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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Luke 736 through 50.
One of the Pharisees
asked him to eat with him,
and he went into the Pharisees
house and reclined at table.
And behold, a woman of the city
who was a sinner.
When she learned
he was reclining at table in the Pharisees
house,
brought an alabaster flask of ointment,
and standing behind him
at his feet, weeping.
She began to wear his feet with her tears
and wiped them with the hair of her head,
and kissed his feet,
and anointed them with ointment.
Now when the Pharisee who had invited him
saw this, he said to himself,
if this man were a prophet,
he would have known who
and what sort of woman
this is
who is touching him, for she is a sinner.
And Jesus answering said to
him, Simon,
I have something to say to you.
And he answered.
Say it, teacher.
A certain moneylender had two debtors,
100 500 denarii, and the other 50.
When they could not pay,
he canceled the debt of both.
Now which of them will love him more?
Simon answered, the one,
I suppose, for whom
he canceled the larger debt.
And he said to him,
you have judge rightly.
Then, turning towards 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 wet my feet with her tears
and wiped them with her hair.
You gave me no kiss,
but from the time I came here,
she has not ceased to kiss 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 are many, are forgiven.
For she loved much.
But he who is forgiven
little, loves little.
And he said to her,
your sins are forgiven.
Then those who were at the table with him
began to say among themselves,
who is this who even forgive sins?
And he said to the woman,
your faith has saved you.
Go in peace.
I want you to think, just for a second,
about the biggest mistake of your life.
The biggest regret,
the thing that you've done, that you are
the least proud of,
the moment you wish you could take back.
Then I want you to think about
not just that moment
or that thing, but walking into a room
with the people who know
going back to the place
where everyone understands what you did.
Where everyone you know
is thinking the same thing is whispering
the same thing.
This is the marriage that ended
because of your affair.
The family finances
that are ruined because of your addiction.
The relationship that is over
because of your lying and your
betrayal.
Can you imagine what it would be like
to be free of that?
I mean, I think if we're honest,
we would say that that moment,
that thing we did, the rooms we can't go
in, the places we don't go back to.
Those things shape us.
They shape us more than we'd like
to imagine.
The weight of them shapes us
more than we would like to believe.
Can you imagine what it would
be like to be free of that?
To breathe without the weight of that?
Can you imagine what it would be like
to go back to that place,
to be in the room with those people
and not be crushed
by what they're thinking
and what they're saying?
Well, that's
what this week's passage is all about.
In a sermon series on Jesus as a redeemer,
Jesus who sets us free.
We're talking this weekend
about how he sets us
free from shame.
So if you have a Bible,
why don't you take it out
and open it to Luke chapter seven?
We're going to begin in verse 36
and look at the rest of the chapter.
Take out your phone, your tablet,
however you want to get there.
And hey, if you're here
and you didn't bring a Bible, you maybe
aren't super familiar with the Bible.
So glad that you're here.
Everything that happens this week,
and especially this, is as much for you
as it is for anyone else.
So if you want to follow along by holding
something in your hands,
you don't have to.
But if you want to,
there's a Bible in the pew in front of you
or in the back of East Hall.
And today's reading, it's a little tricky.
It begins on 811, bottom right
hand corner, and then quickly moves
to page 812, the next page.
But however you're getting to Luke
chapter seven,
let me hold out an outline to you that
I hope you're going to be encouraged by.
Three points.
Very simple.
They go like this. Freedom is possible.
How to get it and how to know you have it.
Freedom is possible.
How to get it
and how to know that you have it.
All right, let's start with the first one.
Freedom is possible.
This story is incredible.
And if you don't have the full kind
of background, the cultural moment,
it might be tough to really understand
just how incredible it is.
The story takes place
at the house of a man named Simon.
He is a Pharisee.
Not now.
The Pharisees were super religious guys,
like the religious man's religious man.
They were the moral elite,
the social elite, the spiritual elite.
You had to really want it to be
a Pharisee.
You had to be willing to do the work
in all three of those categories.
And so as a consequence,
they weren't just super religious,
they were super judgmental.
They were better than everyone.
And you knew it and they knew it.
And so Simon,
one of the Pharisees, invites Jesus
to dinner, and Jesus goes,
and while they're eating dinner
now in this culture, that would have meant
there was a table
in the middle of the room
and they were kind of reclining
at the table.
Your chest would be towards the table
and your feet away from you
as you kind of lay out at the table.
And during this dinner, a woman comes in.
Now, now, this is not just any woman
that the text calls her
a woman of the city, which is a church way
of saying she's a prostitute.
She's a streetwalker.
