Good morning, Michael. [Laughter] I got to be myself. Okay, so um this is just a scripture reading for this morning. It’s a harmonized account of our gospel story as recorded in Matthew 27, Mark 14, and John 12. A few days before the Passover feast, Jesus came to Bethany where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. They gave a dinner in Jesus’s honor at the home of Simon the leper. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those with him at the table. As Jesus sat reclining, Mary took an alabaster flask containing a pound of very costly perfume made from pure nard. She broke the flask and poured it on Jesus’s feet, also anointing the feet of Jesus and wiping his feet with her hair. The entire house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. When the disciples saw it, they were indignant and scolded the woman, rebuking her harshly. Judius a scarat, who was about to betray Jesus, was quick to speak, saying, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor. He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief and having charge of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it. But Jesus aware of this said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whatever you want, you can do good for them. and you will not always have me. She has done what she could. In pouring this perfume on my body, she has prepared me beforehand for my burial. Truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her. Meanwhile, a large crowd of Jews found out that Jesus was there and came not only because of him, but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So, the chief priests made plans to kill Lazarus as well. For on account of him, many of the Jews were going over to Jesus and putting their faith in him. May God bless the reading of his word. Morning. Good to see you. Can Can you smell the food wafting up from the kitchen downstairs? If you can’t, it smells really good. So, I hope you can all stay for the uh for the potluck afterwards. Hopefully, we’ll have lots of food and and a good time of fellowship. It’s good to see Barb back. Barb’s been away. She’s had surgery. She’s had issues. And Barb, it’s nice to have you here with us. Yeah. So, we’re we’re just looking at uh the passage that Elizabeth just read. It’s a short understated passage, a little obscure incident that happened one evening in the living room of someone’s house in a small village uh in a small nation, the first century AD. But this event was really enlarged and dignified by Jesus when he said of it, “I tell you the truth. Wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” So, we’re looking at a story this morning that Jesus said would never be forgotten. Sure enough, here we are 2,000 years later in a place where the gospels preached. And just as Jesus said, we’re retelling the story of this extravagant, imaginative worship, remembering the woman who was at the center of it, Mary of Bethany. It’s a story that arrests our senses. If senses, if you have the the scratch and sniff version of the Bible, this is going to be really meaningful for you this morning. But it’s not ju it’s not just the smell that lingers over this passage. It’s also there’s a convicting question that we need to ask ourselves and that is my worship of Jesus more like that of Mary in this story or do I more closely resemble the men that were in the room with her? Do I know when to say enough is enough in my worship of Jesus or do I blow through all the stop signs and cast out all the restraints uh just as Mary did that evening? So, we’re going to do an overview of the story and then we’re going to return to that rather convicting question. Timing of this uh story is significant. It’s the final Passover feast in Jesus’ earthly ministry that’s approaching the religious leaders that hatched their plan to kill him. They’d already put the word out on the street in fact that if anyone located Jesus, found out where he was, if they could sort of get him alone in a quiet place, they should inform on him so they could arrest him and take him into custody. So the final week or the final drama of Jesus’ week is in motion. But before we move into that familiar sequence of intrigue and betrayal and suffering and death, the action really slows down for us in John 12. And we spend a leisurely relaxed evening in the company of Jesus and his closest friends. A little village of Bethany was small village about uh less than 3 kilometers from the bustling capital of Jerusalem. A dinner party was being hosted to honor Jesus at the home of a man referred to as Simon the leper. You’d have to think that Jesus must have healed Simon the leper because a contagious leper couldn’t very easily be hosting a dinner party, you know, no matter how many invitations he sent out. I don’t know how many people would come. So, Simon the leper had probably been healed, but he just couldn’t shake the nickname. It’d been with him a long time. he’d have to change all of his government ID and uh that would be just too much of a problem. So at that dinner party are those three siblings who seem to have been among Jesus’ very closest friends, favorite people in the world. Lazarus, his sisters Mary and Martha, a family that often offered hospitality and friendship to Jesus when he frequently traveled to and from Jerusalem. At brother Lazarus, we read about him last week. Short time earlier, he had experienced death. He had rotted