This sermon was preached on June 12, 2016 at Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, MA. The texts for this sermon were: 1 Kings 21:1-10, (11-14), 15-21a, Psalm 5:1-8, Galatians 2:15-21, and Luke 7:36-8:3.
"O to grace," we'll sing together in a few moments. "O to Grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!" And I am. I am indebted to this church, to Grace with a capital G, more than I could ever say. I am indebted to its priests, Noah and Maggie, to its elderly members, to its children, its young adults, and its parents, to the altar guild, the vestry, the choir, the women's lunch group, the teens, the ladies that fold the bulletins on Thursdays—to every person who has greeted me with a full heart and smiling eyes, who has let me pray for them and with them, who has allowed me to serve them the chalice and gave me rides home in their car. I am indebted to Grace for teaching me new depths of the word indebted, and most of all, the true meaning of the word Grace itself.
Today's Gospel passage is all about grace and indebtedness. It's about a woman, a sinner with a terrible reputation, who bends down to wash Jesus' feet with her tears. And it's about a man, a righteous host named Simon, who sneers at her act of love. Filled with contempt for the uninvited guest, the Pharisee mutters to himself that the woman is too wretched to even touch the prophet's feet. But Jesus overhears him and speaks up.
With a simple parable about two debtors, Jesus teaches Simon that this woman's humility and generosity flows from her gratitude for God's grace. The unnamed woman lives in a society that tells her every single day that either her circumstances or her choices—we don't know what—make her unworthy of love and access to God. Like a debtor who owes more than a year's wages, the woman is made painfully aware of how society judges her to have negative worth. But through her faith, this outcast has come to know that her supposed unworthiness is a lie. I love that Jesus makes it clear that her acts of hospitality did not earn her God's forgiveness. They are instead its result—an outpouring of the great love she has known and accepted from God.
"Do you see this woman?" Jesus asks Simon, although he already knows the answer. Simon has not truly seen her. The Pharisee is unable to look past his prejudice and his sense of superiority to see her human dignity. Jesus reveals that Simon has also been blind in another way—to the ways he failed to provide hospitality to his guest. Too focused on correctly judging what he and his neighbor did or did not deserve, Simon missed opportunities to show love to the person he invited into his home.
Not many of you know this, but Grace Church was almost a missed opportunity for me. The spring before moving here, I was deciding between accepting a scholarship from a famous university to continue my Arabic studies in the Middle East and this offer from a program no one I knew had ever heard of to serve a church I wasn't sure I believed in.
At that point in my life, I had been fully immersed in the highly ambitious field of international studies, a sort of make it or break it game of good grades, prestigious grants, and praise from higher-ups. Somehow, in all of that desperate scramble, I had come to believe my own self-worth was constantly on the line, too, just like my career. Like the Pharisee, I was obsessed with constantly reassessing what one person did and did not deserve in the world, although in my case that person was me.
The thing is it takes a lot of energy to live like that, like your dignity can be won or lost on a coin someone else is flipping. I was tired. I had forgotten—or perhaps I had never really learned—how to step back and listen instead for how I was called to serve, to love.
Most of my two years here at Grace, on the other hand, has been about learning, and then relearning, to get out of the way so I can get a better view of things. Getting out of my teammate's way as she tries on new coaching strategies. Getting out of a child's way as he struggles through explaining what he thinks the story really means, or out of the way of young adult as she prays out loud for a group for the first time. Getting out of the way meant first taking my own need to prove myself out of the equation, so that I could see more clearly how God was already work in the people around me. So that I could to take a breath and choose to act out of love instead.
Running around trying to prove my intelligence, competence, or helpfulness, was the number one way I'd get tripped up around here. Perhaps this never happens to you, but for me it feels a lot like those times when I catch myself waiting for my turn to speak in a conversation and I realize I haven't actually been listening to a thing the other person has said. It turns out that trying to earn respect in everything I did distracted me from so many opportunities to simply be present to the needs of the person in front of me.
The greatest gift Grace ever gave me was to teach me what the good news of grace really means. Because it made all this getting out of the way stuff a whole lot more possible. Grace, the assurance that I am worthy of love no matter what I do or do not do, let me stop keeping score and start showing compassion. Grace, the knowledge that I am forgiven no matter how badly I screw up, helped me focus on forgiving my neighbor.
Best of all, I discovered that grace becomes its own motivation. A wise person, who is much better at this grace stuff than I am, told me last week that gratitude and grace come from the same root word. This Gospel passage proves that more than ever. The sinner's gratitude for God's grace become the source of her own grace to others. Grace begets grace.
There's another hymn, one that we won't sing today because we've sung it together way too many times before. I had the honor of singing it with many of you this past Wednesday at the funeral of a beloved parishioner, and at many other funerals before that. I've sung it standing around the altar with the 5:00pm service muddling through its chords on my guitar. And I sang in every single month with Noah or Maggie—sometimes three times in one service—as we celebrated the Eucharist with the Medford Rehab and Nursing Center residents down the road.
It goes like this—and I know you know it—Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me, I once was lost, but now am found. T'was blind but now I see.
I hope to never forget how blind I was before I got here, because I'm still blind in those ways pretty often. I pray that the awareness of my wretchedness—the ways I seek my own will instead of God's—will strengthen my gratitude for God's unending grace. My wish is to never forget the ways you all have spoke up like Jesus with the Pharisee, and helped me to see more clearly, again and again.
It was Grace that taught my heart to fear, the second verse goes, and Grace my fears relieved. How precious did that Grace appear, the hour I first believed. And now. Right now, standing before all of you.
There's more to the song, so much more. I hope you read it before you sing it again, so you can really hear the words. And I hope you'll notice the other line that I'll sure will never fail to make me think of you. The one that goes, "And Grace will lead me home." Amen.
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