John 12:1-8
March 21, 2010
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Last Sunday, I asked you to stop buying plastic utensils and disposables and use dishes and metal flatware to be washed in our commercial dishwasher. And if we need to buy anything, we should buy compostables. The plastics create waste in our ever-expanding landfills.
We Americans waste a lot of resources on a daily basis—maybe by the seconds and minutes. We throw away 106,000 aluminum cans every 30 seconds. The flight attendants serve up 1 million plastic cups on U.S. airline flights every six hours. We go through 2 million plastic beverage bottles every five minutes. We discard 426,000 cell phones every day. We use 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags each hour. We use 60,000 plastic bags every five seconds. We use 15 million sheets of office paper every five minutes.
Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than one percent of our solid waste stream. We toss out 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean. What a waste!
We don’t want to encourage waste. It’s not good for our wallets. It’s not good for the earth. But there is this school of thinking called the power of waste that suggests that only through wasted resources is when we can change the world. Let me explain.
Back in the 1970s, when the cost of computing power was expensive, engineers used these transistors on a microprocessor to perform valuable functions such as information processing and more serious endeavors. But the cost of these transistors remained high until an engineer named Alan Kay in Xerox decided to do what some observers called “wasting transistors.” Instead of reserving the computing power for only valuable functions, he began using them for fun things—stuff such as drawing cartoons on the screen. Those cartoons and other onscreen things that were created, such as pointers and windows, eventually became the first graphical interface, and that gave life to the Macintosh computer. The Mac, in turn, inspired similar changes in PCs.
In other words, by “wasting” computing power Alan Kay made computers simple enough for the rest of us to use. Now we as computer users have changed things even further by thinking up new applications for the computer; such as the thousands of apps one can find in an Apple store.
This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right; it can change the world.
But before that can happen, while the resource is still scarce, somebody has to use it in an extravagant, “wasteful” way.
Costly Perfume
All of this prepares us to understand the gospel reading. Jesus, in the last days of life, is in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, sitting at the table. Mary takes a pound of “costly perfume made of pure nard,” which was a fragrant, imported oil from a root found in the Himalayan Mountains to anoint Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair. When Mary poured out this oil, the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
But then Judas asked, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and use the money to care for the poor. 300 denarii were enough to pay a workingman’s salary for a year. In today’s dollars, it was worth more that $12,000. But in Judas’ eyes, Mary wastes it, pouring it on Jesus’ feet. “What a waste,” said Judas.
It wasn’t uncommon in those days to anoint the head of a guest as a sign of respect, but in those cases, only a few drops of oil would be normally used. The pouring of lavish amounts of oil on the head was the kind of anointing that was considered sacred, and it was usually reserved for designating someone as a king or priest. The anointing marked that person for divine service.
While we have no way of knowing exactly what Mary was thinking, her action expresses more than simple respect for Jesus; it seems to express her conviction that Jesus is the Messiah. Perhaps she poured the oil on his feet because she didn’t consider herself worthy to anoint his head.
Judas Iscariot is also at the table, and he sees Mary’s action as neither a sign of respect for Jesus nor a declaration of his messiah-ship. He sees only waste, and rudely questions why the perfume wasn’t sold for 300 denarii and the money given to the poor.
Jesus, however, rises to Mary’s defense, saying her act is “for the day of my burial.” Anointing the dead was a common burial practice in that time, but Jesus, who seems to know what is coming, accepted the anointing as an act before the fact. As far as Jesus is concerned, Mary’s gift is one of extravagant love, not of wasted perfume.
One of the most misinterpreted passages in the Bible is the verse when Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Some have used this verse to justify the permanent existence of poor people and excused themselves from any responsibilities to eradicate poverty. This is not what this verse mean.
The correct interpretation is that because there will always be poor people as the result of societal inequities, God’s people are commanded to be generous to those who are needy. Jesus is not advocating indifferences to the poor—or even occasional generosity. Rather, Jesus adds to John’s comment regarding Judas’s behavior and character. Judas’ interest in helping the poor with the proceeds of the potential sale of the ointment is exposed as hypocrisy precisely because he does not make an effort to assist the poor on an ongoing basis. Judas was embezzling from the common purse for his own purposes.
In other words, Jesus could have said, “Yes, this perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor, but would it have? If you had an extra 300 denarii in your hands right now, would you give it to the poor? Is that really where it would end up?”
Notice that John the gospel writer criticizes Judas’s character and motives, describing him as a “thief,” but Jesus does not; he challenges only Judas’ assumption that the perfume—and Mary’s act—was wasted.
Is it Wasteful?
All of us especially living in green San Francisco and being frugal Asian-Americans resist waste. We give a child an expensive birthday gift and he has a wonderful time playing with—the box the toy came in. Rather than rejoicing in the child’s pleasure, we’re bothered that the toy itself is unloved. What a waste, we think, even if we don’t say it. We could have just bought him an empty box!
