Leave Her Alone: Mary’s Mystical, Sensual, Unarticulable Grief

Preached April 3, 2022. St. John’s Williamstown Williamstown, Massachusetts

John 12: 1 – 8

The smell of nard is woody, musty, and spicy. If you were alive in the 1980s, you might remember the perfumes called Poison and Obsession. They were rich, earthy scents some of us soaked ourselves in.

I wore Poison in college. In preparing this sermon I googled this perfume and saw it described as “the ultimate weapon of seduction.” I promise I didn’t know this when I was 19.

One day I took a cab from my college to the train station in town. Let me preface this by saying that since childhood I was a chronically shy person, barely able to talk in most situations.

I realize the irony of sharing this information with you from a church pulpit.

Suffice it to say, I was not one to draw attention to myself. And this day…