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The Sermon for Pentecost 4
July 2, 1995

Christ the King Lutheran Church

The Rev. Edwin D. Peterman, Senior Pastor

Lessons for the Day


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You can't count anybody out. Just when you think some individual is totally without hope, that
person goes on to become someone important. Take, for example, the young lad some years ago
who was extremely overweight and unpopular. He didn't learn to read until he was eight years
old, and even then one of his teachers told him, "If we could open your head, we should find
only a lump of white fat." The poor boy stayed at the bottom of his class until he was fifteen.
Then almost overnight he was transformed. By the time he was a young man he was well on his
way to a successful career as an author. His name? G. K. Chesterton.

Or take another lad who was allowed to stay in school only because he was an even worse
failure on the family farm. He lived in a mental fog for years until one day he had a horrible
fight with a bully in his class. After that he seemed to come alive. He went on to make
contributions to mathematics and physics which revolutionized scientific thought. Today he
ranks as one of the greatest intellects of all time. His name? Isaac Newton.

Or take the little boy who spoke haltingly and responded to questions only after such long
periods of deliberation that his parents were certain he was retarded. In high school he was so
much a failure at everything but math that one teacher told him he'd never amount to anything
and encouraged him to quit school. It took him a full year to get into Zurich's Polytechnic
Institute because he failed the entrance exam. Even after graduating, he had trouble finding and
holding a job. Yet today we remember him as the formulator of the theory of relativity. His
name? Albert Einstein.

All of these illustrations are taken from last December's issue of a newsletter published by
Southwest Kwik Kopy Printing here in Houston. The article in the newsletter actually gives
seven examples, but I have quoted only three of them. What I find interesting is not only the
point they make about people getting a slow start in life and then going on to significant careers.
What is even more interesting is that all seven illustrations deal with men. Not one is about a
woman.

If you want a story like this about a woman, you won't find it in the newsletter of a modern,
enlightened, high-tech company in the fourth largest city in the United States. For a story about a
woman this morning you have to go back to a book written more than nineteen hundred years
ago by somebody named Luke. Specifically, in today's gospel we find a story about a woman
with a humiliating past who is vindicated into a promising future by none other than Jesus
himself.

In those days it was customary for a travelling preacher who had spoken in the synagogue to be
invited afterward into the home of one of the more prominent members of the congregation for
dinner. Apparently that is how Jesus came to be in the home of Simon the Pharisee, as today's
gospel story opens. It was the practice for guests at dinner to lie on a couch facing the table,
leaning on one elbow. Jesus' feet therefore were behind him, away from the table.

Suddenly an uninvited guest appeared in the room, a woman of the city. Quite possibly she had
heard Jesus speak in the synagogue about repentance and forgiveness and was thereby drawn to
him. She brought an alabaster jar of ointment and stood behind Jesus weeping. Then she knelt
and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. If there had been any
doubt about the character of this woman, now all doubt was removed. The only women in those
days who let their hair down in public were prostitutes.

Simon the Pharisee, who was hosting the dinner, was indignant that Jesus permitted this woman
to do what she was doing. Jesus then told Simon and the others the story of a man who forgave
two people their debts to him--one who had a large debt and one who had a much smaller debt.
Then Jesus asked Simon which debtor would be more likely to love the man who had canceled
his debt. Simon cautiously replied, I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.
Jesus went on to point out that the woman anointing his feet had been forgiven far more than
Simon had been; therefore, she was quite naturally much more grateful and loving to Jesus than
Simon was. Then Jesus turned to the woman and said, Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has
saved you; go in peace.

The story ends with the woman being forgiven and transformed into a new person, while Simon
and the other religious leaders remain unforgiven and thus retain the same stodgy self-
righteousness with which they had come to the dinner that day. The woman who had been
discounted and discredited by the others was vindicated because of Jesus, while the others who
were pleased and smug about their own goodness were not vindicated by Jesus at all.

You see, the true measure of any human being in the sight of God is not the depth of sin in which
he or she once participated, but the height of forgiveness to which the grace of God has now
raised him or her. Nor is it our technical goodness at avoiding obvious sin that gives us the
credentials we need to enter the kingdom of God. It is the grace of God alone.

At the dinner the focus of Simon and the others was on what was wrong with this woman who
had come into the room uninvited and had made such a scene at Jesus' feet. Jesus' focus was on
what was right about her. In the eyes of the others, what was wrong with her had to do with her
past. But in the eyes of Jesus, what was right about her had to do with what forgiveness would
enable her to be in the future.

This raises a question about the life of the church in our own time. Does the typical church
today dwell on what's wrong with its members, or does it focus rather on the forgiveness of
Christ which makes things right? An Episcopal priest, Father David L. James, wrote this in a
recent issue of The Anglican: "For the past thirty years, clergy have been so drawn to a
therapeutic model of priesthood that many have lost the ability to speak in anything other than
psychological categories. Sin, obedience, and righteousness have been replaced by
dysfunctional, co-dependent, and passive-aggressive assessments. Parish decline is attributed
to the controlling, addictive and sick behavior of parishioners." He continues, "The church
cannot substitute a therapist for a pastor and replace theology with psychology without serious
consequences to what it means to be a community of faith. When the priest is therapist and the
congregation is patient, the focus is always upon what's wrong. Even celebrations of what's
right have a tentative and suspicious air about them."

I believe that Father James makes an important point. The dinner table in today's gospel was
filled with religious people who were more concerned with what was wrong with an uninvited
woman letting her hair down and weeping at Jesus' feet than they were with what forgiveness
might empower her and them to become. So also today there are people in the church who are
more interested in pointing out sin than in proclaiming and celebrating forgiveness. They insist
on trying to identify and analyze what is wrong with the church rather than promoting what is
right. They are constantly trying to take the church's temperature in their search for signs and
symptoms of sickness.

The Lutheran church consultant, Dr. Peter Steinke, points out that just as there is no living
human being, no matter how healthy, that does not have germs and viruses in it or on it, there is
no local congregation without pathogens. But human beings remain healthy not simply by
attacking germs, but by maintaining a strong immune system. So also churches remain alive and
healthy not by stamping out every single pathogen that resides in them, but by focussing on what
is wholesome and healthy in spite of the pathogens. Dr. Steinke's approach in assisting
conflicted congregations is not only to analyze what is wrong, but to identify what is right and
then help people find ways to strengthen it. And he is quick to point out that the chief thing right
with any church is its commission to proclaim the Word of God and administer the sacraments.
In other words, what is right with any church is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Chesterton, Newton, and Einstein all began as slow learners--even idiots--in the sight of their
peers and teachers. But by the grace of God they grew up to become giants in their respective
fields. In the same way the woman in today's gospel began as a so-called woman of the city
who was an uninvited guest at a dinner for religious dignitaries. But by the grace of God in
Jesus Christ she ended up forgiven and vindicated--empowered for new and redeemed life in
the kingdom of God.

It has often been said that there is no saint without a past and no sinner without a future. That
observation applies to congregations as well. There is no congregation so good that it does not
have some things in its past that were bad. But neither is there any congregation even with a
devastatingly bad past that does not have a future, by the grace of God. The word Jesus spoke at
the dinner in Simon's house is the word by which we live, both corporately and individually. It
is the word that God accepts us as we are and frees us for all we shall become. That word
comes to us in baptism and is shared by us in communion. It is proclaimed from the pulpit and
manifested in the words and deeds of all our members in their daily life. It is a word that has its
origin and destiny in the eternal mystery of God.