I want to begin this morning with several pastoral notes.

We remember in our prayers today our bishop, Bill Persell, and his wife Nancy. He is having surgery at Northwestern Hospital on Wednesday.

I also want to remember in our prayers Ruth Graham, wife of Billy Graham, certainly the foremost American Evangelist. May she rest in peace and rise in glory. I remember a story told by my home rector in Boston as a teenager, Samuel Wylie, who some members of this parish knew later as Bishop of Northern Michigan. When he was a student at Wheaton College here in Illinois he once had a date with the future Mrs. Graham. I never met Mrs. Graham, although Billy Graham did come to preach in the Princeton Chapel when I was an undergraduate, and, by happy chance, I was on to read the Lesson in the service and Dean Gordon introduced me to him before the service. He is a very big man, very affable to a student.

Much separates Christians from one another, and we are in a moment when the accent is on what divides. All of my instincts, and I daresay some are Gospel convictions, lead me to accent what unites. What unites us is Jesus Christ and the Gospel good news of God’s love in his story, and it depends on how great Christ is in the church and in our lives as to how much Christ unites.

And Christ should be the greatest thing.

First reading: Story of a confrontation

A comment about our first reading: last Sunday we began using week-by-week the Revised Common Lectionary, and we have come in, in our first readings, on the story of the Prophet Elijah, and, by chance, today on the story of the confrontation of Elijah and King Ahab and his wife Queen Jezebel. Thinking of confrontations with the powers of this world, I remember that St. John Chrysostom, the golden-tongued preacher of the Word, in his time confronted the Emperor and Empress in Constantinople, with the result that he spent most of his tenure in exile. His feast day in January is not the day of his death, the normal date of a feast in the early church (a birthday in heaven), but rather the day years later when they finally let his body back into Constantinople for burial. Passions had run so high.

This early summer, the summer of a college reunion, I have been reading James Axtell’s The Making of Princeton University and came across this note:

In 1940 the university appointed George Thomas professor of religious thought to initiate the teaching of religion as one of the liberal arts, not as proselytism.

George Thomas was one of my teachers, at the end of his long and distinguished career.

Then Axtell wrote this sentence – something new to me, even though I majored in the Religion department:

At the end of the war, after Hiroshima and Auschwitz made it clear that science had much to answer for and no longer had all the answers, Princeton established a Department of Religion to facilitate a troubled generation’s inquiries into the nature, history, and literature of all the world’s religions, not just Christianity.

                                 James Axtell, The Making of Princeton University, page 342

I do not believe there is any fundamental conflict between the truths of faith and the truths of science. Insofar as both are true, they cannot be in fundamental conflict. Science has been and can be of enormous benefit to human beings – medical science does things that would have been astounding miracles in the time of Elijah or John Chrysostom. But it is always appropriate to raise ethical questions. And there are human questions which science alone cannot answer. 

Today’s Gospel scene

Christ should be the greatest thing. I have a special love for the scene in the Gospel reading today. There is a great painting of it, “Christ at the House of Simon,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is an artist’s celebration of the moment – holding it up and celebrating a scene sketched in words.

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. (Luke 7:36)

So Christ comes, risen and glorified and at the heart of God the Trinity, here to this house, to his table here, to be truly present with us.

In Mark’s telling of this story, it is the house of Simon the leper, by definition an outcast. It is very like Jesus to eat with and make friends with people on the outs. This telling of the story has Simon as a Pharisee, someone in the inner circle, someone on the in. Jesus was not against the Pharisees. Jesus was not against and is not against people on the in. There was and is always in him a compassionate daring, reaching out to anyone on the outs, but never a wall up against those on the in.

At Jesus’ burial, Nicodemus, who was one of the leading citizens, very much on the in, came with an extraordinary huge gift of spices. And what great use Jesus would make of the gifts of the apostle Paul, who, for all he was from the inside, stressed that Jesus’ friendship was all gift, all grace. Bernanos wrote “Tout est grâce.” Paul writes in our second reading, from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:

… we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. (Galatians 2:16)

 And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

I live by faith. I live by trust in the love of God I see in Jesus. I find in Jesus, I am given, all grace, in Jesus.

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. (Luke 7:37-38)

In ancient Israel as soon as the word “anointing” was said, all sorts of bells went off. We do not have those echoes in modern America. If the word “inauguration” were used, well, we would understand that. In the Old Testament, the prophets and priests and kings of Israel were anointed – holy oil was poured on them – as a sign they were sent from God. All Israel was waiting for the coming of “the anointed one” – in Hebrew, the Messiah, in Greek, the Christ – who would save the people. And here Jesus was being anointed in this humble act of faith in the love of God for her in Jesus, in asking forgiveness and in love.

"Your faith has saved you; go in peace." (Luke 7:50)

So may we come, trusting

May we come, you and I, in this hour, trusting in God’s love in Christ – saying “yes” to that gift, trusting in it; to listen to his story – to what Christ did and said, and listen for what God is saying to each one of us in that story; to ask forgiveness and be assured we are forgiven; to come to his table to be fed, with the great signs of his presence and love which feeds us in the deepest places of being human; to build a community here in his compassion and friendship; to bring his compassion out from his table to the city. So may we come in faith, and live in that faith.

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