Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,

given by Rev. Eliza Linley/June 17, 2007

  The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share

Christ's love in the world.  We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to other

    Maybe the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair had mixed motives. Maybe she saw the scene in Simon’s house as unfolding a little differently. She had heard Jesus, been moved by his words. He had spoken to her in a way that pierced her defensive armor. So she came to the rich man’s house with her little alabaster jar of ointment, planning to do a nice thing. And to show those Pharisees that a woman of the streets could recognize a prophet of God, too. Could be just as hospitable, in her own way.

     But when she gets there it’s not like she’d planned. There are all those stuck-up people at the dinner party, and the fancy house. Out of place doesn’t begin to describe the way she feels. She sees Jesus, goes up to him at the table, and all her reserve just cracks. She knows who he is. She is overcome by her own grief, and loss, and brokenness, and all she can do is sob. Talk about a conversation-stopper.

     The host is aghast. As the woman, still weeping, washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and anoints them, Simon’s embarrassment turns to anger at his guest of honor. “If he were a REAL prophet, he could tell what kind of woman she is.” He feels he’s been taken in. Jesus sets him straight. We are left to draw the conclusion that Simon is the one to whom little is forgiven, and who loves little in return.

     David, King of Israel, falls in lust with the woman next door. She’s married. He gets her pregnant. After a series of moves characterized by arrogance and treachery too slimy to describe, David has the husband killed. Nathan, the prophet, sets him straight. “You, O King, are the man who deserves to die”. David, however, will not die. He will be forgiven. But the cycle of violence he has engendered will come back to haunt him, as his wives will desert him for others, and his child will die. The sin may have been committed in secret, but the consequences are public. A lesson for all of us, if a questionable choice for Fathers’ Day.

     Paul is ticked off at Peter. Peter has threatened the unity of the church by refusing to eat with Gentile Christians. He has split the community in half. His actions suggest that the only REAL Christians are Jewish Christians, the ones who, like Simon the Pharisee, follow the law in all things. The ones who, unlike Jesus, don’t break bread with sinners, or eat unclean foods. In fact, Peter’s afraid of what people will say about him. Paul sets him straight. In this complicated passage from Galatians, Paul is really talking about what it means to have your life transformed in Christ. It is a way of being opened up and healed into a grace that goes way beyond worrying about who you eat with. It calls you to pay more attention to who – and how  - you love. Are we moving closer to Father’s Day now?

     Because I missed the opportunity on Mother’s Day, I’d like to talk about fathers, in particular, about my dad. He was funny, and charming, and good with people. He kept ending up elected to run community organizations, which he did well. He had a gift for public speaking. He adored my mother, and she him. Together they wrote things like comic poetry and musicals. They entertained a lot. Much of the time my dad was pretty reserved, but given a martini and the right opportunity, he was wonderful at charades, or at telling a good story. So his core of reserve was always puzzling to me. When the guests weren’t there and there was no one to amuse, it seemed to me that we had nothing to talk about. When I was young, I thought it was my fault. While I was sure he loved me, it also felt like I wasn’t interesting or attractive enough to merit his attention. So, in the self-absorption that comes with adolescence, I shut him out of my life, making it that much harder to connect as an adult. Looking back, I think the truth of the matter was different, and it didn’t have so much to do with me.

     My father, along with so many of his generation, went off to war in Europe. He rarely spoke about his experience in the Royal Canadian Artillery, unless it was to tell a funny story, like the one about handing out a two months’ rum ration to the troops, camped one rainy night at Stonehenge. He came home with a velvet-lined box full of medals, and when I asked him what they were for, he said, “for keeping my boots polished”. The first French I learned was from songs he sang me to sleep with. Later I figured out they were barroom songs he’d picked up on the way to Paris. When I took geometry, I used the fine Scottish protractors he’d used to compute target distances from inside a tank.

     The part I never heard from him was that many of his friends, the men he served with, died on a beach at Normandy. That it was extraordinary for him to be alive at all. And the way he lived with that knowledge was to keep it locked up inside, in a place where feelings and emotional intimacy mostly stayed too, unless something caught him off guard. In the sixties, he and my mother went back to Normandy. As they parked the car at the edge of the bluff above Gold Beach, he started to talk, then came undone, and just put his head down and wept. My mother felt it was a terrible mistake for them to have gone back. Neither of them was of the generation that believed that grieving opens the door to healing.

     We ask so much of our fathers. We ask them to be perfect, and they so rarely are. I think one of the reasons that some have trouble, today, with the idea of God the Father is that we read our own paternal relationships into our relationship with God. In our scripture readings this morning, the door of forgiveness stands open for Simon, for David, for Peter. But it’s so easy to grudge them that forgiveness.

     Simon the Pharisee, in his zeal for God, knows the law - it mandates hospitality and kindness to strangers. He knows the woman was a sinner and judges her so. He applies the law to her, but not to himself. David had a passion for justice. When he hears about the rich man and the poor man’s lamb, he is outraged. But when it comes to seeing his own sins, he is blind. Peter felt free to live like a Gentile, to eat with them, as Jesus did, to relax the old law for the new, but when faced with external pressure, he backed off. He couldn’t live into the freedom of Christ. And what about us? We find it easy to apply God’s judgment to these men who have missed the mark. But then who’s intolerant and unloving?

     We expect men to be loving fathers and good husbands. We expect them to be responsible, upstanding citizens and emotionally available. It’s a heavy agenda. Our society invites men, as the tax forms assume, to be the head of the household. And then sometimes we punish men for assuming leadership in the same sphere. In these times of changing roles and expectations, we have all been forgiven much. In trying to find our way, we have all lost it, both literally and figuratively, many a time and oft.

     Rather than judging, we are called to love much. Today, we give thanks for the fathers who brought us into the world and showed us, more or less, how it works. And to trust that God, the father of us all, will transform us into the fathers and mothers and sons and daughters we are called to be.