Dying to Live (sermon on June 13, 2010)

Galatians 2:15-20
Luke 7:36-8:3


Tom and Carol had been married for over 24 years. But in that 24th year, something happened. You might call it a “midlife crisis”, because in some ways, it was just so stereotypical. Tom hired a pretty, young secretary at work, and within months was embroiled in an affair.

He didn’t even try very hard to hide it. For weeks, Carol was suspicious, and her suspicions were confirmed when she intersected Tom’s cell phone bill and saw the long phone calls and numerous texts to a number she didn’t recognize. Disgusted, hurt, betrayed, she confronted Tom. He didn’t deny it, didn’t beg forgiveness. Instead he told her that he just wasn’t sure marriage was what he wanted anymore. Please, she begged him, let’s try to make this work. Let’s go to counseling. Think of all the years we’ve had together. Think of the children.

“It’s too late,” he kept saying. “What I’ve done is unforgivable. Our marriage can’t ever recover from this.” He left and they soon got a divorce.

“The saddest part of all,” Carol said later, “is that I could have forgiven him. I was willing to move forward from the mistakes we had both made. But our marriage ended because he couldn’t forgive himself.”

What do you think of when you hear the word “justification”? I’d bet that if it’s a word that’s familiar to you--and especially if you weren’t sitting in church when you heard it--you’d think of word-processing programs. When you type up a document and justify the margins, the program straightens up the words so that they are in right relationship to the page. In theological terms, justification isn’t so different. When Paul refers to “justification” in Galatians, what he’s saying is that Jesus Christ, through his life, death, and resurrection, has done the hard work of bringing us into right relationship with God. This, according to Paul is the essence of forgiveness. It is how Christ, quite literally, saves our lives.

Why does Jesus do this for us? Does Christ offer us forgiveness, does he restore us to right relationship with God because of something we do, because we have somehow earned Christ’s forgiveness and justification? Paul says, emphatically, no: “no one will be justified by the works of the law.” We are not restored to right relationship with God because we follow a certain set of rules. Our life with God is not a schoolroom; we don’t earn our salvation through good behavior and we don’t get detention for breaking the rules. We are forgiven, justified, saved by grace, a free gift from God who loves us before we have done a single thing to deserve it.

You can’t blame the Galatians for wanting some rules to follow, though. After all, early on in our lives we learn the lesson that, generally speaking, good things happen when we follow the rules and bad things happen when we break them. We figure out fast that if we want something, we have to earn it. Want good grades? Then study hard, turn your homework in on time, and perform well on the test. Want to excel at sports? Then practice, work out, eat the right foods, get enough sleep. Want to earn a lot of money? Then pick the right career, work hard, butter up the boss, invest your money in the right places. In every one of these scenarios, it’s all about you, and what you can do. So it’s no wonder that we find it easy to put being a Christian in the same category. As the preacher Brian Blount says, “It’s all about standards. People have to do certain things, believe certain things, act certain ways before we let them have the grace God is allegedly giving out for free.” (1)

The story from Luke we heard today is a perfect example of these kinds of standards. Simon was a Pharisee, an active, faithful Jew. The Pharisees were the equivalent of elders and deacons; they attended every worship service; served on boards and committees, led Bible studies, organized mission projects. On this night, Simon was feeling particularly good about himself because he’d gotten Jesus of Nazareth, the celebrity prophet, to come to his house for dinner. Clearly, he must be doing something right.

But then, just when everyone is settling comfortably down to dinner, in walks someone who breaks all the rules. It would have been bad enough if a woman had walked in this room where only men could gather. But this wasn’t just any woman, it was a woman from the streets, yes, a woman from those streets. There were so many ways in which she didn’t belong. And yet she walks right up to Jesus and then she is crying, she is sobbing, so hard that her tears are dripping onto his feet and she is wiping them with her hair and rubbing expensive ointment on them. It’s not just improper, it is disgusting, it is offensive. Simon is appalled.

Jesus knows just what Simon is thinking and he also knows that Simon will jump at the chance to give the right answer to a question. So he asks him a question about two debtors whose debts--one big, one small--are both forgiven. Which one will be more appreciative? Simon indeed answers correctly -- it was a pretty obvious answer, after all -- and in doing so sets Jesus up to put him in his place. It is this woman, who knows that Jesus has forgiven her sin -- not because of anything she has done or will do but simply because that is the nature of God’s grace -- who demonstrates true gratitude and hospitality toward Jesus.

