Forgiveness

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

June 16, 2013; 4 Pentecost, Proper 6, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 7:36 – 8:4)  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." Jesus spoke up and said to him, "Simon, I have something to say to you." "Teacher," he replied, "Speak." "A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?" Simon answered, "I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt." And Jesus said to him, "You have judged rightly." Then 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." Then he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" And he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.

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Sometimes when I’m doing research for sermon preparation, I run across someone who opens the scripture for me, and I think, that’s what I want to say about this passage.  That’s what happened to me this week, so credit most of the ideas and many of the words for this sermon to David J. Lose who holds the chair for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN.  He says this story of the woman who interrupts the dinner party is one of his “absolute favorite” stories.[i]

So, let’s set the scene.  We are in the home of Simon, a prominent Pharisee, who has invited Jesus to dinner, most likely to allow Simon and his influential friends to get a taste of what this exciting young prophet is up to.  Expectations are high for a sophisticated and respectable discussion.

The proper and civil evening is interrupted by a woman who is known as “a sinner.”  Now, that doesn’t mean necessarily that she is a prostitute, as some have assumed, but she is known to be a sinner, and we can imagine people like Simon and his friends know why.

She behaves in an audacious, provocative way, lavishing affection upon Jesus, washing his feet with ointment and tears, kissing his feet and drying them with her hair.  Outrageous. 

It seems that Jesus knows why she has done this unexpected act, and he offers to share his knowledge, as Rabbis often do, with a question and a story.  Simon, who do you think would be more grateful, someone whose debt of $100,000 was cancelled or the one who was forgiven $10,000?  “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.”  Well, yes. 

I can imagine Jesus opening his hand in a gesture toward the woman, who is profoundly expressing her gratitude, weeping and overcome with gladness and joy – “the kind of gratitude understood only by someone who has been given everything.”  Forgiven everything.

Now let’s think about that for a minute.  What does forgiveness mean, especially when you have profound things to be forgiven for?  At its heart, forgiveness is the restoration of relationship.  When you have done something to rupture a relationship or to injure another, forgiveness happens when that other releases any claim, just like a cancelled debt.  “Forgiveness cancels relational debt and opens up the future.”

More than that.  “Forgiveness gives you back yourself.”  When you live with a burden of guilt, it is so easy to define yourself by that lack and to let it dominate you and your sense of self.  You can feel like you are a failure; you are “the mistakes you’ve made, the debt you owe.  When you are forgiven, all those limitations disappear and you are restored, renewed, set free.  So, yes, forgiveness is everything.”

After Jesus’ conversation with Simon, Jesus looks at the woman and says to her – reminds her, most likely – “Your sins are forgiven.”  “I think Jesus had already met this woman, already forgiven her sins,” that’s why she is so grateful.  But a reminder is helpful.  Especially in a context where you can imagine Simon and the others are looking at her the way some people do when they look down on others.  Jesus tells her again that she is forgiven.  “Some things, you see, are so good it’s hard to believe they’re true.  And so Jesus repeats the words of forgiveness that they may sink deep into her broken and reborn heart.”

Now that would have been enough for a good story and a good lesson.  But Jesus goes deeper.  He makes some comparisons – this sinner’s acts of extravagant hospitality in contrast with Simon’s lack of generosity.  Jesus says that the truth cuts both ways.  Jesus makes no accusation or threat toward Simon, just a simple observation:  Those who have been forgiven little love very little. 

Maybe Simon has been forgiven much, but didn’t notice because of his status.  Maybe he doesn’t think he needs forgiveness, after all, he’s a good man, a Pharisee who is conscientious in his behavior.  Perhaps he even disdains forgiveness as something for others, like this woman who is so clearly a sinner in need of forgiveness.  Him, need forgiveness?  No.  No, thank you.

And so, if we are unaware of our need, we can’t receive the gift for what we lack, and we experience little gratitude, at least nothing like the gratitude of one who knows she has received everything. 

It is one of the problems for those who believe they have earned everything.  They are often blind to what they have been given, often unable to see their debts, their need, even the damage they may have left in the wake of their earning everything. 

It is an even bigger problem for those who have sensed themselves to be entitled to everything, dare I say, entitled to anything.  When you live in a privileged situation, you just take so much for granted.  So many of your needs have been met, that you may not even recognize them as needs.  Or gifts. 

