Readings (click here for the readings):
   2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15; Psalm 32; Galatians 2:11-21; Luke 7:36-50

Before Pam and I moved to Vermont a year and a half ago, my life was a lot different than it is now.  Instead of three jobs, I had only one, and even that was fairly controllable.  I worked in a hospital taking care of kids in the ER and the ICU and the main ward, and I worked long hours at a stretch – 30, usually. But when I was done, I was done. I handed the beeper over to somebody else, went home to sleep, and then I had a few days off before my next shift.

The job had its challenging moments, but after doing it for a few years I’d seen most of the so-called “bread and butter” cases many times.  It was clear what I should do, and I was almost always able to do it pretty well. Sure, there were moments when, being a perfectionist, I beat myself up over subtle things I could have done differently, but they were fairly few and far between.

This week, for first time in the last eighteen months, I looked back rather fondly on those simpler days, when I didn’t have three jobs – all of which seemed to have been pretty complex and impossible to succeed at of late.  Instead of coming home exhausted from lack of sleep but knowing I did everything right – as used to be the case with my old job – recently I’ve been coming home with the sense that, as the old saying goes, I can’t win for losing.

At the pediatric practice I’ve had a string of cases that I can’t just leave behind at the office: teenagers who hear voices telling them to hurt other people but whose families can’t afford the astronomical cost of seeing a therapist, and five-year-olds who have a morning routine of pouring a bowl of Captain Crunch and then watching two hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer stab and kill all sorts of demons on TV.

At the hospital I’ve had a string of ethics consults that have been anything but bread-and-butter, and sometimes my colleagues have shown me aspects of the cases that I missed the first time around. Once everybody else disagreed with me, but I’m still convinced I was right, because of my relationship with a guy who never said a word to me.

That one probably deserves a little explaining. To set the stage, as some of you know, I like to write, and I recently completed a story that I’ve been working on for a while.  It’s a mystery, and one of the characters is a private eye – kind of like Sam Spade – who drinks Glenfidditch scotch and is almost too cool for words.  Well, as it turns out, the patient I consulted on was a retired private eye, whose wife confided in me that she kept his bottle of Glenfidditch in her purse, just in case he might wake up and need it immediately.

I wasn’t able to talk with the patient, because he was heavily sedated.  The rest of the people on the ethics committee were willing to do certain things that would markedly shorten his life, but I wasn’t.  And one of the reasons that I wasn’t was because I had a genuine affection for this man, and I wasn’t willing to let him go just then, because that seemed like a betrayal of trust on some level, to me.  Somehow, in ways that he certainly couldn’t know, something had passed between us, and he had an advocate – someone who cared about him way more than I should have.

And then there’s church, where in the midst of progress on the rectory and the organ and, dare I say, on our spiritual lives, I made a decision after prayerful consideration and discussion that I believe is right for the parish.  In the grand scheme of things – in a world where kids suffer for lack of needed care and where a soon-to-be widow’s only sign of hope is the bottle of 18-year-old scotch in her purse – the decision was pretty small.  But some folks’ feelings have really been hurt, and I’ve been accused of character flaws that make me wish I weren’t as thin-skinned as I am.

And, yet again, miraculously, the readings assigned for this morning speak to this very situation.  In the gospel, Jesus is having dinner at a Pharisee’s house.  Now being a Pharisee wasn’t easy, but it was pretty clear cut.  You knew what the rules were – heck, you helped write the rules – and if you kept them, you knew you were in good shape when it came to God.  There was no question or doubt, and after a day at the synagogue you could go home feeling safe and assured.

But then this woman shows up at the party uninvited, because she’d heard Jesus was going to be there.  She hadn’t gone to school to learn what being faithful was all about; she probably didn’t even know exactly what she needed out of life, only that she needed something, and needed it desperately.  And so she does the only thing she can: she weeps and anoints Jesus’ feet with ointment, because she doesn’t know what else to do. 

