Abstract
Following the death of President Jimmy Carter, the congregation of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, confronted the liminal space of grief after decades of welcoming visitors who came each Sunday from around the world to be part of the president’s Sunday School teaching. On the Sunday following Carter’s funeral and interment on January 9, 2025, this guest sermon, here revised, drew upon John’s text of Mary’s anointing of Jesus’s feet and his subsequent washing of the disciples’ feet as both a recognition of the radical bridge-building between life, death, and new life in which Carter and the congregation participated, and the image of love as the new “currency” that enables the Christian community to co-create new dwelling spaces of connection and healing for the community. Continuing on a Johannine theme of the Word becoming flesh, the sermon concludes with an invitation to the congregation to come forward for an anointing of their feet with water for the journey before them.
To the congregation of Maranatha Baptist Church, I bring you greetings from the people you do not see, but whom you have served, whose feet you have washed in this world, and on whom you have made an impact. 1 I bring you greetings, not because I know them, but because they know you. They know of your faith. They know of your hospitality. They know of your goodness. Today, may the Word become flesh among us as we gather.
We prefer a world with our loved ones on this side. We grieve the loss of President Carter and Mrs. Rosalynn Carter. You, as a congregation and community, grieve the loss of an uncle, a friend, a brother in Christ. And, some of you are grieving friends and family members whose names I have not said. The grief can be so close you can hear their voice or laugh, trace their hand in your mind’s-eye, or notice a smell that reminds you of them. I can see my father’s right thumb which had some of its padding gone from a minor accident in his workshop. I can smell my grandmother’s homemade angel food cake as its sweet aroma would fill her small home in Southern Illinois. You may see where the Carters sat in this sanctuary space or where President Carter stood when he taught Sunday school. As much as our faith runs deep, we prefer a world with our loved ones on this side.
We long for our loved one, our friend, to still be present among us. We encounter an ache in which, as poet Edna St. Vincent Millay names, “The Presence of the Absence Is Everywhere.” As we make room to sit at the feet of this ache, something deeper can emerge. So, we pause for a moment, and sit at the feet of this ache, waiting and letting go and wait on the Spirit of God who “intercedes with groanings too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). 2 As I sat in this ache with the life-changing recent loss of my father and also the world-changing loss of President Carter, something emerged in this pause.
What is on this side? What was built on this side? What is on the other side? What lasts? What forms a bridge between this world and the beyond? What dwelling spaces are offered?
Jimmy Carter was a builder of bridges, a builder of new systems, and a builder of homes. He built bridges of peace when violence threatened and the divide between oppressors and oppressed seemed insurmountable. He built new systems of community-based intervention to eradicate the Guinea worm disease and save lives. He built homes with people for whom home ownership was an impossibility. A hammer. A nail. A level. A saw. An imagined dream of creating new spaces to live, to thrive, to be is not merely a distant blueprint; it is here on this side in communities across the world. Habitat for Humanity and The Carter Center continue to draw us together to become builders. As a congregation, you too are a part of this mission, drawing us together and seeking a way forward with your hands and your feet.
We may find ourselves saying, yes, but it is not the same as it was. It is not the same as having that loved one right here, right now. Our longing for a loved one brings us to a space of saying, “I wish it was that way, again.” Our love and our nostalgia intertwine, and we wish we could go back. If only we could go back to the way things were. If only we could go back to when the church was welcoming more people through its doors to encounter this brother. Wouldn’t it be great if it could be like that again?
In the passages from John 12 and 13, the disciples are in a confused, bewildered, threatened, and troubled state as Jesus is going toward Jerusalem for the Passover. A plot from the chief priests and Pharisees that would take Jesus’s life had just been discovered. It was so threatening that it prevented the disciples and Jesus from walking freely among the people. 3 It was not safe.
In this deeply conflicted, grieved, and threatening space the disciples faced, Jesus beckons them further toward Jerusalem, a place where multitudes would be gathered because of the Passover. This was not what the disciples imagined would happen. This is not what was to be built on this side. If each of the disciples could have created a job description for the Messiah, it looked nothing like a Jesus that keeps talking about giving his life and dying. Their hopes for Jesus looked very different from his turning toward Jerusalem, where leaders were plotting to take his life. Surely, this is not the way. It would not include this pause in Bethany, at the edge of Jerusalem. It certainly would not include going to Jerusalem.
It is in this pause, in this in-between space of Bethany, Jesus is met. It is in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Their home is a place of food and hospitality. Their home is a space of friendship that is more like family. This space had offered him a respite again and again in his ministry. It is the respite he needs for what is soon to come.
