04/06/2025: Lent, Pouring Out Our Pieces

Mary of Bethany pours herself out when she anoints Jesus's feet in John 12:1-8. Her devotion prompts some to say, "What a waste!" But Jesus defends her and says that her love is not wasted. 

What is God inviting you to pour out? 

Scripture is read by Kim Maxwell. 

Sermon by Rev. Beth Demme
For more information, visit www.graymumc.org

Transcript

Kim Maxwell (00:05):

The gospel reading today is John chapter 12 verses one through six. 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 reclining with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume, made a ard, anointed Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair. [00:00:30] The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume, but Judas s scar at one of Jesus' disciples, the one who was about to betray him, said, why was this perfume not sold for 300 de 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 Mary alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor [00:01:00] with you, but you do not always have me. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks. Speak to

Rev. Beth Demme (01:06):

God. Speak to God. Imagine. Imagine you're at a dinner party and one of the guests does something that is so bold, so tender, so unorthodox that the whole room just stops breathing for a moment. That's what happens in our gospel reading today, [00:01:30] Mary of Bethany, a disciple and a friend of Jesus, she does something that seems shocking to the people who are gathered for that dinner meal. She takes a pound of very expensive perfume, so this would've been like a very thick oil or like a cream or a lotion. It's made from nard, which is a really expensive, precious element from a flower, and she just starts wiping it all over [00:02:00] Jesus's feet and then it's so much it won't wipe in, right? So she lets her hair down and she wipes it with her hair. Now, in this time, this day, in Jesus's time, women didn't let their hair down in public.

(02:14):

That just was not done and touching someone's feet. No, you didn't do that. That was unclean. You were no more likely to touch someone's foot in the first century than you would be today, right? We just don't do that. So Mary's choice [00:02:30] to do these things, it's not just an act of generosity, it's an unusual act. It's improper. It's something that just wasn't done and everyone at the dinner party was probably shocked or even scandalized by what Mary was doing, but it must have seemed to Mary that this was not only the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do. This is taking just before [00:03:00] the events of Holy Week, Jesus is on his way to the cross in a few verses. He's going to be on a donkey coming into town as people shout, Hosanna, hosanna. Soon he'll be washing his disciples feet.

(03:14):

The shadows are gathering, the cross is looming. But before all of that unfolds, we have this intimate dinner scene, a gathering of friends, a quiet moment of tenderness [00:03:30] and now tension because of what Mary has done. It's a small gathering, but the stakes are high. Love is in the room, grief is in the room, and the fragrance of Mary's act lingers. I've actually brought an anointing, oil made from nar with me so that you can smell this, and when you come up for communion, you'll have an opportunity. I will anoint you just by putting this on your hand. Trust me, friends, it is strong. [00:04:00] This will linger with you all day if you choose to do it. So in that room that night, this scent is just lingering and it would've stayed on Jesus' body for the events that were to come. Lent is a season that is about broken pieces, but it's really about how those broken pieces in God's hands can be fitted into something beautiful and they're in that room with Mary [00:04:30] and Jesus and a room filled with mixed emotions and Mary's quiet courage.

(04:36):

Mary brought one of those fragile pieces and she offered it as an act of love for Jesus. Her gift doesn't fix what's coming. It's not going to spare Jesus one second of suffering, but it reveals love, and in that way, it prepares the way. Imagine it. Imagine her kneeling before Jesus. Her hands [00:05:00] were probably trembling as she went to unseal this jar, a jar she had probably saved for years. Generous isn't quite the right word because this was more than generous. This was such an expensive offering that this would have been her safety net. We're talking about Mary's life savings, right? The gospel of John tells us the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. That detail is not only poetic, it is theological. [00:05:30] What Mary does doesn't touch only Jesus. It touches everyone in the room. That's how love works, isn't it?

(05:40):

That's how sacrifice works, right? It lingers, it spreads, it transforms. Well. What does that look like in this day and age? What does it look like for someone to pour themselves out? I want to give you an example. I want to tell you about a young woman named Maggie Doyne. Maggie grew up in suburban New Jersey. [00:06:00] She was a typical 1990s early aughts kid, early two thousands kid. When she was 12, she started babysitting and saving money for college. But when it was time to go to college in 2005, she realized she wasn't ready. She had done well in school. She had followed the path that had been laid out for her, but she said she just didn't know who she was and she didn't know who she wanted to be or what she wanted out of life. It was like something [00:06:30] in her was telling her to pause, to just pause.