The Pharisee is offended, because things like that just weren’t done, especially in his house.  But Jesus tells the Pharisee and everyone else who’s there – including the woman, if she dares to listen even as she washes Jesus’ feet – that if God forgives you a great deal, then you’re going to love Him a lot.  But if God doesn’t forgive you for much, then you’re not going to have much reason to love Him, in the end.

Jesus is telling them – and us – that everybody gets forgiven everything, if we ask for it.  It’s not a question of God forgiving all of one person’s sins and half of somebody else’s.  God forgives us all completely, which means that the people He forgives the most, must have had the most sins in the first place.  They’re the greatest sinners – the ones who think of themselves more than others, who do things they know are bad for them and displease God, who might not give God a second thought until they walk by some rich guy’s house and see Jesus there and know they have to dosomething, right there, right then, or else they might be lost forever.

And, the biggest sinners will surprise you.  The Bible is filled with stories about how the seemingly proper and upright guy is the biggest sinner in the world, while the guy everybody looks down on is actually on the right track when it comes to God.  And that’s exactly what happens in the Old Testament reading about King David – whom we know in hindsight was a pretty fallen character, but back then was probably viewed as the holiest guy around.  The prophet Nathan comes up to David and tells him a story about a man who has everything but is so greedy that he takes the only thing some poor man has – a lamb. 

David erupts in righteous anger, going on and on about how to punish the rich man: kill him, take all his lambs, and on and on.  Then Nathan tells him that that’s exactly what David did, when he stole the wife of Uriah.  David repents, and Nathan proclaims that God has forgiven him.

The take home message from that is the surer we are that we’re right, the more like we are to be wrong.  Time and time again in the Bible when somebody comes out with a statement like, “Well, obviously that’s a terrible thing to do,” God responds in one of two ways. Either He says to them, “I’m not so sure it’s terrible, after all,” like Jesus did with the woman who anointed His feet. Or else God might say, “You’re right, it is terrible.  But can’t you see that you’re doing that very thing right now?”, like He did with David.

The biggest sinners loving God more than the pious folks. The seemingly most godly people actually committing the most heinous of sins.  The Bible is describing a world where nothing is as it seems, and where we can never go home from our job or our church or from anywhere with full certainty that we did everything right.  Which is just as well, because there’s nothing miraculous – there’s nothing Godly – about getting rewarded for what we did right.  It’s fine to get paid for a job well done, but that has nothing to do with God. 

God is about showing us how we’ve fallen short, but before we can start beating ourselves up about it God steps in and embraces us and tells us that He’s already forgotten what we did wrong, so it’s about time we forgave ourselves, too.  God is about loving us more than the folks around us seem to right then, because He knows the deepest stories of our hearts that we never had the courage or chance to tell, like the old private eye in his hospital bed, or the sinful woman who crashed the high society dinner party.

The bottom line is that we don’t need to do anything – we don’t need to do the right thing or do a good job or even say a single word.  The woman in the gospel story certainly did none of those.  She doesn’t say anything in the whole story – the only people who talk are the ones spouting off about what you need to do to be saved, even though they don’t have a clue about it.  And ultimately it’s the silent, sinful woman who goes away justified and forgiven, simply because she did the only thing she possibly could, which was ask for help, and show others the same love and concern that she wanted herself.

We all try to do our best.  To do a good job.  But being Christian isn’t about being good, and it’s not about being right.  It’s about being forgiven, and realizing that our mistakes and flaws and hurt feelings are the windows through which we see God’s love.  And when we accept the fact that we are flawed and forgiven, then we’ll be able to accept that about others, too.  The person next to us might indeed have some major character flaws.  They may have done something that we really disagree with.  But that’s not where community ends; that’s where community begins. And crazy as it sounds, if we see ourselves and each other as God sees all of us, we might actually end up being jealous of the most sinful people in our midst.  For they are forgiven much, and because of that, they will surely love God just as much, and more.

[Home] [Worship] [Sermons] [Youth] [Mulch] [Projects] [Info]