Someone asked me recently why I have gravitated toward the church as a context for justice work. Is there something different, he asked, about doing social change work from a Christian perspective, or is it just convenient to work within a body of people who are already assembled?

It’s a good question, and it’s one that both the Christian lectionary of recent weeks and my life have been speaking to in surprising and disorienting ways.

As some of you know, I spent the first week of June at Duke Divinity School, taking part in a Christian summer institute on reconciliation. It started on a Monday night, and we began, appropriately enough, in a garden. The folks at Duke had prepared for us a beautiful feast in a cathedralesque room amidst the elegantly manicured Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Everything was beautiful, and nevertheless the event was hard for me. I am not good at the smile and mingle. As all 175 of us circulated among exquisitely bedecked tables and surreally beautiful twilit paths, shaking hands, nodding and clucking at each other’s ministry projects, I started to feel more and more like a fake. What was I doing here? My organization’s reconciliation ministry in West Oakland is barely off the ground, and trying to articulate what we were doing seemed always to imply that we’d done more than we have. Beyond that, I felt personally estranged, unsure how to move beyond the smooth, surface networking encounters to some kind of authentic connection with these people.

This feeling persisted throughout Tuesday, until by mid-afternoon, I was pretty depressed. The dis-ease was exacerbated by the fact that there was no mention of queer concerns in any of the materials or the agenda for the week. How could Christians gather around reconciliation without addressing what I consider to be one of the greatest contemporary breaches in the church?In a clumsy attempt at breaking through to something real, I found myself coming out in a small group in the context of my afternoon seminar, a small group that included a woman from Uganda. It might not have been a bad move, except that our small-group time was nearly over, and we had only four minutes for my share, which meant the session ended with my words hanging in mid-air and me imagining all kinds of horrifying responses in my listeners minds. I felt the deafening silence intensify around me. The woman from Uganda did approach me, but did so in order to assure me that the reports that the lives of gay people in Uganda were at risk were all false because there were no gay people in Uganda. Hearing about the absolute invisibility of gay Ugandans (whom I am quite sure exist) only intensified my sense of isolation and anger. By that evening, I was ready to change my flight and beat a hasty retreat home to the protective bubble of the Bay area.

But something happened to me between the time when I fell asleep Tuesday night and when I finished my morning prayer and meditation early on Wednesday morning. It was as if God said to me, “Being gay is not a sin. You are right about that. But hating yourself as much as you hate yourself right now. Now THAT we need to talk about.”

I realized that being among more conservative Christians had triggered old, old feelings of self-loathing and despair. It was as if I were back in high school before I’d come out, convinced that some unnamable thing, something really profound, was wrong with me, something that meant there was no hope of my ever accessing the sense of real community that those around me seemed to access so easily.

And I realized that the conversations I was having felt superficial to me because I was withholding myself, holding back in order not to risk betraying the shameful secret that I was a lesbian. It wasn’t conscious. I didn’t make an explicit decision to hold back. It was just my default self-protective stance.

Somehow, during the morning break in our plenary session, I found myself approaching the organizers of the institute and asking for permission to make an announcement to the group. Suddenly there I was, standing in front of a group of nearly 200 Christians, many of them socially conservative, and offering myself as a resource to anyone who wanted to talk about Christian reconciliation with gay and lesbian people. “I am an out lesbian,” I said, “and I don’t claim to have Capital-T truth about the issue, but I have wrestled with it, and I’d really love to engage with you.”

Immediately upon sitting down, I experienced the most exquisite sense of relief and freedom. I didn’t know what would happen next. I didn’t know that this decision would lead me into undoubtedly the most profound and intimate conversations I’d ever had with strangers. What I did know is that I was free.

