Sunday- Lent 3

It doesn't take someone with a lot of skills of observation to notice that Jesus is often found around women who he shouldn't even be talking to. What may be the most surprising thing about that is not that he hung around them- and them around him- but that the stories actually got into the Bible. Just look what the happened with John McCain last week- it was the appearance of impropriety that was talked about. And Jesus lived on the edge of that impropriety constantly.

He didn't actually have to do anything. Just being with them and letting them be with him was all that needed to happen. And his followers who finally put the book together, who gathered and edited the Gospel stories were brave enough to put them in. In spite of the breaking of cultural mores and turning things upside down, they were open and honest about it and didn't try to spin or hide it.

That tells me a great deal about the early church. It was radical and even revolutionary. It also saw itself as the place where those who were outcast in one way or another in their cultures could come to be accepted and loved. We have runaway slaves, and prostitutes, and tax collectors, and women, and Samaritan women- all right there as part of the church's pre-history in the history of Jesus.

Unfortunately an institution like the church (or any other one, probably) can find it hard to maintain that cutting edge. It becomes an Institution and Institutions have to survive. Things and times and people change. There's not much we can do about that, of course. But perhaps we can do something about ourselves in the midst of those Institutions. We can still read the radical stories and not sentimentalize them or turn them into some nice, safe Sunday School story.

In that is the power of the Gospel- and of salvation.