in a tomb for four days and had been called back from the dead by Jesus. So he now sits uh healthy and fresh a few feet away from the one who had given him back his life. We read as Elizabeth read Lazarus had become a bit of a tourist attraction. People were coming not just to see Jesus but also to see Lazarus. Maybe talk to him about what’s life like on the other side of death. What’s like life life on the other side of the grave. So, a great evening for Jesus and his friends. Martha, it says, put on the spread, efficient, diligent person that she was. Probably a really terrific meal. Everyone was full. And I imagine the smell of coffee and pie kind of lingering in the air. And the guys sitting around the living room and telling stories and making jokes and maybe smoking cigars and and suddenly something happened that made everyone stop. You probably could have heard a pin drop as Mary came into that living room. As we mentioned last week, three times, three occasions in the gospels, we find Mary. She’s mentioned uh three different stories of her. Each time she ends up at the feet of Jesus. And here on this evening, that’s where she wants to put herself once again. This time she has something in her hands, a little flask, an alabaster jar, a full pint, or about two cups of an exotic perfume. She snapped the neck and broke the jar. Didn’t care to save or preserve any of it. And that pungent smell just began to take over the room. So you couldn’t smell the turkey or the pie or the cigar smoke anymore. That perfume just overpowered it all. Wasn’t any ordinary perfume. It was exotic. It was nard. That’s a an oil extracted from the root of a plant grown in the mountain regions of India. So very rare and expensive for anyone in Palestine to have owned. We’re told that the value of that pint jar was the equivalent of a year’s income. Not just what you would save in a year, but what you would actually earn in a year. And can you imagine taking the equivalent of everything you earned last year, literally liquidating it, putting it in a bottle and then pouring it out on someone’s head. So with her ma her hands, Mary took this perfume and she poured it on Jesus’ head and kind of smushed it, I imagine, into his hair and it must have dripped down his cheek and onto his robe and it fell on his lap and she bent down and she dripped more of it on Jesus’ feet. And then instead of using a cloth or a paper towel to catch the excess, she used her hair to soak up the drops. So now Jesus is covered with this fragrant perfume. It’s all over Mary as well. It’s on her hands and her arms, her hair, her face. Perfume was on the one that’s being honored. Also on the one who’s doing the honoring in this act of worship. And that thick overpowering smell filled the room, the entire house. Everyone was breathing it. droplets of perfume, I imagine, on the chair and on the cushions and on the carpet. And everyone sat there watching, and you could see the faces of the men, how uncomfortable they were with what they were seeing. They didn’t know how to handle that moment. This woman had come in among them. She had done something absurdly unexpected, so extravagant, so lavish, uninhibited, embarrassingly intimate, and it made the men squirm. Took them a minute or two to find their equilibrium, but when they did, their response was to criticize Mary, take her to task. It says they began murmuring and muttering and they were indignant. That’s the same Greek word for indignant that we looked at last week. It’s often used of a of a snorting animal, like a snorting horse. And we came across that word last week because that was Jesus’ mood when he was taking on death, standing outside the tomb of Lazarus, about to call his friend back from the grave. So the men in the living room were snorting mad at Mary, centering their criticism on her silly, thoughtless, reckless wastefulness. All that money poured down the drain. Tens of thousands of dollars worth. And the disciple Judas took it upon himself to be the spokesman for the other men in the room. Woman, what have you done? He had already conducted a little quick mental calculation of what that would have been worth. And he said, “That bottle you just broke was worth a year’s wages, and now it’s just evaporating in the air. Never seen such an obscene waste of money in my entire life. You could have put that money to good use. You could have helped the poor. Could have given it to Hope Mission or or Mustard Seed or Strathona Street Mission. Instead, you’ve needlessly and you’ve shamelessly thrown it away.” Gospel of John mentions in an aside that Judas he wasn’t really motivated by altruism or social activism here. He was he was doing some virtue signaling. He didn’t care about the poor. In fact, we’re told he was a thief. He used to embezzle the money from funds that had been donated to support the daily needs of Jesus and the other disciples. Judas’s virtue signaling at masked a spirit that knew and cared nothing really for the poor. In fact, following that evening, the first thing we read that Jesus did that Judas did was to go to the chief priests and to make arrangements to betray Jesus for money. So that’s the event and I don’t know how any of us would have felt that evening in the living room. I mean, my first thought might have been I that stain’s never coming out of that chair and it’s going to take weeks to get the smell out of this place. It may never go away. That’s