This freedom, this relief and gratitude, I think I glimpse in the gospel passage in which an the unnamed woman bursts into the banquet to kiss and weep over and anoint Jesus’ feet. She has no right to be there. She is, the passage tells us, ” a sinful woman,” someone who is scorned by most of those reclining around the Pharisee’s table. Not only is her over-the-top display of emotion and devotion scandalously out of place in what I imagine was supposed to be a serious academic discussion of Jewish scripture among rabbis, but she herself was considered unclean, and her touching of Jesus would have made him unclean, as well, according to Levitical law. Simon, the Pharisee who is hosting the dinner, is immediately judgmental not just of her but of Jesus for not recognizing that he should be scandalized as well.

What is it that has so emboldened this woman, that has enabled her to break through her own shame and all the norms of her culture to display this kind of love?

Jesus tells a story that gives us the answer.

“A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he cancelled the greater debt.” And Jesus said to him, “You have judged 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 bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing 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 were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

Now, this story is often taken to mean that the woman is forgiven more because she expresses more love. Some Bibles use a caption for this story that reads “A woman who loves much is forgiven.” But this interpretation gets the causality wrong. The woman isn’t forgiven BECAUSE OF her expression of love. Rather, she expresses love because she has been forgiven. It’s not an “if-then” logic — ‘if you repent or do some kind of penance or do enough right, then you will be forgiven.’ It’s a “because-therefore” logic — ‘because you have already been forgiven, therefore you are freed to respond with a changed life, a heart that turns to God.’

The creditor in Jesus’ teaching story -a clear stand-in for God – doesn’t forgive the debts of the two debtors because they do something to deserve it. He forgives the debts because he knows they can’t repay them, and he has compassion on them. He makes up the difference out of his abundance, and the debtor who has been forgiven much is overcome with gratitude. Imagine if your entire credit card debt was forgiven right now. How would you feel?

“I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.” The forgiveness, consciously received, enables this woman to behave differently, to act boldly out of gratitude and joy rather than obey the expectations of a culture that would keep her locked in shame and silence. The woman is an embodiment of the freedom that comes from receiving unearned forgiveness. She is emboldened to cross the cultural divide, even knowing how she will be looked upon there.

A lot of people said to me, at the institute, “Oh, that was so brave!” but it didn’t feel like bravery. All I knew was that I’d been set free – free from captivity to the norms of the institute, free from other people’s opinions, free from my own internalized shame.

The gospel story above is paired in the lectionary with a passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and in this passage, Paul reinforces the message that freedom, salvation, justification comes not from right action or even from right belief, but as a free gift from God in Jesus Christ.

“We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by the faithfulness of Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.”

The Pharisee Simon, the host of the dinner at which this woman appears, is invested in justification through the law. He wants to do it all right. Now, I don’t want to be too hard on him. The Pharisees are kind of the fall guys of the New Testament, and actually MOST of us fall prey to the same errors as they do. We get caught up in trying to do it right. I know that I try to have all the right social justice opinions. I go out of my way not to shop at WalMart or get gas at BP (or Exxon or Shell). As often as I can afford to, I eat organic, fair-trade, free-range, shade-grown everything. And there is nothing wrong with all this. These are good things to do. The problem comes when I think I am thereby justifying myself, proving myself to be blameless in the eyes of God or my equally socially conscious friends. And that justification by right social action, or even more frequent, justification by right opinion, takes the place of being in loving relationship. In progressive Bay-area circles, our version of the Jewish law is the social justice checklist by which we evaluate people’s commitment to the cause and thus their worthiness.

Did that person just say “disabled” instead of “differently abled?”
What kind of car do they drive? That isn’t an SUV, is it?

In what ways do your codes of right action and right belief obstruct loving relationship?

For myself I think about the anger and bitterness I harbored toward the other people at the Reconciliation Institute, those I imagined to be homophobic and closed-minded, the ways I withheld myself from them. Or I think about the ways I distance myself from people whom I judge as having too much nice stuff, or from those who shop at WalMart. I have heard people at my very progressive church say that we shouldn’t be feeding people because it lets the state get away with not providing social services. Well, who bears the burden of that self-righteous point of view? I also see a lot of so-called white antiracist activists who can’t STAND other white people. What does that serve? When we are in this mode we are operating under the illusion that it is possible to get it right, to justify ourselves by right action and right judgment. We are deluded into thinking there is some place of purity.