And she comes in wearing this perfume
around her neck,
which is a tool of her trade.
It's like a carpenter's hammer
or surgeon's scalpel.
And she goes over to Jesus's feet
and she takes down her hair,
which in that culture,
you never did as a woman.
And she begins to sob and
and so that her tears are kind of washing
Jesus's feet,
and she's using her hair to mop it up.
And then she takes
this jar of perfume and breaks
it and pours it out on Jesus feet.
And everyone is watching
and no one can believe it.
I mean, a religious guy's party
and a prostitute comes in.
Sounds like the beginning
of a really bad joke.
No one can believe what is happening.
Now, with that in your mind,
let me read the story to you.
It says this.
One of the Pharisees
verse 36, asked him to eat with him.
And he went into the Pharisees
house and reclined at table.
And behold, a woman of the city,
who was a sinner, when she learned
that he was reclining at table
in the Pharisees house,
brought an alabaster flask of ointment,
and standing behind him
at his feet, weeping,
she began to wet his feet with her tears,
and wiped them with the hair of her head,
and kissed his feet
and anointed them with the ointment.
This is a crazy story.
It's a scandalous moment.
It's so scandalous
that for every guy at this party, it's
what they would have been talking about
for the next couple of months.
It's an incredible story,
but I can't help when I read it.
But ask one singular question.
And it is a selfish question,
but maybe you can resonate.
How did this woman get so free?
How does a prostitute
walk into a religious,
judgmental, masculine party?
A room full of guys
who either judge were judging her or,
I hate to admit it, were customers
a hypocritical, judgmental religious room
full of men?
How does a prostitute
get to the place in life
where she can walk in, walk through their
whispers, through their stares,
through their judgment,
and basically fall apart
in their presence,
and then debase herself by using her hair
and tears and perfume, which screams I'm
a prostitute to wash Jesus's feet.
I read this story and if I'm honest,
I'm jealous.
How did she get so free?
Well, here's the first point
I want to make.
It's not a dramatic one.
It's not a big one,
but it's a, I hope, a poignant one.
And that is if this woman,
this prostitute, can walk into this party
with that kind of freedom,
then freedom is possible for you.
If this woman can walk into this party
totally free,
then I really believe it must be true
that for you and I, we can go back
to that moment, back to that place,
back to those people, and breathe
free.
Freedom is possible.
But of course, that begs
the question, doesn't it?
And that's my second point.
Well, how do you get it?
How do you give it
the freedom as possible?
How do you get it?
Well, you need to know that this story
has three main characters.
The first, of course, is Jesus.
The second is the woman who's
the prostitute, and the third is Simon,
whose house they're at, whose party it is.
And Jesus is going to compare Simon
and this woman throughout the story.
He actually compares them to two debtors,
one who owes 50 and one who owes 500.
And the key part of the story is that
although one owes, about a month's wages
and one owes a, year of wages,
neither one of them can pay.
And that way they're the exact same.
The whole point of this story
is to speak to both of them.
That's because the two of them,
the prostitute and the Simon, represent
the two human ways of dealing with shame.
Let me show you what I mean.
I want you to just envision for a second
with me a swimming pool.
I know, you know, swimming pools.
The place where
we're obviously never going to go again
because it's going to snow
and be cold forever.
But back when we used to have sunshine
and go to the pool,
I want you to envision a swimming pool.
And the water of the swimming pool
is your guilt
and my shame.
A swimming pool full of guilt.
A swimming pool full of shame.
Two ways of dealing with it.
The first is you can drown in it.
That's the woman.
You can be the kind of person
where everybody knows you're guilty.
Everybody knows what you did.
This is when your marriage is over
and everyone knows it's
because you had an affair.
Everybody knows
it's when you lost your job,
and everybody knows it's
because you can't stop drinking
for drowning.
They're soaked in guilt and shame,
even if they could somehow
get out of the pool and walk around,
there'd be water everywhere.
They they're dripping.
And you can reach a point in life where
all that's true of you are your mistakes.
All that anyone knows
about your cares to understand about you
is everything that you've done.
You can drown in shame.
The second way of dealing with it,
though, is like being on a float
in the middle of the pool.
That's what Simon is doing.
This woman comes in and she she washes
Jesus feet and Simon says,
well, Jesus must not be who
he says that he is, because if he
if he was,
he would know who this woman is.
And if he knew who this woman was,
he wouldn't let her touch him.
You see, Simon
isn't in his guilt and shame.
He's floating on the top
on a float called comparison.
And his philosophy is pretty simple.
I might have done some things
I'm not proud of,
but as long as I'm better than her,
I'm okay.
Floaters find every reason they can
to believe that their goodness outweighs
their badness.