(06:36):

So instead of going to college, she packed up her backpack and set off on a journey to the other side of the world, hoping to discover not just new places, but something deeper within herself. She did not want to save the world. She just wanted to see it. She wanted to know it and maybe in the process see and know something [00:07:00] about herself too. Well, Maggie's journey eventually led her to Northeastern India where she worked with a refugee community that was refugees from the nearby country of Nepal. And Maggie says that at that point in her life, she did not even know Nepal was a country. She did not know this was a place, and she certainly didn't know that it had been through a decades long civil war. She didn't know that the people of Nepal suffered under widespread [00:07:30] poverty. She didn't know that there were generations of children who had grown up without any access to education or safety.

(07:39):

She later learned some of the facts. What she learned is that in this time in 2005, 2006, one in 20 children in Nepal was an orphan. Some sources suggest that today that number is as high as one. In 11, she learned that at that time, only half of the female population had [00:08:00] ever attended school. She learned that nearly 60% of the people of Nepal lived in poverty. So while working in India, Maggie became close with one of those young refugees, a woman named Sunita, and these two young women decided that they would go together from India to Nepal and they would journey back to Sunita's Village, the one she had been forced to flee when she was a child. So they loaded up, they rode [00:08:30] buses for days and days, and then they got to the end of the line and the bus driver said, okay, ladies, this is the end.

(08:38):

And they got off. And then Maggie says they had to walk up up into the Himalayan foothills to find Sunita's Village, only to discover that the home Sunita had once loved and felt nurtured in, had actually been destroyed. But Sunita said it was okay because she knew she was with family. She wasn't related to [00:09:00] everybody in the village, but she was. These were her folks. Well, one day when it was getting close to time for Maggie and Sunita to head back to India, Maggie had a moment and it really was a moment that changed her life forever. I want to read to you a little bit from Maggie's book. This is her book between the mountain and the Sky, and she says, the first time I see her, she's a streak of orange, a curl of tangerine [00:09:30] skin sitting in the dirt rising from the belly of the riverbed.

(09:33):

She dust off the bright puffy sleeves of what in a previous life must have been a party dress and gets to work. She can't be older than five, I guess. As I stand at the lip of the bank, I watch her weave between slabs of plastic and cinder blocks and scoop up a stone the size of a soccer ball, waddling it back to her pile of gravel and grunting like a quarry man. [00:10:00] She sits cross-legged and waxs the rock over and over. Her eyebrows scrunched so tightly that they seem to meet. Maggie says, no matter where I go, I always seem to end up in places like this one, alleyways, outskirts, trash heaps the back pockets of a place where less desirable things and people get stuffed away. I've been traveling all over the South Pacific and living in India on my gap year, but still a mix of sadness, [00:10:30] fear, and shame hits me under my tongue every time I see these hidden tucked away places.

(10:37):

Little kids go to work in some places, their porters, laborers on construction sites, domestics, agricultural workers. Watching them work is jarring, watching them work with a smile even more so the little girl pulls herself up, shakes the pebbles from her skirt and sizes up a new hunk [00:11:00] of shale beyond the territory she staked out in the gully, there are others, all women and children as far as I can see, a coalition of them. Some look very thin, some smile through their sweat, and nearly all of them look tired, worn, ragged and caked in a layer of dust from the river bed, they wander up and down looking for rock material they can crush into gravel by hand and sell to developers and contractors working [00:11:30] on road construction projects. My little friend in the orange dress looks up from her hammering, her eyes flexed with gold and lack of sleep lock onto mine after traveling and traveling and traveling, I cannot go another step.

(11:48):

What am I supposed to do in this moment, in this life? What are we as a human family supposed to do and be? She drops her mallet and I look [00:12:00] at her as if she has the answers, she looks at me like she is the answer. Namaste. She shouts, frantically waving her tiny leathery hand my way, a giant sun soak, smile, practically explodes between her cheeks. Hello, big sister. She said, my Nepali isn't great, but I know this phrase everyone is. Everyone's Dede here. I take a long look at her. She takes a long look at me. [00:12:30] Namaste. I say Back. The population of the universe dwindles to exactly two. A teenager from Jersey who spent her childhood bouncing on an enormous backyard trampoline and just trying to get good grades and a delete, an untouchable who has never seen a school or a toilet, sifting shoeless through the trash and grinning like a goofy cartoon. There she is, the world's most unspeakable [00:13:00] failure and its unending promise all tied up with a thin orange ribbon. The plates inside me begin to shift. I keep walking knowing with certainty that I'll see her again crossing the river and letting her perfect bird voice echo in my head, Namaste.

