Luke 7:36—8:3
June 13, 2010
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
If I were to ask you to write down on a piece of paper a sin that was pressing on your heart, a burden that you wish to set down before Jesus, I wonder how many of you would find that exercise to be too difficult. You might say, “What do you mean exactly, a sin that is bothering us?” “What do you mean a burden we wish to set down?”
Talking about sin and forgiveness doesn’t come naturally. We don’t like to admit that we have sinned. Like you in San Francisco, I grew up in Boston hearing about the “four spiritual laws.” The four points were: God loves us; sin pushes us away from God; Jesus died for our sins; and if we think this is true, then we are saved. How many of you raised your hands as a young person when the pastor asked if you believed this? I know when I was growing up; some of the sixth graders raised their hands every year just to be sure they wouldn’t go to hell.
Acknowledging for ourselves that we are people with sins is a difficult truth to accept perhaps because we like to believe that we have evolved spiritually.
Dinner Party
The passage for this morning is the famous dinner party at a Pharisee’s house. In this situation, we can learn about sin and forgiveness, about the God who forgives sins and the church that has been empowered by that same God to carry on the work of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation in the world.
Luke describes the woman simply as a sinner without specifying the sins. In that culture, a sinner violated God’s expectation for living in covenant. The community often isolated sinners. In addition, sinners bore the personal burden of their own guilt.
It may seem strange for us who are accustomed to houses that are completely enclosed to read that this woman enter the Pharisee’s house. In those days, the courtyards of many houses were open to the street so that a passerby like this woman could slip in without being noticed. People in need would be allowed to come to gather the leftovers so that good food wouldn’t be wasted and the host would come across in the community as being kind and caring.
Banquet tables in those days were low to the floor and the guests sat not in chairs but reclined with their feet extending slightly away from the table. They would lean on their left elbows on a pillow and use their right hands to reach for the food. It would be fairly easy for the woman to stand behind Jesus and to bathe and anoint his feet.
The woman must have heard that Jesus is announcing the presence and coming of the realm of God. For her, the coming of the Kingdom of God means forgiveness and restoration back into the community that she’s been isolated from. The woman responds to this discovery of wholeness by extravagantly honoring Jesus. With her tears and ointment she provides the hospitality that the Pharisee did not.
By now, it was more than the Pharisee can stand. How could Jesus let such a scandalous thing go on? The Pharisee has been gracious enough to invite Jesus to dinner—even though some of his friends probably disapprove. Now this woman is falling all over Jesus, kissing his feet, and filling the room with the overpowering smell of Calvin Klein’s Obsession!
When I read this story, I’m afraid that if I were there, I would be Simon, the Pharisee that didn’t approve. I would have pointed out the fact that this woman was a sinner. Perhaps all of us “good church people” are more like the Pharisee than we are willing to admit. So how would you feel if you invited a minister to dinner and he brought a prostitute with him?
The whole spectacle leads the Pharisee to say to himself—just loud enough for everyone at the table to hear him—“If this man were a real prophet, he would know what kind of woman this is.”
So Jesus tells a story: “Two men were in debt to a certain bank. One owed five thousand dollars, the other five hundred. When neither of them could pay, the president of the bank wrote off both debts.” (Anyone who has dealt with a bank in these past couple of years knows very well that this is a parable.” “Which of the two will be more grateful?”
Simon scratches his head nervously, “I suppose the one forgiven the greater debt.”
“You suppose? Of course, the one who was forgiven more will be more grateful.”
Then Jesus turns to Simon, comparing his puny hospitality to that of the woman who has lovingly kissed Jesus’ feet. Simon is so righteous that he sees little for which he needs to be forgiven, and so he sees little for which he needs to be grateful.
It’s easy to read the story and miss the point. The difference between Simon and the woman is not that she’s worse sinner. Simon’s pride must be worse to God than the woman’s sins. The woman knows more forgiveness not because she has sinned more but because she feels more need for grace.
Now if I were to ask you to write down a sin that is pressing on your heart, a burden that you wish to set down before Jesus, can you do that now? I’m not saying to you that you have many sins that you may feel unworthy to be at Jesus’ feet. But are you like Peter, the Pharisee who believes that he is so righteous that his pride has prevented him to see that he is also in need of God’s grace?
Salvation
Jesus said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” The people at the dinner party began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
In the Scriptures, salvation is not a four-step program, like the “four spiritual laws” or a question of whether you’ve been baptized. Salvation is the experience of God’s grace.
The Hebrew word for “salvation” means “to make sufficient.” Salvation is the discovery that life without God is insufficient, and that God’s grace makes sense of life. In the Gospels, when Jesus tells someone, usually someone in need of healing, “Your faith has saved you,” he literally says, “Your faith has made you well.” This means that you are okay, sufficiently well and ready to begin your life anew.