Over breakfast at our house yesterday, some of us were talking about the catastrophic BP oil spill and how we could possibly respond to it.

Boycott BP? Well, that doesn’t really do much because, as it turns out, the oil supply from all the companies wells is mixed together and then redistributed anyway, so when we fill up at Exxon instead, we’re getting oil from BP wells anyway.

Boycott gas stations all together? Yes, that is a step, but for me not driving seem to end up meaning accepting rides more often from other people, effectively pushing off the responsibility on them, and even if I don’t accept rides in cars, I end up riding buses or BART, or flying, or buying goods that were shipped here by diesel truck, or heating the house, or otherwise depending on the oil supply. There is no place of purity. We are thoroughly embroiled in the very systems we indict. And until we recognize that, we are directing our energies out there without attending to the brokenness in here, and that means we’re going to replicate the brokenness.

I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie A SIMPLE PLAN. The story is both simple and devastating in the way it chronicles the causal chain that is set in motion by a seemingly small breach of integrity. Two brothers and a mutual friend find a large sum of money in a downed plane in the middle of the woods. No one seems to know about the plane. No one seems to be searching for the money, so they decide to keep it. Almost immediately, this decision leads them into a chain of lies, deceptions, and, before long, devastating violence. The movie is so haunting, I think, because it taps into our semi-conscious knowledge that we are each embroiled in some version of that story, some effort to get free of something we have done or been made to think we’ve done, and any attempt we make to get free on our own is going to lead us into greater deception and wrong-doing.

This is the story we encounter 2 Samuel 11. David, who really is about as good as it gets among human beings, this valiant king, loyal in most ways to God, and ancestor of Jesus himself…David gets himself in trouble. Or rather, he gets himself and Bathsheba in trouble. While Bathsheba’s husband Uriah is off at battle with David’s army, David sleeps with Bathsheba and, oops, gets her pregnant. This is going to be a PR nightmare. David tries to extricate himself from this predicament by sending for Uriah and getting him to have sex with Bathsheba so that hopefully he will believe that the child she later bears is his. But alas, Uriah, in a burst of nobility, refuses to go have a great time with his wife while his fellow soldiers are off fighting a battle. In desperation, David arranges to have Uriah die on the battlefield, and then he takes Bathsheba as his own wife. Despite all these machinations, David has to come face to face with what he has done, in this case, through his encounter with the prophet Nathan, who brings David to the confession “I have sinned against the Lord” and the recognition that his wrong action has brought about the death not only of his rival Uriah but of his own son. While some of us may not have committed adultery or directly ordered someone to be killed, the scrambling to cover our tracks is familiar, isn’t it?

So where does this leave us, if there is no purity, if none of us is innocent, nor can we achieve blamelessness through our own actions? Where does salvation then lie? How does deep, transformative social change happen?

Thomas Merton, the great monastic contemplative activist, once wrote:

“A revolution is supposed to be a change that turns everything completely around. But the ideology of political revolution will never change anything except appearances. There will be violence, and power will pass from one party to another, but when the smoke clears and the bodies of all the dead… are underground, the situation will be essentially the same as it was before: there will be a minority of strong men in power exploiting all the others for their own ends. There will be the same greed and cruelty and lust and ambition and avarice and hypocrisy as before.”

So again, where does this leave us?

I think it leaves us with grace, freely given by God to us without any reference to what we deserve. Implicit in the gospel passage is the notion that Jesus forgave both the so-called “sinful woman” and Simon the Pharisee, not because they did something to deserve it, or even because they believed something in particular, but just because it was his nature to love and forgive everyone he encountered. Jesus is an expression of what Rev. Scott Hutchinson calls the eternal “giveness” of God.

Now, this kind of grace is scandalous. It feels like letting people off the hook, and if we’re honest, most of us want them on the hook. We want them to pay. Grace is not at all fair, and we progressives love fairness. It’s one of our buzzwords. We like to think that in the transformed world, everyone will get what they deserve, and our underlying assumption is that we’re pretty good and that therefore we deserve quite a lot. But as I get more honest with myself and others, I’m not so sure.

