|
Back to Sermon Archives
June 17, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Psalm 5,
Galatians 2:19-21, Luke 7:36—8:3
“You Are Forgiven: Is That Any Way to Talk to a
Woman?”
I have been reading in the San Francisco papers
about this as the 40th anniversary of the “Summer of Love” – with its
all-so-felicitous slogan (Remember?) “Make Love, Not War.” Yet who
would argue that the human species and the common life of the peoples of this
world only really stand the long-term chance of “a peace sign in Palestine” if
we begin to act as we believe making love – valuing one another passionately in
mind, body, heart and soul! -- is more intrinsic to us, more attractive to us
than making war?
Jesus here in this story again will not be bound
by law and tradition. He does not buy into our helpless resignation to things
such as war -- as they were then, are now, will be forever, amen! Jesus is so
willing, literally and metaphorically, to be reached by the unreachable, touched
by the untouchable, moved by the unmoveable, changed by the unchangeable. The
secret to change in and with Jesus is real encounter -- embrace, engagement,
exchange -- between persons and among peoples -- equal human beings with equally
valid names and identities, stories and histories. Jesus is not afraid that
anyone else can taint or corrupt him. He says elsewhere, nothing outside us can
ever defile us.
That kind of openness and acceptance to the full
and free persons each of us is is precisely what we as a congregation have to
offer. We offer it, for instance, when we invite all parties to a neighborly
conversation about Brick Park. We offer it when we invite the youth of the “all
ages” Holland Project (www.hollandreno.org)
to transfer some of their scheduled concerts here if they cannot find another
available, accessible, and affordable space. We offer it when we invite Youth
ArtWorks (www.youthartworks.org)
to help create banners and flags, “Colors of Hope,” for our building this
summer. Where else can Jesus learn about caring for feet if not from someone
who does it for him? Any more than we can learn about enemies, people called
“homeless” or “street,” or even our own and scary children -- unless and until
we interact boldly with them?
Can we not imagine that Jesus is led to wash the
feet of his disciples the last night he spends with them because this anonymous
woman – onto whom all the other men present seem to project their own worst
fears of touching and being tainted – this woman first washed his feet? With
her own tears? Her own bodily fluids? And dried them with her hair? Still
thought to be the sexiest and to this day therefore most controversial and
coverable part of a woman’s body? Kissing his feet and anointing them with
expensive perfume she may well have earned the hard way? Jesus does not die for
rules, for laws and traditions, but for her. Paul says here, we tried keeping
all the rules and working our heads off to please God, and it did not work. So
we quit being “law people” and tried to become God’s people instead – directly,
personally related. Christ’s life shows us how, and enables us to do it! Now
we may identify ourselves completely with Christ.
I call our attention to the first poem in our
Words for Meditation (See
www.renofirstmethodist.org). In this moment of encounter -- embrace,
engagement, exchange – the poet says “audacity and need coalesced.” We read and
will hear Bishop Shamana (Her book is available now, after worship and from the
church office!) talk about creativity in us all as that meeting of the gift
that’s inside us with the need that’s outside us. She urges us to believe in
what and how we express of ourselves – in word, in song, in drama, in dance, in
painting, in quilt. Please! Let your artistic gift, reluctant though it may
be, become part of our celebration with Bishop Shamana July 8th!
Don’t tell me, don’t tell the Bishop, you don’t bring a creative gift – they try
to tell everyone that! But God will not be mocked! What and how we express
makes a difference! It matters to God in whose own creator-image we are created
to be co-creators ourselves! It matters to the earth we are given to be as
stewards and artisans of!
This gospel woman inspires the poet to look for
that “single impulse,” that one tiny breakthrough, in any of us that may
“precipitate” us, moisten us, liberate our creative juices – “into a precarious
moment of hope!” Isn’t that often the best we can hope for? Moments of hope in
the midst even of disaster and defeat, death and despair? In further hope that
such moments may reach, touch, move, change one another in a spirit of new
creation far beyond our conception, must less our control? Is that not the hope
we hoped in our celebration of Sharon’s life this week? The hope we further
hope for our children and youth? And did not what the poet calls “a dam of
saline grief burst” in us? As we cried out our hearts? Our minds, our bodies,
our souls? And did not ever-present, ever-thoughtful, ever-active Jeff Spalin
rescue us with abundant boxes of Kleenex?
Is life not often at best “clear rivulets in a grimy flesh wiped clean with
hair?”
According to the second poet, “Tentatively, she
entered. She knew she was not welcome here.” We men always struggle a little
with Fathers Day, with ways we make welcome the women and children in and of our
lives. It’s not just that we may not know how to welcome them but that we make
them feel unwelcome. It is that we are not willing to meet them in such a way
as to learn to welcome them. I am convinced that if we men allowed ourselves to
welcome, to make full and equal room for the women and children of our lives, we
would have to make more love than war. We would come to acknowledge that
everybody is somebody’s child! We would have to threaten that
“military-industrial,” security-incarcerational complex President Eisenhower
first warned us about. We would have to wonder -- if as Jesus says our hearts
are where our money is – why do we bleed billions a month in war that is not
working but only making worse?
