Who Do You See?

A ll four Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus, but the version in Luke does not focus on the extravagance of the act.  Instead, Luke directs our attention to a poignant question:  “Do you see this woman?”       

Who Do You See?

Luke 7:36 – 8:3 

Over the last 12 ¾ years I have drawn on many sources for my sermons: personal experience, movies, books, songs, visual art on the wall, even jokes, texting, and Facebook. But I never expected to use Terry Mitchell’s doctoral dissertation

in a sermon; Terry is my former husband.

He did his graduate work in social psychology with Dr. Fred Fiedler at the University of Illinois. Fred studied leadership and had developed a questionnaire that asked subjects to describe the co-worker they most preferred to work with, and the one they least preferred to work with. In a whole series of studies, there was a positive correlation between the tendency to say nice things about one’s Least Preferred Coworker and various measures of leadership effectiveness.

What Terry did was to tease out what might lead someone to say nice things about a co-worker who he/she didn’t enjoy working with. The research Terry did (and I don’t recall the details, but I am sure it involved lots of questionnaires!) showed that high scores on LPC (Least Preferred Co-worker) were actually measures of cognitive complexity – the ability to hold several pieces of information simultaneously, even if those bits of information were complex, inconsistent, or even paradoxical. So a manager who could identify both good and bad traits in a staff member was likely to be more effective than someone who saw only good or only bad.

The Pharisee who hosted the dinner in today’s reading saw only bad in the woman who came into his house with an alabaster jar of ointment. He saw a sinner.

Jesus, on the other hand, had a more cognitively complex view of her. He acknowledged that she had sinned, but he saw more in her and of her than that. He saw her as a person who had offered the traditional courtesy of washing his feet when he entered; he saw her as a person who greeted him with a kiss; he saw her as someone who honored him by anointing him with oil. He saw her.

That compassionate vision is notably scarce in our public life at the moment. The loud voices of 2010 come from observers who see in only one dimension, who simplify persons and problems by ignoring all of the complexities and nuances. Those oversimplified visions are then expressed in sound bytes that exaggerate differences, inflame emotions, and contribute to an adversarial culture of litigation and conflict.

Part of our vocation as Christians is, of course, to be peacemakers. And the making of peace requires us to push back against this culture of one dimensional vision and to insist that persons are more than just

The language of this is to use fewer nouns and more adjectives in our descriptions of one another. Instead of “hawk” or “dove,” we might say “woman who believes force is necessary to defend freedom,” or “man who is dedicated to peace,” Instead of “tea party member,” we might say “person concerned about the dangers of excess government power,” or perhaps even “person concerned about the dangers of excess government who is also a fly fishing enthusiast and a Scrabble player.”

The point is that these nouns – man, woman, person – turn our attention to the wholeness of individuals. They provide us avenues on which we can search for common ground, areas in which we might find common concerns, places where we might act together and move forward together. Peace making grows when we look at one another the way Jesus looks at us.

There is also a kind of peace within ourselves that grows when we look at ourselves the way Jesus looks at us. One of the gifts I found in middle age was the capacity to own all of myself – to become much clearer (though not perfectly clear!) about my talents and my shortcomings, my strengths and my foibles, my virtues and my habitual sins. I turned away (most of the time) from scolding myself for what I don’t do well, and turned towards finding ways to accomplish those things – often by cooperating and collaborating with others. At the same time, I began to find ways to truly appreciate qualities and skills that are mine, and to find ways to express and use them with joy and satisfaction.

Inner peace does not mean turning a blind eye to real sin. We are careful, even cautious, about the use of the word “sin” in our congregation and in our progressive Christian tradition. Many folks come to our church precisely because they have been uncomfortable (or even harmed) by a language of sin that is blaming, shaming, and punitive. Let me suggest this morning that if we are going to see ourselves and others through the eyes of Jesus, we need to reclaim the word “sin” and the truth that it represents.

That truth is that we are not the people we want to be, and we are not the people that God hopes we will be. We begin our worship every Sunday with a prayer of confession precisely for this reason. Our spiritual journeys – as well as our relationships and daily lives – are hampered by the ways in which we are self-centered, distractible, greedy, and conventional. And some of those roadblocks are reasonably labeled as sin. The good news for Christians is our conviction that God forgives our sins and offers us renewal of life, but we are not spared the knowledge that we have erred, that we have exploited others, that we have failed to care for our neighbors or work for justice, and that we have let our devotion to God be crowded out by the business and busyness of our lives.

There are versions of the story of the anointing of Jesus in all four of the gospel accounts. The other three all focus on the expense of the ointment that the woman uses, and Jesus’ defense of her action. I love preaching from all three of them, because they give me an opportunity to speak about extravagance – a virtue that is often missing in the church. But in this version of the story, it is the question that Jesus asked the Pharisee that haunts me: “Do you see this woman?”

I began by arguing that this text calls us to a kind of cognitively complex way of looking at one another and ourselves, but I must end by arguing that the complexity we need is as much spiritual as it is cognitive. We are called to search for and nurture the capacity to see persons and events with spiritually complex eyes. We are invited to look more deeply and more prayerfully at one another, to see sin when it is present, but also to see generosity, hospitality, affection, ambition, and hope. We are called to look at the world with eyes that love, with eyes that see with both clarity and compassion. May the story of this ancient sister of ours lead us in that direction.

Prayer for June 13, 2010

Almighty and everlasting God, creator of all things seen and unseen, hear now our silent prayers, as we open our hearts to you in the sacred quietness.

God of faith and hope, we bring before you our prayers for those we have named this morning – we especially remember … Bring to each of them the gifts of mercy and grace that are most needed, according to your wisdom and love.

God of Birth and of Resurrection, we pray in gratitude and anxiety about the opportunities you put before us in the Gospel.

You have promised us forgiveness if we repent and ask for it; you have offered us grace without conditions or restrictions; you have even offered us life beyond life. We praise you and thank you for these remarkable gifts.

We pray for wisdom and courage to receive these gifts with an open heart. Help us to accept your mercy on our sinfulness, our neglectfulness, our thoughtlessness, our heartlessness. Help us to accept your mercy even when we may not be ready to forgive ourselves, and even when those whom we have wronged are not ready to forgive us. Bore through our resistance to hear this good news, past our sense of fairness and propriety, and into our hearts that are longing for your healing and forgiving touch.

We pray for energy and imagination to enter the new phases of life, the new chapters of our autobiographies. Temper our solemn moods with moments of levity, with breaths of laughter, with flashes of humble reality about our own foolishness and self-importance. Let us, instead, be refreshed by the winds of your spirit; bring us the lightness and liveliness of young adventure, the freedom to experiment and make mistakes, the depth of confidence to follow your call.

Save us, we pray, from the illusion that nothing will ever change, that nothing can ever change. Illuminate, instead, the first steps of the new road that you have put before us. We do not expect a highway without shadows, but we do look to you to accompany us through the dark stretches, and to remind us of the light ahead.

As the summer begins, refresh our understanding of the faith, and renew our commitment to live as disciples of the one who came to us as a baby, who lived with us as a brother, and who is present with us still as our Risen Savior, even Jesus the Christ. Let us pray together now in the words that he taught us …

November 28, 2004