Pressing On

​In our Gospel reading, Mary of Bethany pours a pound of expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet. That’s a LOT of perfume! I suspect it was an understatement to say that the house was filled with the fragrance. I’m guessing it was suffocating. Then Mary wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair. It’s a beautiful act of love that must have also been a little awkward for everyone involved.
 
But we’ll be hearing about the washing of feet again next week, on Maundy Thursday, so I’ll focus on our other readings this morning. They certainly have plenty for us!
 
Speaking on behalf of God, Isaiah says in our Old Testament reading, “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?” That’s God acting.
 
The Apostle Paul makes a similar point about his own action in response to God. “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”
 
Forget the old, embrace the new, press on.
 
People will hear that message differently.
 
For many, it sounds great. We are a culture that wants the new and improved, the next big thing. My children, ages twenty-eight and twenty-five, love the new. Nicholas tells me, for example, that the newest version of technology is virtually always “objectively better.” I am sure he is right. But that is NOT how I experience updates to my computer.
 
I was once like my sons. I used to like the new.
 
At the risk of violating everything Isaiah and Paul said about forgetting what lies behind, I reread the first sermon I ever preached, which was on these very readings. It was in the spring of 2007, and I was working my way towards ordination. To fulfill the remaining ordination requirements, my family and I were preparing to move to Massachusetts that fall.
 
I began my sermon by confessing that I had had an anxiety dream about preaching a few days earlier. Although I didn’t mention it in my sermon, I was even more anxious about all the other new things that would soon be coming my way: moving to New England, returning to school, serving as a hospital chaplain, and beginning my priesthood.
 
But I was also excited about the new thing I was experiencing, the new thing God was calling me to. I was eager to press on towards my goal. The readings we just heard spoke directly to where I was in my life at that time. They were good news for me, and they felt like good news.
 
But that is not true for me in the same way at this stage of my life. I am settled, comfortable, content with things as they are.
 
I do look forward with hope. But I certainly don’t want to forget the past. I enjoy studying history. I enjoy reflecting on my own journey to this point. Particularly in this centennial year for our parish, I enjoy celebrating the last hundred years.
 
And I am no longer big on embracing the new. In my house, we joke that if everyone were like me, human beings would still be living in caves. Straining forward to what lies ahead is not who I am, particularly at this stage of my life.
 
But that makes our readings even more important for me and for people like me. These readings are a challenge and an invitation that we need to hear.
 
It is easy to get stuck in ruts. That is true for many people, particularly as we age. And it is certainly true of the Episcopal Church.
 
I’m guessing many of you have heard the jokes about how many people it takes to change a lightbulb from this group or that. How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb? Change?!
 
We rightly love our traditions. And, if we get too stuck in our ways, we run the risk of stagnation or worse.
 
The Apostle Paul, in the years before he became a Christian, was an extreme example of that risk.
 
Paul loved the traditions of his people, and Paul lived them. Paul claimed that “as to righteousness under the law” he was “blameless.” Paul did it all.
 
And so, when God did a new thing, when God came in the flesh, when a new movement arose preaching a Gospel of love and inclusion, Paul reacted with extreme hostility. Paul was, as he says, “as to zeal, a persecutor of the church.”
 
Thankfully, Christ shook Paul out of his complacency, his self-righteousness, his persecuting zeal. Christ helped Paul to see and understand the new thing God was doing. Christ called Paul to embrace that new thing and to become an agent of further change in the Church. Paul became the apostle of a law-free Gospel to Gentiles at a time when many even of the other apostles weren’t prepared to go so far.
 
And Paul kept pushing forward right to the end of his life. Paul wrote this letter from prison, probably in Rome, probably in his fifties, which was old in the first century, and probably within a year or two of his execution. Even then, in prison, as an old man near the end of his life, Paul, who had been so attached to the old ways before he met Christ, Paul kept straining forward to what lay ahead, pressing toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
 
That is our calling, too, hard as it can be for people like me to hear it.
 
God keeps moving forward. What God did in the past, those things that we have captured in our traditions, is not always a good measure of what God is doing now or will do in the future. Our task, our challenge, the task and challenge of every generation, is to see God’s hand at work in the world around us, however new it may be, and to get involved.
 
Unfortunately, I don’t always see God’s hand as clearly as I would like. And these readings are a warning that part of my difficulty may come from the very fact that I am comfortable and content with things as they are and have been, that I am not inclined to look for the new thing God is doing.
 
But if I want to see God’s new thing, I do know more or less where to look.
 
God’s new things seem often to happen among people who are struggling: people like the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, to whom God sent Moses; or the people of Israel laboring under Roman domination in the first century, when Christ himself came among them; or people like us during the pandemic, when many of us experienced isolation and loss, but also when Churches embraced technologies that have dramatically enhanced our capacity for evangelism.
 
It may well be the same in our day. God is doing something, and God’s new thing is likely happening among those who are hungry or afraid or oppressed, the “least of these,” the people Christ tells us to help if we want to help him.
 
My prayer for us, especially in this centennial year when we look back at our first century but also forward to our next, is that we can appreciate the surpassing value of knowing Christ, that we could willingly accept the loss of all things if necessary, that we can and will press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. And I pray that in Christ’s name. Amen.