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In thinking about this morning’s sermon, I could not escape the absolutely wonderful roasts and toasts to Jim this past Friday night. Laughter is a great thing, especially at someone else’s expense. We learned a few new things about Jim and chuckled at the traits we know and love. Pete Hotchkiss provided a great analysis of Jim’s sermons. We heard a remake of a few songs from Toko and Dave Ackerman and later a cluster of choir members. We heard from Tom Aldrich, the Moderator Jim’s first year. Former interim pastors, Dale Ostrander and Linda Carder chimed in. Ruth Freitag and Bob Robey shared some wry humor. And of course we had to cheer on Jim the thespian, no not lesbian, in clips from the various musicals CCC has produced. What a multi-faceted and multi-talented guy. You get the idea that it was a very full and fun evening. Several people provided ingredients that made for a warm beginning of formal farewells.

Now you may be wondering how this works into this morning’s sermon. Look in your bulletin and read the sermon title. Jim’s Roast gave me new insights into what it means to belong to Christ Congregational Church. A community of great generosity and sin!! Let me explain.

Sarah Ander’s husband, Eric Nelson, did an expose on CCC from an outsider’s perspective. You see, Eric is Jewish. You won’t see him here most Sundays. But he and Sarah are active with a couples’ communication group led by Jim and Lois. He rightly pointed out that eating and drinking are meaningful rituals in this church. He pointed out a few other things but I won’t go there. Generosity and good old fashioned perceived sin are part of the fabric of CCC. We are just the kind of people God likes to see come to church.

I think we need to hear about sin this morning. St. Augustine is a church father who is famous for his commentaries on sin. It is Father’s Day after all, a word from a church father is in order. I quote from the Confessions of St. Augustine:

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or our longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in us. All these good things and all our security are rightly found only and completely in him.

There are likely some, (not here), who would consider our Friday night fun, sinful. (if for no other reason than if felt good) Taking perfectly natural desires and saying yes to those desires as a substitute for God is, by definition, sin. But in the case of our Roast, next to Jim, God was front and center. We were not filling our need for God through the sin of gluttony, drinking, and wild living. Cigar smoking, for a few, came later. We were addressing our need, in the presence of God, clergy, and loyal church going people to laugh in the midst of a time of inevitable tears.

Liberal, progressive Christians have a difficult time with the word sin. We may even wrestle some with the concept of sin. It’s a knee jerk reaction to the centuries of shame based theology encapsulated in the Doctrine of Original Sin. (Thank you, St. Augustine.) Something had to explain why human beings are so inclined to screw up. We are born this way - sinners.

I have served churches that deleted all mention of the S word. Talk of brokenness, missing the mark and being unkind was okay. Saying the S word was not. So of course I had to preach on sin one Sunday. It went downhill beginning with the obvious awkwardness the scripture reader felt as he tripped over the S word and struggled to find another way to say the sentence. I think I would handle the situation differently now. Springing sin on folk who have been burned by fire and brimstone isn’t very pastoral.

Today’s Gospel tells the story of a sinful woman forgiven. The story is told in all four gospels. In Matthew and Mark the text heading is, The Anointing at Bethany. John’s Gospel says, Mary Anoints Jesus. Luke’s focus is the sinful woman. What was going on here? The story then and today can make us uncomfortable. It paints for us a scene of incredible intimacy and extravagance. It’s also about unconditional love. We call that grace.

Just for fun, let’s hold up the 4 stories side by side. If we were in seminary we might take our colored pencils and underline in yellow everything that is identical, underline in blue those that Mark and Matthew share but not Luke and John, etcetera. It’s okay to color on Bible handouts. The story remains basically the same – a woman pours something on Jesus, someone in the room objects, Jesus responds positively and whatever happened was so remarkable that it was remembered 40-50 years later when the gospels began to be written down.

Rev. Jackson Day, preaching from Christ United Methodist Church in 1998, examined this question. He concluded that as the early Christian Church developed, the values in this story, the values of intimacy, extravagance and grace, came into conflict with two other important values – justice and righteousness. It happens still today.

Let’s spend our money on remodeling the church building. No, that is extravagant. But Jesus liked the expensive attention he received. That was then. This is now.

A commitment to social justice means being offended when someone takes more than their fair share. The woman gave Jesus more than his fair share. Matthew, Mark and John solve this problem by having the ointment represent an anointing for the impending death of Jesus. Linking it with a burial also tones down the intimacy dimension of a woman making over Jesus in public. Luke doesn’t include the critique of an expensive ointment. He has the Pharisee in a huff over the kind of woman Jesus is letting touch him.

Grace is an amazing reality from God. Jesus accepts us as we are. No strings attached. This was and is a stumbling block for the church. Where then is righteousness? What about consequences? What about judgment? What about taking advantage of others or not putting God first?

Our right and wrong system is basically commercial, Jackson Day says. Everything has a quid pro quo; do right and you will be rewarded; do wrong and you will be punished.

This story and many others in our Christian scripture challenge this standard operating procedure. What did the gospel writers do with a Jesus that enjoyed generosity and practiced grace?

Luke decides the woman had to have a reason for her extravagance. She poured out sweet soothing ointment over Jesus, drying his feet with her hair, because in order to get something you had to give something. Unique to the other three gospels, Luke introduces us to forgiveness. The woman loved much and therefore, was forgiven much.

The hypothesis goes that Luke was uncomfortable with such generosity, from the woman and maybe from Jesus. He calls her a bad person. Bad for her generosity? Her claim to Jesus? In Greek a word often used for sin is hamartia. It means a falling short of the mark. It has no sexual implications. However, in the pecking order of sins, sexual behavior rises to the top. A really bad person is a prostitute. Luke doesn’t say this but the cultures, including our own, do. The unnamed woman who ultimately became Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, a sinner in need of Jesus’ forgiveness.

We are all sinners tho not in the hands of an angry God. We all have moments when self or other are paramount and God is ignored or rejected. Most times I wager, we are clueless to our idolatry. That’s why being part of communities of faith are so important. We need to on a regular basis reflect on our lives and God’s requirements. We need to hear how people from long ago and people right now agonize over being accepted – accepting of themselves and accepted by others. We need to recognize our tendency to exclude, to fear, to kill those not like us. We need to understand our silence in the face of injustice as wrong. Is that sinful? Yes. Because we are refusing to trust God to be with us as we stick our necks out. Are we damned because we find it hard to trust God that much? No we are not damned. God loves us with an unimaginable tenacity. The guilt we experience may be God’s prodding. We are capable of so much good. And God longs for us to live into the Original Blessing that we are.

I grew up learning about mortal and venial sin, black and white lies. Stealing $1 was worse than stealing 50 cents. (even as a 5th grader I knew the priest was seriously off base on that one.) It’s best to think about sin not in the form of a list, what I can do and what I had better not do, rather, consider instead being in regular communication with God. Not necessarily praying with hands folded, but checking in like Fiddler’s Teve. “Hey God, how do things look from your perspective? I could use some input.”

When those kinds of conversations are absent, when the demands of faith are rationalized for an easier way, when the “least of these” do not matter, when love is painless, then we have perhaps missed the mark. We have fallen short. We have sinned against God.

Yet, hope and promise fill our lives. Grace abounds. No matter our shortcomings, Jesus holds us. Jesus knows we are more than the smucks we sometimes are. God believes in us. And when we believe that is true, a new day dawns every day. And, all will be well.

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