Salvation is the experience of losing our selves in grace that’s bigger than we are, that makes us well. We have all experienced times in our lives when we are more fully our selves is when we love somebody. By losing our selves, we find our selves. For then it’s no longer our selves at the center of the universe, but the one we love. We give of our selves so that by all the rules of arithmetic there should be less of our selves that there was to start with. But we find out that we have more—blessings from God that is all sufficient for life. Only by this divine paradox there’s more. Jesus puts it this way, “The ones who lose their lives will find their lives.”
For this desperate woman, coming to the Pharisee’s house was the moment to see Jesus and possibly receive grace. She knows that she isn’t welcome at the Pharisee’s house. But she made a simple plan to be in the moment to receive salvation. Are you open to having those moments with God when you’re not hurrying through life as business as usual and to say to God my life is insufficient unless I know God’s grace? Are you ready to give your life to God to become insufficient in the world’s definition of sufficiency in order to become truly sufficient because you have salvation from God’s grace?
God’s Grace
Jesus turns to Peter, the Pharisee and asks, “Do you see this woman?” The answer is “No.” Peter doesn’t see this woman because he thinks that she is unworthy to be in Jesus’ company. Peter doesn’t see her because he thinks that people like him who’re hosting the dinner party are more righteous and are not in need of sins to be forgiven.
Earlier, I suggested that you might be the Pharisee in this story. But is it possible that you are the woman in this story? Did you slipped into the sanctuary without anyone noticing like the woman who slipped into the dinner party? When it comes to hearing stories about grace, is no story about grace far from our own?
Fred Craddock tells of visiting a small church and being surprised at the appearance of a large pastor—6 feet 4 inches and 300 pounds. “The pastor’s most noticeable feature was his stumbling, lumbering gait. He was awkward, almost falling, with long, useless arms at his sides, like they were waiting further instruction. His head was misshapen. His hair was askew. He stumbled up the steps to get to the pulpit. When he turned to face us,” Craddock says, “I saw the thick glasses, and through them I could see milky film over his eyes, one of his eyes going out, nothing coming in to the other. When he read, he held the Bible near his nose. When he spoke, the muscles in his neck worked with such vigor as he pushed out the words, as if he had learned to speak as an adult. But I lost all consciousness of that after a while. He read 1 Corinthians 13 and spoke on the greatness of love. He wasn’t poetic or prophetic, but was warm and affectionate.
The relationship between those people, the love that he extended as he preached, and the love that came back from those people who sat quietly, leaning forward, was captivating and I was captured. How could this grotesque creature be so full of love? I didn’t understand. I started remembering those stories about how people who have grotesque features are sometimes granted a special quality of affection, Beauty and the Beast or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I thought of children with Down’s syndrome, how they have the capacity to grab you and hug you and kiss you, when other children stand at a distance. Is this what I am seeing? Is this the providence of God that grants people who lack attractiveness on the outside to have that quality on the inside?”
“After the service, I lingered at the door and listened to the greetings and little words of pastoral care and comfort between him and the members. One woman I would guess to be seventy shook his hand at the door. She said, “I wish I could know your mother.” She was having the same trouble I was. She didn’t understand the source of this love and thought maybe, “I wish I knew your mother.” He said, “My mother’s name is Grace.”
A few minutes later, Craddock remarked, “That was an unusual response you gave to that woman, “My mother’s name is Grace.”
The pastor explained: “When I was born I was put up for adoption at the Department of Family Services. As you can guess, nobody wanted to adopt me. So I went from foster home to foster home, and when I was about seventeen, I saw some young people going into a church. I so wanted some friends, so I went in, and there I met grace—the grace of God.”
God’s grateful salvation is offered to you and me. God accepts the woman who sat at Jesus’ feet. God accepts this pastor when no family wanted to adopt him. God accepts you and me today not because we have so many sins and burdens that we need to seek penance, forgiveness and reconciliation for surely we know we are sinful but because we feel more the need for grace in our lives.
There are no four steps to salvation; there’s only one word—grace. We’re not saved by anything that we hold, but by the one who holds us. The best that we can do is give ourselves to God’s grace and give thanks.
Let us pray.
Lord, thank you for revealing to us your grace and mercy to receive salvation. Help us to understand that we are all people who have sinned against you and against each other and are now in need for forgiveness and reconciliation in order for us to start life again. We are grateful for your loving salvation of which we do not deserve but out of your love for us, we have received. In Christ who accepted the woman at his feet has also accepted us, we pray. Amen.