Sermonstudio

Some of the most impressive people I have ever met are missionaries. This is not because of some misdirected romantic notion I have about mission work but because of who these people are, what they are doing and, perhaps as important, what they could be doing. Let me give a few examples.

Some years ago I took a mission team to work in Conjuncto Palmieras, a favella or slum of about 10,000 inhabitants outside the northeast Brazilian city of Fortaleza. There we met Lawrence and Judy Fetter. Larry was a pastor in the United Church of Canada who had had a successful career and, in mid-life, was serving a large suburban congregation. His wife was a writer of children's literature. Then they determined that they wanted to do something more for the Lord, something different, so they applied for mission service. To make a long story short, by the time we met them they had gone through language school and were serving several small Methodist Churches, freeing Brazilian national pastors to serve larger congregations. They were building their own home in the Conjuncto, which at that point was really a squatters' village writ large, making them not just the first missionaries to do so, but the first pastor who would actually live among the people.

In recent years I have taken more than one group to the "Give Ye Them To Eat" program, a rural development ministry in the remote Mexican village of Tlancualpian, population 3,000. The program was begun and continues to be led by an American lay missionary couple, Terry and Muriel Henderson. Terry is an agronomist by training, Muriel an educator. They are both renaissance people doing whatever needs to be done in a multifaceted ministry that includes faith development, agricultural improvement, health education, and much more.

Nor does one have to look to foreign countries. Here in Evansville the Reverends Calvin and Nelia Kimbrough have labored in the inner city at Patchwork Central, an intentional Christian community they helped found two decades ago. Calvin is a talented photographer and videographer and Nelia is an artist. I am confident that with their gifts and graces they could have served in a variety of settings or pursued successful careers in the media and the arts.

The point is that in each of these cases -- and many others that any one of us could provide -- these individuals who are serving God by serving the poor -- could be doing many other things, things that some people would argue would be more appropriate and more valuable.

Perhaps as a successful pastor of an affluent suburban congregation, the Reverend Fetter could have raised untold sums of money to go toward mission work; perhaps he could have supported several missionary families had he stayed in the parish. The Hendersons could be successful farmers or otherwise engaged in agribusiness in their home state of Arizona, sending machinery and food and money to Mexico, perhaps occasionally taking a week or two to provide hands-on experience in the field.

Now if these suggestions sound unkind or far-fetched, let me suggest that's only because we are sitting here in a worship service, because, in fact, such critiques are made all the time. Virtually any time we have prepared to take a mission team anywhere, in this country or abroad, someone has sincerely asked, "Couldn't you do more good just by sending the money?" The answer to that question depends, of course, on how your define "more good." Obviously you can buy more nails or paint with funds that are not spent on airfare or food; but you do not have the human interaction; you do not communicate the witness of care and Christian love by not being there. And over the years I have had any number of students whose family and friends have been less than overjoyed to learn of their intention to enter the ministry or go into mission work or some other "helping" profession rather than engage in a more lucrative career. You can recite the arguments about "doing good by doing well," sending money, supporting helping agencies, etc, etc. The persons in question have sometimes gone one way, sometimes another.

"Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" That is not a bad question; and certainly not one that has stopped being asked. A lot of good for a lot of people could have been done with almost a year's pay for an average laborer. God does need good business people who send donations to the church as well as clergy, doesn't God? So this familiar tableau from John 12 is not all that outdated. There is the pious Mary sitting at Jesus' feet as she had done on at least one other occasion, according to Luke 12; and there is the money-grubbing betrayer Judas, salivating over the money that he would like to put into the common purse where he can filch it!

When we put it in those almost caricature-like terms it is easy to translate it with pious me (or pious you) in the role of Mary, sitting at Jesus' feet; and some evil secular humanists (or at least misinformed bleeding-heart liberals) saying, "No, don't do that! Don't serve the Lord!" But when we look a little closer and see a more nuanced story, it may be a little less clear about exactly where we fit in.

Because, of course, John 12 is not the only place there is a story like this. The other Gospels have similar stories; similar enough that some readers feel that today's lesson is simply a doublet, a slight variant of the same story; others think the discrepancies are significant enough that there were two episodes of women washing Jesus' feet. Whichever interpretation is more congenial to you, it was not just Judas who raised the objection about the waste: in Matthew it is the "disciples" who became angry and objected; in Mark it was "some" who were there who were perplexed. It was not just Judas; it was "some," "some of the disciples." And in any case it wasn't just somebody washing Jesus' feet and somebody objecting to it; Martha was there, serving as usual, and the recently resuscitated Lazarus is at the table. A more variegated scene than we might remember it.

