In my career I have endured two “official” oral examinations.  The most recent one was seven years ago with the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners.  At that examination, candidates are given a case scenario, and fifteen minutes to assess the situation, propose a treatment plan, and cure the client. I studied for the exam with a couple of very bright colleagues who were extremely anxious.  I was actually quite calm about it due to fact that I had survived a similar traumatic experience.   

At the age of twenty-four I was examined by the Board of Ordained Ministry of the California Nevada Annual Conference/ United Methodist Church.  I had completed three years of graduate education, spent countless hours and dollars, and was committed to my deeply felt “call” to serve Christ and the church.  Whereas the psychologist board was concerned that I could save lives, the board of ordained ministry was concerned that I could save souls.  They are only subtly different.   But to become ordained, like other candidates, I had to sit for two hours and respond to theological questions. 

As I remember it, the interview took place in a church library.  The interview panel was all ordained “elders”, and most of them looked very serious in their dark suits and ties.   It went well for the better part of an hour when one of them flipped over the page in his notebook, lowered his dark rimmed glasses, looked me square in the eye and said, “What is sin?”   

At that moment everything I learned in theology 101,102, and 103 escaped me. I was silent for a long while.  Thinking, “just say something!” and “don’t look like a dufus!”  I ran around in my head looking for a Bible verse with which to impress them.  There was Jesus saying to the crowd, “you who have no sin throw the first stone.”  And there was Jesus hanging out with lots of people who had sinned.  No small question, “what is sin?”

Somewhere up from the core of my being I found the words to say.  To the man who had asked the question, “what is sin?”  I replied,  “why, you are…” (he looked shocked) “…and I am, and we all are.”  The Greek word for sin implies “missing the mark,” more than shameful condemnation.  Sin is not about being unworthy in the sight of God it’s about being off the mark, like an archer not quite making the bull’s-eye every time.  You just can’t make it to the target with every shot. 

Whatever else I said is a blur to me now.  But it sufficed and I was ordained.  I’ve been preaching about sin for many years since then.  And the question doesn’t get much easier. This week the question shows up again in the form of Luke’s gospel story of the woman with the alabaster jar.  My Bible titled this story,  “a sinful woman forgiven,” but it would be more aptly named, “A Tale of Two Sinners” or “A tale of two sinners and how Jesus saved them both.” 

This a good story about sin, because it is also about forgiveness and about grace.  In my opinion everyone in this story is missing the mark.  Except, of course, for Jesus.  Jesus ends up correcting the whole kit and caboodle. 

To quote a phrase you may have heard at church before, “we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  But I totally reject the term “sinner.”  I sin, therefore I am a sinner.  I just don’t get that---its shame theology.  It says that my bad behavior makes me fatally flawed and eternally damned.  This is bad theology (oh, maybe I do remember something from those classes).  In the mental health field lately we’ve been correcting our language.  We don’t say that someone is a Schizophrenic; we now say the individual has the disease of Schizophrenia.  We no longer say “Oh, she’s bipolar,” as if who she is a mental illness.  No, she is a person (a child of God) who happens to have bipolar illness.

People don’t say of a person with cancer, that they are a cancer.  Why should we say that a person who has an experience with sin is a sinner?  The worst thing you can do to someone’s self esteem is to brandish him or her a sinner.  “He’s a sinner,” or “she’s a sinner.”  We’ve got to stop doing that.  Labeling is one of Simon the Pharisees sins in this story and the New Revised Standard Bible repeats the mistake. 

You probably don’t need me to tell you that from time to time you sin.  You get the sin dis-ease.  You hurt someone you love.  You say things you wish you could take back.  You are blind to your own racism and other isms.  You hurt yourself with bad behaviors and over indulgence.  Yes, you sin.  I sin.  I sometimes sin very boldly!  Don’t you?  We have all fallen short.  We sometimes miss the mark. 

As Frederick Buechner wrote in his work The Alphabet of Grace (pg 100) “you are weak, but he is strong.  You are a pig, but he is a hero… (and) he so loved.  The world.  So loved it. The alphabet of his grace is sufficient.”

So now we have that sin thing straightened out we are ready to look more closely at the sins of the characters in the story.  I think that we’ll find ourselves to be more like them than not.  Let’s feel what is would have been like to have lived inside of their skin on that day with Jesus at the Pharisees banquet.

Jesus was invited to the home of a church ruler named Simon the Pharisee for a meal and he was shown to his place at the table.  He reclined to eat, as was the custom of the day, on a chaise-lounge sort of deal.  The remarkable thing is that the other custom of the day was for the host to wash the feet of the visitor before eating, and to greet the guest with a kiss, and if you really treasured your company, you would anoint them with oil before sitting down to business.  None of that happened.  It is interesting that the Pharisee invited Jesus to eat with him but did not perform the same acts of hospitality that he would have for someone else he had greater respect for.  Why did he skip these traditional kindnesses?  Did he really value Jesus, or had he invited him to the house to discredit him?  (Was he more like the board of ordained ministry–ready to grill him?)

A woman from the city who had sinned (so says the story, but we do not know what kind of sin this implies) stood behind Jesus and began to weep.  She must have cried a torrent of tears to flood his feet to the point that they needed to be dried with her hair.  And she continued to tend to his feet, the story says, kissing them and anointing them with “the ointment which she had brought.” 