After dinner, Mary takes out a bottle of perfume, opens it, and pours it on Jesus’s feet, wiping his feet with her hair. Anointing a king was supposed to happen with oil poured onto his head during a coronation. Surely, if Mary would “get it,” she would anoint Jesus’s head. Yet this anointing, this coronation, flips the whole story. The aroma of this anointing fills the room with the scent of perfume. As Gail O’Day names in her writing on the Gospel of John, this is the second time we encounter a strong scent in Bethany. In the previous chapter, Martha is “worried about the odor of Lazarus’s rotting corpse.” 4 The odor of death does not have the last say in that story. And here, in this story, the stench of death is preempted. Mary prepares Jesus for what is to come. Mary is the minister to Jesus. Oh, what it must have been like for Jesus to be met, for someone to get it and prepare him for what was to come. Mary, tenderly and lovingly, pours out perfume on the flesh of his feet that will be pierced. Love permeates the room.
This intimate, tender, loving act reaches the nostrils of Judas Iscariot. He protests at such a show of extravagance, questioning why the expensive perfume was not sold and given to the poor. Judas’s plea sounds noble. He is showing himself as caring for the poor. Yet, here Judas’s protest with one lie covers up deeper ones. Not only does he refuse to share, as the keeper of the common purse, but he steals from it. His lies begin to be exposed as Jesus says, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:7–8).
Jesus praises Mary’s leadership as he sets a barrier around the stench of Judas’s lie: first in telling him to leave Mary alone, second in naming the deep gift Mary is offering, third in exposing Judas’s warped dwelling place, and fourth in calling Judas back to the centrality of Jesus’s way of being present. These four interrelated moves reveal where Judas is really dwelling within Jesus’s curious statement, “You always have the poor with you.” Judas’s dwelling place was to take more than what was his. His dwelling place was to conspire to have more. He stole, and he will even betray, in order to grab more. In Judas’s world, the poor would always exist as greed’s stench permeates his own being. Yes, indeed, the poor will always be with Judas.
In our Western culture, success is measured by what we produce and consume. The Gross National Product. The Consumer Price Index. Produce. Consume. Produce. Consume. These are the markers of a good society. Produce. Consume. Produce. Consume. This exchange of production and consumption forms an economy, a currency, an exchange in society’s household. It reveals our dwelling place.
Here, at the breakfast we shared at table this morning, in the space where President and Mrs. Carter often broke bread with you, the room permeated with stories, connections, affirmation, peace, and even care for a stray puppy, shared over with a feast of biscuits, grits, bacon, eggs, fruit, juice, coffee, and love.
Yet, as the sounds of the President’s funeral this week fade, we are at a precipice. Changes are on the horizon of our lives and in the life of this congregation and congregations around the country. We ask the questions: Where are we dwelling? What spaces are we creating and living into? Who will we become? What kind of dwelling space will we make? What currency will we exchange with each other, with the world, with Jesus?
The disciples were not understanding Jesus. The disciples had been with him for 3 years and had not gotten it. Jesus knew their dwelling place was still stuck. Even a donkey ride into Jerusalem, instead of the triumphant horse and chariot ride of kings, did not move the disciples. Their measurement of leadership and success was much more triumphalist than what was about to happen. Their economy was about to be interrupted. Their world was about to be turned upside down.
In Barbara Holmes’s book, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village, black, indigenous, and people of color offer wisdom. In crisis, in the in-between spaces, in the unknown, Holmes calls us to find a pausing point. This pausing point is an oasis, a place in which the horror of what is happening is not allowed to be the primary driver. Instead, this oasis becomes a place in which the Spirit is allowed to break in and transform. “At the moment of crisis, you grasp one another spiritually, gather your collective courage, and let go!” 5 Letting go is the precursor to being reborn. 6 This pause and release allows a new space to open up, a rebirth that forms a new dwelling place, a transformation, a new economy.
When the disciples arrive in Jerusalem, they are not ready to pause, to release, to be reborn into Jesus’s economy. They still are not getting it, as they gather for a meal before the festival of the Passover. Imagine, for a moment, the inefficacy of the text if Jesus shared at the table something like, “Hypothetically speaking, what would happen if I had washed your feet like the servants do? What would you think?” Then, methodically, Jesus goes around the room asking the disciples for their response. Peter chuckles and says, “That is not your place and I would not let that happen. That is not the way we do things.” How would that change the scripture text? How would that change the story? Would transformation happen?
