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June 17, 2007The story we’ve just heard in the gospel is a rich one – Luke is a master storyteller and he pulls out all the stops. A woman who is known to be a sinner, an outcast who is shunned by the community, crashes the dinner party of dignified religious leaders who are outraged, naturally.
For the gospel author Luke, Jesus is all about showing mercy to the marginalized who have been made into disposable “things” by those in power. And so Jesus responds to this disgraced nobody with kindly acceptance. But he goes further. Because in Luke, Jesus does more than support the downtrodden. He shows that it is the lowly who are lifted up and the high and mighty who are cast down. The last are first and the first are last.
And so Jesus tells his Pharisee hosts that this woman whom they hold in such contempt, this woman whom they keep at a safe distance is, in fact, closer to God than they are. For proximity to God is measured by the amount of love we receive and give. Jesus points out that she gratefully accepted God’s loving forgiveness, and then poured out her love for God by washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Such an intimate, affectionate act of devotion.
By contrast, the hosts haven’t extended themselves an inch towards their guest, Jesus. They didn’t offer the usual Middle-Eastern signs of hospitality by greeting him with a kiss and washing his dusty feet. They keep their horrified, self-righteous distance from anyone, including Jesus, who might have spiritual cooties, anyone who might infect them with uncleanness. They hold themselves above the world and all the bad people they see there, thinking that this way, they will be closer to God.
Quite the opposite. Again, our proximity to God is measured by love, nada mas. Nothing else.
This is a powerful message, one which has potency for any age, and certainly for ours. There are people all over the world who believe in cooties: Muslims, Jews, Christians; politicians who pontificate about evildoers “whose only motivation is to hate and destroy;” indignant radio hosts and clergy who decry the immorality of our day; and those who drive behind tinted glass from gated community to security lots at the office, careful to avoid streets where there might be poverty or other forms of human unpleasantness.
When we raise ourselves up in righteous indignation and separate ourselves from those who offend us, we make them into something less than human and ourselves to be squeaky clean. The effect is that the other becomes disposable, and we become unreal. Neither state has anything to do with God.
We are close to God when we gratefully receive God’s unconditional love for us in spite of our faults, instead of insisting on some unnatural ideal of perfection for ourselves. We are close to God when we remember that everyone has their story, everyone has their pain and confusion, and everyone needs understanding and mercy. We are close to God when we stand alongside anyone – a homeless addict on the street, a divorced adulterer, a paroled criminal – and know that they, through their love, might be closer to God than we are.
As I said, this is a powerful message that disturbs the social order in any age. But in our gospel for today Jesus has another way of turning the tables on his hosts. It has to do with how this woman might be restored to a right relationship with God. The Pharisees see “a sinner” - as if that were some horrible state of personhood - who must repent through some act of atonement to bring purity to her tainted soul. Jesus sees a child of God who was lost and now is found. That’s why they were doubly offended when Jesus pronounced the woman forgiven, instead of referring her to the proper religious authorities.
We’re not given much information about what, if anything, the woman said to Jesus. Her actions speak for themselves. I don’t think she confessed anything. All she did was come to Jesus and begin to weep and to wash his feet. She returned to God. She came out of isolation and gave herself to God.
If we place her action in the context of many other stories of the Bible, we see that it is a classic story of exile and return. She was shunned and isolated, and now she brought herself back into loving community again. She left a life of self-destruction and found healing. She was exiled and now had returned to God.
This is the biblical story of the lost people of Israel wandering in the desert, and then, after a long time, brought into a land of milk and honey. It is the story of a people in captivity in the foreign land of Babylon, then returning home to Jerusalem. It is the story of the prodigal son, coming back to the unconditional love of his father.
I talk quite a bit about exile and return, because I prefer it to the terms sin and atonement, which just doesn’t grab many of us today. Most of us don’t live in guilt or resentment all the time, and so we don’t need to dwell on sin and forgiveness as a daily practice. We don’t feel tainted, needing to make ourselves clean before an offended God.
Our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, was talking in an interview about two strands of religion. “One,” she said, is "most concerned with atonement, that Jesus died for our sins and our most important task is to repent." But the other is "the more gracious strand." It "is to talk about the second strand - life, to claim the joy and the blessings for good that it offers, to look forward.”
The first strand - sin, repentance and atonement - were what the Pharisees expected from this woman. It is what they expected from Jesus, if he were, as they sneered, a real prophet. But instead, Jesus graciously spoke to them about life, about the joy of returning from exile. He spoke to them about the blessing of tears and affection, and the good in this woman. He rejoiced with her that she could now go forward with her life.
The biblical, Christly model of exile and return – instead of sin and atonement – is a powerful one, and, I think, more natural for many of us. We know it when we’re off-center, ungrounded. We know it when we’re morally, spiritually, physically, or mentally off-balance. We know it when we’re lost, when we’re in exile.
The way to live again in the love of God is to return. Returning, however, is not a simplistic thing. There is no recipe, no formula that works for everyone. That’s why the model of sin and repentance is so limited as it is often presented; it presumes that all we have to do is to feel bad and tell God we want to be better, and then receive the forgiveness we need. Presto! We’re made clean!
Returning from exile, on the other hand is more mysterious, more like real life. As our Presiding Bishop said, it is about life, about how we claim the joy and blessing and good that life offers, about how we can actually look forward into new life. That is a journey, a pilgrimage that reveals itself to us one step at a time, through one open door and then eventually another. Returning from exile takes time: our whole life long, and into the next.
Jesus turned the tables twice on his hosts in today’s story. He showed them that proximity to God is measured not by unreal ideals of righteousness, but in love. And he showed them that this woman was not in need of purification; all she needed to do was come home to God.
He invites you, too, to return from whatever exile, extreme or subtle, you may be living in now. He invites you to measure your proximity to God by how much love you allow yourself to receive and to give. And he invites you then to claim the joy and the blessings for good that life offers, to look forward to new life in God.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church