(13:23):

In another life, she could be my sister in another life, she could be me. [00:13:30] Can you see her? Can you see that little girl in the orange dress? Maybe someone like that lives in your memory too. Someone who shifted the ground beneath you. Someone who was part of an unexpected life-changing moment, as you can hear from that excerpt from her book, that moment broke Maggie open. But instead of running away or denying what she was feeling, [00:14:00] she really leaned in. She thought about her own life and she realized it had never occurred to her. It had never crossed her mind that childhood was a luxury. Some children didn't get to experience. Maggie couldn't erase the little girl's sweet face from her mind's eye. So she started asking questions. She asked some friends, well, why isn't that little girl in school? Why is she breaking open [00:14:30] rocks with a hammer?

(14:31):

Instead of learning how to read and write, Maggie learned that the children in Nepal worked so that their families could afford to eat. Everyone in the family worked to scrape together enough money to be able to buy just a little bit of food, and sending a working child to school of having them work would mean that the family would face more poverty, more hunger, a bigger struggle to survive. [00:15:00] Plus education was not free. Going to school would cost Temas family money. Okay, thought Maggie, but how much can a child really earn, right? Well, it turned out that Hema was earning less than one US dollar per day, okay? Thought Maggie, they work six days here. I dunno, about $20 a month for less than $250. [00:15:30] I could cover an entire year of this child's earnings. That'd be good, but there's probably no way I could afford tuition, right?

(15:39):

That's got to cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Remember, Maggie is a teenager from New Jersey, and that's her frame of reference, right? Going to private school in New Jersey would cost thousands of dollars a month. So Maggie started asking around and she found out that the little girl's tuition would be any [00:16:00] guesses, any idea what it might have cost? No. So it turns out that it would be 1200 rupees, which equated to $10 a year, $10 a year. It's one thing to be moved by a child's needs. It's another thing to respond. And Maggie, she responded. She decided that she was going to make a personal commitment. She's like 18, 19 [00:16:30] years old, right? She's going to make a personal commitment to this little girl and her family. She would personally cover the cost of he's education, and she would give the family the equivalent of he's wages so that the little girl could go to school.

(16:45):

So Maggie went back to the quarry, back to the riverbed area, and this time she took her friend Sunita with her so that there would be a translator. Let me just let you hear this in Maggie's words. This is again from her book, Sunita squats down smiles and talks [00:17:00] to the little girl as the child is sorting through a bundle of trash and picking up an aluminum can, caked in green sludge, we find out where she's from, ette, how old she is. She's seven, not five, as I had guessed. She's so small and we ask if she has any family. No father, but she has a mother who works in the river bed too. Then Sunita asks her if she'd like to go to school. Hema stops [00:17:30] her eyes open wide and she lets out a series of ridiculous squeals, fast and frenzied words that even Sunita can't catch pour out of her as she hops around us.

(17:41):

Ricocheting off one bank of the river and then the next Sunita laughs. Hema says she'd like to go to school more than anything the world before. We can think of what to do next. She grabs our hands and drags us with shocking force toward her mom. Huma's mom looks strong, almost [00:18:00] Amazonian with fabric wrapped around her lower back for support. As she extracts rubble from the bank, she turns out to be even more excited than her daughter. Two weeks later, dressed in a burgundy checked shirt, blue slacks and a neck tie, half the length of her body with the local cuckoos announcing her and an audience of black snuffling pigs. Hema walks out of the riverbed and onto school and a different future. [00:18:30] Maggie poured herself out. She poured it out a little, and then she said, but it was kind of addicting to know that you could have this kind of an impact so addicting that before she finished that trip, she had enrolled five more girls in school, but that still wasn't enough. Maggie's heart broke for the children who didn't have homes for the kids, who didn't have families, who didn't have any safety. So Maggie called home to New Jersey to her [00:19:00] parents, and she said, you know that $5,000 I have in my savings account that I've been saving since I was 12 and started babysitting, I'm going to need you to go ahead and wire that money to me. I want to buy some land here and I want to build a home for the children who don't have a family.

