From the Pulpit:

Oil is Messy Stuff
 

It was a summer evening longer ago than I like to admit. My boys had spent the day swimming and riding their bikes around the neighborhood, and we’d eaten supper on the back porch, and, as was my delight in those days, the house was full of their friends, the energy of at least eight or ten boys hanging around as the day wound down and the sun set over the cotton fields behind our house.

I’d been to Blockbuster and rented a video. “What’s it rated?” they asked as they lounged on the floor of the den with pillows and quilts. “Well,” I answered, “it doesn’t have a rating, but when it was made all movies were G.” “Bo-ring! Bo-ring!” “No,” I said. “Wait until you see it. Give it a chance” “Oh, jeez,” they said when it came on. “I’ll bet it doesn’t have any special effects.” Following the opening credits, which I had to admit were pretty lame and with way too many trumpets – the film was made thirty years earlier -- we see a young man walking down a country lane, clearly looking for adventure, and we hear him say, “Call me Ishmael.” In no time at all the boys were swept up in the stormy adventure of nineteenth century whale hunting.

The irony to our time is that the hunters, who are so vividly portrayed in Melville’s  deeply theological novel, Moby Dick, systematically wiped out the world’s population of whales, raped our oceans and slaughtered the great Leviathan, which the psalm tells us God created for the sport of it –the fact is that they all but exterminated the largest animals ever to exist to feed the world’s hunger for lighting oil and corset stays, forcing the search for an alternative source of energy. And so in the mid-nineteenth century people began to experiment with the potential of kerosene. Thus began the world that now runs on internal combustion engines, our insatiable hunger for petroleum products, even when that means taking risks for which we have no solutions. Oil is messy stuff.

I’m not the first to recognize the doppelganger image presented by the hubris of the maniacal Captain Ahab as we reel with the uncontrollable oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, and there’s no way to ignore the oil spill when our gospel lesson is all about a profligacy of oil.

I admit I wrestled all week with this image of too much oil -- on the one hand we witness endless images of the horror of the red goo gushing uncontrollably out of the pipe deep down in the Gulf of Mexico, the unforgettable images of dead dolphins and lifeless rare sea turtles, not to mention all the pelicans and terns and gulls coated in the slick and heavy nastiness of the oil; and on the other hand we see the image the forgiven woman who is so overwhelmed with gratitude to Jesus that she dares to crash a high society dinner party to slather him with strongly scented spikenard. All week long I knew I couldn’t talk about her oil and ignore the tragic spectacle that has been going on for fifty-five days now, with no solution in sight. But what do we do with this? How can we fit these two stories together in such a way that we find meaning in them, and what’s more, meaning that draws us closer to God, so that we may come closer to what it means that God created, entered, and has redeemed all creation even as we daily see images of pollution and death on our TV’s and computers?

It’s not a tidy fit. Maybe it is a good thing that we find it so disturbing. Maybe it is a good thing that the story from Luke’s gospel is exposed as the outrageous action that it was, that Jesus, as he confronts his host, reveals that he is anything but the compliant celebrity guest whom Simon expected to enhance his social standing in front of his ritzy-ditzy friends.

No, oil is messy stuff and this is all about being out of control. As we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives we are relinquishing the illusion that God’s blessing is about being well-behaved and predictable. No, true hospitality, which is at the heart of this story, is nothing less than opening the door to the unexpected and frequently the unwanted guest.

There is a vast difference, though, between being extravagant and being irresponsible. And it is gratitude that is at the heart of that difference. It is gratitude that is at the heart of hospitality, the gratitude of sharing what we have been given so that it may bless others as it has blessed us. Gratitude honors the value of what we receive and what we give. Gratitude instills in us a sense of responsibility on the one hand and generosity on the other. And true generosity is an expression of trust in God, who is the source of all good gifts.

Oil is messy stuff, and I carry some around in my purse, in a special zippered compartment and in a special silver vessel whose top screws on tight so it doesn’t get all over everything. It doesn’t hold a whole lot of oil, but it doesn’t take much to make a mess. Oil doesn’t evaporate, but rather, when we rub it on our skin, in time it sinks in and becomes part of us. Oil is the medium of blessing, that is what anointing is, and last night I prayed and wept at the bedside of our precious sister Liz Higgins and anointed her for the ultimate healing, which is death. Anointing is an expression of infinite love, the retracing of the cross of her baptism, the affirmation of her identity as the child of God, who is being taken home to be held, whole and alive in God’s arms.

While we’re talking about oil and hospitality, let me say that it is an unexpected delight that today we are welcoming Aedan Jones into our Christian family. Ordinarily we only baptize people on certain designated days of the year, but Aedan is only going to be in Austin visiting his great grandmother, Violet Presley, for a short time, and Aedan very much wants to be baptized. When I take the oil of chrism and make the sign of the cross on Aedan’s forehead, we will all be sharing with him the very same oil that the woman poured on Jesus, the oil of blessing, the oil that once we are touched by it, even though we can no longer see it or feel it, it makes a mark on us that can never be removed. Aedan, it is a privilege for us to welcome you into the family of Christ, even though God has loved you with God’s whole heart from the day you were born. God delights in you, and all these people today will promise to do everything we can to help you grow up aware of the love of Christ, so that you are now empowered to be a minister of love in the world sort of like the day that Harry Potter got his wand. Harry had always had the power because it was part of who he born to be, but his wand helped him to use it to make the world a better place.

Oil is messy stuff. One way or another it will mess up our lives. The oil of baptism calls us away from complacency. It challenges us to be who God knows us to be, which is better than we’d ever give ourselves credit for. This alone is enough to give us pause, enough to call us to sit in silence and to imagine, if we wish, the songs of the great whales who swim in the deepest oceans, to imagine our hands slick with ointment as we lavish our Lord with our love, to make the sign of the cross on the forehead of a beloved friend as she leaves this life for heaven or a precious child as he takes on his mission to love and serve this world with all the energy and optimism of youth, to dive right in and claim his birthright as the beloved of the almighty. Let’s take this oil and make a new Christian. Are you ready, Aedan? God is, and we are.

Amen.