Let me illustrate this with a story.
This week
I'm sitting at dinner with my family,
which is a little bit
like going to the circus
and my wife Amy and I and our five kids,
and then we finish dinner
and we're clearing our our plates,
going to the kitchen.
And my eight year old son Graham decides
that it would just be hilarious
to take the bottle of Cajun
seasoning off the table
and dump it over his six year
old sister's head.
Now he thought the lid was on.
It turns out it wasn't.
So the seasoning goes all over her
and gets in her eyes
and it's spicy seasoning.
And she's a six year old girl,
so she sees this not just as a painful
experience, but an opportunity to get her
brother in trouble so she loses it.
I mean, she really leans in.
She's saying like, dad, don't worry,
I remember what you look like in my mind.
You know, I'll never see you again. But,
I mean, she's just falling apart.
And then Graham's losing it,
and I'm yelling and Amy's yelling,
and it's just awful.
And so Graham gets into his room
and eventually
I get assigned the responsibility
of going up to his room to talk to him.
And so as I go up the stairs,
I'm working on my monologue.
You may not know this,
but I happen to communicate for a living,
so I'm feeling really good
about the speech I've prepared for my son.
You know, I'm going to say things like,
hey, I know you didn't mean to do this,
but this is why we don't do stupid things,
right?
Because, you know, they didn't design
that bottle of seasoning as a weapon.
So you and I've got this whole speech
prepared.
I open his door, I sit on his bed, I
throw my arm around him, and I give him
the best ever parenting speech.
And he responds.
He looks at me
and he talks for ten minutes,
and all he did for
ten minutes was make excuses.
Well, how did I know the lid wasn't on?
Who, dad?
Who didn't put the lid on?
That's the question you should be asking.
Ten minutes of excuses.
Because in his mind, he had to float
above the surface of his guilt.
He's so terrified of being the kind
of person who dumped
seasoning on the head of his sister.
He's so terrified of what might be waiting
for him in the water that he has
floating on excuses to stay dry.
Tell me you can't identify with that.
So the truth is, you're at church
on a Sunday
at 10:00 in the morning, there's
this really cool thing called brunch.
You might not have heard of it.
If you're at church at 10:00 on a Sunday,
you're probably a floater.
But you see, the thing is about floaters
and downers
is that they seem different,
but both of them are stuck in the pool.
Don't you want to get out?
See, what this story is really about
is how to get out of the pool.
And the woman does that.
Simon does not.
By the way,
he's floating at the end of the story.
It's the woman who hears Jesus say
later on in the story you are forgiven.
It's the woman who gets free will.
That begs the question,
then how do you get free?
And the answer you
you will be really glad to hear
only involves three very simple steps.
Look at what the woman does.
First, she picks up her shame.
When she leaves the house,
she decides to grab her
bottle of perfume, which would have been
a single shot of perfume. Not.
Not the way you and I
might think of a bottle with a spray top.
It was just a little jar
that held one shot of perfume, and,
And a prostitute
would wear it around their neck
so that when you contracted
their services,
they could break the bottle,
pour it over their body and smell good.
She picks up that bottle
when she leaves the house
because she isn't just
going to the dinner party.
She isn't just going to Jesus.
She's going to take her shame.
See if you're a floater.
That's the hardest step.
No more excuses, no more blame
shifting, no more focusing on what
everyone else did.
She picks up her bottle.
Now. No little girl
dreams of being a prostitute.
So you and I know
if that's where this woman is,
she has been sinned against
just as much as she has done the sinning.
You know that, and I know that.
But the step to freedom
isn't talking about what they did.
The step to freedom
is picking up your shame and wearing it
around your neck.
Second, so that you can take it to Jesus,
not just picking it up,
but taking it to Jesus.
She is taking that perfume
for a particular reason.
She gets in that dinner party
and she takes the single
obvious implement of her trade.
The thing that screams I'm a prostitute!
And she breaks it over Jesus.
She takes her shame and puts it on Jesus.
Which is exactly what the message
of Jesus is all about.
Jesus came to die
to get people out of the pool.
This woman pours her perfume on Jesus
so that he can metaphorically,
if not literally, go to the cross, smell
like a prostitute.
Which is appropriate because on the cross,
Jesus becomes the prostitute.
He becomes our shame.
He becomes the person who did that thing,
who told that lie,
who committed that betrayal.
He becomes the addict.
Listen, you have to understand this.
You don't pick up your shame
to drown under it.
You don't pick up your shame
to beat yourself up over it.
You pick up your shame to pour it
out on to Jesus.
So that he can die for it.
