“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 describes one of the most compelling and controversial scenes in the New Testament in those lines. Think about it: Jesus is at table, a guest in a Pharisee’s house – the Pharisees are really big into externals -- and in comes this woman – a sinner – who is carrying a jar of costly ointment, because alabaster was the vessel of choice for perfumes and ointments. She weeps at his feet, and on his feet, washing them with her tears and then anoints him. The sight, the sound, and the smell must have been overwhelming.
We are most often most aware of sight and sound, but I think smell is important, too. I know that I’m going to come off as “food-focused,” but is there anything in the world that smells as good as the smells coming out of a kitchen? Sometimes I take an evening walk and I can tell just who is grilling – and often what they’re grilling – just by sniffing as I walk past. But, baking, now there is something that awakens and arouses all sorts of thoughts – and memories – within us. The smell of cinnamon and other spices transport me back to my youth and to coming home on those days when my grandmother, who lived with us, would bake. And then, if she was baking bread – wow! Those “homey” smells are such a part of us that realtors advise people to bake a loaf of bread or boil cinnamon sticks before people come through a house that is for sale. Why? Because it stirs up memories and good feelings – and then they go through the house already softened up.

Someone caught this in an advertising jingle that’s been playing in my head now for a couple of weeks: “Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven and…..” [let the people complete the line]. I suppose that advertizing campaign was directed at all of us who were raised in the “food is love” school of parenting. And it’s clear that I’m not the only person who thinks of loved ones, some now gone, when we smell something wonderful baking. What did Jesus and Simon and those gathered smell on that long ago evening?

Simon, and probably the bulk of those there, smelled something rotten. This woman was an obvious sinner. He couldn’t quite grasp how a prophet, a teacher, a holy man like Jesus could allow her to defile him by these actions, by allowing her to touch him? Something was rotten. Jesus smelled the offering of the self which leads to forgiveness, renewal and transformation. Don’t we read in the prophet Hosea (6:6), “For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice, knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings”? And doesn’t Jesus pick up on this verse in two different passages in Matthew’s Gospel (9:13, 12:7)? In Matthew 9:13 Jesus says, “ ‘Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’” Here in Luke’s Gospel he tells a touching, compelling story of forgiveness of debt, and where he uses ‘debt,’ think sin.
In our day and age we don’t like to talk about sin, even in Churches. I think that it’s the case because over the years the Church – and here read ‘clergy’ – have trivialized it, focusing on misdemeanors, rather than on the things which keep us from loving God and our neighbor. I may have told this story before, but I can’t resist telling it again. I was in Boston attending a meeting and was walking across Boston Common. And there on the Common I saw a tent set up for a revival meeting – right in the middle of Boston. There was a fellow, larger than me, stuffed into a black suit, a once-starched shirt and tie, sweating profusely, holding one of those large, floppy-bound Bibles (I like to call them prehensile Bibles, because you can fold it just so) preaching away to two people sitting on hard folding chairs. The middle of Boston Common, the middle of June and he was preaching up a storm and he just makes the point. He was striding up and down and I remember him saying – and I can’t come close to reproducing his accent – “Do ya like the taste of that Budweiser beeeeeeeeer? Walll, I hope ya do, because you’re not getting’ any in heyaal.” How do people get ‘hell’ to last for three or four syllables? You know God doesn’t really give a rip if you’re drinking a Budweiser beer, unless, of course, you’re from Milwaukee and then you should be drinking something else, true? It’s not what goes in that condemns, Jesus says, it’s what comes out. And when we trivialize it, when we make it misdemeanors it misses the point. We miss the point of sin as that which keeps us from loving God and our neighbors.

Instead, we’ve moved toward a kind of pop-psychology, wellness kind of thing, which misses the point that human beings can get off-track and self-centered – which describes exactly what sin is. In both Hebrew and Greek sin is defined as “missing the mark,” and that’s what it is – our falling short of what God has called us to be. Contemporary Benedictine spiritual writer, Brother David Stendl-Rast suggests that we use the term “alienation” instead. He writes, “Alienation is our contemporary word that makes sense to us today. . . .We all know what that is. We know what it feels like; being cut off from everything, from ourselves, from anything that has meaning, from all others . . . from ultimate reality, from God.” [“Thoughts on Mysticism as Frontier of Consciousness Evolution” in Human Survival and Consciousness Evolution (SUNY, 1998), p. 98 quoted in Shea The Relentless Widow, p. 163] Alienation, separation, self-centeredness all echo how St. Augustine described someone in sin, “incurvatus a se” (curved in on one’s self). Sin curves us in on ourselves.

Augustine would know, because there was a man who struggled – and struggled mightily – with sin. I would commend his Confessions to you, because there you read that struggle and the movement from alienation to communion with God. You also, as Ben Yagoda points out in his wonderful little book Memoir: A History, get one of the earliest glimpses of autobiography. Listen to this passage from the Confessions: “It is with doubtful knowledge, Lord, but with utter certainty that I love You. You have stricken my heart with Your word and I have loved You. And indeed heaven and earth and all that is in them tell me wherever I look that I should love You…But what is it that I love when I love You? …in a sense I do love light and melody and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God – the light and the voice and the fragrance and food and embrace in the soul…I breathe that fragrance which no wind scatters, I eat the food which is not lessened by eating, and I lie in the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder….”

Augustine would also say, “Forgiveness has two lovely daughters: compassion and justice” “Mercy, not sacrifice.” In truth, what we learn today is that nothing says loving like extending love and forgiveness to others as it has been extended to us. That woman’s sins were great and Jesus says, “she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” Luther would say pecca fortiter – “sin boldly and when you come for grace, come more boldly still. For God loveth a lusty sinner.” You know why he’s saying that; because the bold sinner will also repent boldly and then will also live faith boldly. He echoes Augustine who talked about strong sinning which would lead to strong forgiveness and strong living. If we’ve been forgiven we’re to act with compassion and justice, reflecting God’s love. We’re to live strongly as God’s people.

Paul the Apostle strongly influenced both Augustine and Luther. What we read in his letter to the Galatians is how God goes about “justifying” – something I read said think about it in terms of how a page is justified: straightened and made to fit. Justification by faith straightens us out and makes us fit, so that we can be the kind of people that God created us to be. Paul was one who had known alienation, but came to a remarkable transformation through coming to a living relationship with the Risen Lord (which is still available to all of us). The communion, the oneness, he felt led him to say, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.” Powerful words and a powerful truth. I took those words as my theme when I was ordained twenty-eight years ago.

It’s been thirty years since we celebrated the sesquimillenium – the 1500th anniversary -- of St. Benedict’s birth (480) and I still remember a scene from a documentary that was done on Benedictine communities. It showed a group of nuns – some of whom I came to know – sharing recreation time together, making popcorn, young and old enjoying each other’s company. The narrator’s line, which has stuck with me for thirty years, was: “These sisters have grown old being Eucharist for each other.” Nothing says loving like something from the table – bread broken, shared, nourishing body and soul; wine, the cup, poured out, gladdening the heart, easing the thirst. That is what we are to be for each other and for our world. Remember, it was Augustine who said, “You are what you eat. What lies on the table is what you become.” Beloved, we are the body of Christ and nothing says loving any better than that – go live, go act, go love as what you are. Nothing says loving, well, like…well, loving.