November 13, 2011
Money & Stuff Part 4, Alabaster Jar - Matthew 26:6-13
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadCharlotte’s Thunder Road Marathon was yesterday. The winner was Kyle Smith of Linden, MI, with the time of 2:37. I have come to learn that running is a way of life. For some people (and this may sound very strange) running is life. It’s everything. Consider these two people out of the most recent edition of Runner’s World: Bill O’Shields of Greenville, SC, was serving a fifteen year prison sentence for robbing a bank. He was bitter, beaten, and bored, he said, but then he started running around the prison yard. That fall, he was logging seventy miles a week. He ran his first race three days after his release from prison. “Running gave me a whole new life,” he says. “I can’t even remember my past – it’s like it wasn’t me. I have a good life now, and it’s all because I run.” Or Jim Austin of Wylie, TX, says that “my big sister told me, ‘Running is your gift. You can do it any time you want, for as long as you want.’ She was born with cerebral palsy and told me that her favorite dreams are the ones where she dreams that she can run. I’ve never taken a run for granted since.”
That’s powerful stuff, isn’t it? Neither of them have made any major financial investment. In fact, we all can do what they do. I think that’s part of what’s so attractive about running. It’s the most primitive form of human transportation. It’s what we humans were intended to do. If you have two legs, two feet, and some muscles mass, then you can almost surely run. As far as possessions, we have the exact same thing that they have. We might need a buy a pair of running shoes, and some shorts, and a hat, but that’s about it. It’s not that they have something that we cannot afford, it’s not that they have something that we don’t even already have. It’s just how they use what they have. Or, I guess maybe you could put it this way: value is not so much about inherent worth. Maybe value has more to do with how we use things than the things themselves.
We don’t know who this woman is out of Matthew’s Gospel. Luke says she’s a “woman of the city” and John says that she’s Mary. Matthew and Mark just refer to her as a woman. We don’t know where she came from, or how she knew Jesus, or how much money she had, or what her religious beliefs were. We also know very little about alabaster jars in 1st Century Palesetine. Back in that day, they were very valuable. People would anoint their guests’ heads with oil after a long day traveling. The more important the guest, the more valuable the ointment. This particular jar of ointment, according to Mark, was worth a year’s wage. The average annual wage of a Charlotte area resident is $49,779 per year. That’s a lot of money. It was very valuable then. However, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not much. Even the money, $50,000 is a small fraction of, for example, our national debt. The jar and ointment themselves would be valuable from a historical perspective today, but we don’t anoint peoples’ heads with oil anymore. The jar’s inherent value honestly is not all that much. It’s how she used the jar that gave it its value. Had she used the ointment for herself, we’d never have heard of it. Or had she had passed it down from descendent to descendent all the way to today, it would be valuable to a certainly family, but not so much for anybody else. Maybe Matthew and Mark leave the woman nameless for a reason. The one thing that we know about that woman is the one message they want to get across. She used what she had in a very valuable way, in fact in a way that made it invaluable. Jesus said that every time this Gospel was told, it would be in her remembrance. Two thousand years later, we’re telling this same story about this woman. Do you think they’ll talking about this particular man in 4011?
My father is fond of saying that there’s the fish camp crowd and the country club crowd, but there’s not much difference between the two. He’s right about that, and maybe I know the reason why. It’s not what we have that makes us wealthy, but how we use what we have that makes us wealthy. If it’s just what we have, then every succeeding generation in the country should be happier than the previous one, because every succeeding generation has more stuff than their parents did. Yet that’s clearly not the case, is it? Well-being has very little to do with how much stuff we have. It’s how we use that stuff.
Sam Smith spent a career in the army. He and his wife, Dawn, had three children. As an army man, Sam never hit the financial jack pot. Somehow or other Sam managed to make Fort Hood, TX, his home base. During his last several years there, he and Dawn decided that they wanted a farm, so they bought some land about an hour north of Fort Hood in Mooreville. He and Dawn would come up on weekends to build their dream home. He hired some of the more technical stuff out, but Sam and Dawn pretty much built that house themselves, weekend after weekend, month after month, year after year. Finally, I think after about two years, they had built their house. They then built a barn, and then another one. Then they got some cows, a couple of horses, several pigs, a dog named Lee from the Killeen, TX, pound, several peacocks, and a crazy goose named Wilbur. And then they got a new preacher, yours truly. I stayed with Sam and Dawn for at least one night every week for three years in the house that they built together. Their children had moved out by then and they let me stay in one of their old rooms, on the west side of the house, what they would later term as the “west wing.” They would feed me well, we would talk for most of the night, and then Sam and I would play blue grass together. We’re not talking about South Fork here or anything. They did not have lots and lots of land. Their farm did not make them rich, nor did their retirement from the army, nor did any of their stuff. It was how they used their stuff that made them, in my opinion, rich, and how they gave their stuff that made me rich.
Much of the Church for centuries has reduced the role of things to almost nothing. If it’s physical, we have long since said, then it’s either meaningless or downright evil. Yet the Bible never does that. Jesus said that we don’t live on bread alone, but never did he advise going without it. In fact, when he ran into people, even thousands of people, who had nothing to eat, he gave them some bread. Stuff is not all bad. In fact, it’s good. But again, it’s how we use the stuff that’s bad or good. Humans are the most intelligent creatures on the earth, yet if we never use our intelligence, then it’s useless, right? We may as well be a slug. And, if we use our knowledge for evil purposes, like building bombs and weapons of mass destruction, then it’s evil, and then we’d be doing well to be a slug. There isn’t anything at all wrong with money. We can do great things with money. It’s how we use money that makes it either good, indifferent, or really bad.
Be it intelligence, or talent, or money, or physical ability…, some of us have more stuff than others. The question that we have to ask is how we use that stuff, and why we use that stuff. Do we use our stuff in a way that makes it truly valuable? I went to Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2006. That seminary was founded in 1902 to educate the Presbyterian pastors in Texas. During that time, people invested a lot of stuff in that place: money, bricks, mortar, chapels, pews, organs, books, classrooms, teachers, preachers… Lots of stuff goes into making an education. And that’s what I got there, was a good education. Now I paid for that education. There’s no question about that. Yet I paid less than a third of what it actually cost. Somebody, actually many different people, used their stuff in a very wise way, which allowed for me to get educated, which made it possible for me to be a pastor. If you like having me as your pastor, if you like having anybody as your pastor, then you are indebted to thousands people who have used their stuff to educate those pastors. We have all benefitted from it. Now that is value.
Jesus memorialized this nameless woman. Whenever the Gospel was told, he said, it would be in her memory. The only thing that we know about her is that she had something, and that something was very valuable to all of us because of how she used it. I hope and pray that we use our stuff in a valuable way. What we have is often beyond our control. How we use what we have, however, is not. That’s a choice. Like this woman, we might be nameless in the grand scheme of human history. But we sure don’t have to be meaningless. God has given us a name, and a purpose, and an opportunity, and some stuff. So use it faithfully so that your own life and everybody else’s lives may be enriched.
In the Name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
