St. Mary's Episcopal Church

Pentecost: Sheep, Pharisees, rocks and sand (Luke 7. 36-50)
A children's sermon for our Vacation Bible School Celebration

Sing with me:
I just want to be a sheep baa baa
I just want to be a sheep baa baa
I pray the Lord my soul to keep I just want to be a sheep baa baa.
Don't want to be a Pharisee……….

Wait a minute! What's a Pharisee?
In our song we sing, because they're no fair, you see.
But I have to tell you-that's not exactly true.
Pharisees as a group were people who loved God and wanted to be very, very close to God.
So they carefully kept ever rule and law that God had given and made some of their own as well.
Where they got into trouble was that they thought that if they could keep all of God's rules and laws, they would be close to God-holy
Many, many Pharisees were very good and holy people.
We'd like to be like that, wouldn't we?
But in our song we sing about a Pharisee who was no fair you see-that means, I think, that the Pharisee who tried to be close to God by keeping all the rules got in trouble when he judged how well other people were keeping God's rules or not.
Those Pharisees who judged others would then be no fair, you see.
Simon in our gospel today was a Pharisee.
He invited Jesus to his home for dinner, and Jesus was delighted to have that time with Simon.
But Simon, who was so busy all the time trying to remember every one of God's laws and keep them so that he could be closer than close to God, forgot to keep one of the easiest rules to keep.
It was called a rule of hospitality.
When I was a little girl, every summer my family would go to Lake Texoma with friends.
We'd play in the lake all day, and my skin is very fair so no matter how much sun screen I wore, I'd get sunburned.
When I walked up hill to our friends' lake house, before I went inside my mother would hose all the dirt off from the lake water and the walk up the dirt path.
Then she'd put Noxzema on my sunburn and give me a kiss.
Does anyone do that for you?
This is what hosts were expected to do when a guest came to their home in Jesus' day.
Wash off the guests' hands and feet, put oil on their sun baked skin and hair, and give them a kiss of welcome.
If the host didn't do it, then the host was to make sure that a servant did it for him.
But for whatever reason, Simon, a man who loved God and wanted to be holy, tried so hard to keep every rule and law that he forgot to offer hospitality to Jesus.
Meanwhile, a woman from the street comes in who has done lots and lots of sinning.
We aren't told what she's done wrong. We don't know her name. We don't know anything about her except that she enters Simon's house uninvited, a very brave thing to do, and washes Jesus' dirty feet with her tears, and pours what may have been her most precious treasure, oil, on his weary feet, and kisses him over and over.
All Simon can see is that this woman who had already sinned had done something wrong one more time.
But here's one thing that I love about Jesus:
Jesus always looks at everyone and everything through God's eyes.
The person Jesus sees when Jesus sees the woman is not someone who had done wrong.
The person Jesus sees at Simon's house is a woman showing how very, very much she loves Jesus.
Which Simon forgot to do.
Even though Simon had almost never done anything wrong, that is sinned, and the woman had done lots and lots and lots of things wrong, Jesus regarded not Simon's and the woman's sin but their love.
By what she did, the woman showed more love than Simon.
It's really hard to look at people like Jesus does.
At Vacation Bible School we learned an important Bible verse.
Can you say it with me?
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
And love your neighbor as yourself. Luke 10. 27

Jesus saw that by the way that the woman treated Jesus, she loved God with all her heart and soul and mind and strength and her neighbor, who was Jesus, as herself.
Maybe even loved Jesus a little more than she loved her self.
The very most important thing for us to do for Jesus is to love.
When we do our best to love like Jesus loves, then every thing else we do seems to eventually turn out all right.
You heard another Bible story this week about two men who each built a house.
One man built his house on what? Rock
The other built his house on what? Sand.
What happened when the really really bad storm came?
The man who had taken time to build his house on hard rock, his house withstood the storm.
But the man who had taken the easier way and built his hand on only sand, when the storm came, what happened to his house? It fell down.
I have something for you today.
A rock.
This is a whole basket of rocks that I gathered Friday during Vacation Bible School from the pile of rocks we are using to build our meditation path.
Where is the meditation path?
It's a curvy walkway out under the trees in the corner of our property by the big cross and the round, brick outdoor worship space.
We've been working for at least a year to get the path built.
It's hard work and takes lots and lots of hands to build it.
Now I want to tell you a secret about the meditation path and why it's called a meditation path.
Do you know what a labyrinth is?
It's a special kind of walk with twists and turns but a path that if you keep following the path you always get to the center, and then if you follow that path back the way your came, you always get right back out.
I've always wanted St. Mary's to have a labyrinth.
But when the people designed our prayer garden back under the trees, they had an even better idea.
They discovered if they took all the twists and turns of the labyrinth and opened them up that the path looked like Jesus with open praying hands.
Isn't that cool?
So as we walk on the curvy path we meditate by praying and thinking about whatever Jesus shows us-like how Jesus always holds holds us and the whole world in his loving hands.
Which is why it's called a meditation path. A place to ponder, pray, and think.
I have a rock for each of us to remind us of how we can choose to look at how bad people are or how much Jesus loves them and so we do, too.
To remind us that Jesus told us to build our lives on the rocks of his love and not the sand of judgment.
Now a rock can be a dangerous thing.
It can be used as a weapon and hurt people.
But a rock can also be used to build a meditation path.
A place for people to walk and to think about Jesus and Jesus' love and how we can walk more and more in that love.
When you leave worship today, please take a rock.
You can choose what you do with this rock.
But I have a suggestion.
If you want to remember to love God and each other and to build that love by walking in God's love and in prayers, after church take your rock and put it on our meditation path.
Thank God for loving us.
Pray that God will help us love God and love each other. AMEN
For more about labyrinths, go to: www.veriditas.net/about/labyrinths.html