Third Sunday after Pentecost

June 17, 2007

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 7:36-8:3)

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.

Jesus spoke up and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher,” he replied, “Speak.” “A certain creditor had two debtors, one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.” And Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.“ Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities; Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.

The Gospel of the Lord.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Women’s Movement in this country and around the world was at its height—some of you can remember those days—and there were movements across the country that emerged to address the problem of violence against women and children in every region of the United States and in many other places around the world. Along with that, leaders in many of our larger cities sponsored what were known in those days as annual Take Back the Night marches. Their significance was the symbolism of making our streets at night as safe for women and children as for men.

For one particular Take Back the Night march in the early ‘80s, a few of my friends from the Council of Churches and I gathered with the crowd at Loring Park and joined a column that took up the whole of the street of marchers moving past the Basilica and then proceeding down Hennepin Avenue, all the way through one of the most inhospitable districts of the Twin Cities, in the dark of night, when all of the sudden an angry woman, with hair flying in every direction around her raging face, came screaming at us out of one of the local bars, yelling, “You’re no better than us! You’re no better than the rest of us.” The security patrol was there to respond and calm the sobbing woman down.

But as the march continued, I became more and more thoughtful at how the very best of our efforts to be in solidarity with all women who were victims of violence of all forms, including hers, how the best intentions could be felt and experienced instead as a put-down; how a movement for social change could be experienced instead as judgment.

It was African American theologian James Cone who said it so well when he said, “It is always easier to get the people out of Egypt than to get Egypt out of the people, for the deepest form of oppression can be seen at the point where the oppressed themselves have internalized the culture’s opinion of them and have come to believe it themselves.”

I carried the memory of that woman with me when years later, in the late ‘80s, I traveled to England, Germany, and eventually Scandinavia, to research the efforts in those countries, comparing them to ours, to address battering, assault, and what by then had become known as the trafficking of women and children around the world. Before I left America, I had read about a highly innovative and effective program near the train station in Copenhagen, sponsored, yes, by a Church of Denmark commission, seeking to salvage young women caught in the trafficking network. And so I set up an appointment to interview the director of that program, when I got off the train and found the center. She said to me, “We don’t have a lot of time for people doing research and writing books. We have all we can do to just get through one day at a time.” But in the end, she gave me more than two hours of her time at the coffee house, which had become a kind of refuge and sanctuary for the women she served. And when I asked her what was the key to the success of her program, she said, “The young women know that they can just stop by here for a cup of coffee and be safe, and know that we will accept them as they are, without judgment. We are here to help find alternatives, without reservations.”

The picture that we have of the unnamed woman who anoints Jesus as Messiah, that is, the Christ, in Luke’s Chapter 7, is one of the most dramatic pictures of radical acceptance that we have in all of scripture. The fact that she dares to enter the house of a Pharisee not only suggests her courage and determination, but is in keeping with the trust and regard in which Jesus was held by outcasts and sinners. His very presence proclaimed, “You are accepted at my table; here you will find a friend.” The story is recorded in all four Gospels, indicating its significance in early Christian traditions. The event takes place just six days before Passover at Bethany, at the foot of the Mount of Olives, in its earliest accounting, which suggests that this may have been a type of “last supper,” although never remembered as such in Christian tradition. In ancient times, it was the prophet who anointed the king. Here, it is an unnamed disciple who becomes the prophet who anoints, naming Jesus the Messiah, as well as symbolically acknowledging his destiny for the cross. Whereas the other disciples, time and again, do not understand the prophetic consequences of Jesus’ ministry of radical inclusion, the outcasts do. For here Jesus is violating every conventional custom of the Greco-Roman world, as well as every law of Torah. It would be the outcasts who would know that such a ministry of welcoming, of eating with outcasts and sinners, will ultimately end in rejection and the cross. And so Jesus is anointed a different kind of king, as Messiah, whose radical acceptance will open up a new future for those most destitute who find their way to him.

