4th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 6C

4th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 6C June 12, 2016 I was watching the season finale of a popular network tv medical drama this past week. And I was struck when the main character complained of another, more emotive character that she let all her feelings just come pouring out of her everywhere. When the two characters had an encounter later in the show, the less emotive one said to the other, “Just stuff your feelings down! Just stuff them down deep so they don’t come pouring out onto everyone!” At the time, I thought, “what a horrible and dysfunctional way to live—to stuff your feelings down so deep that no one really knows what you are feeling”. But I will confess that when I read the gospel reading for this Sunday, that was my initial reaction for the woman who washes Jesus’s feet. Good grief, woman! You are in the middle of the dinner party. I get that you are grateful to Jesus, but really, stuff your feelings down, stop making a spectacle and let’s get on with the meal! That also seems to be the reaction that others at the dinner party are having, including Jesus’s host—Simon the Pharisee who is one of the faithful religious folk to the day—not so different from us. And so Jesus asks Simon a question in the form of a parable. He talks about two different debtors, one of whom owes 500 and the other 50. Both find that their debts are forgiven, but the one who owed more is the more grateful one. Then Jesus brings it back to the current scenario with the enigmatic statement: “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.” Jesus, it seems, is not in favor of the “stuffing your feelings down” school of behavior. So what does this mean for us? Where is the good news in this? I suspect that there are some of us here today who identify with the woman. We have done something in your life that for which we carry a great deal of regret and maybe even shame; we know that this something separates us in relationship with God and with other people. In some way, we have had an encounter with Jesus, like this woman must have had prior to the dinner party, when Jesus looks at her, knows her, loves her, and assures her that her sins are forgiven. Then she is so grateful, she is overbrimming with love, and she shows up at the dinner party to offer her thanks to Jesus. (If you have not had this experience and you long for it, we have a sacrament called Reconciliation of a Penitent that can help you with this. Call me, and I’ll tell you more about it.) But others of us are more like Simon the Pharisee. Our sinfulness is not something that is always hanging over us, ever present with us. It affects our relationships with God and others, but we’re not really aware of it. We don’t think of ourselves as sinful people; we might think of others as sinful people, but not ourselves… For us, the debt that has been forgiven is the smaller one, and we are those who “having been forgiven little, we love little.” We are the ones at the dinner party who want the woman to quit making a spectacle and stuff her feelings down deep inside, so we can get on with our nice dinner. This past week, I said something that was uncharitable and judgmental about someone else in passing-just some small, nasty remark. My husband looked at me and said, “You don’t like very many people, do you?” I was struck, because that is not the way that I see myself. So I asked myself, “Huh, I wonder what is going on with me now?” As I began to delve deeper, I discovered that I had spent very little time in reflection or introspection over the last month, and I definitely needed to delve a little bit deeper in my own soul. This past week, Parker Palmer posted a poem that I had read before (and maybe even preached on), and one part in particular struck me anew. The poem is titled Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, and it is a powerful and gritty reflection on how suffering can be transformed. In the last two stanzas, Nye speaks about how we know kindness after we have also known loss: Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. Perhaps what Nye and the gospel reading tells us this week is that for those of us who do “stuff our feelings down,” then perhaps we need to spend some time dipping down into that well, where our losses and our failures dwell. Gradually, draw them upward into the light and offer them to God and ask for redemption, for healing, for forgiveness. Then we will know the power of forgiveness in our own lives; we will become reacquainted with the love of God for each and everyone of us; and we will be able to offer kindness out of our own experiences. Does this make you uncomfortable? My dear ones, that is actually the good news, the love and forgiveness of God already at work in you. And that is where we begin.