In the passage from Galatians, Paul says, “We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ,” not by what they deserve, but by the nature of Jesus, son of God. Now, a note about that translation: Those of you who know your Bibles inside and out may know this verse slightly differently. “It is often said that we are justified not by the works of the law but through FAITH IN Jesus Christ.” However, the actual Greek is more accurately translated as not “faith in” but “faithfulness of” Jesus Christ. Do you see how that shifts the power and burden of justification from us and our ability to believe the right things to the very nature of Jesus? The power to change the world is not vested in us fragile earthen vessels, or anything that we can come up with on our own, but in the God who made us and knows us and animates us and loves us beyond measure.

Something very deep in me shifted during my week in North Carolina. During the first few days of the institute, I was angry at the people who believed I was a sinner because I was gay, and I felt that I either needed to leave – get away from them – or convince them that they were wrong. Those are some pretty confining choices. By the grace of God – and I mean that literally – another possibility opened up to me. It became possible for me to offer myself to them in all my brokenness (yes, sinfulness, not because I’m gay but because I fall short in a thousand other ways) and try to love them through our honest conversations with each other. Suddenly it seemed clear to me that I didn’t have to argue with them about my sinfulness, because regardless of whether I was a sinner as a lesbian or they were sinners as homophobes, Jesus would have eaten with any of us anyway. What I had to do was to be WITH them and be honest. I think this is what my former pastor, Rev. Lynice Pinkard, meant when she would say to people who were not Christian, “I don’t care so much what you believe. I care what you experience.” I don’t know what effect our talks had, and I may never know, but I know I loved those people.

Now, loving them doesn’t mean that I didn’t make them uncomfortable. Loving people doesn’t mean lying to them to preserve their comfort. Jesus doesn’t mince words in this passage. He’s quite clear about what Simon didn’t do. He’s not trying to spare him the sting of recognition. And in North Carolina, I came out, and I told them I didn’t think homosexuality was a sin, but I also told them I didn’t need them to agree with me, and I hope I conveyed with my actions and words that my regard for them was not contingent upon their agreement with me.

Also, I want to be clear that this was not something that I, Nichola, cooked up on my own, or that I should be congratulated for. I really, really, really didn’t do it. I couldn’t have. It is something that God did in me as I meditated on God’s unwavering love for me in spite of my shortcomings. It was for me not so much a matter of believing in Christ as believing INTO Christ. Paul said, later in Galatians, “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” He gave himself for me! What a gift! How can I keep from singing?! How can I not, like the woman in today’s passage, fall to my knees in gratitude? How can I not respond by showering the nearest person with love?

What Jesus did was to break, finally, the unrelenting mimetic cycle of violence, the pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing by which one’s own well-being requires the brutal sacrifice of someone else. My hope and prayer is that Jesus can do that in and through me, that I can release people from the captivity in which I hold them so that they AND I can be released into real, authentic life. I think that unless we get the love of God deep into our bones, we are going to be dangerous as activists, because we are still going to continue demanding a sacrifice. We may even try to extract it ourselves. But another alternative is available, an alternative that emerges out of the wellspring of God’s unending love. All that is required of me is that I surrender to that.

With this in mind, I find myself wondering what it would be like to surrender with regard to this horrifying oil spill. What would happen if I let myself really feel my complicity in that tragedy, even as I also held a consciousness of God’s absolute forgiveness and love for us, even now, in the midst of what we have done? What if filling up the gas tank became a time of lament, a time when I actually let myself feel those pelicans’ struggle for life? What if I really allowed the grief to well up in me? I don’t know what would happen, but I imagine what it would be like if some of us spotted each other weeping at the gas pump, and if then maybe we got to talking and crying together, and then maybe out of our grief, we got an idea of something we could do together….The possibility is beyond my imagination but I don’t think it’s beyond God’s.

Maybe that’s what it would mean to be “sinners united for justice.”