One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and
he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table.And a woman in the city, who was a
sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an
alabaster jar of ointment.She
stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her
tears and to dry them with her hair.Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the
ointment.Now when the Pharisee
who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he
would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that
she is a sinner.” … Turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this
woman?I entered your house; you
gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and
dried them with her hair.You gave
me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet.
You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with
ointment.Therefore, I tell you,
her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.But the one to whom little is forgiven,
loves little.”Thne he said to
her, “Your sins are forgiven.”(Vss. 36-39, 44-48)
(All passages from the new Revised Standard Version of
the Bible.)
The Extravagant Gifts of the Marginalized
Today
is Father’s Day
I love my
own father, and celebrate his part in my life today.Also, I congratulate all families who are celebrating a
father or fathers today.And,
heck, let’s celebrate the families with no fathers and we even have a couple of
families among us with two fathers!My sermon however, does not really deal too closely with the theme of
Father’s Day, except that, one who many of us know as a mentor, counselor,
spiritual leader, friend and, yes, for some of us, perhaps as a father figure,
is one who followed the call of today’s gospel--a call to see beyond that which
would judge and exclude people and to celebrate the extraordinary gifts that
we, each and all, have to offer, however odd these gifts may seem, and however
under-appreciated they may have been, even by we the givers.
[For more
on Greg Dell, see this story from the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River
Forest:http://www.wjinc.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=8881&SectionID=4&SubSectionID=&S=1,
]
And so I
dedicate this sermon, to Greg Dell.His life and ministry illustrate the theme of this sermon so beautifully
and vividly that I could just stop here.
…
But I
won’t…
On
Wednesday evening at Bible study I asked the questions: “What gift in yourself
or in another has surprised you?”
Think
about that, because we will get back to it by the end of this sermon.Let’s be silent for just one moment,
and welcome the Spirit to be with us as we consider the text for this morning.
[Silence]
Galations
2:16“Now we know that a person is
not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ so that
we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the
law.”An equally justifiable
alternative translation of the same text is “Now we know that a person is not
justified by the works of the law butthrough the faith OF Jesus Christ, so that we might be justified by the
faith of Christ, and not be doing the works of the law.”One translation places the emphasis on
our faith; the other on the faithfulness of Jesus, even to the point of death
on a cross.And what is the point
of the cross, if it is not the ultimate statement of the worth of each and
every human being, each member of God’s family?The gift of life that God recognizes in each of us is worth
whatever the cost to claim it, protect it, liberate it,breathe new hope into it in the face of
all oppression and yes, sin, that would break that life down and act out the
lie that the beloved created children of God are trash.
So
I prefer the second translation, that which relies on the Faith of Christ, because I am not one who believes that only
Christians benefit from the grace and saving love of God.
According
to my understanding of this Galatians passage, we are not saved by doing what’s
right, but through the saving example and work of Jesus we are brought back to
a proper understanding of and relationship with our God.This transformative work, however, is
saving not just by putting us into a new category, ”The Saved,” but by making
our relationship to the world and to ourselves different. We understand our
worth to God, and as the Spirit works in us, almost always through community,
we come to see the importance of our contributions to our world, our
neighborhood, our workplace, our family.And no matter how small those contributionsmight seem, they matter because the Creator of all the
universe is intimately connected to us and to those around us.
Before
we go on, it’s important to understand that the law is not a bad thing in the
mind of Paul or of Jesus.The law
was an attempt to order the world according to the principals of a God who
cared about the world.Much about
the laws of the Jewish people of Jesus day would be incomprehensible to us now,
and indeed, Jesus on many occasions broke the laws that limited people—women,
for example .But let’s not forget
the laws that gave a concrete plan to living out the vision of Justice: Laws
that required a systematic re-distributing of wealth on a cyclical basis to
ensure that there was not an ever widening gap between rich and poor; laws that
actually limited the ways that punishments could be meted out; laws that
required ethical and hospitable treatment of aliens, the poor, the orphaned,
the widowed.
In this
Galatians passage, however, Paul probably refers mostly to the dietary laws,
laws about circumcision, etc., that distinguished the Jews from non-Jews.And his main argument is that the
new Gentile Christians should not be excluded by the fact that they do not
observe those laws nor should they be required to practice them to become
Christian, because the new understanding is that one becomes part of the
Christian community through grace, through the merits and work of Christ, not
through the law.This should never be construed as
anti-Semitism.It was a clear
message of inclusion.All were welcome.Paul was NOT telling Jews they could
not continue practicing their Judaism.He was telling them they could not exclude new converts to the church because they did not observe Jewish
law.
