the Rev. Dr. Paul Tellstrom Irvine United Congregational Church

Proper 6 “C” “You Are Our Shakespeare” June 17, 2007

Epistle Reading: Galatians 2:15-21 word count 2,468

Gospel: Luke 7:36-8:3

Today’s reading is a little like a story Valerie Cox¹ wrote about being at an airport waiting to catch a flight. She went and bought herself a bag of cookies and a book, and settled in a chair in the airport lounge. To kill time, she began to read her book. Suddenly she noticed that there was a man sitting beside her who was helping himself to her cookies. She wrote that she felt immobilized by this—she didn’t want to make a scene, and so she read on, made sure that she got her share of her cookies, and watched the clock. As this brazen “cookie thief” kept on eating her cookies, she got more and more angry and righteous about his actions, and said to herself, “If I wasn’t such a nice person, I’d haul off and hit him!”

She wanted to move the cookies to her other side but she could not bring herself to do it. With each cookie she took, he took one too. When only one was left, she wondered what he would do. Then with a smile on his face and a nervous laugh, he took the last cookie and broke it in half. He offered her half, and he ate the other. She snatched it from him, thinking, “This guy has some nerve, and he’s also so rude that he didn’t even show any gratitude!”

Finally, she heard her flight called. She gathered her belongings and headed for the gate, refusing to look at the ungrateful “thief.” She boarded the plane and sank in her seat, reached in her bag to get her book and to forget about the whole incident. Inside her bag, next to her book was the full bag of cookies that she had bought, not one of which had been eaten.

She remembered being very quiet and embarrassed about her behavior as she ran the scene over in her head. She had sat next to a man, and without speaking to him or showing him any courtesy at all, she had wolfed down his bag of cookies thinking they were hers in an aggressive and unfriendly manner. Not only that, she had been inhospitable, believing herself to be a righteous presence in the company of a sinner.

What had he done? He not only allowed her to take what she wanted, he did not correct her behavior, he showed hospitality and humility, and he even smiled as he split the last of his snack with her. One showed the love of Christ, one did not.

In today’s reading, Jesus points out the difference in hospitality between Simon the Pharisee who has invited him to his house to eat, and the woman within the house who opened the alabaster jar of oil and washed his feet with the oil and her hair. Simon has a high reputation, and the woman has a low one.

Jesus said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

There is the one who can show hospitality, who does so legalistically, comparatively, and with a greater concern for self. There is the other, who simply gives hospitality.

In the time I have shared with you so far, I have seen all kinds of people come to this place, attracted by its sense of hospitality and acceptance in what appears to have always been a unique community. There have been moments here when I have witnessed the best that we can be, and I have pinched myself as a reminder that this kind of intersection of lives, not found in the world outside our doors to my knowledge, is real. I have also seen people hoping to find community, but for whatever reasons, slipping away almost virtually unknown…a missed opportunity for a greater spiritual connection.

Dr. Mary Pipher points to something rather poignant in her book, “Another Country: The Emotional Terrain of Our Elders.”² She writes that for those of us who are boomers and younger, we still have NBC, CBS and Time, just as the generation ahead of us did, but we who are younger are experiencing a very profound shift in how we see community from the understanding of our elders, and although the names of some of our longstanding institutions may still be the same, something is very different.

Our seniors grew up in a world where the collective was more important than the individual. Families stayed in the same geographic region, and people were accustomed to gathering together across the generations, seeking and finding the recognized need for a strong community, and places like this would play an important role in the formation of community. My generation and those younger than me are different. We strike out on our own, often leaving the nuclear family behind, and we tend to cluster more in groups of our peers. We pursue multiple friendships in what we define as our community, and we are more fluid with the idea that the community may change. We want different experiences out of life.

Although Pipher is writing to point out ways in which we might better understand our senior generation, what this has to say about the formation of community is significant.

Some people who come to inquire about our church are more on a personal journey of discovery that is about them individually than it is about finding a faith community. One of the comments I hear is, “You won’t see us every week, because we really believe in going out there and getting different viewpoints from different places. Note: “places” not “community.” Pipher is talking about this generational difference.

The Willow Creek Church, one of the country’s biggest mega-churches, knows about this. The church plans evangelism around the revolving-door concept—it knows that people will come, stay for a while, and move on. The church has a food-court, like a mall, instead of a recreational hall like most churches, where people can pursue the many choices that are out there, instead of reaching for what is available, and sitting down next to the person they thought they would like to get to know better over a shared meal.

This church wasn’t built like Willow Creek. It was a small church start that became a middle-size church, while retaining an institutional memory of what it was like to look around and know something about the people that gathered in the same Sunday light. That memory is a crucial thread, kept strong in how we continue to reach out and offer hospitality and more—the knowledge that “you belong” here sharing your journey with these people.

The church invited people to bring their fully thinking, rational, questioning minds with them. It invites people to come to the party as they are, bringing their whole selves openly and freely. It declared a “from-the-heart” theology, much like the charter of Christian liberty that Paul declared to the Galatians (those Celtic transplants that settled in Turkey). The apostle Paul is telling them that one comes into union with God through developing faith, and while ritual observances may assist in the building of faith, they only provide the framework. He also stresses community and acceptance beyond the legalisms, and these are qualities that have been ingrained throughout the years at this church.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said:

“When you enter a synagogue or a church, you know when it is one that is

prayed in, because it has the odor of sanctity about it. You also can tell

when you’ve entered a happy home—there’s something in the atmosphere.³

I cannot tell you how many people have told me about their experience of walking into this simple room for the first time, or looking around it and knowing that they would feel welcome here. That, or perhaps the collective feelings, emotions, prayers, thoughts, and actions that have been given birth to in this place leave the room with the very spiritual residue that Archbishop Tutu alludes to.

