This morning’s lessons are principally about sin and forgiveness and yet in beginning to write this sermon I kept returning again and again in my mind to the thing I really wanted to talk about which is the woman in this morning’s Gospel. We don’t know who she was because she’s unnamed but her story was remembered and told by Matthew, Mark and Luke. In this morning’s version we’re told that she was known to have been a sinner, in other words, not the kind of person with whom one would willingly associate. But otherwise, in all three gospels the story line is basically the same. An uninvited woman comes into a house where Jesus is having dinner and proceeds to anoint him thereby honoring him and acknowledging his uniqueness. It’s an act which also foreshadows the fate that will befall him on that cross which lies ahead. Both Mark and Matthew claim that Jesus said these words about her and what she did that night, “And truly I say to you, wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” Yet Luke’s version of her story is the only one which has made it into the three year cycle of lectionary readings we use in the Episcopal Church as the basis for our sermons. I’m sure that the reason Luke’s version made it into Cycle C is because her story is coupled with two lessons about sin and forgiveness. I love this woman! But I don’t want to talk about her sin this morning or even about her absolution by Jesus. What I want to talk about is her spontaneity; about her impulsive, inappropriate gesture. You know, the kind of thing you might expect from an emotional, overly dramatic woman. How often have you heard words like those used to describe an action like the one this woman took on that night so long ago? And that’s probably because the attributes we tend to prize are things like reason, tradition, correctness, prudence, appropriateness and why we don’t honor, and certainly don’t seek to emulate, actions which express our raw emotions or which might give a hint of the loss of self-control or non traditional behavior. But what are the characteristics of true religious discipleship? How would we describe the kind of discipleship which Jesus actually exemplified? Well we’d probably have to begin with qualities like sensitivity, the love of beauty, raw emotion that’s expressed and not repressed, alertness to detail, awareness of nuances, intuition and genuine expression of feeling. You see what we’re talking about isn’t rationality or tradition. What we’re talking about is feeling because it’s only from feeling that the truest gifts of Christian discipleship are expressed. What this woman did served as a vehicle to express her faith and her profound love for this man Jesus. For it’s only when we allow ourselves to feel the ineffable stirring of our raw emotions within ourselves and then summon up the courage to express them, through spontaneous acts of feeling as she did, that the power of our faith is most eloquently expressed. It’s through such impulsive actions, as those of this unnamed woman in anointing Jesus and washing his feet with her tears and then drying them with her hair that we get closest to the kind of relatedness that Jesus called us to express in his name.
But actions like this woman’s are so very rare in the normal pattern of our lives. Oh it’s not that we never express ourselves. Even the shyest among us is quick to make it known when we’re hurt or when we want to complain or feel that things aren’t right. But how often do we stop and use those same strong emotions to express our own personal feelings on those occasions when tears form in the corner of our eyes because we’ve been profoundly moved by something someone has said or done, or when we’re overcome with feelings of love or pride over the actions of someone whose life has touched ours, or when we feel so thankful and overwhelmed by the love which has been expressed or the time someone has taken on our behalf.
When was the last time you really expressed any of those kind of feelings? Told the people closest to you that you loved them or how much your ability to function was tied to your relationship with them or how very much they had affected your life in a positive way. We don’t take the time because it just isn’t the kind of thing you do. You don’t act emotionally or behave impulsively if you want people to think well of you. I often think of those words about life and love and being that Thornton Wilder put into Emily’s mouth in his classic play Our Town. Just after she has died and is looking back at earth Emily says, “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. Oh Earth, you are too wonderful for anyone to realize you.” Well this wonderful role model we have in this morning’s Gospel, this unnamed woman who certainly wasn’t a pillar of her community, this woman who horrified the Pharisee who was Jesus’ host did take time to look at the One whose life had touched hers and she showed him how profoundly his ministry and presence had moved her.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the woman who wrote so much about death and dying remarked that those who cry the loudest at death are the persons who have never really lived. The observers who cautiously stood on the sidelines never taking the risks which might have made them vulnerable or open to criticism or ridicule because they were expressing deep feelings or emotion. The deepest sorrows don’t really come to us in death. They come to us in our dying while we are living through our refusal to participate fully in what our life is really all about. For the only way to live fully is to live passionately and vulnerably which means risking being made fun of, being criticized, being rejected or being opposed. Yet it’s only through expressing what’s deep within us that you and I can ever get close to the kind of discipleship that Jesus demonstrated throughout his life and ministry.
