Sermon preached by the Reverend Nicholas Lang, Rector

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

3^rd Sunday after Pentecost, June 17, 2007

In the name of God who creates, loves, and sustains us. Amen.

If you wanted to find Jesus in first century Palestine, your best chance of doing that was at someone’s dinner table, at a party, or in a large crowd with lots of hungry people. In fact, Luke’s Gospel gives a picture of Jesus either being a part of or describing a trail of meals. You may recall the more familiar of them such as the gala feast thrown for the prodigal son and the feeding of the 5000.

In the Gospel story today we find Jesus at dinner, this time eating at the home of a well-respected Pharisee by the name of Simon. Recall that the Pharisees were not typically the company Jesus kept. He is not there long when a woman – also well known but for different reasons – enters the house and sits right at the feet of Jesus and begins to wash his feet. Huge social taboo!

Luke makes a point to frame her behavior in sensual language, lost on us because we are hearing the text in English. The Greek uses the word άυπτω (haupto) which means “to caress or fondle.” The A-list invitees at the dinner party were scandalized that Jesus would allow this intimacy with a woman who is known as a sinner. Actually, in that culture, she struck out and would have been excluded from the table just because she was a woman. The sinner part was just the icing on the cake.

On a cooler, out of summer Sunday, I would take us down a number of paths to unpack the richness of this text. Today, in mid-June, we’ll take the short cut and revere this wonderful and amazing passage to underline and write in big bold letters the foundation of our mission as a church: RADICAL WELCOME.

Methodist bishop and renowned preacher, William Willimon says of this passage, “Here is a strange messianic kingdom indeed: a kingdom in which the outsiders become insiders, in which the wretched of the earth are royalty, in which the most poor – the least and the last – are the most prominent.”

The ministry of Jesus as a preview of what God’s kingdom will look like was more often than not expressed through and at the dinner table right up to the very last when he gave us the holy mean we share together this morning. Jesus loved to share the table with anyone who would join him there. He still does.

Yes, this Gospel is also about forgiveness and reconciliation and transformation and we find that exemplified in the woman who is on center stage in the drama, but none of it – neither forgiveness nor reconciliation nor transformation can happen if we’re not invited, if we’re not welcome at the table. That’s the gift Jesus gave her. That’s the gift Jesus gives all of us.

Every time this community gathers – whether to eat the Holy Food and Drink of the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, or sip coffee and munch on goodies provided at the coffee hour in the parish hall or enjoy Sunday evening cocktails offered regularly at the homes of our members, Jesus eats and drinks with us – sinners. And he does so gladly and with great ease.

Sarah Miles was raised as an atheist and lived an enthusiastically secular life as a restaurant cook and writer. She opens her book, Take this Bread, with this account: “One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans – except that up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.”

We continue the tradition of radical invitation established by our founder, Jesus, by creating a culture of welcome and hospitality at this Communion Table and at every other junction by which people might enter our life here, echoing the sentiment of Fred Craddock, that “wherever and whenever, for whatever reason, anyone is not welcome to sit at table with you, to eat with you, then you do not have church.”

We can’t take the credit for it, however. It is not an original idea. Jesus did it first. We’re just imitating the master of hospitality. Yes, this Gospel is also about forgiveness and reconciliation and transformation but none of it – neither forgiveness nor reconciliation nor transformation can happen if we’re not invited, if we’re not welcome at the table. That’s the gift Jesus gave her. That’s the gift Jesus gives all of us. Claim it and celebrate!