I love my Monica. I love holding her hand. I love her squinting eyes, messy hair and rumpled flannel pajamas when the lights come on in the morning. I love teasing her about her accent although I pray she never loses it. I miss her when I’m working. And I love my two girls – I am certainly the most blessed of fathers. My three girls are a constant source of joy and laughter. I love my parents; they have been a constant, steadying Christian influence my entire life. I love my friends, although I sure wish I had more of them and more time for them.
I love my story. I love my neighborhood. I love our simple apartment. I love my new Hush Puppies and the great new socks I found a few weeks ago at Sam’s Club. I love food, cars, action novels, photography and good football games. I love movies and music. I love my computer and my iPod. I love road trips, rowdy oceans and hot coffee on cold mornings.
My life is filled to the brim with all sorts of love. So if there is one area of this “Live Like You Were Dying” conversation I don’t need, it is this part about loving deeper. I’m good here!
Yeah right! Let’s open the Bible and see an example of what loving deeper truly looks like, shall we Kevin? Open your Bibles to the first eleven verses of John 12 and just think for a moment about loving deeply...
Six days before the Passover celebration began, Jesus arrived in Bethany, the home of Lazarus—the man he had raised from the dead. A dinner was prepared in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, and Lazarus was among those who ate with him. Then Mary took a twelve-ounce jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nard, and she anointed Jesus’ feet with it, wiping his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance. But Judas Iscariot, the disciple who would soon betray him, said, “That perfume was worth a year’s wages. It should have been sold and the money given to the poor.” Not that he cared for the poor—he was a thief, and since he was in charge of the disciples’ money, he often stole some for himself. Jesus replied, “Leave her alone. She did this in preparation for my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.” When all the people heard of Jesus’ arrival, they flocked to see him and also to see Lazarus, the man Jesus had raised from the dead. Then the leading priests decided to kill Lazarus, too, for it was because of him that many of the people had deserted them and believed in Jesus.
This is a gorgeous Scripture passage, isn’t it? What a love moment! This passage models what it means to love deeper. If we’re interested in learning to live like we are dying, there are four loving deeper lessons we can learn from Mary in this story. Mary loves deeper…
Love Unusually
Mary loves unusually. Mary is not driven by religious protocol, societal norms or some false sense of duty, expectation or propriety. Mary does not speak a word here. Mary does not explain or ask for permission. Mary’s love is unusual – it is a heart overflowing into action.
How unusually do we love God or the people around us? How extraordinarily does the love we have within us express itself? Do we offer only a “standard issue” love that is proper, required and expected or do we go far beyond that? How unusually do we love?
I have a couple of good friends from our Ely days who know something about loving unusually. While they are in Ely, there are all sorts of people in and out of their humble trailer. They are constantly doing unexpected, unusual things to let people know they are loved. Just a couple weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I got a nice card in the mail with a $200 money order in it for Elim Church. No particular reason; just their way of blessing me and telling me how much they miss our times playing hand and foot together. They are preciously unusual!
When my Grandmother Hanson passed away years ago while I was in college, it was a very painful loss. She was warm hugs, a gentle ear, cookies and apple pie to all of us. It was very hard. Yet at the reception after the funeral, I was deeply comforted by four of her Luther League friends approaching me, asking if I was the “steak dinner” grandson. Huh? But as we talked, it turned out, years before, on a whim when no one else in my family happened to be home one Saturday evening, I made a surprise candlelit steak dinner for Grandma, put on a suit, picked a bouquet of dandelions and went over and picked up Grandma and brought her over to the house for supper. My sweet Grandma Hanson loved and remembered that evening and proudly retold the story so many times, her Luther League friends got sick of hearing it! I’m so glad I did that! There was nothing at that memorial service more comforting to me than knowing my sweet grandmother knew I loved her unusually. And that is the gorgeous irony of learning to love unusually. That silly, insignificant, teenaged, dandelion steak dinner on a boring Saturday evening now means ever so much more to me than it ever could possibly have meant to her! Living like we are dying means we learn to love unusually as Mary did.
Love Lavishly
Mary also loved lavishly. It is hard for us to fathom the lavishness of this moment. And I’m not just talking about the value of the perfume, although that was certainly lavish. If we were to place this incident in today’s financial terms, it would be as if this red, gladiola smelling perfume imported from India cost somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand dollars. This may well have been Mary’s life savings or entire inheritance. Or it may have simply been a reflection of how very wealthy her family was. But in any event, it was a lavish, extravagant waste of money in the eyes of the people in that room. It was the silly rich girl flushing money away on the Teacher that could have been very well used in all sorts of other meaningful ways. While John tells us Judas objected, the other Gospels say all the disciples were upset.