I think that it is my responsibility to remind you of this occasionally. You have something very rare. It needs to be shared by inviting others to find their “niche”, their own place in it as well. It would be a shame to take it for granted and somehow forget the importance of “community” and hospitality in our lives, while there are signs that it is slipping away from us in so many ways everyday.

If you take a picture of a new home from the real estate page, and compare it to a home of seventy or eighty years ago, you will see that the front porch where people gathered at night and talked across the yards and to passersby is gone. The garage is now the dominating feature. The automatic door opens and closes, and people step from their sealed cars into their sealed houses. How do we learn to love our neighbor without knowing our neighbor?

Communities like this are one of the remaining social structures where people remarkably different from one another find paths that intersect and friendships grow that would not be possible if not for a place where hospitality is given away as promiscuously as the woman who gave her welcome to Jesus by washing his feet with her hair.

Many of you long-timers remember the greeters here who hugged strangers at the door, who smiled at you when you needed a friendly face, who also showed you the face of a kind of hospitality, grace, and openness that perhaps you don’t get to see during the week. The church has to be the place that is real; complete with real tears, tiffs and tumult, but a homely reminder in the corner of our minds during the week when we come up against the smiling faces and blank platitudes, or deceitful government, spin-doctors and snake-oil salesmen. I know I can face it because I am anchored to something real. Something called “community.”

And now, you are the greeters. You are the institutional memory. To people looking for meaning, looking for what is real, you are now the smile at the door and the giver of the unexpected hug. You represent something “real”.

Ralph Johnson was an ancient, regal man of mixed Native and African-American blood. He sang in the choir, and near the end of our time of prayer, he would always lift up a verse from Shakespeare. People loved it and told him so. Empowered by this, he startled us one Sunday by giving the speech from Macbeth that starts, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?”

In Bible study that week, his younger brother told us that he was embarrassed by it. Others assured him that people genuinely liked hearing Ralph’s poetry, and overcompensated by going and telling Ralph that he had to do more. That Sunday we were treated to all twenty-two stanzas of “The Wreck of the Hesperus”.

“Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, That ope in the month of May.”

Meanwhile, younger people were coming to church and bringing their friends.

They were fascinated that this was going on. There were three generations of Ralph’s family in the church, and aside from his brother, if I was all right with it, they were. Then came the Sunday Ralph chose to end our time of prayer with “The Raven”. “The Raven” is always a much longer poem than we remember, and longer still in a sanctuary of people whose heads are presumably bent in prayer. Towards the end of it, something rather liturgical happened. Ralph read the stanza, pausing before the end, and the congregation responded, “Quoth the raven, nevermore”. It was call-and-response until it finally ended with, “Quoth the raven, nevermore”. And someone said, “Amen.”

This called for a discussion of the nature and purpose of prayer, and I made the decision to give Ralph his own separate place in the program called, “A Moment with Ralph Johnson”, which he never liked, feeling it constricted creativity. But it changed the church. Some of the younger people who had been coming, joined the church stating that they liked the fact that somewhere there was a place where all different kinds of people could be who they were, demonstrated by how a ninety-something year old choir member could feel free to suddenly stand up and quote Shakespeare.

Your uniqueness, your welcome, your different point of view expressed just when no-one was expecting it, is the poetry and rhythm of Ralph’s Shakespeare.

As we move into summer, let me say that when you are not here, these gifts are not given away at the door and neither are yours.

You have created a most unique church community. This is the place that when you enter it, you know that it is prayed in. What it will be next is up to you. The love and the hospitality it is known for is yours to give away.

“The church is a place where we try to think, speak, and act in God’s way, not in the way of a fear filled world. Our church is a home for love, a home for people to dwell in unity, to rest and be healed, to let go their defenses and be free—free from worries, free from tensions, free to laugh, free to cry.”

“Church is where all hearts are one so that nothing else has to be one. Church is where there’s such a climate of acceptance that gets worked on here so that each of us can be his or her unique self. Church is where we learn to be free, strong, and mature by sharing with one another our continued bondage, weakness and immaturity. Church is where we so love one another that it becomes bearable for some of us to live as solitaries.”⁴

It can’t happen without you giving yourselves away deeply to each other, charging you up for the week, being life’s anchor, providing a safe place to have your doubts and questions, to forgive, to laugh, to re-commit yourselves as servants to the world and to each other. Love your church by being in it with each other. AMEN

Sermon Resources:

1. Upon research, I found that this was originally written as a poem called, “A Bag of Cookies”.

2. Mary Bray Pipher, PhD. “Another Country: The Emotional Terrain of Our Elders,” Simon &

Schuster Books; New York, 1999

3. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as quoted in Colin Greer, “Without Memory, There is No

Healing; Without Forgiveness, There is No Future,” Parade, January 11, 1998, 6.

4. William Sloane Coffin.

Scripture for Sunday, June 13, 2004

Proper 6C

Luke 7:36-8:3

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.

Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him--that she is a sinner.” Jesus spoke up and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher,” he replied, “Speak.”

“A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.” And Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.”

Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”

And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the realm of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.