Sunday, April 3 – “Brazen Acts of Beauty”

View this recorded version of Sunday Worship from April 3, 2022.

Bible Verses

John 12:1-8

Full to the Brim – Brazen Acts of Beauty

Snippets from the sermon by Rev. Christina Kukuk.

“Our first stop is with this jar of precious oil. The day before holy week, Jesus is at his friends’ house. You known them from familiar stories, perhaps: Mary, Martha, Lazarus. Mary takes a jar of expensive perfumed ointment and breaks it over Jesus’s feet, wiping them with her hair. An incredibly sensual act. It makes the house smell amazing.

But the intimacy of this act, the brazen act of beauty, the tenderness of this act, makes some people uncomfortable, and some of them complain: ‘That money should have been used for the poor’.

Now what was immediately clear to me, is that anybody who would make an act of beauty and tenderness like this mutually exclusive from caring for the poor, has never been poor. Because all of us need these experiences of tenderness, affection, and beauty…

Can you think of a time when a friend or family member did something really lovely for you? Something that made your whole body feel good? And if it helps this morning to reach for something that smells good to you, perfume or anointing oil, or the flowers in your vase, why don’t you inhale that for a moment.”