A Fragrant Offering

In Luke 13:1-9 we find Jesus being anointed with nard by Mary to prepare him for his coming death in 6 days. I can imagine the powerful aroma of this perfume, which cost an entire year’s worth of wages.

The setting is a dinner in Bethany at the house of Mary, Martha and their brother Lazarus. I can imagine the smell of freshly baked bread, the smell of roasted meats and other delicious dishes.

But just weeks before, there was a different odor that surrounded this group. Lazarus had fallen ill and died before Jesus could travel to him. Lazarus was in a tomb for 4 days when Jesus commanded that the stone be rolled away and told Lazarus to come out. Martha said to Jesus: “Lord, already there is a stench…”

The intense fragrance of nard. The welcoming smells of a dinner being cooked. The smell of death. The sense of smell for me is significant. Of all of the senses, my sense of smell is my best. It’s a sense that I associate with past memories and present experiences. The smell of mounds of fresh oranges in the grocery store always transports me back to my Grandma’s house in Yuma, Arizona. She had orange trees, and when we visited we would pick huge piles of oranges. Oranges are the smell of my Grandma Crystal.

Perhaps there’s a spiritual dimension to the sense of smell as well. In C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters a demon named “Wormwood” has been assigned tempt a human so that the human will end up in “our father’s house below.” Wormwood is berated by his demon supervisor, Screwtape, for allowing his human to fall in love with a virtuous, Godly woman. He says to Wormwood: “Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odor….The dog and the cat are tainted with it.”

Can you guess what the deadly odor is that Screwtape says taints everything, even the dog and the cat? It is the fragrance of God’s love. The fragrance of God’s love is one that comes from those people that belong to God and express God’s love to others. It is a sweet fragrance that is pleasing to God.

            As we observe a holy Lent, we can follow Mary’s lead by making an offering to God. We can ask ourselves: What is the fragrance of my life? What is the fragrance of what I offer to God? What is the fragrance of my offerings to people and things other than God? What is the fragrance of my works, my words, and my actions?           

Legacies

On February 22, my family said their final goodbye to my grandmother, Lillian. At 94, she had lived a long and vibrant life. She had grown up in the 1920s, lived through the Great Depression and World War II, graduated from college as a nurse, married her sweetheart, raised four children, delighted in her seven grandchildren, cultivated her flower garden, traveled the world, and loved God. Her smile, her laughter, her voice, her hobbies, her heart, and just her being Grandmother is hard to say goodbye to, but it is joyful to know where she is now. 

As I write this, I am looking at the heirlooms from my grandmother - a small china doll that looks like she is singing, a bell that hung in her kitchen (one of many that told us when dinner was ready!), and the kimono and straw hat I wore as a six-year old on her back porch playing tea with my dolls. These are objects from my childhood at Grandmother's that will help keep the memories of her always close to my heart. 

Since saying goodbye to Grandmother, I have been thinking about life, about legacies, about our gifts that we pass down to others in our lives when this life has ended. What do I want my legacy to be? What do I want to leave behind to the world? What do I want people to remember about me? These are questions that I am still working on answers to. But, I do know that every day is a gift from our Father, and each day should be a day where we leave a mark for Christ. I want to live for Christ and to show Him to people through my life. I will try to leave His footprints on my path as I journey homeward. 

Life may seem like it will last forever, but it is just a breath, a shadow and a dream. It is very fragile, and we only have one chance to make an impact. What will your legacy be? For what do you want to be remembered? 

The Sign of Jonah

Jesus said, "This is an evil generation.  It seeks a sign.  But no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah."

-Luke 11: 29

In our Eucharistic lectionary during Lent, this is the gospel for today (or to be more accurate, Luke 11: 29-32).  This is a very peculiar passage that leads many to ask:  what exactly IS the sign of Jonah?!

You remember Jonah, right?  He was the young man whom God called to be a prophet, to go to the great city of Nineveh and tell them that God was fed up, that death and destruction would come to them in 40 days.  Jonah resisted God's call as long as possible, even going into the deepest, darkest corner of the bowels of a great fish in order to escape God's call.  But God would have none of it, and Jonah eventually said yes and proclaimed God's prophecy to the people, only to see their cries of repentance turn God's ear and change God's mind.  Unfortunately for Jonah, this meant that he would be labeled a false prophet, forcing him to flee and become angry with God.  The story ends with God asking the disgruntled Jonah a question:  'And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’ (Jonah 4: 11)

So what does Jesus mean when he tells the crowd following him that no sign will be given except the sign of a young man who resisted God's call, preached a prophecy that was not fulfilled, and ended up being angry at God?  The 'sign' of Jonah isn't really a sign at all when we think about it, rather it is more like an anti-sign.  It points us toward the journey Jonah went on.  It points us in the direction of surrendering ourselves into the belly of darkness before we can know what is essential.  You see, Jonah thought he was in control.  He did not want to surrender to God's call for him.  Often times we feel the same way.  Jesus is insisting that, for Jonah (and us), the spiritual journey is more about giving up control than taking control.  

Our journey of faith is like leaping out into the water.  When we take that leap out into the unknown we have an experience with God, a lived experience.  Yet that experience, like Jonah's, is not fully understood until after the fact.  The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, 'Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.'  Jonah only knew what God was doing in his life until AFTER emerging from the belly of the fish.  He had no message at all to give until he had first endured the journey, the darkness, the trials.  He tried to avoid them, tried to avoid God, but eventually the reluctant prophet surrendered his own will to God's.

There is a reason Jonah is my favorite prophet:  it's precisely because he didn't want to be one!  What is the sign of Jonah?  It is the reluctance   It is the feeling that our own lives are within our own control.  It is the insistence that we can do it all on our own.  Only after the fact, after the trials and difficulties, after spending the night in the belly of the beast, do we find that, in fact, we are God's, and that God's presence is ever with us, God's guiding hand has always been and will always be there.  

Jonah's story is our story.  It is the story of someone who did not believe he was capable of doing something so massive, so great as being a prophet of God.  Jesus' generation did not see God's hand at work until after Jesus was gone.  Will your eyes and hearts be open this Lent to hear and see God in your life, calling you to go to your own Nineveh?  Do not wait for Easter's dawn to find out!  Do not wait until you look back on this season and wish you said yes to something God was calling you toward.  Leap out into the water!