You may recall this story from other versions of it in the gospels.  Each author has quite a different take on the story–in another version the woman was chastised for wasting expensive perfume instead of giving it to the disciples so they could use the money for the poor.  We don’t have that happening here.  We simply have an unnamed woman offering Jesus the kindness that the Pharisee had overlooked.

She has challenged the host’s inhospitality with her own hospitality.  And not surprisingly it provoked his rage.  The Pharisee attacks Jesus and the woman, and doesn’t even address them directly.  He turns to his company at the table, and says, “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.” 

Well, yes, an unclean person would defile Jesus.  But he could care less about that, obviously, he let the tax collector touch him, and the leper, and the woman with the flow of blood.  He let them all touch him, and he touched them as well.  This is obviously Simon the holy Pharisees’ problem.  He’s engaging in defensive behavior in light of his own fear–perhaps of being contaminated too, perhaps jealous of her sensuous attention, perhaps he knew her intimately himself–umm, perhaps he was losing power to this up and coming prophet and wanted to simply put him in his place.

We put women in their place by over sexualizing them.  As Biblical scholars have repeatedly done–in the Journal of Biblical Literature, scholar Charles Cosgrove reviewed the question of this unnamed woman’s past sins.  Scriptural tradition has called her a “prostitute” based on the fact that her hair was down.  But Cosgrove’s scholarship showed that women put their hair down for others reasons too, including extreme anguish, extreme gratitude, being in mourning, being young and unmarried and other reasons.  We don’t know if she entered the room with her hair down or loosened it to wipe his feet.  The text doesn’t tell us the nature of her sin, but if we fill in the gaps by demeaning her we fall into Simon’s holier-than-thou trap.  We make him look good in the story by shaming her. 

Throughout the history of Christendom, patriarchs have put greater weight on sexual “sins” than on other kinds of sins.  The Bible, for example has hundreds of verses on the sin of ignoring the widow and the orphan, the misuse of money, and disobedience to the commandments.  Yet the church has continued to put some sexual sins first on its priority list and then used them as a means of public slander and social stigma.  We say straight people commit sexual sins but that they are forgiven in the eyes of God.  The majority of the male candidates for the Presidency have “sinned” sexually by their own admission.  Yet we rail against the sexual sins of women, minorities, and those of diverse sexual orientations.  Some kinds of sexual sins will take you straight to hell and that’s that.   Others are apparently the kinds of sins that Tertullian once said, “God winks at.”  The labeling of sin is about power in the church and culture.  Who decides whose sins are worse than others?    

We can no longer use sexual sin as a handy way to make ourselves more self-righteous by shaming others. And I tell you that there are very few people in this room who have never committed a sexual sin–for example, used another person for gratification, betrayed a promise of fidelity, gone hog wild and hurt themselves or others as a result, objectified a person for sexual arousal, used their power to coerce sexual activity, etc., it’s a long, long list.

So let’s give the unnamed woman in this story a break shall we?  Look how Jesus does this.  First, he tells Simon to look at the woman.  “Do you see this woman?” he asks. Really see her.  See her with compassion.  Then Jesus tells a story inside the story.  Jesus says, in effect “Simon, if you would add up all of your sins, you would find that you are the one who needs the greatest amount of forgiveness.”  He pretty much saves Simon by telling him that he is way off base here.  But he also says that if you have committed a lot of sin, it means you will be forgiven all the more.  There is mercy here.

Jesus then turns to the woman and says to her, “your sins are forgiven.”   She has shown great love which comes before grace and after grace too.  While the others at the feast start murmuring among themselves about the presumptuousness of Jesus to forgive her, he offers her yet another assurance. 

This reminds me to mention something else.  I know that you are grieving at the end of your ministry with Michael.  But when your new pastor comes in a few weeks, this story is pretty clear about what you are to do.  Welcome him to dine with you, and wash his feet, and if you are still crying that’s okay.  Embrace and kiss him (on the cheek please), and anoint his head.  And don’t be petty about his activities, and especially rejoice if he hangs out with “different” people, some of whom, just like you, commit sins. Welcome him, welcome him.  In so doing, you show great, great love.  That’s the gospel lesson this morning.

A few weeks ago in my women’s writing group I was lamenting a very public sin I had committed with my words at a lecture for 950 clergy in Ohio.  And my friend Liz said,

“Just put it on your list of things that will send you straight to hell.” We laughed and everyone spent the next half hour writing their lists.   That was a healing balm for me in a tough time.  There are quite a few days in which we need to hear Jesus’ calming voice “your sins are forgiven.” 

Yep, I have my list of sins.  We all do.  The Pharisees list would have included his self-righteousness, the denigration of a woman, the failure to see past the log in his own eye, his refusal to welcome Jesus with an open heart as well as open table.  The woman’s list – well we’re not sure.  Perhaps she exchanged herself for a roof over her head and enough money to feed the kids.  We just don’t know.  Her list, like her name, is unnamed. But perhaps her flooding of tears tells us more than Simon’s verbosity.  St. Francis once said, “preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”  She is silent throughout the story, but her lavish act of love toward Jesus told the whole story.  She receives these precious words from Jesus in the end, “your sins are forgiven, your faith has saved you, go in peace.”  Hear them alongside of your own list, will you?  “Your sins are forgiven; your faith has saved you, go in peace.” 

Praise be to God!