Going Public - Alabaster Jar - Week 3

Big Idea: Hearts that honor Jesus are filled with hope

Good evening ladies and gentlemen of the the internet!

My name is Charlie Kae and I’m the lead pastor at Grace Empire in Wesley Chapel, Florida and I would like to welcome everyone to Grace Empire online.

Our vision is help hurt people restore, revitalize, and refresh through a relationship with Jesus X.

Everyone is welcome at Grace Empire, but if you were to ask us what our focus is, we started Grace Empire to reach the non-affiliated, gnostics, and non-believers. If you or someone you know has been hurt by religion or has been burned out by doing church, Grace Empire fits a unique role for those that are looking to reengage their faith or find an accepting community.

As a church, we try to keep Jesus at the center of everything we do, so we are praying that you encounter and experience our living God tonight.

We love interaction. So feel free to comment, ask questions, and ask for prayer while you’re watching and the admins will address them ASAP. If you have a prayer that is more personal in nature, you can email us at [e-mail] and our prayer team will begin praying for you immediately.

But before we continue, our online disclaimer.

Grace Empire Online focus on giving you sermons - so without a doubt - this is an incomplete version of church.

As we move forward with this online church thing, I wanted to urge you and remind you that online church should never replace the community you get from your local church.

We love and are so very honored that you tuned in with us today and by no means am I saying this to guilt trip you, hurt you or make you feel inadequate in anyway. We know everyone is on a different journey with God and the fact that some of you are watching is a huge step and I applaud you for that.

At Grace Empire, our goal is to keep Jesus at the center of everything we do and a big part of that is understanding our place within the church. It’s not just that you need people (which you do); but it’s that people need you.

But as I said, the online church is an incomplete version of what God intended the church to be. The local church also gives you a place to

Worship / Praise / Sing

Met with other believers in Fellowship and discipleship

To serve our community through social action

Fulfill the Sacraments of the church - Which for us is baptism and communion.

And lastly, gives our tithes and offering

At GXE we teach that we give to give, not give to get. We give our tithes and offerings because we are thankful to God for providing for our needs. It is also to acknowledge that we live, work, and are sustained because He allows us to be. And because of the advancements in technology giving is an easy one.

You can give online through our website www.graceempire.com, or via text by texting the words GraceEmpire to the number 77977 and then follow the link texted to you.

You can either do that now, or at the end of the message.

Alright with all that out the way…lets get to Jesus shall we?

Pray

We are in week 3 of our 5 week Easter series titled Going Public where we look through the gospels and unpack people that were living in obscurity, forgotten or outcasted by society, hiding from fear, or hidden from view. We will learn their stories, see how they were “hiding” and how encountering Jesus would change their status from hiding to hollering to hoping.

In week one we spoke about Blind Bartimaeus and how he had cast aside a life with no hope to a life filled with hope. What hope is there for a man blind from birth? There is none, but when confronted by Jesus, Bartimaeus worked up enough boldness and courage and asked for the implausible, to recieve his sight.

In week two, Pastor Jean Luc spoke about the woman with the flow of blood and how desperation can be used like a tool, like a catalyst to bring about hope. It is the desperate, the ones at the end of their rope that are willing to try anything. Desperation is more than a state of being, it can be a spiritual discipline in our lives.

And today we are talking about one of my favorite stories in the New Testament, the sinful woman and the alabaster jar.

There is a lot to unpack here so let’s get started. We are reading from Luke 7:36-50.

This week we talk about honor. Honor is such a complicated concept because we don’t live in a culture of honor. I do not want to get into a lofty definition of honor for this sermon; I would like to keep things simple. Honor is often defined as high respect, and great esteem.

There is a phrase, I want you to think about. You honor me. Sometimes it said like this, you honor us with your presence. What does that mean? It means you recognize who that person is, someone of worth, someone of importance, and you are stoked that they are with you.

That is the vein in which I want to tap into today. Knowing who Jesus is, will help you honor him, and honoring him will help you go public. It will help you go from hiding, to hollering, to hoping in and through Jesus.

So lets get started.

