In the summer of 1991 Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested for kidnapping, torturing and murdering seventeen men. Even though there wasn’t the shadow of a doubt that he had not committed these crimes, in court he pled – as was his legal right – not guilty. In 1995 those who had bombed the Murrah office building in Oklahoma City denied their guilt, as did a former football player accused of murdering his wife. On a much larger scale, Serbian leader Slobadan Milošević, charged with organizing and executing a mass “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia, pled not guilty at his trial at the Hague, and even presented evidence to justify his actions. “Not guilty” is what many of our political leaders claim when the web of lies and evasions they have created unravels, and their marital infidelity comes to light. Mark Sandford on the Appalachian Trail? Right. And just in Thursday’s newspapers, we learned that BP’s 2009 regional response plan, which was approved by the federal government, vastly understated the dangers of a spill and overstated BP’s ability to respond. The answer of BP’s spokesman to queries about the plan’s glaring lies? The company is “reviewing” the plan. What’s wrong with this picture? Don’t any of our public figures accept responsibility for what they’ve done? Don’t any of them demonstrate humility and integrity?
Was St. Paul anything like these notorious public figures? Was Simon the Pharisee in today’s Gospel lesson? Surely not, you would answer. Wasn’t Paul a Pharisee of Pharisees, a highly educated member of his community? Neither Paul nor Simon had murdered anyone. As far as we know, they didn’t cheat on their taxes, they weren’t unfaithful to their wives, and they didn’t terrorize their servants. Indeed, if Paul and Simon were observant Pharisees, they worshipped regularly, tithed meticulously, kept away from notorious sinners, avoided any chance of ritual defilement, and followed a complicated rule of personal conduct. Sounds like some people that we know. Like me, you probably haven’t murdered anyone, cheated on your taxes, abused those who work for you, been unfaithful to your spouses, or knowingly broken the law. We worship regularly, support the church and worthy charitable organizations, engage in outreach to those less fortunate, do our best to follow Jesus’ command to love God and our neighbors, and know how to behave in various social situations. Clearly we’re not like Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh, OJ Simpson, or Mark Sandford. So, like Paul and Simon, having followed all the rules, are we righteous in God’s sight? Are we acceptable to God? Have we bought our way into heaven?
Absolutely not, says Paul! He was writing to new Christians in Galatia, a region of Asia Minor, in about 55 AD. The early church was still struggling with the question of whether new Gentile Christians had to in effect become Jews and adopt all the tenets of Mosaic law. Before his encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus Road, Paul himself was sure that following every jot and tittle of the Mosaic law and the Pharisaic code would make him right with God. After that life-changing experience, Paul learned that salvation was God’s gift to all. In the strongest possible terms he reminded the Galatian Christians that all have been made acceptable to God, not through observance of the law, of rules and regulations, but through Jesus’ death and resurrection. It wasn’t that Paul denigrated the law, it was rather that he realized that it wasn’t sufficient to make us acceptable to God. On our own, however closely we follow all the rules, we cannot meet God’s standards. But by God’s grace and with faith and trust in God, Christ transforms us, so that we begin to become the people we were truly created to be, not through our own actions, but through Christ’s power working within us.
In our story of Simon the Pharisee we have a vivid example of what Paul was talking about. As we see him in today’s story, although Simon had invited Jesus to his house, he seems to have treated Jesus disrespectfully. Simon seems to have believed that in his scrupulous observance of the law and the customs of the Pharisees he was righteous in God’s sight. In contrast to Simon, the unnamed woman who barged into this all-male gathering knew that she was not righteous in God’s sight, that she was desperately in need of God’s mercy and forgiveness. Unlike Simon, she threw herself at Jesus’ feet and ministered lovingly to him, showing her repentance with her streaming tears. In turn, Jesus praised her great love, the love that sprang out of her realization that God had accepted and forgiven her. Jesus’ assurance to her that her sins had indeed been forgiven, and her faith had saved her, were spoken to Simon and his guests as well as to her. Salvation, he reminded them cannot be earned, even by the holiest and most righteous men. Rather, forgiveness and salvation are God’s gifts to us, gifts which we receive when we acknowledge our sins and weaknesses and accept God’s forgiveness in faith. The story doesn’t tell us what happened to Simon and the woman after this encounter. But we can hope that both of them, and the other guests as well, were transformed by Jesus’ declaration of God’s forgiveness and grace.
That message is for us too. We may not be murderers or thieves. We may not be drug addicts or prostitutes. We may not have cheated on our spouses or our taxes. But the truth is, whether we admit it or not, whether we think about it from one Ash Wednesday to another, we are all sinners. We are all as capable as Paul, Simon, and the “woman of the city” of greed, sloth, lust, avarice, gluttony, wrath, envy, and pride, to say nothing of others not included in the Seven Deadly sins list. Collectively, we may be doing as much harm to the environment as BP. But the good news is that we are already forgiven for our “manifold sins and offenses.” Whenever we acknowledge our sins and weaknesses, we discover that in Christ God has already forgiven us. What is more important, when we acknowledge who we are, and have faith in God’s saving power to heal and strengthen us, God begins to work in us. God begins to change our lives from the inside out, so to speak. God begins to transform us more and more into Christ’s likeness.
This is our proclamation as a church. This is the message we need to share with the world: that we don’t have to buy our way into heaven, that there are no sins we can commit that will make God hate us, and that through Christ’s action we have all been made acceptable to God. Is this what the rest of the world hears from us? Sometimes I wonder. With our wrangling over property, sexuality, abortion, and God knows what else, I wonder whether a message about God’s unconditional acceptance of us ever gets through. Sometimes I wonder whether anyone else thinks that the church is a place of forgiveness and acceptance.
Here’s what I would like our message to be. Evangelical writer Tony Campolo tells the story of a trip to Hawaii for a conference.1 Jet-lagged and hungry, he woke up at 3:00 AM and decided to leave his hotel and go out looking for something to eat. The only place open at that hour was a hole-in-the wall dive. Tony quickly found out that at that hour most of the patrons were streetwalkers. That particular night, one of them, a woman named Agnes, mentioned that the next day would be her 39th birthday, and that she had never ever had a birthday party. The counter man confirmed that all the women were regulars. So Tony came back at 2:30 the next night. He decorated the joint and put up a big sign saying “Happy Birthday, Agnes!” The counter man had found a cake and told all the girls. Right at 3:30, in walked Agnes. Everyone shouted “Happy Birthday,” and Agnes nearly fainted. Then Tony suggested that they all pray. With half the prostitutes in Honolulu listening, Tony prayed that Agnes’s life would be changed, and that God would bless her. When he had finished, the counter man said somewhat angrily, “Hey, you never told me you was a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to anyway?” The Holy Spirit must have been at Tony’s elbow when he said, “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning.” “No you don’t,” said the man. “There ain’t no church like that. If there was, I’d join it. Yep, I’d join a church like that.”
You and I did join a church like that. God help us to be that church.
1The story is from Campolo’s The Kingdom of God Is a Party. It was retold by David E. Leininger in Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit (Lima, OH: CSS Publishing, 2009).
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