“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul.”
Thus starts the song “It Is Well With My Soul,” which was written after personal tragedy. It took me a long time to hear the difference in the two lines, and realize they were two separate ideas:
Whether peace is with me, OR sorrow flows over me, I say “It is Well with my Soul.”
For our church family, we've had a lot of the second this week, with three deaths, tears and sorrow have been flowing. Because of that, I've made a choice to focus on the first in today's worship. We need the peace, and joy, and goodness. Luckily, the texts today – unlike the standard Lenten texts – feed us with what we need.
The Gospel lesson today is just a little bit different then the story as we sometimes hear it. The Gospel of John tells a story VERY similar to the synoptics, EXCEPT that it is Mary the sister of Lazarus who is anointing Jesus, and not a prostitute like it is in the synoptics. This is a woman who is consistently presented as knowing the right way to be with Jesus. She's the one who sat at his feet, and received praise for doing so. And now she is the one who understands that the best thing she can do is annoint him and bless him.
Footnotes in study Bibles let you know that 300 denarii was a year's wages for the average person in those times. The extravagance is outstanding. She basically pours a $20,000 container of perfume/moisturizer on his FEET and cleaned them with her hair. I'm not sure I can imagine a more profound action.
The Gospel of John, with its poetic imagery and profound language, intends to leave us SMELLING this story. Did you hear the line “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume”?
Really, the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume as it interacted with the body of Jesus. The same perfume smells differently on different bodies, right? So we're lead to wonder, in this passage, about the fragrance of Christ. His body combined with expensive, pure, oily, essential perfume: filled the whole space with its scent. Sweet, intense, fragrance of the body of Christ. The perfume, then, becomes both itself and the symbol of the smell of Christ. That the most expensive of all oils, poured in great excess over him and combined with him creates the smell that approximates the true goodness of Christ.
I've been pondering this week, what I would associate as the smell of God. For me, the answer seems to be: water. Water, in theory, has no smell, but in function it does. The smell of the ocean is pungent. The smell of each river is distinct. Even streams have a smell. Somewhere in the goodness of the smell of moving water I find a connection to the smell of God.
That was one of the hard parts of living in the desert for me, there wasn't moving water anywhere to be found. Water in the desert is so very clearly the same thing as life in the desert. Where there are sprinklers in LA, the ground is dry pebbly sand, and nothing grows from it. (And the climate of LA is similar to the climate of Jerusalem.) In the winter, in LA, the rains fall, and the desert blooms. The water brings life where there seemed to be no life. But when the rain stops, the life goes back into hiding. And really, even the amazing bloom of the desert is stark in contrast to life here, with abundance of water. The amount of water in a place is in direct correlation to the amount of LIFE in a place. Water equals life.
So, when we hear in the Psalm and our Isaiah passage that God will bring RIVERS into the desert, we are hearing that God will transform the live-less land into a place of abundant life and profound goodness. There is no desert where there is a river. The desert stops being desert – and that's the promise God is making in the midst of the desert. It seems we come again to “when sorrows like sea billows roll.... it IS well with my soul.”
I was never very good at praying out in the desert. My throat would be parched and my skin burning and the sun would shine too brightly into my eyes. My friends who grew up in the desert were frustrated with me that I couldn't sink into the beauty of the starkness. I could see it, but it was always so unfamiliar to me that it made it harder to pray. It does, however, make it easy to connect with God as the living water, and to think about God as the drink that quenches all thirst.
And, again, since I can smell God in water, it becomes possible for me to consider the SMELL of the living water, and the joy that would come with that smell when truly thirsty in the desert. Even drinking in the SMELL of the water could fill a soul with hope, and fill in the places of fear and worry.
My brother and I took the hike of lifetime once. It was suggested to us that we go to Prarie Creek Redwood State Park and hike the James Irvine trail. That far up north CA is a totally different place. The redwoods themselves have a scent that is indescribably beautiful, if you ever have the chance, I'd encourage you to go see and smell them. The trail we hiked ran through the redwoods, down into “Fern Canyon”, out to the beach of the Pacific Ocean, and the back to the trailhead through more redwoods. The entire day was amazing. But today I want to talk about that Fern Canyon.
The state park website puts it this way:
Dim and quiet, wrapped in mist and silence, the redwoods roof a moist and mysterious world. Park trails meander over lush ground and the walker is treated to the cool feeling and fragrance of wood and water.
A couple beautiful “fern canyons” are found along the North Coast, but the Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is undoubtedly the most awe-inspiring. Five-finger, deer, lady, sword, and chain ferns smother the precipitous walls of the canyon. Bright yellow monkeyflowers abound, as well as fairy lanterns, those creamy white, or greenish, bell-shaped flowers that hang in clusters. Ferns are descendants of an ancient group of plants which were much more numerous 200 million years ago. Ferns have roots and stems similar to flowering plants, but are considered to be a primitive form of plant life because they reproduce by spores, not seeds.
In Fern Canyon you hear water slowly dripping down stone walls, cushioned by vibrant green plants. The floor is pebbles, flat and easy to walk on. The Redwoods shoot high, starting at the top of the canyon walls and going on forever. It is so green you can't believe it with all the walls covered in ferns. (You don't get the color, but you get the coverage on the cover of your bulletin.) And the smell, that's what got me to remembering Fern Canyon this week. All at once you can smell the ferns – with their light, bright, vital scent, and the water, with its freshness and coolness, and the redwoods … that smell like … like wisdom, and the lightest waft of the ocean too, as its less than a mile away. The smell in that place, along with the beauty and peace that it inspired, lead me to say that Fern Canyon comes the closest in my life to smelling of God.
Our God is water in the desert. Our God fills our souls when nothing else is doing it. Our God offers us beauty for all of our senses, as reminders of God's own goodness. Go out from this place, my friends, and use all of your senses to let God fill up your souls.
Amen
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