Sometimes, even when wasting is cheaper than not wasting, we persist in trying to avoid waste. The nature of copy machines and printers today is that sometimes the paper feeder mechanisms mess up and pull two pieces of paper through so that you end up with one printed sheet and one blank sheet that looks perfectly good. What’s the best thing to do with the blank sheet? When the Ricoh copier repairman came over to the office this past week, I asked him this question too. “What’s the best thing to do with a blank sheet that went through the machine?” The recommendation is to throw it away.
There’s something that happens to sheets that have gone through the printer. They pick up a static charge or something that causes many of them not to go through smoothly on the second try. In fact, often they cause the machine to jam. Then you have to spend 15 minutes tinkering with the printer, or, in extreme cases, calling for repairs. Most people who work in offices soon learn that that’s what can happen when they try to avoid wasting a sheet that came through blank. But many will try it again anyway, simply because it doesn’t feel right to waste what seems to be a perfectly good piece of paper. Some will send it through a second time even when the company policy says to throw it away! I do!
We don’t want to encourage waste, but the story of Mary who anointed Jesus with expensive perfume suggests that we may need to rethink when extravagances are really not wasteful.
You have heard about the recently opened, new and costly cathedral that was built in Oakland’s Lake Merritt area, the Christ the Light Cathedral. You might think, “What a waste, spending all that money in that city where there are so many poor people who need affordable housing?” Might it be that the people who now come to worship in the cathedral will also be feeding the poor in the area?
Some people have expressed some concerns about us spending $40,000 to clean and restore our sanctuary stained glass windows. They may say, “What a waste, spending all that money on old windows when that money could have been used for programs and ministries?” Might it be that people who come and worship here may become so inspired by God to serve that they would give their lives for Christ—something much more valuable than $40,000?
You hear about some exceptionally talented young adult who has potential and opportunities in many fields but who decided to work at an inner-city mission, and you think, “What a waste of all that talent.” Might it be that the work of this young adult may touch the lives of countless children who eventually can transform and revitalize the entire neighborhood?
You know of a young person who has been offered a full scholarship at a well-known university. But she decides to go instead to a local college where she has no scholarship so she can live at home with her mother, who isn’t well and has no other family. You might say, “What a waste of a future?” But might it be that the relationship that this young woman has with her mother leads to a life of untold meaning and fulfillment?
Are these things really a waste, or are they something else?
Let me tell you a story about Dorothy Day who has been called an American saint. She took her Christian faith right into the most dreadful slums of New York City. There she established the first Catholic Worker House, a place of radical Christian discipleship.
That house became a place of hospitality for the down and out—for men Day later described as “grey men, the color of lifeless trees and bushes and winter soil, who had in them as yet none of the green of hope, the rising sap of faith.” Not long after, the Catholic Worker House began welcoming women and children as well.
One day, a wealthy socialite pulled up to the house, in a big car. She received the obligatory tour of the mission from Day herself. When she was about to leave, the woman impulsively pulled a diamond ring off her finger and handed it to Day.
The staff was ecstatic when they heard about this act of generosity. The ring, they realized, could be sold for a princely sum—enough money to take some pressure off the budget, at least for a while.
A day or two later, though, one of them noticed the diamond ring on the finger of a homeless woman who was leaving the mission. Immediately, the staff members confronted Day. “Why, in heaven’s name, would she just give away a valuable piece of jewelry like that?”
Day responded: “That woman was admiring the ring. She thought it was so beautiful. So I gave it to her. Do you think God made diamonds just for the rich?”
In the end, the story of Mary with the perfume summons us to think broadly about that which we are quick to label “wasted”—wasted time, wasted effort, wasted talent, wasted money, wasted resources, wasted commitment, wasted life. Some of those things may indeed be true squanderings, but we can’t be sure. Wasted, perhaps, can only be rightly identified based on the final outcome.
Are you wasting your life for God?
Some may say that Christ’s death on the cross was a costly outpouring of God’s love for the world. As followers and disciples of Christ, we can see the results of God wasting his love on us. Are we a waste? We are certainly not.
Sometimes it is only through the wasted resources of God—the giving of his Son on the cross for us that in him, we can change the world. Inasmuch that God loves us so much that he wasted his Son on us so that we may have everlasting life, let us believe and waste our precious lives in Christ’s name for the world.
Let us pray.
Most gracious and loving God, there are times in our lives when being extravagant is the only way we can express how profound and deep our love is. We know that our extravagance is wasteful. People are dying as we speak, dying from the lack of basic needs and we pray that we will do whatever we can to offer help. But Lord, we want to express the profoundness of our love, the depth of our thankfulness and our continuing desire for more of you. O God, please accept the wastefulness of our worship of you. Amen.