When I was working as a Chaplain in a hospital cancer unit day after day I was dealing with people who were facing their own death or the death of a loved one. I was new at this whole business of ministry and I desperately wanted to be good. You know what I mean, to do and to say the right thing. Because with people who are at this critical place in their life journey you certainly don’t want to say the wrong thing and frankly a good deal of the time it’s very hard to have any sense of certainty as to what the right thing to say really is. Oh I was well prepared. I’d read the books on pastoral counseling. I’d been taught by one of the greatest authorities on pastoral counseling in the world. But the only thing that really worked very well was to put all of the notes and books and advice away and just move our of that deep, emotional, impulsive gut place that we women are always accused of having when we behave in ways that aren’t rational, efficient, prudent and all the rest of those linear thinking kinds of descriptions that our culture tells us make for success in life.
I think I realized that I was on the right track when I began acting normally and started sitting on the bed with people and stretching out my hand on their bed, laying it there making it available for holding. I can’t tell you how many people, how many rough and tough brusque men reached out and grabbed that hand. Do you know that people tend to stand on the edges of the hospital rooms of people who are dying? It’s almost as if they’re afraid that they’re going to catch something. Whenever I entered a hospital room I was never sure what the individual’s reaction would be. But only once did I get thrown out of a room by a man who was so enraged at God because he was dying that the very sight of a chaplain made him furious. All of the other times I moved out of my place of emotion and feeling and love it was right. A lot of the time I never even said a word. Sometimes it was just holding onto someone or absorbing their tears on my shoulder. Yet, at other times it was risking, risking the kind of anger that did make that man yell at me to leave his room. One experience I will never forget happened on a rainy summer afternoon. I was sitting with an elderly woman when I heard a scream coming from the room across the hall. I knew that the room belonged to a strong and vivacious woman attorney who was involved in a long and violent battle with lung cancer. She and I had spent a good bit of time together over that summer as she had been hospitalized repeatedly for one crisis or another. Our relationship was based upon a strict set of ground rules. The very first day I walked into her room she announced that although she had been confirmed as an Episcopalian she’d given all that up sometime ago. She was an ardent feminist and a powerful woman in her community. It was fine, she told me, if I wanted to talk to her as long as I understood that God, the church and any of that stuff was not to be part of our conversations. We had some incredibly interesting conversations that summer. We talked a lot about her dying. She knew that she was dying and the only part we didn’t talk about was whether God or whatever was up there or out there had anything to do with the whole process. One day I walked by her door while she was eating lunch and she barked, “Ellen, come in here. I want to talk to you! Do you realize how ridiculous our whole health care system in this country has become? Do you have any idea what it’s costing for me to die?” Then she launched into a cost analysis of what that days tests, radiation and treatment must have cost according to her best estimate. But on that afternoon I when I heard her scream I knew that something was very different because it wasn’t like Joyce to scream. The Head Nurse and I collided in the doorway of her room and it soon became very clear that Joyce might indeed be dying. As I began to move away from the bed to give the nurse more room Joyce reached out and grabbed my hand, “Don’t leave me!” she gasped, as she fought for breath. Before long the orderlies were there and we were racing down the hall to the elevators and the intensive care unit. Bed, IV’s, the nurse and me all running alongside the bed with me still holding Joyce’s hand. As we waited for the elevator and Joyce fought for life, I looked down at her remembering all of her threats, “Don’t you dare talk to me about God” and I said, “Joyce, I think you’re really dying this time and I’m gonna pray” “Do it!” she said. So I prayed as the elevator carried us up to the intensive care unit with it’s machines and wires and tubes. I prayed all the way into the room and when I finished with what was virtually her last breath I heard an incredibly strong AMEN. Well Joyce didn’t die that afternoon. It was three weeks later that I gave the homily at her funeral service at St. James Episcopal Church in South Pasadena. I told that congregation of her family and her friends that there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Joyce was, in the words of our Burial Service, even in her own mind, a sheep of God’s own fold, a lamb of God’s flock, a sinner of God’s own redeeming and that God had received her into the arms of God’s mercy and into the blessed rest of everlasting peace in the glorious company of the saints in light.
As for me, I’ll be forever grateful that I took the risk to act out of that deep emotional place within me and announced my intention to pray for both of us on that scary afternoon. So in some small way, on that afternoon, I know that I honored the memory of her, who so many centuries before had done that thing which, ever since, has been told by Christians far and wide in memory of her. Amen
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