Let’s
take the example of the woman in the Gospel story today.In all the times I heard this story
growing up, I don’t think I ever got the powerful emotions of it, the intimacy
of the situation, the extravagance of the gift this woman brought and the deep
well of emotion she expressed as she weeped and kissed and anointed the feet of
Jesus.There had to be some
previous contact.The woman must
have heard a word of hope, of inclusion, of mercy and grace, of humanity, of dignity,
of compassion.Somehow, because of
something Jesus had done or said, she mustered the courage to come in and touch
Jesus, knowing full well that a man like the Pharisee would not see her
behavior, indeed, even her presence as appropriate.The Pharisee refers to her as a sinner, and because, as
someone pointed out at Bible study, in the absence of any other sins being
explicitly mentioned, we usually make the sexist assumption that a woman referred to as a sinner in the Bible was a
prostitute or was in some way guilty of some sexual transgression.But we don’t know this to be the
case.It may have been, but it is
just as possible that the woman simply was not properly observant of the
law.She may have been guilty of
any number of identifiable acts deemed immoral or unlawful.Or she may have been considered a
sinner simply because she was “other,” an outcast for any number of socially
determined reasons including her gender, her marital status, her unwillingness to
submit to domination, who knows?The point is…she would know that she was not considered fit to enter the
house of a man of high standing in the religious community such as this
Pharisee.But she knew Jesus was
there, and through the faithful ministry of Jesus, she discovered her value to
the God of love and justice.So
she mustered the courage to go to him.To thank him. To express the powerful emotions and hope for
transformation that his ministry had caused in her.
The
story Jesus shares with the Pharisee definitely treats of mercy and gratitude
for the forgiveness of a debt.And
Jesus tells the Pharisee that perhaps the one who has been forgiven of more is
grateful for more.But I wonder if
Jesus is not speaking with his tongue in his cheek just a little.Prodding the Pharisee a little.Thinkiing back to the story in which he
encourages his followers to remove the log from their own eyes before plucking
a speck from the eye of another.At any rate, the timing is a bit odd in the way Jesus says, “Your sins
are forgiven.”It’s almost as if
this forgiveness is something in the past, something that was already a reality
before the words were spoken, before the woman ever entered the room, and that
Jesus understands that this act is an expression of gratitude.
Now
it’s important to clarify something here.If Jesus was forgiving sins here, they were not sins based on
identity.He was NOT forgiving
this woman for being…a woman.He
was not forgiving her for being herself.And I would bet that her expression of gratitude, the particular way it
was offered, had something to do with her very own peculiar identify and
gifts.Perhaps it was this oddness
or boldness that made her a bit uncomfortable to people.Perhaps, if truth were told, one of her
“sins” in the eyes of the Pharisees, is that she just plain made people
uncomfortable.But Jesus saw
beyond that.And whatever actions
she had taken that were considered sinful, hurtful in some way to herself or to
others, Jesus was more than willing to forgive, and implies in the story that
the forgiveness was a foregone conclusion, and that the woman’s realization of
that was the place from which such great emotions and boundary-breaking
behavior came.
What
the Pharisee saw were categories of righteousness and reasons to exclude
people.What Jesus saw was the
preciousness of every person and, in that moment, the preciousness of this particular person.And he understood the value of her gifts.He says to the Pharisee: “You didn’t offer me a kiss when I arrived!You did not wash my feet and rub them with
ointment.You did not anoint my head!”She had found and was beginning to value something that the
Pharisee, apparently, had still not seen, even in himself.
Now
back to our Bible study question from Sunday:“What gift, in yourself or others, has surprised you?”
For
me, it was the wonderful realization that my identity as a gay man was, indeed,
a gift.A gift to myself, yes, but
also a gift to the world and, as many of us lgbtq as well as heterosexual,
single, married, asexual people have discovered here, we are a gift not just to
the world, but to the church.
Archie’s
story.[Name changed for
confidentiality.] How he timidly found himself in a pew one Sunday,
having believed he did not wish to be in any church or, perhaps, deserve
to be.What did he discover
over the years between that morning and yesterday afternoon when he spoke
as one of the lay leaders saying goodbye to Greg and Jade?He discovered that he was a gift
to our congregation, and that he had gifts that we need and we celebrate.
Dana’s story:How he found himself hired as the
new music director one week before the wedding ceremony for two men that
would lead to the charge, trial and conviction of Greg Dell for violating
the discipline of the UMC by marrying two men.What Dana discovered was that his ministry was just
the gift God had in mind for that moment in time as the choir became a
voice of defiance, mourning, and most loudly, celebration and hope.He tells of the service at the
Northern Illinois Conference when the whole choir, bursting at the seams
with some forty or more members compared to the smallish group it had
been before Dana’s hiring and Greg’s trial, marched down the aisles of
that large university auditorium dressed in rainbow colors and singing
like we’ve heard them sing time and time again.Dana said the faces of the audience looked as if they
were asking, “Are they ALL gay?”They did not expect such a wonderful gift from such a suspect
group of God’s children.
Pastor Vernice came
to us from Garrett Evangelical Seminary and the African Episcopal Church,
thinking she was preparing to work in Christian education and that her
time with us was simply a field study experience.Vernice, did you ever expect to
become Associate Pastor?To
be such an important and exciting addition to our pastoral staff?[Vernice shook her head, laughing
and saying, “No, I did not.”]
Now I leave you with the question.God’s grace is beyond question.Our value to this God is beyond
question.What surprises you about
your gifts and the gifts of your neighbors?IN what ways have you, in the past twelve years of Greg and Jade’s
ministry with us or, just last week or even today, had the courage to accept
and celebrate the gifts in yourself and in others?When you think of it, express it in some way, extravagant or
simple, but generous. And most importantly, don’t let anyone bar the door!