(19:23):

Everything that she had saved. That's her jar of nard, right? Her $5,000 savings account. Now with that [00:19:30] money, she bought land. She borrowed tools and dug a foundation for a home. Maggie got her hands dirty, and of course the friends she had made along the way were there to help too. Once construction was underway, Maggie came back to the US and she worked babysitting jobs and dog walking jobs and any odd job she could to earn money to send back to Nepal to be able to finance the construction. At one point she convinced her parents to have a yard sale, and they went [00:20:00] through the house and she said, this is just not going to be enough. We're going to need more. So she made flyers and she put a flyer in each neighbor's mailbox and said, we're having a yard sale, and I invite you to make a donation of your unwanted items so that we can sell them, so that we can build a home for these children in Nepal.

(20:20):

This life-giving project. Well, of course, the money started coming in. One neighbor gave her $5,000, another neighbor gave [00:20:30] her $20,000, and another neighbor said, you're going to need to set up a 5 0 1 C3 charitable corporation, and I'm going to do that paperwork for you. That first building became the Co Valley Children's Home. It's not orphanage. It's a family home, a place where Maggie and other trusted adults can live and raise children together. Before long, they of course also built a school. Then came clean [00:21:00] water, healthcare, food security. Over the last 17 years, Maggie has helped raise hundreds of children and she's helped educate hundreds and hundreds more. What began as a single act of generosity, pouring out her savings, pouring out herself that turned into a haven of hope for hundreds and hundreds of precious human beings. Maggie didn't wait until she had more experience or more [00:21:30] money or more answers or more credentials, and she freely admits that there is freedom in being young and not knowing the pitfalls that await you.

(21:39):

If she had known what she learned, maybe she would've not been quite so adventurous, but nothing could stop her. She gave what she had. She poured out what she could, and beauty followed, healing, followed, transformation followed, and our gospel. Reading [00:22:00] Today, when Mary anointed Jesus's feet pouring out love and tenderness in this incredibly personal way, Judas accused her of being wasteful. He said, why? Why wasn't this perfume? It's so valuable. Why wasn't it sold? And the money given to the poor? But Mary didn't measure love in terms of return on investment. She didn't see her relationship with Jesus through a transactional lens. [00:22:30] She measured love in presence, in devotion, in the kind of giving that trust God with the outcome. Maybe Jude, maybe he was embarrassed by over the top way. Mary was committing herself to Jesus, honoring Jesus. Scripture tells us Judas probably wanted the money for himself. So undoubtedly he was thinking about himself in that moment. He wasn't thinking about Jesus. He wasn't thinking about what was to come. [00:23:00] He wasn't letting the beauty of the moment, the holiness of the moment wash over him. And even though we know Judas concern wasn't sincere, his reaction might still echo in our minds. It was wasteful, wasn't it? Why was Mary so extravagant? Even dare we say it showy.

(23:27):

Surely some people who hear Maggie do's [00:23:30] story wonder, why would she do that? Why would she do so much, dedicate so much of her life to children who are living so very far away? What about all the needs here in the us? Why is Maggie Duyne taking money from Americans and spending it on those people all the way over there? Doesn't Maggie realize there are poor children right here who need her help? In our gospel reading, Jesus responds to Judas questions [00:24:00] with gentleness and depth. He says, leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. Mary's act wasn't waste, it was worship. It wasn't excessive, it was extravagant. Love and love is never wasted. When we think about the way Maggie Doyne has poured herself out, we do well to remember Jesus saying, [00:24:30] when you have done it, what you have done for the least of these, you have done also for me.

(24:37):

So when Maggie cares for a child in Nepal, it is as if she is caring for Jesus himself. Mary of Bethany cared for Jesus too, and she saw something that others didn't see. Something that not even the apostles seemed to grasp. She understood that Jesus was heading towards suffering to toward death. So she responded with what [00:25:00] she had and Mary's act. It was intimate. It was vulnerable, and she pours out something costly. Yes, the perfume that was costly, but she also pours out something deeply personal. She pours out her love, her grief, her hope, her trust. Mary takes something fragile and precious, and she lets it go trusting that Jesus is worthy [00:25:30] of it, trusting that nothing given in love is ever wasted. I Where do you see yourself in this story? Are you like Mary? Are you ready to give something precious even if others don't understand?

