When it finally dawns on her what is going to happen, she is torn up by all kinds of emotions.  She takes them to God in prayer, and she pours out her heart, and she says, “I can’t change this. I can’t change his choice.  I can’t go with him either. What can I do to let him know that I understand his choice, the price he is paying, and to let him know how much I love him, how much I care for him?” And then she got an idea.

Time was short, so she crashed a dinner party.  She took that expensive oil and she poured it over Jesus’ head.  Jesus understood exactly what she was doing.  And I imagine that there was brief moment where for them, that dinner party didn’t exist.  It was just Jesus and a woman disciple, their shared understanding, and the hard, hard road ahead. And tears.  I’m pretty sure she had tears.

We call Jesus “Messiah,” “Christ,” what do those words mean?  They mean “the anointed one.”  And who anointed Jesus?  The Holy Spirit, no doubt, at his baptism.  But the only human who ever anointed Jesus was this woman. She did it exactly the way a priest or a prophet should anoint a king in ancient Israel, by pouring oil over his head. And we don’t even know her name. Her story has been hidden behind the forgiven woman with the provocative hair in Luke.  Maybe her story was not told because mostly men told the stories, men who could not picture a woman as a priest or a prophet.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is a feminist theologian at Harvard Divinity School.  She wrote a book called In Memory of Her. In it, she lifted up the untold stories of women in the New Testament who were apostles, prophets, preachers and teachers, leaders of churches. It’s one of those annoyingly technical seminary books, but it had to be, to be taken seriously by the people who control and interpret our sacred stories. I needed to hear those stories of women who followed Jesus.  In the church of my childhood, there was no place for a woman preacher. I needed to know I was not alone.

Savor the irony in the title of that book, In Memory of Her. After nineteen centuries, what Jesus said would happen, finally started to happen.  Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

This anointing woman saw what others did not see, did not want to see.  That’s why I call her a prophet. What she did was not understood; she was criticized.  These things I saw as soon as she was lifted to my attention.  But in 2018, I find myself identifying with a different facet of her story.  Knowing that she was powerless to stop the ugly events to come, this anointing woman did not hide in fear or denial.  She did not rant in anger.  She did a beautiful thing, a loving and respectful thing, if misunderstood. I need that reminder to face the world we live in now, and to find ways to act with beauty, love and respect.

We all need sacred stories. Stories of real people who love and serve God, people of all descriptions and conditions, so we know we are not alone. And we hear the stories differently at different times in our lives, because our stories are still unfolding.

I have been telling my story, one on one, to a trusted person, since I was twenty-nine.  Often I don’t even know what my story is until I start talking.  Together we figure out where God might be in it.  We can’t prove it. But I can try to live by it.  Sometimes we laugh together and sometimes we cry together.  And I am not alone, when I tell my story.

What is your sacred story?

If the religion that you received failed you, and you have had to do the heart-wrenching work of letting go of that story and finding Good News you could trust, you are not alone.  Tell your story.

If life handed you a challenge you did not expect, and you have struggled to face that challenge faithfully instead of live the life you thought you would have, you are not alone.  Tell your story.

If you were not loved, not accepted, and you have struggled to believe that you are lovable and acceptable, you are not alone. Tell your story.

If you made a really big mess of things, and you have faced up to the mess you made, and are figuring out how to put your life back together, you are not alone.  Tell your story.

If the current chapter of your life is confusing and terrifying, you are not alone.  Tell your story. 

If you have just received the most wonderful gift in your life, or if you are celebrating an enduring blessing, you are not alone.  Tell your story.  We all need to hear those stories!

In the coming week we will be telling the Good Friday and Easter stories.  Let yourself enter into those stories.  God meets us in sacred story.  And your story is a sacred story.  Amen.