And then third, and if you're a drown or
this is the hardest
part, she leaves it with him.
This perfume.
You can't put the jar back together
once it's broken.
You can't put the perfume
back in the bottle.
You see, if you're a drown or the call of
Jesus is to give your affair to him,
let him go to the cross
and be the guy who ruined his family.
Let him go to the cross and be the woman
who couldn't stop drinking.
But he says, when you pour it out on me,
I will pay for it.
And don't you pick it back up again.
Isn't the story he tells about two debtors
whose debts were paid?
You see, we think the way out of
the pool is through
death, just forever, to be marred by
what we've done or by floating around
on the pool of my religion.
Look how good I am.
Look at how much I give.
Look at how much I serve.
I can't really be that bad.
At least I'm not like them.
And Jesus says
floaters and drownings are the same.
They never get out of the pool.
Do you want out?
Then pick it up.
Take it to Jesus
and leave it with him.
How do you know if you're ready for that?
How do you know if you've done that?
How do you know if you really are free,
or if you're just floating around
on the float of religion?
Well, that's my third point.
Not just freedom is possible
and how to get it,
but how do you know you got it?
Jesus tells Simon.
Look at what he says.
Beginning in verse 41.
He says, A certain money
lender has two debtors,
100 500 denarii, and the other 50.
And when they could not pay, cancel
the debt of both.
Now which of them will love him more?
And Simon answered, the one, I suppose,
for whom he canceled the larger debt.
And he said to him,
you have judged rightly.
And 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 wet my feet with her tears
and wiped them with her hair.
You gave me no kiss,
but from the time I came
in, she is not ceased to kiss 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 are many, are forgiven.
You see, Jesus says, it is possible
to be a dinner with God and miss him.
And if it's possible to be at dinner
with God and miss him, don't
you think it's possible to be at church
at 10:00 on a Sunday and miss him?
You see the way to know
that you've experienced freedom.
Jesus says, is affection for Jesus.
And of course, how could it not be?
Were you not drowning under your guilt
and your shame?
And he pulled you out?
Were you not floating around in a pool
telling yourself
that you were better than everybody else,
knowing the whole time
all you were really doing
was staring down at the water?
Were you not trapped?
And he rescued you?
Listen, some of you guys are becoming
Christians, and you don't even realize.
That's how it happens sometimes
all of a sudden
you can't help but join in in the singing.
And you're going, oh my goodness,
I love Jesus. Why?
Because I used to be a downer.
I used to be a floater.
I used to be enslaved to my sin
and my shame and my guilt.
And then I realized he would take it.
I could leave it with him,
and he died for it.
Friends,
the evidence that you have experience
the freedom of God, the evidence
that you're forgiven, the evidence
that eternity is waiting for
you is affection for Jesus.
Which is why it grieves me
that some of us are so cold
and sterile in a worship service.
And men, I'm
mostly talking to you.
You know, we're becoming a church
that challenges men.
You guys have responded
to that incredibly well.
So let me lean into that and say this.
It breaks my heart.
How many
men don't engage in the worship of Jesus
in a church service doesn't break my heart
because I want you to sing more.
That's not my point, and I know.
Listen, I know I'm excitable.
I know that
if you ever came to a football game
I was coaching,
you would see just how excitable
when I chip in on the golf course.
Doesn't happen very often,
but when it does,
I turn my wedge into a pony
and ride it around the golf course.
Okay, I'm excitable. I get that.
You don't have to be like me,
but if I see you doing this
and your mouse not moving on a Sunday,
let me ask you, is that how you are?
Your son's little League game?
Is that how you are?
Fourth quarter of a Browns game.
Because you see a coldness.
Yeah.
Touché.
Coldness
towards Jesus
doesn't make me mad at you.
It makes my heart breaks for you.
Because it just might be indicative
of the fact
that you are still drowning or floating.
Brother.
Sister in Christ, did you come in today
full of affection for Jesus?
Because if not, I'll tell you why.
It's not because you're the worst,
not because you're evil.
It's because you are drowning or floating.
And the only way out is through him.
So three questions to end.
Do you want to be free?
Are you willing to get wet?
And are you ready to sing?
Let me pray for us, father God,
this story would be awesome
if it was just about the prostitute.
It'd be awesome in hard, but awesome
if it was just about Simon because half
the room would appreciate it either way.
But you and your incredible kindness,
love drownings and floaters both.
So you put us both in the story.
God, in your infinite grace
to the power of your Holy Spirit.
Will you reach down even now
and pull us out of the pool?
We don't want to drown.
We don't want to float.
We just want out.
We want to be free.
We want to breathe fresh air.
Do that for us.
In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.