I Don’t Know How To Love Him John WM, Buchanan
Luke ¥:36-50 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 22, L977? Columbus, Ohio

The Churches which stand in the Reformed Tradition, among them the
Presbyterians, it is now obvious, have been caught unprepared by the dominant
religious motif of our generation - the rennaisance of personal spirituality: a
phenomenon perhaps best described by the idiom, "Born Again Christianity",

The Zenith of this amazing rennaisance has been approached in the
surfacing of self described "born again Christians" in the ranks of our culture's
celebrity elite: entertainers - Pat Boone, Anita Bryant: athletes ~- too numerous to
name but clustered around a very vigorous organization called the Fellowship of
Christian Athletes: politicians - former Senator Hughes, former Presidential alde,
Charles Colson, The zenith was achieved, however, in the election to the Presidency
of Jimmy Carter, a devout southern Baptist who uses the vocabulary of the movement,
attends church regularly and even teaches a Bible Class. It docs not appear that
the President's conversion experience was quite as dramatic and cathartic as it has
been portrayed: in fact it seems to have been preceeded by a great deal of thought,
study and discipline, Mr Carter sounds at times like a Presbyterian which, I am
tempted to say, is what the Presidency ought to do for one - but I won't, ‘The fact
remains that his personal religion, which is no one's business but his own, became
everyone's business, and that it was perceived generally as the "born again" variety.
Political analysts thought it would be detrimental, Cultural analysts regard his
election as a dramatic break-through on a par with the election of the first Roman
Catholic President in 1960, What it signals is that "mainline religion" is no
longer mainline: that normative American religion is more conservative theologically,
and more personal in focus than Presbyterianism, Methodism, Episcopalianism, And if
you doubt that hypothesis, consider the following statistics published in the
Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches and rehearsed in U.5,News and World Report
recently, In the past decade some churches have slipped: United Methodist member-
ship is down 10%: Episcopal, 15%: our United Presbyterian constituency is down LO%,
in the same period of time, other churches have grown: Southern Baptists are up 18%,
Assemblies of God 37%, Seventh Day Adventists 34%,

Now those statistics are far more complex than they scem. I resist
vigorously the nearly automatic business conclusion that churches that grow must be
doing the right things and churches that decline must be doing the wrong things, I
hold out for the possibility, at least, that the reverse may be true at certain
places and times in history: that churches may be doing all the right things and for
that reason be declining, The New Testament, after all, is not a sales manual:

Jesus was crucified for doing all the right things, and as a friend observed to me
recently, "a church that doesn't get itself crucified occasionally has to ask whether
it is really a part of the Body of Christe."

Nevertheless, it is my observation that Churches in the Reformed tradi-
tion have been caught unprepared to deal with a radical resurgence of the kind of
spirituality characterized by conversion and rebirth. And I repard it as a matter
of highest priority that we begin to do just that,

We react negatively to extremism, Part of the reagon we are Presbyter~
ians, I suppose, is that we are not on the extremities or fringes of anything, Our
heritage, which is deeply engrained is to value reason over emotion; to regard
personal religion as a process of growing - a becoming. Thealopically, our most
beautiful music is a "grace note" which holds that salvation is a gift of God in

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Jesus Christ: that there 1s nothing further that needs to be done, beyond what
happened on the cross: that to be saved is to know that we are Loved by God,
without condition,

In this series of sermons we have focused on the storias of people in
the New Testament who became followers of Jesus Christ, attempting to allow them to
inform us. We began with Simon Peter whose rebirth, I suggested, occurred when he
sensed the miracle of Christ's love which remained constant in spite of Peter's
denials, Last Sunday we looked at Nicodemus, an old man, a respected Pharisee and
member of the Sanhedrin, with whom Jesus talked about rebirth,

This morning I wish to hold up another story, The subject is Mary
Magdalene, Tf have borrowed the title for this sermon from her song in the Rock
Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, It seemed to describe the dilemma in which we find
ourselves: I Don't Know How To Love Him.

There are no fewer than six Marys mentioned in the Gospel records, Some
of them do very similiar things in different Gospels and there has always been a
lingering suspicion among students of the New Testament that at least several of the
six are one and the same, There is also a lingering tradition that Mary Magdalene
may have been the nameless prostitute whose story was told in the New Testament
Lesson this morning,

What we do know is this. Mary Magdalene was one of several women who
became a part of the small entouraze which followed Jesus around Galilee over a
period of three years, At some point Jesus had healed her of an ailment described
as "casting out seven devils"; an idiom for severe mental or emotional disorder,
After that she became, apparently, a very devoted follower, She was among the
company which traveled to Jerusalem for Passover, She was there through the climatic
events of that week and was conspicuously present at the crucifixion, She came to
the tomb early in the morning on the first day of the week: she reported the fact
of the empty tomb to the others, and shortly thereafter, alone in the garden, became
the first person to experience the greatest truth of Christian faith - the reality
of the resurrection,

Those are rather impressive credentials but there is much more that we
don't know. Who was she? Where did she come from? What, exactly, was the nature
of her illness?

For the purpose of this sermon I am going to engage in some speculation,
What follows is not New Testament scholarship, but a story constructed on the basis
of the few things we know about her and freely employing Literary license, It is
not, therefore, a true story but it may be a helpful one.

Her name tells us chat she was from Magdala, a smail town on the western
shore of the Sea of Galilee. Archcologists and historians tell us that Magdala was
a very lively place, It was primarily a Gentile town; the artifacts discovered at
the site are mostly pagan. Magdala was the hub of a lot of commercial activity:
farming, fishing, fish curing, trading and ship building, The wealth of the city is
documented by a curious anecdote: when the Romans collected taxes, the money was
transported from Magdala by wagon, rather than horseback or donkey. Atl this con-
spired to make Magdala a wide-open town with a reputation for the best and most
available prostitutes in the area, When Magdala was destroyed the Rabbis recorded
their opinion that the tragedy was a result of the city's notorious immorality.