Luke 7:36–43 NIV84

36 Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. 37 When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, 38 and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. 39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.” 40 Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to tell you.” “Tell me, teacher,” he said. 41 “Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?” 43 Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled.” “You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.

There is a lot going on here and we have to break it down systematically or we are going to miss some key points. The three people involved in this story is Jesus, Simon the Pharisee, and the sinful woman.

So lets talk about Jesus. We believe here at GXE that Jesus is the son of God, and that he came to save all humanity. Matter of fact, Jesus is the center of all that we do. Thats why we are called G-X-E. X is the greek shorthand for Christ - thats why we call it Xmas. So X is at the center of Grace Empire. ohhhh…clever right?

Jesus has begun doing ministry all over Judea. He is becoming infamous for His authoritative teaching and his ability to heal, cast out demons, do miracles, and even bring the dead to life. Wherever he goes, he is beginning to draw a crowd. All people that are in desperation, or those that are at the end of their rope, are flocking toward him. He is being followed and surrounded by mobs of people wherever he goes.

Next up is Simon the Pharisee.

Simon is a Pharisee and Pharisees are religious leaders at the time of the New Testament…think of them as the pastors of the New Testament, but generally they are the villains when referenced in the New Testament and thats because Jesus viewed many (not all) pharisee’s as hypocrites. Their love for authority and prominence seemed to out weigh their love for the people they were tasked to shepherd. Their hearts had grown cold to the essence - the substance - of God’s word. Pharisees studied Scripture, memorized it, and tried to avoid “sinning” but lost the heart of what God was about. They embodied what most people today hate about religion.

Let’s continue.

The third person in this story is the sinful woman. Here are a couple of notable facts about her. We know that she’s a sinful woman because Simon claims her to be. Thats what she’s renown for. By her actions, as you just read, we know something is going on beneath the surface. We don't know what she’s done to be labeled a sinful woman, but we do know that to be considered a sinful woman would make you ceremonially unclean…

So a little bit of New Testament history. For some this will be a good refresher.

in Jewish culture, the ordinary state of being was “cleanliness or holiness.” This is what you wanted to be or wanted to stay. Being clean was one of the most important aspects of Jewish culture. Unfortunately, a person or object could contract ritual “uncleanness” in a variety of ways: by skin diseases, discharges of bodily fluids (don’t think too hard about that cause it’s just gross), touching something dead (Num 5:2), or eating unclean foods (Lev 11; Deut 14).

An unclean person in general had to avoid things considered holy and take steps to return to a state of cleanliness. Becoming unclean or being unclean, placed a person in a "dangerous" condition under threat of divine retribution and even death ( Lev 15:31 ) under the wrong circumstances.

Purification always involved a waiting period - until evening for minor cases and up to eighty days in major cases. Cleansing could involve ritual washings, atoning sacrifices, and priestly rituals. "Unclean" objects required purification depending on the material: by water (wood, cloth, hide, sackcloth), by fire (metals), or were destroyed (clay pots, ovens), ( Lev 11:32-35 ; Num 31:21-23 ).

I say all this to say, to be in a state of cleanliness and then become unclean is a major pain in the butt. Strangely we all get this now. To come into contact with someone that has been verified with the Coronavirus, leaves us contaminated - it is like we are new unclean - and must enter a waiting period of 14 / 10 days in order for us to be released from quarantine. That waiting period makes us clean.

But for the NT Jewish community, this was more dire. Imagine having to put your whole life on hold because someone bumped into you. You had to go off and be by yourself for a whole day…or even up to 80! Thats like being quarantined for 3 months! Some of you extroverts in the room would rather skydive without a parachute than do that.

So an unclean person, especially those that could not get ritually “clean,” would have to walk around whenever they were in the vicinity of people and screaming “unclean, unclean” every where they went. That made them very unpopular at parties. An unclean person was a social pariah, an outcast, which made the sinful woman, a stray of society. This is the sinful woman at her most hidden. She may not be in hiding by choice, but she is definitely made invisible, unworthy, by those around her.