just common courtesy when you go to a house party to keep it a scent-free room, you know, in in respect for those with allergies. And then there’s the cost. Whatever your before tax gross income was last year, can you imagine it just dissolving into the room into the air as droplets of perfume? Surely this requires a little bit of explanation or interpretation to make any sense of it. It begs illumination. And that’s what Jesus next provides. I don’t know how Mary was taking that harsh, intimidating criticism of the men in the room, but listen to Jesus’ words to those guys. He said, ‘Leave her alone. Don’t trouble her. She’s done a beautiful thing to me. Jesus said, “What she’s done, it’s not wasteful. It’s not irresponsible. It’s not silly.” He doesn’t say she’s done a a needful thing. Doesn’t even say she’s done a useful thing. doesn’t say that I’ve been waiting all day for someone to dump a bunch of perfume all over me. No, Jesus said he’s done a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful moment if you have eyes to see it. Beauty is not something that’s ever measured by just utility or practicality. Beauty occupies a different category. And in terms of honoring and worshiping Jesus, it might not be a category that we tend to access very often. to do something beautiful or create something beautiful involves some imagination and thinking outside the box. And as Mary describes uh or demonstrates her imaginative worship, it only comes from her response of seeing the great beauty of Jesus, the immensity of what he had done for us and for her. Only then will the normal restrictions and restraints of our worship begin to fall away. So we we can only guess what went through Mary’s mind that evening before she did what she did with the perfume. She had to be motivated, I suppose, uh by no other reason than that she saw beauty in Jesus. She saw value in Jesus. It demanded a very beautiful sacrificial response. So conjured up in Mary’s imagination, this made total sense. It’s the best way that she could think of to reflect how much she valued Jesus. Uh, this was the man who had once defended her against her angry sister by saying that she had chosen the best thing by sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to his words and taking in what he was saying. And he was the one who had given her brother back to her from the dead, calling him out of the tomb and restoring their family. How could she not thank and worship him and and and use the thing of greatest value to her? In Mary’s mind, the best way she could show her gratitude in her worship was through this completely unself-conscious piece of performance art where she dispersed on Jesus that thing of highest value. Alabaster jar of perfume. Maybe it was a family heirloom that had been passed down. Maybe it represented her entire life’s savings. Maybe it was her dowy saved up for that time when she’d meet someone special and she’d be married and use that little commodity to set up her household. During that evening though, with her mind and her spirit in worshipful adoration of Jesus, her imagination went to that little cupboard in her bedroom where she kept her most precious possession and she acted on her imagination. Go get the jar, take it into a room full of men, do something completely socially unacceptable, let down her hair, and then physically worshipfully anoint Jesus using her hands and her head and her hair. completely extravagant, completely excessive worship that doesn’t know how to say enough is enough. And Jesus says that was beautiful. It was her way of honoring the best and most beautiful person she had ever known. And things were coming to a head at that point. People were out to get Jesus. Jesus himself had been disturbingly, frequently speaking of his pending death. Mary’s imagination took her to that highly treasured alabaster jar. Instead of being pragmatic and telling herself, “What a ridiculous notion, what a ridiculous thought,” she kind of followed the thread of her imagination, her intuition, she performed her art, maybe without even really thinking about what it might mean. And only after she had done it, Jesus remarked on how beautiful it was. And Jesus supplied the missing piece of meaning uh behind her action. I don’t think it’s improper to suggest that Jesus may have been as surprised as anyone else to experience this highly imaginative act of worship. But hearing the criticism of the men, he ran with the situation. He defended Mary. He sensed what the Holy Spirit was doing in that room at that moment. And then he wrapped up Mary’s sincere, imaginative, instinctive act into his own story. He explained it to them this way. This was likely as much a surprise to Mary as it was to anyone else in the room. Jesus said, “You you’ll always have the poor with you. Whenever you want, you can do good to them, but you’ll not always have me.” What she has done tonight has served to prepare my body beforehand for my burial. It’s not disrespect or disregard for the poor that the poor are always present. It’s no excuse for not using our resources to help people. Jesus was saying the poor, they’re always going to be around to receive your help. But Jesus himself would not be around much longer. You’ll not always have me. So Jesus was indicating that behind Mary’s imagination lay some true Holy Spirit inspiration. Not to say that Mary had thought it all through beforehand cognitively and