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So let us speculate: a little girl growing up in a rich, pagan, lively
city with a flourishing prostitution industry: a little girl who was a part of a
despised and curious minority, under the thumb of Roman power and arrogance, Let
us speculate that a young Mary assessed the whole situation and concluded that
prostitution was an alternative which promised financial reward, Nothing, however,
was as abhorent to the Jewish community. A prostitute paid a dear price indeed;
total rejection by her family, her people, her synagogue. She was nothing, In fact
they may have said that she had a demon: she was sick: out of her mind. How else
could she do what she was doing? In fact, she must have had seven demons!

But one day, perhaps, Mary encountered another man, out of Nazareth,
thirtyish. He did not want what all the others wanted, He didn't ask for anything
and at first she was frightened. He seemed simply to see her as a person, a Woman,

a whole human being, not an availabie plaything, and not a wretched outcast, Suddenly
she felt worse about herself and, at the same time, better about herself than she had
ever felt before, Perhaps she found that she could talk with him, She didn't have
to tell him that she was confused: that she felt guilty and angry and ashamed and
cynical, She didn't have to teli him that she was a sinner, Obviously, he knew that
and it had not made a difference. Somehow he could get by all that and accept her as
a person of worth and dignity and value.

Suddenly she - Mary - mattered to someone. And suddenly, I propose, her
condition was healed by the unconditional love: the demons of self-hatred and guilt
and cynicism were banished by the strong love of this man, When he Left and her
professional activity needed to resume, she couldn't do it. She was a new person
now: the old Life had to be put behind her immediately and decisively. But what does
a reformed prostitute do in Magdala? Mary decided quickly. She packed her belong-
ings: her clothing which was far too vulgar, but all she had: even the semi-precious
perfume, and set out to find him.

She followed into Galilee and caught up with him at the home of a
respected Pharisee, of all places; at a dinner party. When she saw him again all the
guilt and self-recrimination, the years of pent up self-loathing came to the sur-
face: how to thank him? How to Love him? Bursting into tears she threw herself at
his feet and took that symbol of all that was past, the alabaster jar of perfume,
and emptied it over them,

The very proper dinner host was horrified, Trying to be gracious, per-
haps, he suggested that Jesus didn't know what this woman was, The significance of
what she had done, however, was clear to him,

So she followed him through Galilee, to Jerusalem, right up to the foot
of his cross, And when he died she kept on following to the tomb; and her following
confirmed what he had done for her, He was not dead: he was still with her: the
change in her was real, She was reborn: healed, forgiven and given her life back,
Mary Magdalene, or the nameless woman in Luke 7 - whichever - was born again, in
the Love of Jesus Christ.

One of the most telling critiques of Christianity is that it seems, at
times, to require its adherents to feel bad about themselves, In the hands of the
Shurch the Gospel becomes, at times, very bad news rather than good news, People
already, we axe told, feel bad: Christianity often seems to confirm their worst
suspicions about their own worth and value. Typically, religion vould have

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‘required a full disclosure from the woman in Luke 7. She would have to make a
full confession: she would have to turn around, prove herself by living the moral
life: then and only then would religion allow her to be at peace with herself,

Transactional analysis, or T,A, as it is known, became immensely popular
because it identified the lack of self-esteem as a major emotional problem for many
people, We play games all our lives, the psychiatrists tell us, trying to prove
that we are worth something, that we are loveable, that we are OK, to use the T.A,
vocabulary, And religion, tragically, sometimes seems to be the major culprit in
reinforcing the whole system,

The tragedy is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is realistic about the
human condition, but not morbid about it, In fact, as we contemplate that forlorn
woman, kneeling at the feet of our Lord, we must conclude that the basic thing the
Gospel has to say is good, It is really good news, It is that God loves you - and
understands you and accepts you as you are,

It is no limp humanism that condones any variety of human behavior, Jesus
did net approve of the woman's profession, That should not even need saying, What He
did not do was insist that she surface ail her bad feelings: He did not force her to
repent as a condition of His forgiveness and acceptance. He simply accepted her and
that miracle prompted her penitence, That acceptance, extended before she did a
thing or said a word was the power that healed her and allowed her to do something
ehe had not done before - to love; to show her love, to weep tears of Love,

We don't know how to love anyone until we feel good about ourselves, It
is that simple - and it is that which the Gospel of Jesus Christ addresses in each
of us,

The late Paul Tillich put it this way: "Being forgiven and being able to
accept oneself are one and the same thing.,.in the midst of our futile attempts to
make ourselves worthy,.,we are suddenly grasped by the certainty that we are for-
given and the fires of love begin to burn, That is the greatest experience anyone
can have, It may not happen often, but when it does happen, it decides and trans-
forms everything,” (The New Being, p.12).

That, I propose, is what happened to Mary Magdalene, She was grasped
by the certainty of forgiveness and the fire of love began to burn, That is what
we presume weekly when we engage in an act of corporate confession, We confess
because we know God loves and accepts us. We confess because the news is good -
really good, We can love one another because we are loved by God, We are free to
love - wives, husbands, parents, children, friends, strangers - because we are
loved, We are free to give the sift of grace to one another,

When it happens, Tillich observed, it decides and transforms every~
thing. It opens up new life, It is what is called being born again.
Amen.

Our Father, help us ~ in the love of Christ ~ to accept ourselves.

Help us really to hear the good news of Your love, And then help us to love,
honestly, unconditionally: through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,