Extravagant    [ik-strav–uh-guh nt]

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. ~ Annie Dillard

I am a convicted, unrepentant logophile. As such I acknowledge I have loved the word extravagant and its noun form extravagance for as long as I can remember. Maybe it is traceable to the passage above from Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which I read when I was hitchhiking and hiking around the United States when I was 22. I honestly don’t recall. All I know is that my theology and spirituality have long been rooted in the sense of the extravagance of God’s love manifest most obviously in the resplendence of the universe and incarnated in Jesus.

I understand the primordial creative act as a cosmic display of the extravagance of divine love. Let’s start with a bang! A grand entrance indeed. As a Christian, I understand Jesus as the incarnation, as the “living reminder,” and the sacrament of the encounter with this lavish love which comes courtesy of divine extravagance. It is this excessive, eccentric giveaway which we are blessed to receive, invited to participate in, and compelled to enact in our simple, day-to-day lives.

In the hands of the wrong people, on the bodies and in the mansions and penthouses of the wrong folks, extravagance has the tendency to slip over into ostentatiousness, to pretentiousness and possessiveness, to the need to impress and to set oneself above others. Even Mr. Peacock can think his royal robe is for his own delight which is most likely why the creator placed his plumage behind rather than in front of him. Misused, extravagance is offensive. But in the biblical tradition the most vivid and memorable expressions of extravagance are not defined by material wealth but rather by actions showing inexplicable generosity and vulnerability of heart which make communion possible. For example:

In the Book of Genesis, we read the story of Joseph, betrayed by his brothers and sold into slavery, only to have the tables turned. Now, years later, he is the ruler over all the land of Egypt, and he encounters his brothers who have come from Canaan seeking food to survive the famine in the land. They do not recognize their brother though he knows them. But instead of responding with understandable vengeance he forgives them their brutality, instructs them to go retrieve their father in Canaan who thinks Joseph is dead and return with him and their father’s household. When he does, Joseph gives them the best of all the land of Egypt. It is an incomprehensible series of actions. Ones of unbelievable proportion and a testimony to the extravagance of love and forgiveness.

In the gospels of Mark and Luke Jesus is recorded praising a certain widow’s extravagant generosity when “out of her poverty,” not abundance, she drops two copper coins into the temple treasury. It was “everything she had, all she had to live on.”

In each of the four gospels, the evangelists offer a story about a woman with an alabaster jar who anoints Jesus at a dinner party. Scholars differ on whether these are variations on one event or two or even three different occasions. But in all versions there is the reverently superfluous pouring forth of expensive perfumed oil on Jesus much to the chagrin, anger, indignation, and judgment of onlookers who regard the exaggerated gesture of largesse to be wasteful.

These illogical, incongruous gestures of both vulnerability and generosity are reflections of the extravagance of God’s love which is the taproot of Christian theology and the inspiration to guide our spirituality.

God is an extravagant lover, or if you prefer a less anthropomorphic image, the presence of extravagant love in action. We tend to think extravagant means “too much.” And that works – exceeding what is expected, deserved, or justified. But what it literally means is “to wander beyond.” God’s love goes way beyond what in human relations would be considered appropriate, fitting, fair, sensible, or just. God’s love is outlandish – it spreads throughout and beyond our private property, our little piece of land, our neighborhood, our country. Extravagant love is love that consciously and intentionally wanders beyond human boundaries of propriety, decorum, the way it’s always been.

It is a mistake to hear “extravagant love” and to think it refers to something Pollyannaish, ethereal, a fantasy for dreamers, precious, or showy. When it strikes some people as offensive, impractical, politically or economically unrealistic, bad for business, bad for the brand, then we are getting closer to the truth, closer to the radical, costly nature of divine love which we are free to receive and bound to enact. In the story of the woman with the alabaster jar in Mark’s gospel, the full cost of the love Jesus will pour out is alluded to when the woman purposely breaks the jar and pours out all its contents on Jesus’ head. When his disciples show their disapproval he rebukes them saying “she has anointed my body beforehand for burial” and thus is also anointing him for his final giveaway in the vulnerable extravagance of his death.

Paradoxically, it is exactly the extra-vagary-ness of God’s love that makes one of Dostoevsky’s characters famously remark, “Love is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” Indeed, if we go by the name Christ-one, which of course is what Christian means, then we are expected to put into deeds the love that wanders beyond what is sensible, proportionate, socially acceptable, politically wise, familially customary, religiously pure, personally safe, or good for one’s resume or reputation.

Nothing could be more self-implicating. Nothing should be more clear for those of us who choose the Christ-life as our spiritual path than that we have been signed on for the impossible responsibility and privilege of incarnating the extravagant love of God. And when we fail, as we surely will, there is waiting for us not the cheap grace of which Bonhoeffer warns but extravagant grace which is not something that excuses but rather is itself the excessive flow of divine love that reminds us not only what God is like but what it means to be human, what it means to come from God and to be moving with the flow of God toward God. Love evokes love and is only known in action. And we are the supporting actors in the sacred drama of incarnating this divine, prodigal love. But nothing could make us more vulnerable, that is, “able to be wounded,” since love also exposes whatever and whoever does not serve love. As a result, it often evokes fear, anger, hate, and even violence in the direction of those who serve love.

One does not need to be a Christian to live a Christ-like life. Gandhi and so many other known and anonymous saints have shown us this, and in so doing put me, who claims to be a Christ-one, and others, to shame. But unlike Gandhi, those who do claim the name Christ are vowed to transpose the wandering-beyond-love-of-God into daily deeds, sometimes earth-shattering actions, more times not, but always indifference-shattering, and cynicism-breaking.

Here’s the deal. God needs our bodies, our legs and arms, to carry that love to places that lack signs of love. God needs us to wander beyond the borders of comfort, ethnicity, religious tradition, sexual orientation, socio-economics, politics, and prejudices to deliver that love. And if joining the words God and needs offends our sensibilities or theology I humbly submit, in case you haven’t noticed, God doesn’t wave a magic wand from some white ivory tower making all personal, social, national, or global boo-boos disappear. St. John of the Cross encouraged “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.” Teresa of Avila reminds us:

Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassionately on this world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes. You are his body.

God needs our feet, our eyes, our arms, our hands. God is an extravagant lover and we are the delivery men, the delivery women. We are couriers of God. God is a vagrant we carry in our hearts. We are the body of Christ carrying the body of Christ to others in packages marked kindness, welcome, hospitality, non-violence, reverence, wonder, awe, kinship, mercy, deep sympathy, solidarity, compassionate action, justice, humility, gratefulness, joy, and praise. To be a Christian is to be a divine accomplice, a collaborator in the wandering-beyondness of divine love. Who knows where it’s bound to turn up. Hopefully, wherever we do.

Extravagant Blessings,
Dan
For the original explanation of “A Word to the Wise” posts see link here.