June 17, 2007
3 Pentecost, Luke 7:36-8:3
How do you all like my new and improved outfit? Now I get to wear the official uniform of the ordained person. First, there’s this collar. Although why someone hasn’t found a better way to do this than a plastic collar with unreachable buttonholes I cannot fathom. I also have a little added color today, which I love.
Those of you who were able to be at the service yesterday at the Cathedral might remember the moment when the Bishop asked the congregation to come forward if they knew of “any impediment or crime because of which we should not proceed” with the ordination. There’s a similar line in the marriage service, when the priest tells the congregation: “If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else for ever hold your peace.”
Those pauses always make me a little nervous. They bring to my mind the scene that has been repeated in more movies than I can count where someone rushes in and stops the wedding at the last minute. Like the final scene in The Graduate when Dustin Hoffman breaks into the church in the last scene and steals the bride away, fighting through the crowd with the crucifix. Or in Wedding Crashers when Owen Wilson rushes in and professes his love for the girl and her fiancé is finally shown to be the jerk that he is. In these moments, the truth is revealed and it changes everything. And so, when the priest asks that question during the wedding, I always worry just a little that some angry ex-boyfriend or jealous friend or disapproving family member might step up and throw a wrench in the works.
For close to a decade, I’ve been feeling like I might be called to the priesthood. In the beginning, it was just a glimmer of an idea, but it kept growing stronger until finally I just couldn’t keep it in. And then I began the “process,” the long, complicated, process toward ordination. I met with the priests at my home parish; spent six months meeting with a lay committee there; attended a weekend retreat with the other folks from the diocese that were wanting to be ordained; had multiple interviews with the Commission on Ministry and the Standing Committee, not to mention the Bishop; spent three years at seminary; did field work at an assisted living facility; and of course field education at St. Luke’s and then here, with a lay committee for each. And then there’s the medical, psychological and marital examinations. And throughout that process, in the back of my mind, I wondered what all of the folks involved in those many steps along the way would think about me. Would the Church agree that I was called to this ministry? And even though I knew, realistically, that it wouldn’t happen at the National Cathedral yesterday, my stomach tensed up when the Bishop asked his question to the people gathered and that pause came.
In our Gospel reading for today, we have this beautiful story about the sinful woman crying at Jesus’ feet and anointing him so extravagantly with her tears and with ointment from that alabaster jar. And we get inside the head of Simon the Pharisee and hear him think to himself, “If Jesus really were a prophet, he’d know what kind of woman this is – a sinner!”
I think all along in my process toward ordination, including yesterday at the Cathedral, I was half waiting for my Simon the Pharisee to pop out of the crowd and expose me as not particularly holy or good or worthy. Waiting for someone like Simon to speak up and this whole process to grind to a halt.
It’s an incredibly human insecurity – this feeling that if people knew who we really were deep down, they might not like us, might not trust us, might not admire us. That if we screw up one day and say or do the wrong thing, it might all come crashing down around us. The same feeling is at the bottom of the angst I remember from my teenage years. When there was so much pressure to be part of the crowd, to be the person I thought would be accepted by others. To belong. I remember never feeling like I could really be myself, feeling like maybe no one really got the real me.
Priests and psychiatrists say that this comes up all the time in their conversations with the people that come to them. And it’s been this way since the beginning of time. We see the very first man and woman in the Bible going through this in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve hear God’s footsteps in the garden and they are ashamed of their nakedness and afraid of what God will think and so they hide themselves among the trees. I really think this basic insecurity is part of our human condition.
But the glorious thing about our Gospel story today is that Simon is SO wrong. He isn’t wrong in thinking that this woman had lived a sinful life. That part he’s right about. We aren’t told what she’d done, but at some point she’d done something that was bad enough and well-known enough by the community that she’d been branded a sinner and become something of an outcast. Most commentators assume she was a prostitute. So Simon was right about the woman. But Simon was wrong in his assumption that if Jesus knew this woman was such a sinner he would never have let her touch him in this intimate and loving way.
Jesus already knew this woman’s past – he knew everything about her. Just like God did with Adam and Eve in the garden, knowing they’d eaten the forbidden fruit, Jesus could penetrate into this woman’s heart and know everything she’d ever done. Just as he did with the Samaritan woman at the well who had been with so many men, and with Peter who would deny Jesus three times in Jesus’ moment of greatest need, and with the rich young man who followed all of the commandments but was too attached to his possessions to leave everything and put Jesus first. We see Jesus looking deep into Simon as well, knowing what he was thinking about this crying, loving woman at Jesus’ feet without Simon even uttering a word. Jesus could see into these people and know their shortcomings and their failures and their fears and their insecurities.
And that knowing gaze penetrates into our hearts as well. God knows all of the things we’ve ever done. The grievous ways we’ve hurt others. The impure motivations that sometimes lie behind our kindest-seeming acts. The jealousies and bitterness and grudging attitudes that we hide behind our facades of genteel pleasantness. And God knows all of the things we’ve left undone. The ways we’ve ignored the blatant needs around us, the hungry stares and the glaring inequalities.
God knows all of these things about us, knows exactly who and what kind of people we are. God “gets” us – God knows the real us that lies behind the façade that we put up to be safe and comfortable. And loves us anyway!
With this woman at his feet at Simon the Pharisee’s house, Jesus’ gaze didn’t stop with her past behavior. Jesus looked deeper into her heart and saw the emptiness and ache there. Jesus knew that she loved him and longed for a different life.
In the service yesterday, the Bishop in his sermon talked a lot about “belonging.” To whom do we belong? He mentioned lots of possibilities – we belong to our families, our work, our communities, our church. But ultimately, we belong to God. Only God fulfills that elusive sense of belonging and security that we are searching for.
I think about those teenagers that died in the car accident Thursday night. The local girls that many of you might have known from West Potomac. Holden remembers buying balloons at the Variety Store from two of them. Their lives were cut way too short, their possibilities lopped off far too soon. There is no easy way around the mourning that their families and friends will do. It’s the worst kind of tragedy. But one thing that makes something like this a little more bearable for us as Christians is that knowledge that they now see face to face our God who knows the real them and loves them absolutely. They are complete as children of God. They belong.
That belonging is exactly what Jesus offered to the sinful woman when he forgave her sins and told her to go in peace. And it was belonging far deeper and more fulfilling than anything she could have found just by changing her reputation and being accepted by the community.
And when we open up our hearts and recognize our need for God like the sinful woman from our Gospel story this morning – we find that all of our baggage is already forgiven and peace like a river flows into us and washes away everything that keeps us from being the children of God that we are.
That forgiveness is what enabled the sinful woman to give herself to Jesus with her tears and her kisses. That peace is what allowed her to let down her defenses and make herself so vulnerable even though she must have known that Simon and his Pharisee friends would be judging her every move.
So I’m now a deacon in this great Church of ours with its very holy purpose and its very human failings. And it’s a relief that no one jumped up to halt the ordination yesterday. But it’s an even bigger relief that God sees inside my heart. That God knows all the ways that I’m afraid of what I’ve taken on, all the ways that I’m not up to it, all the ways that I think that I am up to it when really I’m not. God has known all of that from the very beginning. And calls me into this particular ministry anyway. Just like God calls all of you into your particular ministries in the Church and in the world. Offering us love and forgiveness and peace so that we can stop being afraid and start living out our ministries in earnest, knowing that we belong to God. Thanks be to God!
Amen.
ER