This was disturbingly lavish love and not simply because of the costs involved. Mary humiliated herself. Every time Mary appears in the Gospels, she appears at the feet of Jesus! She lowers herself to servant status. As a matter of fact, by letting down her hair, she lowers herself even to immoral woman status, possibly even creating a questionable situation for Jesus in the eyes of others. She was lavish in her love. She was shameless in her love. And yet because she was, it is entirely possible Jesus went to the Cross still smelling of the sweet fragrance of Mary’s love. The lavish quantity of Mary’s love left a sweet fragrance that filled the whole house (and probably a fragrance lingering on Jesus for many days). Isn’t that sweet?
When was the last time you loved God or someone around you lavishly? When was the last time you allowed love to carry you completely and wonderfully overboard, in the best and sweetest sense of the word? And please understand this isn’t just a financial or material love. Love lavishly displayed doesn’t have to have hardly anything at all to do with money or material things. Lavish love is about giving lavishly of our selves in all sorts of creative ways.
My friend Larus is a very busy guy. As a computer guy living in North Carolina, he is constantly working. But when his mother’s health failed and his father needed to move, my friend loved his parents lavishly. He did all sorts of lavish things for them, too numerous to recount. He loved lavishly. Living like we were dying means we love God and others lavishly.
Love Now
But Mary didn’t just love Jesus unusually and lavishly, she loved Jesus now. She didn’t wait for a better moment. She didn’t delay or procrastinate. She didn’t wait for others to love Jesus. She didn’t wait for love to be easier. She didn’t wait for Jesus to be more popular and acceptable. Mary didn’t wait for anything. She didn’t procrastinate her love; she loved now.
I wonder how many of us think love is a good idea, but just not right now. We need to reconsider that attitude! Refusing to love now has enormous consequences. William Barclay was quoted in an old issue of Leadership years ago saying, “More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world, and more people have been driven from the church by the hardness and ugliness of so-called Christianity than by all the doubts in the world.” I think he was right about that.
If we’re waiting for a better situation, better people or a some sort of better moment to love as we should, we are almost certainly not loving as though we were dying. Delayed love is not deep love. That is not unusual or lavish love for God and others. Jesus taught us that even the pagans can love and give of themselves for those who love them back. But as followers of Jesus, recipients of the most unusual and lavish love in the universe, we’re supposed to love better than that. Love unusually, love lavishly and perhaps most of all, love right now. And yet it is very common for us to withhold or delay our love. Cartoonist Erik Johnson drew a cartoon years ago of two people angrily leaving a worship service as one of them said to the pastor, “Hey, I'd like to see you love MY neighbor.” If we wait until we finally get a good neighbor to love, we will probably never love as we should. Loving deeper means loving now! We don’t simply love when love is easy, obvious or deserved. We love before it is deserved. We love as we have been loved. We love because our lives have been risen from the dead. We love because, in one way or another, Jesus has given us back our Lazarus. We love now!
Love Courageously
But that takes courage. Loving deeper means loving courageously. Loving deeper means loving when others don’t understand what we’re doing or why we’re doing it.
How tragic is it that Mary’s unusual, lavish and immediate love of Jesus caused a cranky squabble among the disciples? Instead of being deeply moved by the loving heart of this dear sweet sister, the others angrily second guessed her. How typical! Instead of being positively challenged by her, they were negatively exposed by her. Her unusual display of love was not properly understood. And as something of a side note, how tragic is it that Jesus’ love and resurrection of Lazarus does not cause an outpouring of love among the religious leaders of that day. They resolve to kill the miraculous evidence of the unusual, lavish and immediate love of Jesus. Just like the love of Jesus, our love is frequently not accepted or understood.
But loving deeper means we accept that. Loving deeper means loving courageously. It means accepting the fact that others will not often understand our loving behavior. It means offering love that only Jesus himself might understand and fully receive.
Marian Liautaud shared a wonderful story about courageous love years ago. She said, “Sometimes I feel left out of the world my husband, Dan, shares with our son. They share experiences I would never think of offering Danny. Like the time Dan got off work at midnight and decided to wake up our son to frolic by moonlight in the first-fallen snow. The neighbors wondered what all the noise was at that hour, but I smiled at the thrill little Danny was having and the gratitude I felt for the man who was giving it to him.” Courageous love doesn’t worry much about what the neighbors might think. Courageous love only cares about the little boy.
Courageous love cares about figuring out how to even more courageously love. Donna Hutchinson told a cute story years ago about her friend’s daughter. She said, “One day, my friend's daughter, Britney, came up to her and said, "Mommy, I know Jesus lives inside my heart. But how do I tell him I love him? Do you think if I write 'I love you' on a piece of paper and eat it, Jesus will get the note?” Isn’t that sweet? Courageous love just wants Jesus to get the note. Loving deeper means loving courageously. Mary loved courageously.
Living like we are dying means loving deeper. The great preacher Philips Brooks once said, “Duty makes us do things well; but love makes us do them beautifully.” Living like we are dying means we want love to drive us to do things beautifully. May God help us do so!
Amen.
