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My sermon for Thursday evening, Trinity chapel. It's always a different experience, preaching for fellow Divs. The gospel was Luke 7:36-50. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. "Almighty Father, we confess that we have sinned against you." We say these words just about every Sunday; someone, usually the priest or deacon, issues an invitation to confession and we all kneel to mumble out this prayer. There's supposed to be a pause between the invitation to confession and the confession itself, a pause during which we are to recall our sins, to acknowledge and reject those things in ourselves that we know are hurtful to ourselves, to others and to God. But by the time we get to that point in the Eucharist, past the readings and the psalm, past the gospel, the sermon, the creed, probably a couple hymns - and we know that we still have the whole Communion to get through - we really just want to get on with it. So the pause can be awfully short. Most of the time the deacon or priest has begun the corporate confession while we're still fussing with the kneeler and getting into our properly penitent position. Reflection is lost altogether as we rattle through the confession, often without really internalizing what the words mean - are we truly sorry? Do we humbly repent? The Western church has a long and embarrassing history with sin. A lot of damage has been done to fragile and earnest souls, consumed by an internal tempest of church-fed guilt. I know one elderly man, in particular, who begins and ends almost every sentence with an apology because all his life he's been told that he's wrong and bad and sinful. This is surely not a healthy understanding of sin and it's not what Our Lord calls us to. In this evening's gospel we meet two people from opposite ends of the spectrum. We find Simon, a Pharisee - just a few verses before this evening's reading we are told that the Pharisees, as a group, have rejected God's will. And we meet a woman, a sinner. Just before today's gospel we hear that Jesus is a friend to sinners. So on the one hand we have someone who has distanced himself from God, and on the other we have one of Jesus' friends. We ought to see where this is heading. What follows is a classic example of honour and shame in a complex game of status. We assume that Simon is a respectable member of society - he owns a house and can afford to entertain guests. Jesus has been invited, presumably along with other guests, perhaps as a sort of attraction, the latest curiosity. Perhaps Simon has invited Jesus in order to challenge him, as Pharisees do in so many other gospel stories. But Simon never gets a chance to humiliate Jesus because into the party walks this...sinner. (It's worth noting here that the woman is nowhere described as a harlot, though tradition has labelled her so. She does some risqu� things, but it's still a jump from sinner to harlot. This says more about our traditional view of women than it does about the woman in the story.) Anyhow, in walks the sinner. Privacy must have been a different matter in ancient Palestine because the gospel narratives are full of people barging into other people's homes. She certainly hasn't been invited; Simon considers her untouchable. Maybe that's why nobody threw her out, to avoid touching her. At any rate, there she is and it's not long before she's behaving in a most embarrassing manner. For one thing, she touches Jesus. This is just not done - women don't go about touching men, especially sinful women. The uncleanness of her sin has now rubbed off on Jesus. But that's not all - she's washing and anointing his feet. Touching and caressing a man's feet had sexual undertones; in fact the Hebrew word for feet can be a euphemism for a man's genitals. These disgraceful acts are not only shameful to the woman and to Jesus, they also reflect badly on the house in which they happen. No wonder Simon is upset and no wonder he thinks little of Jesus, who's apparently not bothered by this shocking disrespect and sullying. "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." The implication is that if Jesus knew who the woman was he'd not let her touch him. But there was something Simon didn't know, couldn't know, about the woman's sin...he didn't know that it had been forgiven. The parable of the debtors explains for Simon, and for us, why he couldn't understand this outpouring of love. He hadn't experienced the same abundant generosity as she had; he hadn't seen so great a debt erased. Or, more likely, he thought that he didn't need forgiveness. The other implication in Simon's righteous indignation - "she is a sinner!" - is that Simon doesn't think of himself as a sinner. Unable to see his own faults, he is unaware of God's grace in forgiveness. You can't know that your debt has been forgiven if you don't even know that you have a credit card. And that is why he is stingy in his hospitality. The woman has crossed the bounds of "decent" society, yes. She has become intimate with Jesus in a way that explodes all sense of propriety. She does so because she is fully aware of the enormity of God's forgiveness, and the love she feels in response cannot be contained in polite behaviour. Simon, on the other hand, has been distant. He has not offered water for Jesus' feet; he has not kissed or anointed him. These aren't necessary, mandated rules of hospitality - if they were, Simon would have done them. But they are marks of friendship. He doesn't feel friendship with or love for Jesus, but that's no surprise. Remember, Jesus is a friend to sinners. Unless Simon acknowledges himself as a sinner, he won't be able to access that love. And until he can acknowledge his own sin, and recognize God's forgiveness, he'll never be able to truly love God or other people. And if he can't truly love other people, then he's not going to be able to forgive them, just as he couldn't imagine forgiving the sinful woman. Unfortunately we often find ourselves in a variant of Simon's plight. We can usually see the sin in ourselves - that's one advantage of living in a post-Augustinian church - but we're not always able to forgive ourselves or to accept that God forgives us...a disadvantage of living in a post-Augustinian church. So instead of sitting in smug self-assurance, certain as Simon that we don't need forgiveness, rather we wallow in our own unworthiness. The problem is that wallowing is no position for forgiving. Like Simon, if we don't see and recognize that we have been forgiven, we'll never feel the love necessary to forgive other people. Our Lord calls us into repentance but he doesn't call us there to make us miserable. He calls us to repentance so that we might experience the immensity of God's mercy and love. He calls us to accept forgiveness, freely offered, and to respond by freely offering our forgiveness to the world. And most of all he calls us into repentance so that we, like the woman in the story, can be filled to overflowing with love for God, so that we can burst the boundaries of "decent" behaviour and take our places as sinners...friends of Jesus. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. |