Biblical scholars, like Fred Danker in his early commentary on Luke, have noted the significance of the reference to wisdom in the verse immediately preceding this story. “Yet, wisdom is justified by all her children, suggesting that Jesus means to indicate that wisdom shows her true potential when a broad range of humanity is included in her family.” Others, like Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, even suggest that what might be happening here is an anointing of Jesus as a messenger of wisdom. Wisdom was the one calls all who labor and are heavy laden, and promises them rest and shalom. Wisdom seeks and finds the outcasts on the road, invites them into the banquet, and offers life, rest, and salvation to all who have faith. Wisdom makes all things new, opening up a future to those rejected, as the new friends of God.

In the end, it is a picture of radical acceptance for both the outcasts and for the righteous, for Jesus is, after all, at the home of Simon the Pharisee, who surely needs to hear a word of absolution, too. And we are told in the final verses that there were other disciples, women on the other end of the social spectrum, who are even named, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, who, according to good Greco-Roman customs, served as benefactors in support of this new wisdom movement emerging around or within the ministry of Jesus. A ministry of radical acceptance and inclusion, as we see in Luke, redefines sinners as outcasts and makes them disciples instead, regardless of their social status or class, race, or gender.

Back in the ‘80s, I remember there was a time in some Lutheran churches where we became concerned about the phenomenon of Lutheran guilt, and we began to question the wisdom of printing the Brief Order for Confession and Forgiveness in the bulletin every week. Some felt that it did not help to make Lutherans feel more guilty than they already did, and so why not just put it in every other week rather than every week? When the question came up at a worship committee meeting of the parish that I was serving at the time, one member of the worship committee objected to taking the confession out of the bulletin. Later, he told me that worship was not worship for him without the confession and absolution. As it turned out, he had been adopted as an infant into a Swedish family, in a little Swedish church, in a predominantly Swedish town between Atwater and Willmar, on what was then Highway 12. And so as an African American child, his last name became Hanson. As the only black kid in a little Swedish town, in a little Swedish church, he told me that growing up he always felt like a wrong in the middle of a bunch of rights. “But whenever we did the confession in church, and I heard the absolution at the end, I knew that whatever anyone else thought of me, that God accepted me as I was. And I was no longer a wrong, but a right, just like everyone else.” And so we did not take out the confession and absolution. And many times in that little church, just for Tom, we also sang:

“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole;

There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.

Sometimes I feel discouraged, and feel my work’s in vain,

but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”

Whenever I feel discouraged with the church and with the slow pace of change in society, I remember Copenhagen, and I remember Tom. And sometimes I just recall the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. You have probably passed their striking signs off of Randolph—they are teal blue and black—at entrances into St. Catherine’s College. A recently written history of the Sisters of St. Joseph tells the story of their arrival in St. Paul in 1851, from the little town of Carondelet, just south of St. Louis. Two of the original four nuns were sisters of the famous Archbishop John Ireland, and they are proud to say in their history that they arrived in Minnesota first. But the history of the order goes back much farther than 1851 in Minnesota, dating all the way back to the 17th Century, when a group of just six women religious founded the Order of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the little town of Le Puy in southern France in 1650; six sisters who dedicated their lives to prayer and service to the poor and those suffering from war, the plague, and corruption, as they put in their book, of Church and State. They divided the little village into six districts, each of them taking care of one of them. But the most amazing thing about the story is that a significant part of their ministry was to teach lace making to impoverished young women in order to give them an economic alternative and, therefore, a way out of prostitution. Imagine ministering in 1650 with such a faith that one life rescued from slavery at a time, indeed, one stitch of lace at a time, could change history in the same way that we seek to rescue young children from our streets yet today.

“Yet wisdom will be justified by all of her children,” Luke says. In Matthew, the same passage reads, “Yet wisdom will be justified by all of her deeds.” It is in the anointing that the announcement of something new is on the horizon, in this ministry, in this time. The nonconformist that he was, Fred Danker includes a commentary on this passage: “Jesus refused to permit tradition to endure such second-class status. Unlike church officials of all ages who conveniently say, when confronted with controversy, ‘Not in my time,’ Jesus accepted responsibility and said, ‘The time is now.’ Prophetic ministry does not permanently, if, indeed, ever, enjoy institutional support. And Jesus’ enemies would counter, time and again, that it was poor judgment to flaunt custom in Jesus’ way. But Jesus’ view is that those who hear and observe God’s word belong to his family.”

And so in the end he says to the one who anoints him, “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

Amen.