"Equinox"
March 25, 2007: 5th Sunday in Lent, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
John 12:1-8
Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me."

Isaiah 43:16-21
Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior (they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick): Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.

May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.

Sermon:
Growing up in the South, in Texas, I really didn't know much about snow. Every five or six years we'd get a light dusting, like a quarter of an inch, and that was enough to paralyze the city. I remember a family photo from my early childhood of me standing next to a short sad snowman it had taken me literally hours to scoop together out of the front lawn. Poor little guy, he wasn't long for the world. Snow in Austin never lasted past noon. No, what I knew about snow I cobbled together from television Christmas specials, Currier & Ives, and the Winter Olympic—which pretty much explains my disappointment upon moving to New England and experiencing real snow firsthand.

Oh sure, it's pretty before Christmas. In the fall, the snow is seasonal and postcard perfect. But after that? No one talks about after, when the winter stretches on, one short, dark day after another completely circumscribed by the daily grind of ice and snow, salt and shovel.Lather, rinse, repeat. Or about how all those light, fluffy flakes end up in gravelly brown humps and sock-soaking slush puddles on the sidewalk come March... or April... or May. In fact, there's one of those mounds just up the road here on Temple Street. Now, I'm not saying it's big, but on the way here this morning, I saw Leonardo DeCaprio sailing toward it shouting, "I'm the king of the world!" But seriously, when winter sets in here, it sets into your bones, cold and deep. And the chill seeps into your mind, too. People become quiet, close, closed off. It's a time to huddle inside, to remember, to lick one's wounds and to grieve.

No, no one told me the cold, hard facts of winter here. But then, no one told me about spring, either. And if they had, I'm not sure I would have believed them. Again, spring in Texas is... understated. Spring in Texas is a lovely week in late February when the wildflowers spring up, eager to go to seed before the summer sets in and they're swiftly scorched to weeds.

I remember my first spring here in New Haven as a college freshman. Trudging up Prospect Street to some science class or other, I happened to look up, and... there were buds! on the trees! After months of mind-numbing gray, to see those tiny green buds and the bare beginnings of electric yellow forsythia blossoms, they looked like fireworks! I remember quite clearly laughing out loud, a slap-happy grin pasting my face from ear to ear. Where once there had stretched only an endless dull horizon, suddenly there was life again, and love and <singing> wonderful roses, they tell me. It was still no more than about 55 degrees outside, tops, and that for only about a minute and a half at midday, but it was enough to inspire a young man into foolish flip-flops and short-sleeve fancies. It was spring, and anything, anything was possible. The future was possible.

This week, of course, we marked the vernal equinox here in the northern hemisphere—at 7 minutes after midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, Wednesday, March 21, to be exact—meaning that, at that moment, the sun crossed the celestial equator moving northward along the line of the elliptic. The result of course is that, in that equinox moment, we have nearly equal amounts of night and day, fifty-fifty daylight and darkness. Winter remains, of course, or large frozen chunks of it, hanging out haunting the periphery, and spring is emerging, albeit slowly and fitfully, more the idea of spring, really.

So where does that leave us, in between the tenacious remains of winter and the coming spring thaw, but stuck in the mud? And that's a dangerous place to be. As Garrison Keillor likes to joke on his Prairie Home Companion, some folks believe the kind of early spring warmth we enjoyed last week comes along just to "lull us into a false sense of security so that late-March blizzard can wipe us off the map." At the very least, letting spring exuberance carry you away too early can earn you a nasty spring cold, but, by the same token, letting the winter pall linger too long can be a risk to your emotional health. It's a risky time. Standing here in this equinox moment, looking backward to winter and forward to spring, it's all too easy get stuck, to let the mud and the muck suck you down and hold you all immobile, unable to move one way or the other. Days like this, we're wise to proceed with caution.

That's a bit how I felt approaching our two scriptures for this morning. Both were recommended for our consideration today by the Revised Common Lectionary, but they seem to move in such completely different directions. The reading from the Gospel According to John comes from quite late in Jesus's ministry; in fact, it's the calm before the storm, before the real beginning of the end for Jesus. He's staying with Mary and Martha and their resurrected brother, Lazarus, out in Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem, before his last, fateful entrance into that city, which we will remember on Palm Sunday next week. There on the eve of his betrayal, suffering, and death, Mary offers Jesus the rites of burial he will be denied later. Aware somehow of the chill that grips Jesus and anticipating all that is to come, she pours out her grief for her friend and teacher and savior, even as she pours the costly ointment over his feet and wipes them her hair.

When Judas acts to restrain her, suggesting, truthfully or un-, that the money Mary spent on the perfume could have been used to finance their ministry among the poor going forward, Jesus stops him. "Leave her alone," he says, for "she bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me." The message here—or part of it, at least—seems to be that grief is good, that healthy mourning and remembrance have their place in our lives. If we deny the losses in our lives, all the aches and pains and disappointments, all the winter discontents that dog our days, in favor of some power-of-the-positive policy of never looking back and never surrendering to grief, we will miss something of God, something particular we have in those moments but will not have with us forever—something of the Christ, who suffered and died among us, at our own hands, and somehow, somehow on our behalf.

On the other hand, our other reading for this morning, from Isaiah, chapter 43, follows an entirely different trajectory. It seems to insist on looking forward, only. To the people of Israel, languishing in exile in Babylon, the voice of the Lord cries out, "Do not remember the former things, [do not] consider the things of old." Do not grieve, do not mourn, for "I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" This is a springtime passage if there ever was one, a vision of a wilderness world awakened to new life by the Spirit of God poured out like the spring rains on a dry and dusty land, like rivers in the desert. In God's future, we're told, all of creation will be like a garden where even the wildest of animals, the jackals and ostriches and even God's own stubborn people will rejoice to attend to God's way of life. To hold on to the hurts of the past is to risk this dream of a future redeemed. "I am about to do a new thing," God says. Don't dwell in the past, don't look back, don't blink, or you may just miss it. You may miss me.

