Sermon - 3 after Pentecost "grace makes a scene"

Sermon – 3rd after Pentecost
Luke 7:36-8:3
June 13, 2010
“grace makes a scene”

Imagine the scene. A fancy dinner party at a Pharisee’s house… Then all of a sudden a sinful woman (likely a prostitute or adulteress) shows up uninvited. How do you think the people at the party would have reacted?
This would have been scandalous for many reasons. This woman breaking social norms by showing up uninvited and for being a woman and especially for being a “sinner.” Just by showing up, she is violating so many rules; she’s considered unclean under the law. And, even more scandalous, she is making Jesus unclean by what she’s doing. The people gathered at this dinner party would have likely seen this as a scandalous act of seduction. I mean, imagine if this happened today…in the middle of worship, in a council meeting, at a dinner party. A woman, who has a reputation in the neighborhood as “sinful”, comes and out of nowhere starts washing a guest’s feet with her hair. We would probably see it as an inappropriate act, that she was making a scene.

But this isn’t how Jesus saw it… As we often see in the gospel of Luke, we see a reversal of expectations, a huge contrast. Where the reader would expect Simon the Pharisee to be the model of good faith and desired behavior and the woman as lacking faith and having sinful behavior; our expectations are reversed. Here Simon is the one admonished and the woman is praised.
Jesus reframes what everyone would have seen as scandalous. He views this act differently than everyone else at the dinner party. Because where everyone else sees a sinner, and a scandalous act…Jesus sees a beloved child of God who is pouring her heart out, weeping out of gratitude, and esponding to Jesus with a beautiful act of love. Who Simon, those at the dinner party and society see this woman…it is not how Jesus sees her.
This calls to question then how we see people. How do we see people then, not how society has stigmatized them, but how God see them?

Also, Simon and the Pharisees could see the woman’s sin, but they couldn’t see their own. Simon thought he was righteous because he followed the law to the “T”. But as our reading from Galations, and as Luther would say: it’s not the law that justifies us, or anything we can do; but it is by grace through faith.
Yes, it may be scandalous…but this is what grace looks like. When this woman came to terms with her sin, when she realized that she couldn’t do it on her own, and that she needed Jesus, she comes before Jesus and we see a beautiful, and yes scandalous moment of grace. And this is grace, there is no merit or condition tied to it.
Experiencing the grace of God in Jesus, the woman couldn’t help but to get on her knees, to weep, to anoint and wash his feet with her hair.
In order for there to be forgiveness, redemption; we are going to get dirty, and it might get a little scandalous. This was Jesus ministry, it was right in the thick of it, right into the messiness of the human experience, which can get down right scandalous. And his death on the cross was indeed the most scandalous of all.

So I believe there is a call in this story, a call to get a little scandalous. That is, rather than trying to remove ourselves from the messiness and the brokenness of the human experience, to pretend that we are somehow exempt or removed from sin, what Jesus calls us to do is to get our hands dirty.
We must not be afraid of the sins around us or the sins within us, but we must confront them and confess them. It is in these moments that there is forgiveness and there is release. Oh and then we are filled with love and joy and we can’t help but praise God, to wipe Jesus’ feet with our hair, and to live our lives serving Jesus and our neighbor. Amen.