You don’t have to be in quarantine to be able to identify with the woman. Feeling left out is something most of us have gone through. You may have experienced this at work, or at your schools. You may have experienced this in your family or among relatives. The feelings of being left out or not worthy tend to raise it’s ugly head when you are around the people whom you crave attention from. It is these people that often give you value. For some, it’s like we are perpetually standing in the kickball line, knowing we will always be picked last. Everyday is a version of that event. For others, the feeling of isolation, the emotion of exile, is as close as a mother. It is like they were born with it. It is equally their oldest friend and most diabolical thief.

Being hidden is an age old problem that cares not about who you are or who your parents were. It doesn’t care how much money you have or how beautiful you look. Perfect people feel invisible all the time. It’s why we have tragic stories of nearly perfect celebrities taking their lives. Usually in a hotel room, alone, with nothing but their demons to wrestle with. Even if your life looks perfect on the outside, you may struggle with feeling hidden on the inside. Trust me, you are not alone in that feeling.

So now that you know who the woman is and her state of being, the fact that she is touching Jesus is a major problem. For a Jewish man to let an unclean woman touch her would make him unclean. Also the woman is choosing to come before Jesus even though she knows she shouldn’t be.

There are quite a few stories of desperate people that break the status quo to come to Jesus in the Bible, but these stories exist today. Ask around. Talk to the members in our churches and ask them to tell you why they follow Jesus. You will find many people pursued Jesus despite pressure from those around them.

We all have social expectations. We all have things that we want to do but don’t do because of what people might think. What our friends might think. What our families might think. And I think faith can be one of those things. This woman had a choice...continue living in her situation or start hollering to get out. Like Blind Bartimaues and the Woman with the Flow of Blood, her hollering moment was an action that defying expectations. There was a way she was supposed to behave. There was a social status quo she was to follow. But following that status quo would not change her hidden status. In our for her to go from hiding to hoping, she had to begin hollering. And for her, that was meeting Jesus.

You see she does do something about it. She does something costly, awkward, and taboo. She appears at the house of this Pharisee.

Have you ever wondered how she physically did what she did? I mean they were eating in a home. Did she break in? Did she put on a waiters outfit and slip in through the kitchen?

Well back in the time of the NT, prominent meals like this were considered public affairs. These meals were held in an open part of their home, sort of like a patio. People could come and watch, listen, and learn from the conversations of the diners. Also, I should mention that eating a meal during 1st century Christianity is very different than going to Olive Garden today.

First, the table they dined at was shaped like a big U, with the diners reclining on the outside. They would lay on their sides and eat lounging around, head toward the table and feet away from the table. Dinner would be for a couple of hours, which sounds totally legit to me. Find me a trendy spot that does dinners like this and I will be there with clean socks on.

Now that you have a visual of how they are eating, it makes more sense how the woman gets to his feet. It’s not like she muscles her way through all these harry legs to get under the table. She could go right up to Jesus, which would have naturally been his feet. Then she begins crying on his feet, wiping her tears with her hair, kisses them, and pours perfume on them. It’s a visual that makes you go hmmm.

This all seems strange until you get to v44

Luke 7:44–46 NIV84

44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.

See the way Jesus was treated by his host Simon, says a lot. Simon was supposed to do a couple of things which was customary as the host in this culture.

First it was customary to greet your guest with a kiss to the cheek, similar to Spain, France, and the Middle East. It was a way of displaying love, sincere affection, and friendship. So the fact that Simon doesn’t do that, tells you how he feels about Jesus.

Second, as the host, Simon should have provided a water basin to wash their feet upon entering. As you can imagine, feet were incredibly nasty due to dirt, feces, and other undesirables on the road. It’s like running around a farm with your chacos on. Your feet are going to get nasty yo. Feet washing was a duty given to the lowest slave in the house, if the owner was wealthy enough to have slaves. It was customary for the host to provide a water basin as an act of hospitality.

Lastly, the host would often provide oil for anointing. The anointing of oil, usually on the head, was for a few things...to mask any smell because it is not like people could bath as regularly as they do now, for medicinal purposes (it’s like the original essential oils - lavender chamomile oil anyone?), and it was a sign of honor for the guest. It would be like putting out the good China out when the guests come over; no paper plates over here.