So we may wonder about Simon.  He’s known as a good man, a man of some standing – whether earned or given through entitlement, we don’t know – but he simply overlooked the acts of common hospitality of greeting his guest Jesus with a kiss, or washing his feet, or anointing his head.  It does make one “wonder whether he invited Jesus sincerely or more for sport.” 

Simon could have looked upon the woman’s extravagant show of love and recognized the contrast with his own lack of hospitality.  But instead, “he judges both her and Jesus.  He is a man who has no sense of being forgiven – even of needing forgiveness – and so is trapped in a judgmental hardness of heart.”

Jesus’ story tells both sides of a single truth:  “the joyful truth that those who recognize their need receive their heart’s desire and live out of gratitude and love, and the tragic truth that those who believe themselves righteous or sufficient on their own never know the joy of receiving and so pursue truncated lives absent of genuine gratitude or love.”

We don’t hear any more about these characters in the rest of Luke’s gospel.  But I wonder what happened to them.  So I speculate. 

The woman who showed her gratitude…  I’ll bet she was welcomed into the community of people drawn to Jesus, those others who were touched by his compassion.  Maybe she continued to live out of that energy of gratitude and thanks.  In fact, the reason we might have this story passed down to us might be because she told it later to his friends gathered to break bread each Sunday after his resurrection. 

But what about Simon?  With his lovely dinner party disrupted and his guest insulting him, Simon might have decided he didn’t like this new rabbi very much.  If Jesus were a real prophet, he should have known that woman was a sinner and stopped the whole embarrassing mess before it started.  Simon might have felt shamed.  Not the healthy shame that leads to repentance and forgiveness.  But the unhealthy shame that hardens hearts. 

Simon might have been one of those who decided that Jesus was a problem; that Jesus crossed some unforgivable lines.  After all, who does he think he is passing out forgiveness so wantonly.  Only God can forgive.  That’s what the Temple is for.  If this woman, this sinner needs forgiveness, she should go through proper channels and offer her sacrifices at the Temple.  This Jesus is no prophet; he’s a problem.  Simon might have ended this evening with the kind of anger that can turn deadly.  A self-righteous anger; the anger of someone who is certain that he is right.  And he knows the kind of people that live in the shadow of his rightness – this embarrassing woman and her charlatan rabbi.

And BAM – I realize, I’ve just bashed Simon with the same penchant to go searching for the splinters in my neighbor’s eye rather than pull out the plank in my own.  There I go again.  Judging with a hard heart.

So I’ve got a choice now:  rejoice or resent.  Laugh and embrace my habitual sinfulness, and be loved and forgiven all things; or get down and resentful, either toward myself or toward the Simons of the world, and reject God’s tender embrace.  Will I be like Simon, or like the grateful woman?  How about you?

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[i]  David Lose, Forgiveness and Gratitude, from his Dear Working Preacher blog, http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2601.   All quotes in this sermon are from David Lose or from the scripture text.

 

Stop the Funeral Procession

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

June 9, 2013; 3 Pentecost, Proper 5, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(1 Kings 17:17-24)  The son of the woman, the mistress of the house at Zarephath, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. She then said to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!" But he said to her, "Give me your son." He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. He cried out to the LORD, "O LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?" Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the LORD , "O LORD my God, let this child's life come into him again." The LORD listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, "See, your son is alive." So the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth."

(Luke 7:11-17)  Soon after healing the centurion's slave, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep." Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, rise!" The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

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Remarkable stories!  Elijah prays to God and the life returns to the widow’s son.  Jesus stops a funeral procession and raises the dead son of another widow.  There are at least two ways to think about stories like these.  First, these stories are metaphors of how God transforms our own deadness and makes us alive.  Second, stories like this happen.

I have a friend who was keeping vigil by his young son’s hospital bed on the night when the medical team expected the child to die.  The child was horribly ill, discolored, fevered, and every organ but his brain was compromised by more than 40 tumors that had not responded to treatment.  His condition seemed medically hopeless.

