During these last few weeks of Lent we’ve had a similar thread running through each sermon. Basically we’re trying to do what that marquee says outside: we’re trying to see the world the way God sees it, not just how we see it. We’re trying to listen for God instead of always speaking up about God. And we’re trying to see each other as God sees us. That’s a well-intended message. But it involves a lot of work on our part. It’s not easy to see things the way God sees them. It takes some legwork.

Well, that can be dangerous. Some friends and I were visiting the other day and we put it like this: “You can get so caught up in doing God that, ironically, there ends up being no room for God.” Churches do this a lot, right? The doing of God leaves no room for God. We get so caught up in the details that the very thing we’re planning for never comes to fruition. And in this time of Lent, it is crucial for there to be room for God not out of our doing, but out of our being. As the familiar Psalm reminds us, “Be still and know that I am God.”

Have you ever been invited to a party and you just can’t figure out what to wear or what time to arrive or what to bring? You spend all this time thinking about who’s going to be there and how they might be dressed. And you think about how much time needs to pass before you can walk in the door and be comfortable in that social setting. And you wonder if you should eat before you go, because you don’t know if there’s going to be food there. And on and on and on. And when you get there you spill something on your shirt, the friend you’d hoped would be there has already left and there’s plenty of great food, but you already ate a frozen pizza. But eventually you get comfortable. You get comfortable a lot quicker than you thought actually, and you have a great time at the party. You get to know someone you hadn’t ever talked to before. You stay out later than you’d planned. You have some good stories to share the next day.

I’m talking about a party, but I may as well be talking about church. Now, how did all those details that seized your attention and made you so anxious before you showed up at the party, how did those details help you? It’s dangerous to be all about the details all the time. We can be so preoccupied with doing the party and doing church and doing God that we can never be at the party, be at church or be with God.

This is what Jesus reminds us of today in this story out of John’s Gospel. It’s what I like to think of as Mary and Martha Part II. Martha is keeping house and making sure her guests are comfortable. And Mary takes a pint of expensive perfume, worth more than a year’s pay, and she pours the whole thing on Jesus’ feet and then wipes it off with her hair. Well, the now whole house smells like the first floor of Dillard’s. Mary and Martha are out one fancy pint of perfume. And Judas—the bean counter, the money man—is freaking out.

“Why didn’t she sell that perfume and give the money to the poor? This is an outrage. It doesn’t make any sense. Jesus, tell her that what she just did doesn’t make any sense. Tell her what she did was wrong.” But Jesus says, “She did a good thing! You’ll always have the poor with you, but you won’t always have me.”

Now, isn’t that contradictory? I thought Jesus said that God’s Spirit was upon him to bring Good News to the poor. And Jesus was clear that he was talking about the literal, social poor: people who had no money, who had no clothes, people who had no justice and no voice. These are the ones Christ wants us to recognize. But Jesus also teaches, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” He’s also concerned with those who are poor in spirit, those who are so caught up with the doing of spirituality and the doing of “all things God” that they are void of God’s love, void of Christ’s Good News, and poor in spirit.

For the evangelist who wrote the Gospel of John, the voice of Judas is often you and I. We are the ones who say, “We’ve got to do more good deeds and have more worship services and sing more songs and raise more money,” and that anxiousness can be helpful. But today, and most days, Christ says to us, “Why are you so preoccupied with that stuff. There’s always going to be good work to be done and worship services to plan and songs to sings and money to raise, but I’m not always going to be around. Let it go.”

Jesus isn’t speaking a word against the poor, he’s speaking a word against our self-inflicted blindness and giving us a wakeup call. “You’ll always have the things that seize your attention and sap your energy, but you won’t always have me.” This is the Easter message: We spend all this time getting to know Christ as our friend, our teacher, our Messiah, our Savior, our Master, our Lord…however you define your relationship with Christ, and then on Easter morning we’re supposed to let go.

