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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from the Holy Trinity. Amen.
So, today is Pride Sunday...the final day of Denver PrideFest, which happened to be my very first Pride ever. I've heard this weekend called "the feast day of the unclean masses" by our Pastor Nadia and I might agree, but with the additional adjective, "the feast day of the unclean glittered masses".
And since it is Pride, and since your vicar is gay, and since a bunch of us marched and biked in the parade this morning, I think you might expect some sort of a "gay sermon". However, the gospel reading isn't explicitly about gay people...so I have a hard time bringing the gay agenda into a sermon. Except for this: God created each of you, gay, straight, bisexual, black, white, purple, male, female, both or neither, and loves you as you are, and there is nothing that you can do or say or be that will separate you from the love of God in Christ, and if someone tells you something different, in the name of Christ, they are lying to you.
I have been thinking this week about the woman in the gospel story we just heard, and not just because we were told in seminary that whenever a woman is mentioned in the gospel to preach about her since women get the short end of the stick when it comes to being mentioned in the Bible. Instead I've been thinking about who she was, and why on earth she would be pouring out such expensive perfume onto Jesus' feet and rubbing them with her hair.
Someone mentioned to me this week that she seems sort of like Joan Rivers. Over the top and a bit annoying (after all, I would guess Jesus got a bit perturbed with her constantly kissing his feet for minutes on end).
And then there's the matter of her being called 'a sinner'. It is commonplace for commentators and theologians to jump to the quick conclusion that this woman is a hooker, as if that is the only sin that a first century Jewish woman could commit, but the Greek word for sexual sin is not the same as the one being used in this story...it's more general...just that she is a woman who has happened to sin. Which makes her pretty relatable I'd guess.
She's relatable, because we are all sinners...which isn't a very popular thing for progressive Christians to preach, maybe because it makes us feel a bit too much like street preachers and protestors. I don’t think it’s very popular to preach about because, I, at least, have a lot of “sin baggage”....childhood lessons about sin meaning you will go to hell, and that anything that doesn’t fall into a legalistic and moralistic code of behaviors is sin...and I think it’s easier if we just throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to sin and say that actual sin, which might be the guilt that drives us to the cross, is just as unworthy to talk about as the misinterpretation of sin I’ve been given my whole life. But I think there's a bigger reason we don't want to talk about sin...and it has to do with telling the truth about ourselves. It's easy enough to deny our sin, even when we confess it every week and it's easy enough to walk through life without looking at sinful parts of ourselves that we walk above the surface of, never looking deep enough into ourselves to discover.
Telling the truth about ourselves, acknowledging our sinful nature is uncomfortable. Being able to say to myself that I probably shouldn't flipped off the guy in the car who cut me off means saying to myself that I am not as compassionate as I like to think I am. Being able to say to myself that taking pens and staples from work is still stealing even though I think my company owes me means saying to myself that I steal things, and that it isn't okay.
Being able to say to myself that I need to give other people in my life who are important to me a voice means saying that I am not the most important person in my life, and I need to value those I love more.
Being able to say to that I am only motivated by what will make me successful means saying that altruism is not something I truly value.
And yet, I think that maybe the guilt that comes from these introspections...the guilt that comes from not living up to our expectations for ourselves, the guilt that comes from hurting someone or something else...maybe that's really sin....
Maybe guilt about what we do or don't do is the crux of the question of sin. Guilt is what the law feels like...it convicts us and makes us recognize the fault of our actions...and drives us to the foot of the cross in search of freedom. Martin Luther believed that sin was being curved in on yourself, not looking outward at your neighbor, but instead being a navelgazer. And that's what guilt does to us, doesn't it? It keeps us captive in our own minds, and is the fastest spiral toward dispair that we have available to us. And while we intentionally and unintentionally hurt other people through things we have done and things we have left undone, while we have not loved our neighbors as much as we have loved ourselves, while we have not followed our personal moral code....we have also become captive to the guilt of our actions. We are captive to hearts that have been drilled through by guilt and left us with ones that are empty, drained of blood and drained of life, leaving behind a shell of what once was full of flesh, and love, and life.
Acknowledging the sin present in our lives, acknowledging the captivity of guilt, acknowledging that acting out of guilt does more harm than good....is what leads us to freedom from guilt and sin. For when we acknowledge that sin is true, that guilt holds us captive, we allow ourselves to be broken open to receive grace. In taking off the rose colored glasses we use to look at ourselves, it is easier to see our sinfulness, and to see our need for freedom. And in seeing our need, we can speak the truth that we actually want to be free from the guilt that enslaves us. Breaking our silence about who we are, and the things that have control over us and speaking that truth outloud to God gives us the ability to accept the seed of grace and forgiveness. For when we are silent about our need for forgiveness, we close ourselves off to the liberating freedom of forgiveness. When we remain silent, we close ourselves off to God's grace and forgiveness entering the holes drilled by guilt in our hearts.
When we name guilt and sin, something transformational happens. The psalmist puts it this way:
5Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not conceal my guilt.
I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the LORD."
Then you forgave me the guilt of my sin.
In our acknowledgement of sin and revealing of guilt, God forgives and frees us. The grace and forgiveness of God, in that moment, comes into us and fills our hole drilled heart allowing it to once again beat with life and love. In our freedom, we are able to sing the song the psalmist sang, a song that tells a different story than one of guilt, a song that tells a story of a God who frees us to live a new life.
Because, in our freedom from guilt, shame, and sin, we are no longer able to live out of selfishness. We are no longer able to look at our navels, thinking about our own selves. In our freedom from sin, we are brought to look out into the world, and respond to it with hearts of love, instead of hearts of stone. Life lived free from guilt is a life that boldly walks alongside the unloved and unloveable and unclean masses, not because you feel guilty about your privlige, but because you recognize the humanity in everyone. Life lived free from guilt is a life that daringly proclaims to the world that all are created equal, not because you feel guilty being straight, or white, or male, but because you recognize that there is no place in the world for oppression. Life lived free from guilt is a life that creatively seeks the presence of God in the world, not because you feel obligated to acknowledge a God that demands your reverence and respect, but because you recognize that God is the source of all life, and is present in love.
I like to think that the woman in the gospel heard the psalm we sang...it certainly seems like she did. Because she did not anoint Jesus’ feet to atone for her sins, but rather, Jesus tells Simon, that she was forgiven, hence she washed his feet out of love. Nothing about this woman’s actions of love toward Jesus was motivated by a guilty need to make up for her past and present sinful existence...instead they were done out of the freedom of forgiveness which allowed her to act out of love. I like to think the phrase “Then you forgave me the guilt of my sin”, rang true in the ears of the woman who we only know as sinner, as she performed an extravagant act of love toward another person, and toward God. The woman, forgiven and freed by Christ, works not out of guilt, but out of love. Because working out of guilt only shows that a person is still captive to that sin...but acting out of freedom shows that love has been able to fill in the cracks and transform her into a new creation.
We too are forgiven, freed in Christ, and hence we act in love...because we are forgiven, freed in Christ, the natural response is to act in the world through love, no longer needing to spend our time doing damage control for the things that cause us guilt, but instead living in the world with a new mindset. A mindset that has no room for guilt, and no room for sin, because God fills the holes in ourselves and others with grace that overflows and transforms us...and that grace, which overflows through our transformed and freed selves, washes over all of creation through our actions to heal and change and transform our broken and hurting world. Thanks be to God for that! Amen.
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