Instead, the Gospel of John calls us closer. The Word does not stay “word” in the book of John. The Word becomes flesh and moves in and asks, What kind of dwelling place will we create? What will be enfleshed here? Jesus comes closer. Jesus puts on a towel and goes over to a basin and begins to try to wash Peter’s feet. This act interrupts the storyline of the disciples on a visceral level, leaving little room for ignoring the transformation that Jesus-centered leadership called forth in the world. Peter lets out a visceral “No!” in response to Jesus. And Jesus says, “Unless I wash your feet, you have no part of me.” In so doing Jesus says, “My currency, my love, my servanthood, my way of being is offered in this washing.” This opens a new way of love, a living and embodying of messy leadership from below. Let me wash your feet and have you live what I have been saying all along. Their bodies experience the lesson of leadership Jesus is teaching. The body knows. Research shows that often our bodies know first, before our minds are able to rationally process what is fully happening. 7 The disciples here are suddenly encountering this enfleshed way of being, as Jesus says, “You do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand” (John 13:7).
This is an embodying of messy leadership from below. “Let me wash your feet and have you enter into what I have been saying all along that you could not hear,” Jesus reveals in the doing. Having a part in Jesus, being a leader under Christ’s way, meant entering into something that the imagination could not grasp apart from dwelling it, being it, in all its messiness. Their bodies immediately knew the lesson of leadership that the rest of their beings were still wrapping their minds around.
Jesus bodily shows what a new job description looks like. Jesus gives them a new way of leading. This currency builds a world of love. You see, the reason my grandmother’s angel food cake was so good (my grandmother, who only had an eighth-grade education) was not only because angel food cake is so good, but also because my grandmother had a currency of love. When I smell angel food cake, it is love that permeates. It’s part of my body.
Angel Food. Perfume. Water and feet. Hammers and nails. You have seen this leadership from below modeled, firsthand, here. You have communed with a brother and a sister that have shown it to the world. And you have shown it to the world.
In our national economy, we do not have measures for the exchange of love. How do we measure when a home is built and years later the next generation has that home and the quality of life increases from generation to generation? In a culture in which the impoverished are often scapegoated or dismissed with a misquote from Jesus about the poor always being with us, how do we flip the story and ask, “What kind of dwelling places will we imagine and create?”
You have imagined. You have created. You have welcomed. You have been a witness. You have held Sunday school for the world. You have washed the feet of the world. Now, you are at a precipice of creating another kind of dwelling place.
Cole Arthur Riley embraces places for dwelling and flourishing in her book, This Here Flesh. She says,
Isn’t it something that in Genesis, God makes a home for things before God makes the thing? Not the fish first but the sea. Not the bird first but the sky. Not the human first but the garden. I like to think of God hunched over in the garden, fingernails hugging the brown soil, mighty hands cradling mud like it’s the last flame in a windstorm. A God who says, Not out of my own womb but out of this here dust will I make you. Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape being formed by it.
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When former pastor Tony Lowden gave the eulogy for Jimmy Carter in this space this past week, toward the end of his message he spoke of lives the President touched and people who offered great love to Jimmy Carter. Pastor Lowden went around the room naming people and gave voice to Carter’s gratitude: “Thank you. I love you.” Over and over, again, he said, “Thank you. I love you.” In that turn, it was personal. The exchange became alive in the room. The exchange could become alive in the room because it was already present and alive. Like a perfume, love permeated the space.
In the next chapter of John, Jesus says to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (14:1). He goes on to speak of the dwelling place he is creating for them (14:2–4). This dwelling place was not only for the beyond. It was also a dwelling space Jesus shared among them. This dwelling place is also here, breaking open and becoming flesh among us. What builds a bridge between these dwelling places? Love. Just like God created the spaces for birds to soar and thrive and for the fish to swim, we can co-create with God the spaces of love. Just like Jesus washed our feet, we can create spaces to wash one another’s feet.
So, how do we move forward? As grief comes, allow it to visit. Pause. Wait. Allow grief to permeate your being in a way that you discover you are a people of love—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The grief you feel means you are alive. And it means that death is being transformed into life. Just as Maranatha has built bridges of love to the world community in these past decades, dwelling places to which you are being drawn remain, places where again the Word can be made flesh.
So pause, release, let go. Death will not grow under your feet. Our currency of love says something new will be reborn. A new path will spring forth on which to walk.
The prophet Isaiah writes, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news” (Isa 52:7). How beautiful are your feet. Blessed are your feet. Blessing feet says that we will build something different in this world through an exchange of love. And so, our bodies discover something simply by entering into that exchange, even though we do not know it yet and cannot see what is next.
You are invited to come forward, with your grief, with your fear, with your hope. And we will bless your feet, touching the water to the bridge of your feet, as you move into new dwelling spaces.