I wish this lesson were easy enough to teach to a 2-year-old. Some mornings we’ll have Mac’s breakfast sitting on the table, and I’m doing some dishes and Mac will be grabbing on to my leg for dear life saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” and after reading this morning’s Gospel lesson, I just want to say to the boy, “Son, your old dad isn’t going anywhere, but that food is getting cold.”

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul says that he’s holding on to that for which Christ now holds him. He’s not holding on to Christ, he’s holding on to the things Christ is all about, all the things Christ promises. So, we’re not supposed to hold onto the literal Jesus, we’re supposed to let go of Jesus so that we can embrace all those things that Christ lives for: salvation, righteousness, eternal life, Good News, the kingdom of heaven, and the glory of God.

It’s like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Nazis take the Holy Grail beyond the boundaries that it can go, so the walls start caving in and an earthquake makes the ground start to crack and separate. And the blonde bombshell that seduced our hero, Indiana Jones, into leading her and her Nazi buddies to the Holy Grail, she falls into one of those cracks in the ground. But before she falls, Indiana Jones, the guy who should be saying, “Let her fall. Good riddance,” he jumps over to her, risking his own life and reaches his hand down into the abyss and says, “Take my hand.” And she does, but with only one hand. Her other hand starts reaching out for something else. The Holy Grail is resting on this rocky ledge right behind the woman. It’s right behind her, so she tries to hold on to Indiana Jones’ hand and get the grail at the same time. And she says, “I can almost reach it. It’s right there,” and our hero is pleading with her from above, “I can’t lift you up unless you give me your other hand. Give me your other hand. Let go of that thing. Let go, so I can hold on.” But, of course, she is so mystified by the grail that she keeps reaching out for it, and eventually Indiana Jones can’t hang on anymore. The woman was caught up in the details, and those details got the best of her.

This is how it can get dangerous to be all about doing God instead of being with God. Why are we so concerned with the details of God’s history? The Bible is so difficult to understand: Why did God flood the earth? Why did God ask Abraham to kill his son Isaac? Why did God grant the Israelites safe passage through the Red Sea and then destroy the armies of Egyptians, their horses and all, by drowning them in those waters? Why? I don’t know. But we read these scriptures and we try to make sense of the details: “Well, maybe God didn’t like these things and God did like those things, and God didn’t like those people and God did like these people, and God didn’t mean this but God meant that. And I’m so glad I study this stuff so that I can be like those people that God liked and say those things that God meant and do those things that God did.” That kind of anxious, fearful thinking is so prominent in our world now, and it’s dangerous. Details, details, details.

Details can even tempt us into explaining it all away: “God didn’t mean it.” That’s nonsense. God did things that make us cringe. God did things that we will never understand in this lifetime, but the truth is that God has a story and God has changed and grown in that story.

Remember how God was so angry at the Israelites for worshiping a golden cow that God said, “I’m going to go down there and wipe them out! How dare they do this to me after all I’ve done for them,” and Moses, a human being, says, “God, calm down. They don’t mean it. Forgive them.” And God says, “OK.”

God continues to speak and be. God has a story just like you and I have a story, and we are made in the image of that storied God. Our sole purpose in life, then, our reason for existing as children of God is to let go of the things that don’t matter so we can hold onto the things that do. If we live for the details that divide us—if we live for the details that label us and separate us one from another, then we will live in ignorant bliss and die in incomplete loneliness. But if we live for the truth that unites, the truth that we are an interconnected humanity, put on this earth to empathize with each other and love each other and serve each other, then heaven will be some kind of party. And we don’t have to wait to see God in glory to let the party start.

When we pray for God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, we’re saying, “Yes, Lord, bring on the party!” but we get so caught up with the details of what that party is supposed to look like that the cake is never cut, the confetti stays in the egg, and the champagne cork never pops. Can you hear Jesus saying, “Don’t worry about the details, you’re always going to have cake and confetti and champagne, but you’re not always going to have your sisters and brothers all around you who have never been to a good party in their entire lives. And they need to see it, they need to taste it, they need to experience it.”