That woman from the streets knew without a doubt that Jesus had saved her life. And that knowledge inspires her to actions that arise from her faith that Jesus has indeed forgiven what she felt was unforgivable. The same thing happened to Paul. As Saul, a zealous Jew, he was completely convinced that he was earning his place in God’s kingdom by faithfully following the rules set out for him. When Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus and told him that was wrong, it saved Saul’s life. Actually, it ended Saul’s life, because in that moment Saul died to the person he had once been and he started a new life as Paul, the apostle who would share the good news of God’s grace with the Gentiles. This is what Paul is talking about when he says “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

When your life has been saved, when you have been pulled back from the brink of death and destruction, you will live differently.

Lee Kravitz was a textbook workaholic. A magazine editor with weekly deadlines, he worked constantly and left his wife to raise the kids and take care of the house. He missed countless sporting events, recitals, and even family vacations. Then one day, Lee got fired. Lost and confused without his work, Lee realized that he had been sorely neglecting the important people in his life. And so he devoted a year to reconnecting with people, and to fulfilling long overdue debts and promises.

One of the people he decided to reconnect with was his Aunt Fern. Fern had been Lee’s favorite aunt and when he was young they had shared a special relationship. But Fern was also a paranoid schizophrenic and during a period in Lee’s life when he thought he was too busy to get involved, she was sent by family members to live in a home. After Lee got fired and had some time on his hands to reflect, he discovered that he missed Fern terribly and, not only that, he felt horribly guilty that in fourteen years he had not communicated with her at all. He didn’t even know exactly where she was.

So he flew to Cleveland and met with a cousin who knew where to find Fern. The cousin told him that the doctors didn’t want family visiting Fern because it might increase her depression and make her suicidal. But Lee had come this far and he was determined to at least make sure Fern was okay. Even if he could just talk with her nurses or doctor, he thought, that would be enough. To his surprise, when he did that, they felt it would be okay for Lee to see Fern. So he followed a nurse into the dining room and waited. He didn’t see anyone there who looked remotely like his aunt, but then the nurse turned a wheelchair around and began pushing it toward him. In the wheelchair sat a woman he vaguely recognized.

Of course, he didn’t think there was any way she would recognize him. Surely the illness had clouded her brain too much for that. But as she came closer to him she said, “Lee Richard Kravitz, my brilliant nephew. My brilliant nephew is here to see me.” And then she said to him: “Hug me.”

Lee says about that moment: “I hugged her, and I’ll tell you, it was the longest hug I’ve ever had. We hugged, and I felt the weight of the world fall off my shoulders.” (2)

Accepting forgiveness, from another person, from God, even from ourselves, is perhaps the hardest thing any of us will ever do. Because to do it, we have to admit that we were wrong, that we didn’t always play by the rules, that we weren’t as self-sufficient as we tried to appear. It is the hardest thing we do, but unless we receive the forgiveness that Christ offers, unless we, like Paul are crucified with Christ, then we cannot experience the wonder of new life in Christ, a life in which Christ lives in us and through us, a life where the good works we do are not about earning our salvation, they are about celebrating the grace we have already received. That woman from the streets didn’t come into Simon’s house hoping that if she made Jesus’ tired feet feel better he might forgive her; somewhere along the way, she had received that forgiveness, and her hospitable actions flowed from her gratitude toward him for saving her -- even her!

Through God’s surprising, unpredictable grace, Christ justifies the world and all of us struggling to make our way in it. Christ restores this broken world into right relationship with its Creator, bringing peace where there was violence, wholeness where there was brokenness, creation where there was decay. Sin isn’t just the rules we break or the bad things we do, sin is what breaks down all the good things God created. And when Christ saves our lives, by causing us to die to our sin so that we might truly live, he restores us to right relationship with God. That means we get to participate in God’s magnificent work of restoring the world, bringing peace where there was violence, wholeness where there was brokenness, creation where there was decay. We do not do that as a way of continuing to earn our salvation -- if that were the case then Paul is right, Christ died for nothing -- we do it as an expression of our gratitude and astonishment at what God in Jesus Christ has done for us -- even us. Thanks be to God. Amen.