In the intensive care unit the patient had a nurse solely responsible for him.  She was toward the rear of the room sometime around four a.m. when an elderly woman, simply dressed, approached the bedside and told my friend, “I need to wash the child.”  It was more of a command than a question.  The father nodded his silent consent, and she took a cloth and passed it over the little boy, as if she were cleaning him.  After she appeared to be finished, she said, “I need to do it again,” and she repeated the movements, not touching the child but making cleansing movements over his body with a cloth. 

Immediately he changed.  The fever and discoloration left.  My friend called the nurse to come.  “Something has happened.”  The nurse came to the bedside and began examining.  The child appeared to be completely healthy.  Every symptom of illness had disappeared.  So had the old woman.  She was nowhere to be seen.  But the child was well.

My friend asked the nurse, “Did you see an elderly woman come in here?”  No, she hadn’t seen anyone.  But my friend had.  And so had the little boy.  Both of them saw the woman and remember her to this day.  My friend says she was an angel.  And he believes.  His son, now an adult remembers the woman.  No, she wasn’t an angel, he says.  He doesn’t know who she was.  But she was there. 

Follow-up examinations showed that there was no sign of cancer.  The tumors were gone.  There has never been detected a single cell of the cancer that had ravaged his body to the point of death.  Doctors joyfully and tearfully recorded it as “spontaneous recovery.”  My friend calls it a miracle; and he believes an angel from God healed his son.

These things happen.

But these things also happen in other ways.  Over and over in the Gospel stories, people who met Jesus found that they became alive in new ways.  A Samaritan woman with a scandalous reputation met Jesus at a well where she was drawing water alone at the hottest time of the day.  Maybe she was avoiding the other women; maybe their words or their body language told her they judged her.  But Jesus didn’t judge her, and she found he gave her living water, internal refreshment that changed everything about the way she thought of herself.

A couple of weeks ago our children’s choirs gave a wonderful musical performance of the story of a tax collector, short of stature, who though rich and powerful, found himself alienated from his community because of his complicity with an unjust and corrupt economic system.  When Jesus saw the little man watching from a distance in a tree, he said, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”  And that day Zacchaeus made amends for his dishonesty and changed his entire life.

Jesus approaches us with total love, complete acceptance, unbounded compassion.  Then, Jesus opens infinite potentiality toward all of the dead ends of our lives.  As we trudge along, walking down our familiar, habitual, deadly paths, Jesus stops our funeral procession and says, “Weep no more.”  Or stop whining, or stop making excuses, or stop faking, or stop being miserable.  Whatever it is that we need to stop in order to halt our own particular funeral procession. 

Then he invites us to stand up and regain our voice.  He lets us throw our shoulders back, breathe deeply and clearly, and reclaim our lives and our identity as God’s beloved children.  He takes us by the hand and invites us to live in union with him.  As surely as a branch receives its nutrients from the vine, so we are invited to live in conscious union with Jesus.  His spirit becomes our spirit.  His love flowing in us and our love flowing toward him – love overflowing with radiant acceptance that allows us to be who we are, to be who we are created to be, so that like him, we can simply love our neighbors as ourselves.

I’ve recently done a bit of exploring about people who undergo a near-death experience, something like what happened to my friend with his child.  People who have tasted death and experienced something that they identify as the “other side,” return to this life with a certain freedom and joy.  They aren’t afraid of death any more, but more than that, they aren’t afraid to be truly alive.  They describe their lives as transformed.  They feel a conscious connection with something alive, transcendent, loving and purposeful.  They know themselves to be safe and loved.

The church invites everyone to have a near-death experience.  We call it baptism.  In baptism we are buried with Christ in his death, and by it we share in his resurrection.  Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit, and we are given God’s own indwelling Spirit.

The experience of death and resurrection is a repeatable event.  Every time we have a baptism here at St. Paul’s, we all renew our baptismal covenant, and remind ourselves who and whose we are.  Every time we pray, we can die a bit – letting go of our ego, our self-absorption and our guilt – and we can rise reborn in infinite love and light.  My spirituality professor used to say his best days were those when he died sometime before breakfast.

What is killing you?  What is eating at you like cancer?  …consuming your heart or mind?  Where are the dead ends in your life?  What old habit or destructive pattern needs Jesus’ touch to stop its continued procession toward death? 

Let infinite love and acceptance lift you from your funeral bier and restore you to life.  Stand up transformed.  Regain your voice.  Live in the light as God’s beloved.  Today you can experience your own death and resurrection.