Details. I was on a mission trip in Juarez with the church that I grew up in. We were bringing a vacation bible school to children every morning. One night we sat in this cramped sanctuary, sweating and getting irritated with each other. Did you get this taken care of? Did you learn that song? Did you memorize your Bible verse? Have you got that puppet show ready? Where are the puppets?! We got up the next morning, loaded the van and headed out, looking around, some of us falling asleep. We came upon children running along the dusty road with holes in their jeans and rips in their shirts. They'd fall on their faces and get back up and keep running to us, always happy, faces shining, lives beaming. We got out of the vans – "you got your crafts?" "You got your guitar?" We would continue to be frantic and be in each other's faces.

There was one boy named Martin who I'm pretty convinced had ADHD. He had a high-pitched voice and he would be saying random things in Spanish. I'm fluent enough in Spanish to know what's being said, but not that rapidly, and not when the voice is so high-pitched. The more frantic he got, the more frantic we got. We continued to get stressed out, wondering "Where's this?!" and "Where's that?" that we forgot all about why we were there: to share a story, share why it was that we were there. Suddenly Martin just started to cry. I pulled the boy over and said the first thing that came to my mind, "Te amo – I love you." I kept holding him, even though he was squirming and screaming. I kept saying it and saying it. Then he started to calm down and breath slower. Finally, I was able to let him go. He picked up something to draw with and started coloring. He didn't make a peep the rest of the week, and was all smiles.

Hold on to that for which Christ holds you.

We get caught up in me, me, me and the details of our salvation. So our relationship with Christ gets reduced to what Christ is doing for me and what Christ is saving me from. So, the reason we come to know Christ is because of what we are afraid of: we don’t want to go to hell, we don’t want to burn in the eternal flames of everlasting damnation, we don’t want to spend eternity in the pit of immorality (these are just a few good sound bytes you can pick up from Christian radio evangelism). But read those words of assurance out of Philippians again: “I hold on to that for which Christ now holds me.” Hold on to that for which Christ holds you.

Jesus isn’t so concerned with what he is saving us from, as what he is inviting us to: eternal life, salvation, the Kingdom of God, eternal life, a land of milk a honey, the big party in the sky. It’s an invitation. Jesus says from the cross, “Today you’ll be with me in paradise.” And Jesus says, “Don’t worry about the details: people who bother you, a problem at work that exhausts you, the latest political news that ties your stomach in knots, that friend who never bothers to see things your way, that boss who can never understand what you’re going through, the girlfriend or boyfriend that said something stupid, or whether we’re going to have enough communion bread for everyone to get a piece, those details will always be here. They’ll always be around. But I won’t.”

When I first got to this church, I was looking at a bulletin. I was trying to plan worship for people, most of whom I hadn't even met yet. Karin Stork-Whitson, the interim pastor at the time, was here as well. I asked her, "Karin, where is the invitation?" I was raised Baptist. She said, "What are you talking about? We don't do an invitation." I said, "Why don't you do any invitation?" She never explained it to me. She just gave me a look. I understood – no invitation. Got it. I've come to embrace that. We don't have that here. There's no invitation that says, "If you want to make it publicly known that you want to be baptized or join this church, come forward." Now, I understand an invitation. But now I completely embrace and understand why there's no reason for it to be on this piece of paper. Because that is a detail. Our lives are supposed to be the invitation. So, if you want to talk about baptism and what that means, we can talk about that because God is still speaking. We can talk about matters of faith that intrigue and challenge us, and leave us too scared to talk about it anywhere else, because we are supposed to be invitations to each other.

Our faith is an invitation, so we should mirror our lives after that invitation. Let’s not be so concerned with what the party’s going to be like that we forget to extend an invitation to someone to join us. Our joy in Christ isn’t made perfect by our doing. It’s made perfect by our being. Be still and know that God is God and let your life be an invitation to others that they might share in your deep joy. That’s faith. That’s God’s love. That’s Church. That’s Christ.

You can’t hold on to that for which Christ now holds you unless you first let go. Sisters and brothers, let go so that Christ can hold on. It’s OK. It’s a good thing. Let go so that Christ can hold on. Amen.