theologically and she’d worked out the meaning of what she was going to do, but God had inspired her intuition, her imagination to do something meaningful and significant. And Jesus received her intuitive worship. He blessed it. He called it beautiful. Said it wasn’t fluff. It wasn’t filler. It wasn’t silly. It had some true Holy Spirit meaning behind it. Sometimes in sermons or Bible studies, we’re warned against putting too much stock in our emotions and our feelings. Maybe you’ve seen a little illustration from years back of a train with with facts as the engine and faith as the next car and feelings come along at the last as the caboose. And I understand what’s meant by that. And it might be helpful even for us to think that way in certain situations. But we should never just end up thinking that our emotions are fallible and unreliable. But our great cognitive reasoning is very reliable and completely infallible because our minds can betray us as much as our intuitions might. All of us have experienced uh the consequences of corrupt thinking as much as we have by our misleading emotions. So with some humility, I think we’d all have to admit that our minds and our intellects are just not infallible. And Mary’s actions along with Jesus’ validation demonstrates how our emotions and our intuition and our imaginations often get things right that we haven’t really sorted out in our heads yet. So we have to learn, I think, to be u inspired by the Holy Spirit and respond to the intuitions and the prompts that God’s putting on our hearts. James K. A. Smith describes imagination as a a kind of faculty by which we navigate and make sense of our world but in ways and on a register that flies below the radar of conscious reflection. He’s saying that imagination, intuition make a tremendously important and valuable contribution to the way we figure life out. I don’t know how many of you here are uh fans of the band The Velvet Sundown. Their music’s created quite a bit of buzz this summer. I listened to some of their music this past week. They emerged last month. They released two new albums. They’ve racked up about a million Spotify listeners and their songs began populating a number of the Spotify generated playlists and subsequently the group released their third album just this past Monday on the heels of all that success. Their music’s described as rustic and heartfelt folk country music in the vein of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. And Spotify says that their sound mixes textures of 70s psychedelic alt rock and folk rock, blending effortlessly with modern alt pop and indie structures. Couple of weeks ago, a writer named Ian Bogos wrote about listening to the velvet sundown on a long evening road trip from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin. He says, “Their music’s not bad.” He then adds, “It’s not good either. It’s more like nothing.” Rumor began to spread that Velvet Sundown may not be real, but might be AI generated. And that suspicion was finally confirmed on July 5th. All the songs, all the music, the instrumentation, the vocals, the visuals, it’s all computerenerated. Those are not real people. And an updated bio on the band’s X account describes them as not quite human, not quite machine. We live somewhere in between. And Ian Bogo says that their music is profoundly and disturbingly innocuous. It’s a careless smear of stylistic averages. The lines of the lyrics are generally short things like dust on the wind, boots on the ground, smoke in the sky, no peace found. Bogo says, “Really makes you think until you realize that no, it doesn’t make you think at all.” Another semi-political song pleads, “No more guns, no more graves, send no heroes. just the brave. Could be an anti-war anthem. It could be supportive of the military. Whatever the listener wants it to be. So, the Velvet Sundown songs would go fine anywhere, anytime. Their sound hits the mark is a viable soundtrack for all the daily errands and activities of busy people, music to listen to when you don’t particularly want to concentrate or feel much of anything. And to the writer’s great embarrassment, he says their songs managed to worm their way into his brain after his road trip. When he got to his destination, he signed up for Sunno. It’s a service which you give little text prompts and it creates immediately new songs with all the instrumentation and vocals according to your your um parameters. And mere moments later, he had his own psychedelic rock roadtrip theme jam, bit more amplified, little less satar than the velvet sundown. And one of the new songs created on his behalf, Endless Highway, had the fake vocalist singing, “Rubber Burns, the map fades away. Chasing the ghosts of yesterday.” Not bad, but not good either. And music created by algorithm, though, seems perfectly capable of satisfying the listening needs of a great many people. The writer wonders then if anyone really cares if music is real anymore. And I think there’s a bit of a danger of our worship becoming algorithmic as well. Not just thinking of the songs we sing on Sunday mornings, but our entire experience of the worship of Jesus, whether it’s gathered together on Sunday morning or or we seek to spend some time alone with God during the week. Worship by algorithm is worship that it doesn’t cost or demand a lot from us. There’s not a lot of soul. It’s just kind of there like velvet sundown. It’s not quite