When I first read these two passages in preparation for preaching today, I was at a loss as to what to do with them. Should I pick one and not the other? Certainly John 12 is more seasonable, as it were, given that we're moving through Lent toward Holy Week, but Isaiah 43 is one of my all-time favorites. Our former pastor here, Louise Higginbotham, preached it at my ordination seven years ago. And the lessons of each are valuable in and of themselves. The lessons of both are valuable in and of themselves. But taken together, these two readings seem to move in equal-but-opposite directions and sort of cancel each other out. Why would the Consultation on the Common Texts, the good folks who oversee the lectionary, see fit to put them together here now? Sheer perversity?

I didn't rule it out right away. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to feel that there is something of an equinox moment unfolding here in the tension between these texts. And, contrary to feel-good pop psychology, tension is not always a bad thing—and contrary to feel-good pop theology, there is even tension in the Bible. After all, this is not just one book we have here, written in one hand. It is inspired by one Spirit, to be sure, but within this cover lies an entire library of books, the record of the faithful and not-so lives of countless generations of persons living in relationship with God and one another. There's no simple, straightforward line from God to us, but a crazy, curvy story of stories of God's loving, redeeming work down through history, through us.

And as any high school calculus student can tell you, curves are much trickier than lines, because at any two points on a curve the velocity and acceleration may vary wildly. So it is with scripture, as we see this morning. It's not all sweetness and light, nor is it all gloom and doom. It's not just about remembering and mourning a past lost to us now, just as it's not just about dreaming the future. No, I firmly believe our faith is more a matter of both/and than either/or. These texts benefit from being read together, and we benefit from the creative, if uncomfortable tension, they create for us if we do. Remember: It's cold nights and warm days that cause the sap to rise.

So where does that leave us today? Where, but in the murky mud in between winter and spring? You know me: I love mud as a theological metaphor. But, friends, this is where we live, in this equinox interval between our past and God's future, the now and the not-yet. Winter has not released its hold on the world. Too many in this world still face betrayal and suffering and death—in the streets of Baghdad and the mountains of Afghanistan, in holding cells at Guantanamo, on the wrong side of the tracks and on the right side, too, in our own neighborhoods and even our own homes—and too many of our losses remain yet unmourned. Jesus still lives among the poor and the oppressed, those who have lived and lost. And so we, as followers in the way of Jesus, still have work to do: the work of memory, of honest reflection, and grief for all we have done and left undone to wound our lives, the lives of others, and the life of the world.

The good news of the Gospel, of course, is that this winter will not last forever. Even now, the tender green shoots are beginning to lift their heads up through the dirty snow. Spring is coming. Life is coming. The seed buried in the stone-cold earth will rise.. and rise... and rise... and flourish. Jesus was broken and buried, we know, but is alive even now, and his resurrection, his Easter victory over death portends a spring of souls for the whole world. God has promised us a world where every tear will be wiped away, where "death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more" (Revelation 21:4), where every child of God will be nurtured, every child of God will bloom and bear good fruit for a harvest of grace.

Even so, here at ground level, caught in this equinox moment and hip-deep as we are in the big muddy. Here the myth of progress, the naïve belief that "everyday in every way, we are getting better and better," loses its grip in the grime and the grit. Little by little, the days are getting longer, it's true, but the shadows of the past still loom large for us, and chill winter memories persist. Here in between, nothing seems for sure, nothing seems a done deal. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading light in the Evangelical and Reformed Church that was one of the predecessor denominations of our own United Church of Christ and the author of the now world-famous Serenity Prayer, wrote that we postmodern human beings are caught here in the middle between a false optimism which "conceives of the world as possessing unqualified sanctity and goodness" and a false pessimism that relegates historic existence to a "realm of meaningless cycles." We stand here in a present moment filled with infinite possibilities for good and evil, as is each subsequent moment of our lives.
But, trust me: That's okay; after all, it's the redemption of the world once and for all we're talking about, not just the annual turn of the seasons. Jesus is not simply some ancient fertility god with a nice new Judeo-Christian makeover. No, our God is more. Our God does more. Our God makes a way where there really is no way, and the resurrection we're promised brings new life, not just our same old lives renewed. No, nothing is for certain, even what God's new, good stuff is going to look like.

And so we hope and pray. We mourn what was and wait for what will be. We lean into the grace of a God who makes a way where there really is no way, whose resurrection does more than simply renew our tired old lives but brings something altogether new, who stands here with us in the gap the now and the not-yet in Jesus.. And while we wait, we also work, we work hard; to repair the damage wrought by winter storms, to clear away the dead wood in us and prepare the ground for whatever good it is God intends for us. Remembering Jesus' own example, we are beginning to work out his resurrection among us even now.

Stumbling, fitfully, it's true, but.wth every act of peace, justice, and compassion, we are lifting our heads and speaking out and acting out so that when the not-yet does come, our now will be ready to receive it, that it may take root in us and grow, so that, like the mustard seed, we may become a great tree, a home for all the birds of the air (Luke 13:9) and a shade to the jackals and ostriches and wild asses and women and men and all the other wild creatures God has made to declare the goodness and grace of God. As we inhabit this squishy, squirmy equinox place in between, this is my prayer for us, that even here, even now we might believe and so trust, trust and so act, act and so grow until God's summer sun rises and never sets.