We grow
up learning how to make deals. We know
that if we eat all of our Brussel sprouts, we might get ice cream, if we share
we might get more toys, or (somewhat paradoxically) if we tidy our rooms, we
might not get sent to them so soon.
Deals certainly have their place, but I hope they stay in their
place. A lot of us here are students
and/or teachers, many of you here for summer school. The fast pace of summer instruction can lead
to the temptation to reduce education to a series of deals: the teacher agrees
to impart certain information, the student agrees to regurgitate it, the teacher
agrees to give a grade based on how accurately that regurgitation occurs. Deals have their place, but I hope we’re all
open to something more than that happening in our classrooms: something more
relational, more transformative, more loving.
And I certainly hope we’re open to that in our walk with God.
Because
it can be very tempting to reduce that relationship to a set of deals. God works mighty deeds, so we do loving
things, so God forgives us the less-than-loving things we’ve also done. It’s tempting to read this gospel we’ve heard
in just this way. This sinful woman
performs a meritorious act, so she earns forgiveness. No relationship; just a cold deal. That’s not how God loves us and that’s not
how God frees us for love! In Jesus’
parable, the love is the free response to the free gracious act of forgiveness
of debt. Jesus comments on the reverse: “the
one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”
Forgiveness has come to the forgotten, and the woman’s acts disclose it.
What
Jesus shows us in story, Paul writes of to the Galatians, proclaiming that we
don’t earn our salvation nor can we justify ourselves in God’s sight. Sinners that we are, we depend on the
graciousness of God. And God is
gracious. God does act to free us from
the sin that blocks our love, that makes it misfire in anger, or makes us hold
back in fear. God frees us and forgives
us, and once we come to realize that, the love from which and for which we were
made can’t help but flow. Like this
nameless woman, we will be freed for the extravagant acts of love that accord
with our prodigious forgiveness.
To
encounter this amazing gift of forgiveness, we need to admit that we need
it. That we don’t have it all together,
that we’re not saved by our cv or our transcript, because there’s stuff on
there that we’re really not proud of. And
it’s life-giving and humanizing to admit that.
In a verse close to the ones we heard tonight in our psalm, the psalmist
speaks of the pain of wasting away and groaning while trying to keep his sin
silent, hiding it not from God who can do something about it, but really from ourselves. The words we heard sung tell of the joy and
the “glad cries of freedom” that come from confessing that sin, being freed
from what binds us, freed to love. David
has to be reminded by the prophet Nathan that all God has done is give and all
David is done is take, to finally break down and speak those three simple words
(just one in Hebrew!): (חָטָ֖אתִי) I have sinned.
A saint
who shows us how powerfully forgiveness frees us to love is Damian of Molokai,
the Belgium priest who went to minister in a leper colony. No-one would visit that island; people went
there to die. There was no other priest
there, so whenever a cargo ship would come close to the shore onto which no-one
would disembark, Damian would who shout out to the captain to find out if there
was a priest on board. If there was, the
priest would come to the side of the ship and Damian would shout out his
confession across the waters and receive sacramental absolution. That forgiveness is what freed Damian to
love, that’s what enabled him to reach out and touch those that society
shunned. At the start of his time there,
he would start each homily with the words “My dear lepers…” But after a certain point, he switched to
beginning them all: “We lepers…” His
encounter with forgiveness freed him to love, to reach out, to touch, to risk
his health, his flesh and life in daring sacrificial love. He did this because he knew how God loved him
and how beloved of God were those forgotten to whom forgiveness has come; he
knew that on the other side of daring costly self-sacrificial love lies eternal
life.
I wonder
if Simon, the Pharisee from our story, ever encountered forgiveness. He certainly doesn’t seem to have at the
point in his life we hear of him. While
Damian dared to love, to reach out and embrace a leper, Simon shunned the woman
whose sin made her in his eyes no better than a communicable disease whom he
didn’t want in his home. We don’t know
where the woman came from, we don’t know her sin (the interpretative
commonplace of claiming that she was a sex-worker I think says more about the
interpreters than it does about her); but neither do we know where Simon
went. This story is open-ended on both
ends, at least on the individual level.
More globally, though, we know where this story begins, God’s love; we
know where it passes through, our sin forgiven; and we know where it ends,
humanity freed for extravagant love.
We awoke
this morning to news that 52 people in a bar in Orlando had been murdered
because they were untouchable, gay. We
know there will be hateful acts of ‘revenge’ against our Muslim sisters and
brothers because the murderer claimed to be of their faith. We know how much our world is in need of
forgiveness, how much we are. We know
God loves; we pray we might too.
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