human, not quite machine. It’s worship that we might engage with cognitively, not so much emotionally or imaginatively. We might pray through a list, but never have our hearts stirred at all by the beauty of Jesus. It might be worship that doesn’t expect much, that’s satisfied with little. Worship that knows when it’s time to say enough is enough. So right now, the Holy Spirit, God’s empowering presence is among us. Do we have the imagination and the intuition to respond with any kind of extravagance? Or is it just is this just another innocuous hour of easy listening? Are we like Mary? Are we motivated by the beauty of Jesus and all he’s done for us? Are we a little more like the men in the room, somewhat critical, somewhat insensitive to the Holy Spirit and what he’s up to in our lives, in our church at this very moment? Can we follow our intuition and our imagination into some new places of extravagant worship? As with a small group of friends, once we were wasting an evening, as we did somewhat regularly, just to worship God together, gathered in an isolated building on a ski hill. We’re singing and praying and pouring out our hearts to God. And then the oddest thing happened that evening, and in my experience, never been repeated. But as we worshiped, the room was suddenly filled with the strong smell of what it seemed to be baked bread, freshly baked bread. All of us smelled. It wasn’t faint. It was very palpable enough that a few of us went downstairs to the deserted kitchen in the basement to see if someone might have sneaked into the building to do some baking, but it was all quiet and deserted down there. And in the end, we realized that God had given us a gift that evening. A gift that I think indicated that he was pleased with what we were doing. He might even feel that it was a beautiful thing. Our worship wasn’t utilitarian. It wasn’t designed to get anything from God. Wasn’t algorithmic. It just was. And you might find yourself skeptical of that experience. I understand that. If I wasn’t there, I might be skeptical, too. But would it shock us if from time to time our good father might surprise us with his presence in a way that’s unusual just because he delights in it? I’m not left on the lookout for an ongoing stream of unusual spiritual experiences. But I do feel that if Mary’s story has anything to teach us today, it’s that removing the restraints of our worship might open up a story that’s worth telling wherever the gospel is preached. So we’ll just we’ll close with the gospel. In the end of our passage, as we mentioned, Judas was negotiating with the religious leaders the price to betray Jesus. I don’t know what Judas wanted from Jesus at that point. After three years with Jesus seemed he was a he was willing to settle for money. He didn’t have the imagination to see anything differently. Judas he might have once appreciated and understood the truth of Jesus. He might have uh appreciated the moral goodness of Jesus. He might have been excited and motivated by all the miracles that were happening around him. But he didn’t appreciate the beauty of Jesus. He had a dullled and stunted imagination. turned him into a user rather than a worshipper. And so he became the catalyst in the events that led to Jesus still perhaps wearing that robe with the traces of exotic perfume to his arrest and his trial and his flogging and his crucifixion. He’d be scarred. He’d be strict stripped naked. Anything but beautiful as he suffered under the penalty being imposed as a result of our sin. At that time, Jesus’ incomparably beautiful act of being poured out made no rational sense to anyone. It was a useful, useless, wasteful thing to happen to a man as gifted as he was. If it stuck around, he could have made so much greater contribution to Jewish society. Might even have liberated them from Rome. But now his lifeblood’s just being poured out unnecessarily like a jar of expensive perfume. Or was it? You know, Jesus came to a world so imaginatively created by God, flattened out by our human greed and hatred and politics and religiosity and sin. And Jesus died so that he could restore our connection with our heavenly father, our creator. So he could reawaken our imaginations to the only story that makes fascinating sense of our lives. Brings some color back to our souls. story that tells us, yes, we’re more wicked and deceived than we ever realized, yet more loved and accepted by Jesus than we ever dared hope. So wicked that Jesus had to die for us. So loved and valued that he was glad to die for us. That’s the only plotline that makes life coherent and beautiful again. And I wonder, you know, as Good Friday came to a close, wonder if that anonymous Roman soldier, the one who had gambled for and won the possession of Jesus’ robe, he’s carrying it home. Robe of a condemned, executed prisoner, which still has this sweetest, most unusual smell permeating it. Smell of grace, smell of salvation, smell of worship. Let’s just spend some time personal prayer. This your time with the God you’re worshiping this morning. Maybe ask God to show you any restrictions and restraints that you’ve unnecessarily placed on your worship of him. Maybe pray that Jesus would reveal his beauty, his desiraability to you, just as Mary of Bethany perceived it. And thank God that he’s given you both mind and intuition to know and worship him. This is your time with God. Just take a few moments and I’ll close us off.