(25:49):

Do you sense yourself wanting to offer something costly from the depths of who you are? Are you ready to turn that over to God? Or maybe, and this [00:26:00] is okay, maybe you're more like Judas. Maybe you're struggling to trust the value of love that doesn't come with a practical return. Maybe you have a hard time with vulnerability in yourself and in others. Maybe you're like the other folks at this dinner party. Other folks reclining at the dinner table that day quietly watching, unsure how to respond to someone else's vulnerable offering. Those questions don't in accuse they invite. [00:26:30] Part of being a blessing is pouring ourselves out. Yesterday, some folks poured out their time and energy into making pancakes and sausage and coffee and having conversation with our neighbors. Next Sunday, some folks will pour themselves out by making lunches for hungry folks. Pouring yourself out might mean showing up in those ways or giving your time when no one notices or pouring yourself out might [00:27:00] mean offering forgiveness where you've been withholding it.

(27:05):

Pouring yourself out might mean starting again when it's been hard. In just a few minutes, we're going to have a time of offering. I'm not saying you have to put a jar of nard in there. I'm not saying you have to put in your most valuable possession or your life savings. What you offer is between you and God. But what is God inviting you to do? Do you see, this isn't just Mary's story. [00:27:30] This is our story too. What would it look like to believe that you could pour out a piece of yourself and God could use that for someone else's healing or someone else's transformation, or to change someone else's life? Lent asks us, what peace are you still holding back? What peace are we afraid to pour out? Incredibly? God [00:28:00] invites us to bring our whole selves, messy, broken, greedy in need of repair and healing.

(28:08):

God says, just bring me all that. I'll do the transforming. I'll do that work in you. It's like when you're working on a puzzle and you have a piece and you convince yourself the manufacturer has done, gone and messed up, and they've put a piece in this puzzle that clearly [00:28:30] belongs with another puzzle because I don't see these colors, this shape doesn't make any sense to me. This just doesn't work. That's us. Our lives are not tidy with nice clean edges that fit seamlessly into the world. No. And guess what? God's not waiting for us to become the perfect peace before making something beautiful out of our lives. God's already putting the puzzle pieces together in a beautiful way, [00:29:00] and sometimes we have pieces that just feel too risky, too release, too precious, too valuable. But maybe that's the very peace God is longing to use.

(29:16):

What if your life, your love, your grief, your vulnerability, your offering is one of the puzzle pieces that God needs to change someone else's life? What if it's the peace that God needs [00:29:30] to be able to create real beauty in this world? You wouldn't want to hold that back, right? Maggie Doyne didn't wait until she had all the answers or a perfect plan. She saw something broken, and she just offered what she had, her savings, her strength, her whole heart, and God took that little piece. One teenager from New Jersey, a jersey girl, really, and God made that part of a story so much bigger than Maggie [00:30:00] could ever have imagined Mary of Bethany. She didn't know. She didn't know the impact of her gifts. She didn't know how it would be used, but she knew she had to do it. She had to pour out her love for Jesus in this way. And here's what we see in these women's stories. When we offer God our pieces, especially the ones that seem especially small, especially fragile, [00:30:30] especially valuable to us, when we offer those to God, God handles them with care and fits them into the beauty of the larger story.

(30:42):

Mary is pouring out. It's like Jesus says, she's preparing him for burial. It's a foreshadowing of what Jesus is going to do because Jesus also will offer everything, and his offering will also be misunderstood, and the fragrance of his love, [00:31:00] his love for you, it permeates the entire world. I've gone long, so I'm not going to invite you to bring your puzzle pieces up. Now, hopefully everybody has a puzzle piece. What I'm going to invite you to do is as we move through the hymn of the day and the offering, I want to invite you to reflect on this. It's in your bulletin. What is something you want to pour out for God, [00:31:30] your time, a gift, an act of service, or a part of yourself that you've been holding back? How will you trust that God will use this for something beautiful when you come up for communion? You can place it here, and as you can see, we're putting together a picture that'll be revealed on Easter. Mary poured out her perfume. Maggie poured out her savings. Both acts were misunderstood by some, but received by God as holy. [00:32:00] Neither one knew how far their offering would reach love, lingers, and what we offer from the depths of ourselves, however fragile, however small it is, never wasted in God's hands. May we each find ways to pour ourselves out this week? Amen.