This slightly more complex cast of characters makes me think of the interpretation of this story found in the late Medieval classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, written, I think, in response to some overly-systematized approaches to spiritual growth, like Walter Hilton's The Ladder of Perfection, a kind of fourteenth-century version of the "Four Spiritual Laws." As the title indicates, the author believed that there is much about God that we don't know and can't know in this life, our knowledge of God is obscured by this "cloud of unknowing." This is not a negative thing, like the "Dark Night of the Soul," it is simply a reminder of our human limitations; the Christian life cannot be reduced to a simple set of propositions.

But the anonymous author of The Cloud knew that people find themselves in various circumstances and at different levels of spiritual maturity in this life. In broad terms he could talk about the active life, symbolized in the Luke story by Martha, busy doing many things, and the contemplative life of sitting at the feet of Jesus exemplified by Mary, much to Martha's annoyance. But as much as he wanted to avoid the appearance of a simple plan or scheme, he wrote of both the active and contemplative lives having two levels, with the upper level of the active life being more or less the same as the lower level of the contemplative life. What he was getting at is that at the lowest level of the active life (where I suspect many of us live most of the time) we are so caught up in the frenzy of stuff that Jesus is not on our minds and God is not really part of our lives. At the highest level of the contemplative life we are in full communion with God: this is the perfection we Methodists talk about going on toward; we attain it only in the next life.

Most of us, of course, are somewhere in the middle striving on toward perfection but also backsliding. It would be grossly unfair to characterize Martha as an unbeliever. Recall how, in the story of the raising of Lazarus, she had left Mary and those who had come to console her and her sister, and gone out to meet Jesus with the words, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." These were not the words of someone so preoccupied with the cares of daily life that she had no awareness of Jesus' identity. Nor should we cast Mary in the role of stained-glass window saint simply because she was in the right place doing the best thing on two occasions. She, too, no doubt had her shortcomings; none of us are perfect in this life. But how about those others -- Judas, disciples, some -- who objected to what Mary was doing? Where do they fit in? Let me make a suggestion.

If The Cloud of Unknowing was written partially in response to works like The Ladder of Perfection, I think it was also written in response to one of the religious superstars of fourteenth century England, Richard Rolle. I love Richard Rolle because he is what my mother calls, "A good example of a bad example," and because he embodied the spirit of many university students (and some clergy) I have known over the years.

Rolle dropped out of Oxford University at the age of nineteen with the intention of becoming a hermit. Fashioning a makeshift robe out of two of his sister's tunics and his father's rain-hood, he became a kind of freelance, self-styled hermit. I have no doubt that he had some real, powerful religious experiences, one of which he described as a warmth in his chest that reminds me of John Wesley's heart-warming Aldersgate experience. It is also clear from his writings (in The Fire of Love) that he had an enormous opinion of himself. He had no spiritual director and had absolutely no intention of getting one because he felt he was spiritually far advanced beyond those around him and really needed no advice. He heard sweet heavenly music which made it impossible for him to enjoy the singing in church which paled in comparison. He had visions, joys, and glories in the Holy Spirit. He desired to fast and live a life of austerity, but found himself so continually offered rich and sumptuous food that he, like many of us, developed a weight problem.

In one passage which would be downright funny if it were not tragic, he recalls some particularly inept encounters with women. One was offended because he gawked too much at the ornaments on her dress; another reprimanded him when he spoke of her huge breasts "as if I liked them," and a third took offense when he almost touched one of her breasts -- well, he admitted, maybe he did touch it. Rather than take these reprimands as hints of actual misbehavior, or at least a lack of good judgment, Rolle concluded that it was best to steer clear of women since they are so erratic and unpredictable. After all, in the instances I have just mentioned, he was concerned with the welfare of their souls. I think Elmer O'Brien, S. J., summed it up best in these words: "[Rolle], as many another before his time and since, desperately seems to have wished to be a mystic. And he thought he was. And he said he was. And nobody believes him."

In terms of The Cloud's symbolism, he was at the lower level of the active life, doing things -- some religious, like dressing up like a hermit, some not so religious, like overeating and staring too much at women's breasts. Being at that level was not the problem; but thinking that he was practically in heaven was. By setting himself apart from the church and -- in his own mind at least -- above all his contemporaries in spiritual maturity, he only proved himself to be unattractively arrogant and spiritually immature.

If I am right that most of us are somewhere in the middle of things, striving on toward the perfection of real communion with God, but also backsliding into preoccupation with our daily worries, that's okay. We are in good company. Saint Paul for one knew that he was always striving on toward the goal. The really big problem is if we, like Richard Rolle, mistake where we are for where we wish we were; if we arrogate ourselves to a position of judgment of others in their spiritual endeavors.