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Well, My Dears, It's Another Transition
A sermon preached by the Reverend Dr. Stephanie Nagley at St. Luke’s Bethesda, Maryland on March 25, 2007
You won’t find it in scripture but some say that when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, Adam turned to Eve and calmly said, “Well, my dear, I guess it’s another transition.”
As the song lyric reminds us nothing stays the same but change. And if we’re paying attention we may have noticed that we’ve got a God on our hands who seems to delight in always being about new things. From the very beginning, from Adam and Eve, to here and now, our story with God has been a story of transition and change.
Often those new things come about in the most trying of circumstances. Israel is forced into exile in Babylon – what we know as Iraq. Things don’t look good for God’s people. The good old days are just that, something old and gone, days to remember with longing — even though the days that they remember weren’t always that great either. Memory has a way of sealing off the parts of the story that we don’t want to remember and embellishing the part we do. Nevertheless, here they are in Babylon and not in the promised land they were promised.
But the prophet Isaiah sees differently. The prophet has God proclaiming: “Do not remember the former things of old. I am about to do a new thing...” “ Behold, I am doing a new thing” says the God of the prophet Isaiah. Israel thought that exile was the end and the world had come crashing done. God sees it differently. Change is good, as difficult as it may be. Transition takes us to new beginnings.
I think people are hardwired, to lesser and greater degrees, to see transition and change as something unwanted. That resistance probably has some very important connection to our primitive instinct for survival. Sameness is good. I know where my food source is found. I know where the safest shelter is made. I know just how far I can safely venture into the wilderness. I know what I can expect from the people around me, who I can trust and who I can rely on for help.
Resistance to transition and change is probably an instinct. For our survival we’ve depended on it and sometimes it has kept us alive and sometimes, a good number of times, we’ve held back when it would have been best to move along.
Years ago the Denver Zoo received the gift of a magnificent polar bear, but they had no place to put him. So over time they worked diligently, probably a capital campaign, to raise the funds necessary to build the best and most comfortable enclosure they could design for the bear.
During the interim period the bear was kept in an adequate but not the best enclosure. The bear seemed cramped and he would take three steps and turn, three steps and turn. Day in and day out. A three-step world. After many months his new expansive enclosure was ready.
The bear was released into his new habitation. He stood there and surveyed the landscape for a very long time, as if to take it all in. He stood and looked and then took his first step and then another, and then one more and then he turned. Day in and day out, three steps and turn, three steps and turn. [1]
Behold, I am doing a new thing, says the God of Isaiah.
This is the God of Jesus. The one he is trying to get all of us to live with. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus challenges our polar bear instincts and entices us to venture a little farther than we thought was safe, to change in ways we would have thought we could never change, to see things differently and to suspend our resistance so that our energies have a chance to flow into life-giving possibilities.
We see Jesus’ challenge to accept change and embrace the new once again in John’s gospel. And John’s gospel is particularly full of these subtle invitations to transition and change.
For the third time, in John’s gospel, we are with Jesus and Mary and Martha. You may remember the first time with Mary and Martha. Jesus sat with Mary and talked while Martha fussed that she had to do all the work. Martha was doing the expected of a woman. She was doing the right thing and doing everything right. Mary was out of step. Mary had gone way past her entitled three steps and she didn’t bother to turn. She just kept on going into a new thing.
She sat and talked with Jesus trading ideas about what could be, about new possibilities for life. Oh, maybe they were just talking about rearranging the furniture or changing the way water was hauled from the well, but that’s just the surface talk. The fact that they sat and talked as they did was enough to rock the world. That’s why Jesus told Martha that Mary had taken the better part.
We may not like that response. Those of us who are little more Martha’s than Mary’s. When we get into those Martha places, when we’re fussing and fuming about those other people who left us with all the work, we might want to check our resistance meters. Sure, the work has to get done and someone has to do it but that’s not really the point John is trying to make about Jesus’ first visit with the sisters. His point was to make us stretch, to see beyond the immediate and reach for a new day.
Jesus makes another trip to Bethany to visit Martha and Mary. This visit wasn’t a happy one. Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, had died. They were desolate, inconsolable. Jesus came and they lit into him something fierce. It’s what a lot of us do when we’re grieved beyond the telling or scared out of our minds – we find someone safe to tear into.
Jesus did something that day that continues to surprise me. He dared to violate every natural law. He raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. He had performed miracles before, but nothing quite like this.
Behold, I am doing a new thing.
And now here he is, once again in the house of Mary and Martha. Lazarus is there and so is Judas.
Where else do you go when you know that you may be in trouble, that your life may be coming to an end, but to the house of your friends. Jesus eats dinner with them. Then Mary anoints his feet with an ointment meant for burial.
Behold, she is doing a new thing. The prophet is Mary who has seen the future and understood what following Jesus means. So, she bathes the feet of the one she follows as if preparing his body for burial. She wipes his feet with her hair. An act of utter love. A moment of pure surrender for them both.
The perfume fills the air, like incense carries our prayers to God.
Judas watches. We’re told, almost like a stage aside, that Judas will betray Jesus. There is betrayal later on that will give Jesus over to Rome. But there is betrayal right now, in that house, for Judas is that part of us that resists going beyond the safe confines of his known existence.
He’s uncomfortable with this act of love, this expression of intimacy, with this extravagance that seems to have no purpose.
He can’t see what is happening before him, that the extravagance in this moment is holy, that the love, in this moment, flows free. That this intimacy is an expression of God’s loving, extravagant presence.
There is life in this house because Mary did a new thing. She uncorked that bottle and emptied it knowing that there was nothing more important than this moment and this life.
Always a new thing. Always the calling. Always the hope that we will venture a little farther than we thought safe. Always the God of new things, holding open the gate and saying to us, “Well, my dears, it’s time for another transition.”
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