The poet openly connects this woman’s dreams
with her despair. We glean, we grasp such meanings in moments of suffering and
pain -- our own and those of families, congregations, communities, nations,
peoples we feel for and with. We “get it” that if we did not hope and dream so
much for others and for ourselves, we would not feel such grief and despair at
not finding what we hope and dream for. Grief and despair, creatively lived and
loved, experience and expressed, may lead us to take even greater risks for what
we believe, for whom we believe. Jesus embodies that very connection of dream
with despair, defiance with defeat – as the poet says he is the one to reach out
and caress her hair! He is staking his risk of reputation to hers! Where
others may see in her only the waste of their time and their money, Jesus sees
in her – whatever she sees in herself! – the essential humanity -- Child of
God! Gift of life! Faith and hope of love!
When we make war, not love, we first have to
deny, to demonize and dehumanize others to the point that we can believe they
are more deserving of death than of life. Somehow they are such “failed”
persons, “failed” peoples, failed “states,” as we say today, that they have lost
all “God-likeness” in our sight. They no longer deserve to exist. They are
expendable beyond contempt. We have to tell ourselves that in order to sanction
their deaths. How else can we commit the inhuman, unGodlike act of one
person in the image of God destroying the life of another person in the image of
God?
Even then, no matter how well rationalized, we
cannot own the act and often cannot even talk about it. However justifiable in
appearance, killing another human – in whatever context and especially in war
decided for us by others – leaves us buried in guilt and shame. Our sister Ruth
Moore Stacy is working on this for her degree in grief counseling – How are we
going to help our veterans with all they have done and witnessed live with
themselves, much less live with us? At best, it leaves us able to identify with
this woman who “did what she had to do.” In order to “stay alive.” We say that
about our soldiers all the time. We cut much more slack to those who “have to”
make war than to those who have to make love. Why is that? What does that say
about us?
I was thinking about the “Summer of Love,” and this story, and the act of
fathering which only begins the true life of fathering – though we often settle
for the act of fathering and shortchange the life. The obvious occurred to
me but we don’t often say it in church – “Free love is not cheap sex.”
Have we heard that much in church? The love of God, like the love of
fathering and mothering, is not easy, it’s just free! Whatever it takes
for us to stay alive – and to respect the right and the need of others to stay
alive! To stay fully human and true to who we are.
Do we in the church really need to perpetuate
what the poet calls the “lust and disgust” syndrome of those in this story who
scorn and reject this woman for the very passion they share with her? Imagine
the guys in this room closing ranks in their condemnation of her! And
implicitly of Jesus as well for identifying with her! “Lust and disgust” is the
way we deny, demonize and dehumanize the sexuality of others and thereby our
own. Do we believe God knew what God was doing to create God’s image in these
sad bodies of ours? Or that God meant what God was doing when God gave of God’s
very owns self to take body in Jesus?
I pray everything and everyone we send this year
as annual conferences throughout the church -- all legislation and delegation to
next year’s General Conference -- will move us at last beyond our official
policy of “Lust and Disgust” to the stance of Jesus. The poet says Jesus first
looks at us in all our own humanness – sees us just as we are. Then Jesus
looks through us to our God-createdness – sees the divine redeemed in each one.
Then Jesus sees that we all are good! No wonder he gets himself into such
trouble for us. Not a word about making war. Every word about making love.
Who is this guy anyway??
The “Healthy Child Campaign” (www.childrensdefense.org)
materials in our Fathers Day bulletin remind us, in the poet’s words, “The poor
who are always with us would do things differently if they could.” Do we
believe the parents of 9 million children choose for them to be uninsured?
Do parents choose for some 25-30,000 children a day to die of hunger and
preventable disease in our world? Or for babies to be born with HIV/AIDS?
Or born to parents in exile or refuge or prison? Do children choose to be
war-killed and war-wounded? Do they choose mothers and fathers who are?
Do we think the poor are of a different species? Made up of a lesser
humanity? Jesus gets it! “You are forgiven!” Even if you do
not need forgiveness. Others need to hear that you are forgiven!
Each of us might ask ourselves for a moment, who is it that we most need to hear
is forgiven? Who is the “most unforgivable” person we know? Whom we might find
hardest to forgive for ourselves? Somebody here needs some forgiveness
today! Some part of each one of us needs some forgiveness today. Can
I get a witness?
Six weeks before she died, Millie Keiper told
Bob Olmstead how old and tired and hard-of-hearing she was feeling of late. She
wondered why she even bothered coming to church any more, Bob Olmstead -- with
classic clerical clarity! -- promptly replied, “Because the church needs to see
you here!” That’s right! The church needs to see and hear all of us here! We
need to see and hear one another -- as well as ourselves -- displayed in our
fullest possible humanness! We need to see in the light of God, nothing has
been held against us! Especially nothing of status or condition far beyond our
control.
This is what makes for the incredible strength
and courage to survive and to endure, as “Sweet Honey in the Rock” (www.sweethoney.com)
founding singer/songwriter Bernice Johnson Reagon puts it here. How to survive
and endure even slavery! Discrimination! Prison! Persecution! Detention!
Torture! Even death. That is the word of “Juneteenth” -- news of our full
humanity, our emancipation and liberation to join one another in fullest and
freest rejoicing as one among all of God’s children! Such news spreads slowly
but it spreads surely – even to Texas, now as then! And that will be all our
“good news” in the end. We don’t know how the angels woke us this morning. We
don’t know how we get to run at least one more day. We only know God calls us
afresh every morning! The whole universe knows us by name! Each of us has a
song to sing and a way to go. And as we raise our voices for justice we truly
believe! Amen.
top of page
Archives
|