So the fact that Simon doesn’t do these say that he doesn’t see Jesis as a friend, someone with caring for, and someone worth honoring.

But the woman does.

Check this. The Scriptures do not tell us when the woman arrived. It could have been at the start, in the middle or towards the end of dinner. She could have been present the whole time and watched Jesus be neglected in these ways and maybe it struck a cord in her. Maybe she could see the parallels in her own life. Friend to no one, a social misfit, an outcast, someone unworthy of touching, and certainly unworthy of anointing. Or maybe it’s just a beautiful coincidence.

Whatever the case, she kneels down and begins to weep. And her tears begin to wash the dirt, grim, and filth off of Jesus feet, and because there is no towel, she wipes his feet with her hair.

Then she kisses them out of humility and reverence.

Then the oil. The infamous alabaster jar of oil. An alabaster jar of oil was incredibly costly, it is said that it would cost a year’s worth of wages, around 20k today. And she felt Jesus was worthy enough, honorable enough, to pour it all out on his feet.

And as she’s doing this awkward, yet beautiful act…what does the Pharisee say,

Luke 7:39 NIV84

39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”

Simon the Pharisee has already made a decision about Jesus, the woman, and himself. He think he’s better than Jesus. Jesus should have known better!

And the woman? Who cares what she’s doing or what she’s been through. Who cares that she’s weeping at Jesus feet? This guy as zero compassion for her. All he sees is a sinner.

Look, I know its easy to villainize and vilify the pharisee when you see him as a character in a story. But Simon was a real person with real feelings and there are things that he does here that should reminds us of ourselves.

Haven’t we all made judgements on people? Haven’t we all viewed people like objects instead of looking for their story. I mean every time someone cuts us off in traffic we’ve already made a decision that that person deserves to be sent to the hell, am I right? And haven’t we at some point, closed off our hearts to something or someone for reasons we want to justify? And haven’t we at some point, pointed our fingers and shook our fists at God? As if we could do His work better than He can.

This story doesn’t just have one person that is hidden, but two. Both the sinful woman and Simon are hidden, it’s just that Simon doesn’t know it. His hope is in believing he is better, more righteous than, others. He basis his hopeful status by comparing himself to others. Oh how lost he is! If we think our standing with God is good based on the fact that we are not as bad as that guy or gal over there, we too have placed our hopes in utter tragedy.

Cause it’s not our goodness but Christ’s goodness that saves us.

Luke 7:47–50 NIV84

47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.” 48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” 49 The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” 50 Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

The people wonder who is this who even forgives sins? He’s the one that those who are hidden, can hope in. As we approach Easter, I am praying that we all have stories of being hidden, to hollering, to hoping. I am praying that those of us that feel completely broken and lost, those that feel unworthy and forgotten, would do something to change their status quo, but that something isn’t based on our talents or merits, it’s merely choosing desperation, utilizing our desperate status, and crying out to Jesus.

It is when we follow the example of the sinful woman. When we choose honor over shame. When we choose to honor Jesus by recognizing who he is. Jesus isn’t just a good teacher. Jesus isn’t just a good idea. Jesus isn’t just something we do on the weekend. In Jesus is life. In Jesus is freedom. In Jesus is hope.

Hearts that honor Jesus are filled with hope.

I know how scary this is for some of you. For some, you have to suspend your disbelief. For others, you have to fight the feeling of awkwardness. You feel stupid for praying or for stepping out in faith. Doing something like this makes your hands sweat and your mouth go dry. I know it’s scary, but that’s why desperation can be a good thing. It’s the desperate that are willing to try anything. Give it a shot. What do you have to lose? A moment of feeling stupid? A moment of internal struggle? I urge you to go from hiding to hollering and I promise, hope is on the other side. A living Jesus is on the other side. A God that responds is on the other side. Love is on the other side.

As we draw today to a close, we all want to be like the woman, but I think a lot of the time we can act like the Pharisee. I know I do. But I don’t want too, because I want to walk out of her with more joy in my life. I want to walk out of here with more freedom in my life. I want to walk out of here with the same forgiveness and the same promise that Jesus gives to the woman.

”your sins are forgiven, your faith has saved you, go in peace.”