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An arrogant young woman wired home from her new job, "Made supervisor, feather in my cap." A few weeks later they got a wire, "Made management, feather in my cap." Then after another month, they got a wire, "Fired. Send money for ticket to fly home." Her parents wired back, "No ticket necessary, use feathers."

In the story of the anointing at Bethany, Christians behave in ways that many Christians have forgotten how to behave. One Christian is extravagant. She is "wasteful." She gives from the heart. The disciples want to know why the woman with the alabaster jar of ointment didn't sell it and give the money to the poor. Jesus explains: "I am going to die, very soon. That's why."

Surely some had not realized how numbered his days were. But the woman with the ointment knew. She knew she didn't have many more chances to anoint her Savior. She was a completely different character than our rich young woman of the feathers. She lived for something more than her own effect on the world. She lived for Jesus.

Many of us have become the victims of our own feathers and our own pragmatism. We are so committed to efficiency, and productivity, and saving the poor, that we rarely remember why we are so driven in these directions. As right as it is to work hard for the poor, and to have an impact on the world, it is even more right to remember Jesus. And to remember, especially on this day of the Palms, how brief a time we had him with us.

Some of you probably know another famous biblical woman, named Martha. She is always complaining about how overworked she is. The First Shift at the job. The second shift at home. The third shift complaining to you about the first and the second shifts. She paradoxically hates work but believes in it anyway. Her complaints are actually self-praise: her hyperactivity is her ticket to community approval.

Some of you probably also know Mary. Mary is just the opposite of Martha. When people talk about her, they describe her as lazy, and it's not just the soap operas in the afternoon, the art work in the morning, or her somewhat spacy but apparently contented children. Mary threatens people. Sometimes she actually looks like she is having a good time.

Mary is more likely to have "wasted" her nard on Jesus. Martha would die with it still locked away in a cupboard, along with the "good" china, which never got used.

I wish this conflict between pragmatic work and praiseful work was reserved only for women who also happen to be wives and mothers. It is not so reserved.

When a man loses his job, people in this country go berserk for at least two reasons. We fear his loss of income, and we also fear his loss of self-esteem. We are all of us afraid that men without jobs will know no approval. We must be effective to have approval in this world. Since there is not enough to go around, we had better hang on to what we have. We have an "oil crisis."

If we think we need feathers in our cap, we will find it very hard to live without them. Our culture in fact is one that lives ethically in the dregs of the Protestant work ethic. Middle class men and women live by its lights instead of those of Christian grace, not to mention poor people who are beaten over the heads with these so-called lights almost daily. Why are they poor? Because they won't work. Because they are lazy. Even though most of the women are mothers of young children. Still, the poor are poor because they won't work.

But work is not the basis for our salvation! Grace is. At the deepest downest part of things, grace is real. The work ethic is phony. What matters is the way we praise God. If we may praise God extravagantly, and spend all that we have that way, we can be saved. If we cannot, we can only save, and hoard. Our cupboards will be full, but our hearts will be empty.

The work ethic is the devil's work: it took something good, like work, and turned it into something bad, like control. The anointer at Bethany didn't try to control life: she tried to spend her life, for Jesus.

The work ethic is a semi-sophisticated ploy to control God, to make God do our bidding. The work ethic didn't start that way, but it has become a sacrifice laid at an altar, a way to appease God, a goat, a lamb, a burnt offering.

The work ethic began more innocently. It began as that rather firm and particularly American belief that if we work, things will go well for us, and if we don't, they won't. Now, we argue that if they don't go well for us, it is probably our fault for not working. The God who is implied by the Protestant work ethic is mean: he needs sacrifices laid at the altar daily. Paystubs. Raises. Promotions. Upward mobility. A well-feathered cap.

The God we actually worship in Jesus is a God who requires none of these sacrifices. Rather our God receives gifts, in the form of expensive oil and in the form of praise and play.

In the beginning, the Protestants did not mean the hyperactivity of modern sacrifice. They meant only to experience the grace of God deeply enough so that they could make and do, buy and sell, trade and travel. They thought that material prosperity might be a sign of their election by God to renew and remake their world. Capitalist activity was an offering to God. Since the Reformation, capitalist activity has become a sacrificial, controlling offering. God has been nudged out and off the serious stage. Now, we are human doings not human beings. We make and do and make and do and don't feel elected so much as oppressed. We are busied to death.

We accumulate to our own death. We dare not spend for fear that we might come up empty -- when in fact if we were to spend what we have, we would come up full!

Our worship of pragmatism has made us hyperactive. The hyperactivity is not just ecclesial. It is not just pastors or priests who lay their appointment book on the altar. It is also corporate executives, housewives, labor organizers, social activists, and medical doctors. Very few people have any memory of what it is like to play, to do what you want to do rather than what you have to do. The woman at Bethany played with Jesus: she did what she wanted to do!

Many working people can't consider giving church a shake because they are too far removed from the holy, which for them is relief from the prod; time out of the saddle; time at a kid's soccer game, even if it is Sunday morning; time off; not time on. It is what some might call grace and what others might call ointment.

What is this story telling us about the value of our buying and selling? "Why was this ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor." Can't you just hear the self-righteous envy of the disciples? She did what they couldn't do. She spent. She gave. She refused either to buy or sell.

What can God possibly be saying to us about the human economy? Neither buying or selling is directly related to our reward, not on heaven and not on earth. Mary slept late this morning, and it's okay with God. God is affirming your teenage son's approach to his summer job. God is saying that the number of grapes picked is enough. God is siding with the siesta people against the short coffee break people. God is siding with the extravagant.

There is no salvation worth having that we can earn. We can play our way to salvation instead of earning it. Play is anything you want to do; work is anything you have to do. Some people can play at faxing memos to the office from the campsite; other people can't. Play does not mean that we quit our jobs tomorrow and move into our couches. Play is an attitude: a spirituality, a home -- spiritual home. It has to do with what stands inside us when we tell the boss we've had enough. Play is a freedom. Play is truly a feather in our caps -- lightness.

Play is the ability to give away what we have. Play is the ability to give away what we have in the face of what to some is the ultimate scarcity, death. Play plays with death. It anoints it. It does not see it as scarcity or ending time. Play understands what Jesus understood: time and life go on after death. There is an eternity to life. We can and may enjoy each other now, even if there is not much time left.

Play, many fear, is not plausible. What is not plausible in the terms of the gospel is the world of works righteousness. What is not plausible is neglected children, ozone depletion, white collar slavery, and women folding ironing at midnight. That is what is not plausible. Grace is more plausible than work any way you look at it.

Ask the people who, every now and then, sneak out of the office building and the kitchen, and remember what it was supposed to be like from the beginning. Solo Gratia. Solo Fide. We are saved by grace alone. Some of us take off early on those days. And others of us never go on, even though you can find many of us sitting at our desks or folding our ironing. We don't live a switched life, turn me on, turn me off. We play at work. We play with our God. Sometimes we just play with our feathers.

And surely, if we are lucky enough to run into Jesus at Bethany, we give him all that we have and are.