Willie is a broken man, worn down by thirty four years on the road, worn down by his illusions, rationalizations and false faith in the world’s affections. His sons see him faltering and feel betrayed, not yet willing to face their own shortcomings. Linda, speaking to her sons, as the New York Times drama critic Ben Brantley wrote of his review of the 1999 reprise of the play first played on Broadway fifty years earlier, Elizabeth Franz playing Linda spoke “…with rage that seems shaped by both horrified compassion and selfish fear.”

“I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”

Arthur Miller, through Linda Loman, is calling for what Jesus was a genius in providing, attention, extravagant attention to the blessed light of being in every person. This genius is powerfully illustrated in the story told in this morning’s gospel reading.

This is a story with many layers.

The first layer has to do with Jesus’ relationship with Pharisees, men in those days whose work was to define and enforce the letter of the Hebrew law. They were, by and large, critical of this itinerant teacher from Galilee with his emphasis on the law’s spirit. Yet one of them invites him to dinner and, Jesus accepts. Questions present themselves to us as we read, the answers to which the story leaves mostly to our imaginations.

Why was he invited?

Why was he not given the full hospitality treatment?

What do you suppose Jesus’ followers are thinking? After all he has not been easy on Pharisees. A point can be made by anyone reading the gospels that self-righteousness by self important religious people, Pharisees in particular, is number one on Jesus’ top ten list of paths to human failing. What was it he called them, white washed above ground tombs filled with rot and putrid bones?
Let’s set the scene. Jesus and his host are eating around a table in a portico or patio roofed yet open to the air and the street. A gesture of a fence with a gate separates it from street. They are reclining, Roman style, on chaise lounges facing each other, taking their food by hand as they talked.
A second layer to the story is introduced, a layer central to what the story is all about. A woman of the streets, ”a sinner” tradition says translate to mean a prostitute, enters uninvited yet not refused entrance. She moves to Jesus and stands behind him at his feet. It seems that at first no words are spoken to her or about her. Could this all be ignored or is it considered to be akin to the coming and going of attendants serving the table but not interrupting the conversation? At any rate she is sobbing and her tears fall on Jesus’ dusty feet, dust that a caring host would have long since had washed and attended to by one of the servants. Her tears are sufficient to be used to wash the dust off and she uses her own hair to wipe them clean. All the while she is kissing them profusely. She isn’t done. Now she produces lotion from an expensive container and massages his feet with its soothing coolness and her loving touch. This is extravagant attention. It is profoundly intimate, emotional and erotic.

What would you think? The Pharisee says to himself, “They say this man Jesus is a seer, a prophet but he doesn’t seem able to see what kind of woman he is being fondled by. If he saw her as I see her he’d have nothing to do with her.” And this is just the point. Jesus doesn’t see her as he sees her.
Let’s give the Pharisee credit. He is trying in his letter of the law way to live a faithful life. In his world view he sees the world as either/or, clean or unclean. This woman clearly falls, and he literally means falls, on the unclean side of existence.

What Jesus sees in so many Pharisees is their extravagant efforts to deny and cover up their own incompleteness, their own uncleanliness with the obnoxious perfume of self-righteousness. That perfume stinks. But the Pharisee is a human being, has a light of his own. Jesus doesn’t abandon him. He engages him.

Jesus knows his Pharisees, knows the questions this scene raises in his host’s mind and asks him a question about gratitude. Gratitude is the issue here. Gratitude is what the woman is expressing, profound gratitude for being seen and valued as a light bearing beloved daughter of God. Somewhere before this evening she must have heard, experienced the good news, the soul embracing grace that shone in Jesus face as the light of the love of God.

Jesus addressed the Pharisee and asks, “If two people come to you, one owing you much, the other owing you little and you forgive the debts of both which is the more grateful?”

“The one forgiven much, I suppose,” he answers. I can hear the unstated question implied in this academic answer, “And what does this have to do with anything?

Jesus continues speaking now to the woman, “Your life has been made clean by the love light you saw in me, believe in and now shine on me.”

Then to the Pharisee, “My friend, you asked me here to learn from me. Learn instead from this woman who showed me extravagant attention.”

Again, to the woman, “Leave in peace. Your belief in the light of love will guide your way .”
The final layer of the story is that Jesus sees women. In Jesus’ time, and in much of the world still today, women were second class citizens, outsiders, unseen, unclean, under-appreciated, used and abused by the insiders who did not have the eyes to see the beauty of their being. Insiders in a dominating culture are taught to be blind to the intrinsic beauty of outsiders. In a male dominated culture insiders, male and female, see beauty in women and grant worth primarily to the degree that the surface pleases the male libido. (Libido has its place in the order of things but not on top of the value scale.)

Is it any wonder that many who followed Jesus were women , as Luke says, “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna and many others?” They followed him because he “saw” them. What a difference it makes when we, thinking ourselves invisible, are seen. Gratitude and love pour forth.

It needs to be said here that paying attention takes time. It is a practice that doesn’t come easily in our over stimulated, media saturated, material dominated busy lives. Taking time to pay attention, to see, calls for discipline. It is a spiritual practice.

I was talking with a friend recently, a surgeon retired for a year now, about life after retirement. “I have the time to see things I was too busy to see before,” he said, “but it’s taking me time to learn how to take the time.”

Paying attention is a spiritual practice; attention not only to people but to the whole creation. Taking the time necessary to pay attention, let alone extravagant attention calls for dedication, self-discipline. It is a spiritual practice.

(This could be a good time to elaborate on this point and end the sermon. I’ve had many friends tell me over the years that I miss a lot of good endings in the sermons I preach. I’m risking that here because I think that I have more to say to fill out the sermon, not overburden it , gained from a book I thoroughly enjoyed just finished reading, John Daniels, “Rouge River Journal: A Winter Alone.” )

John Daniels is a writer with an alcoholic father who was a gifted orator and union organizer. Daniels himself has a history of drug use that bordered on addiction. He took a winter in Oregon, with the cooperation of an understanding wife, to live by himself in a cabin in a wilderness bordering the Rouge River to ponder his relationships with his father, himself and creation. What he says is relevant to paying attention.

It was Christmas day and he was, by design, by himself and blue. The rain had stopped after three days and, as he often did, he hiked down to the river not sure what he was looking for but more comfortable looking for it there than in the cabin in which he had waited out the rain. He writes, “I was still in a dejected mood, my own sense of purpose murky and dispersed. “ As a sat there he became aware of a water ouzel, a small western bird often called a Dipper that lives by streams and finds its food underwater where it swims in search of snails and other aquatic morsels. “Gradually, as my thoughts turned in a slow eddy, I became aware of that I was hearing the song of a bird, had been hearing it for some time… In the five minutes or so that I watched and listened, he made several complete revolutions, pouring forth silvery music all the while. Then two alarm calls like a policeman’s whistle and he slanted off upstream…”

“I don’t presume that (the ouzel) was singing for me, but neither do I presume he wasn’t. “
“I believe in chance. I believe in C.J. Jung call synchronicity. I believe in what Christians call providence… What interests me is not a name for that, but that it occurs. I can’t imagine it, but I suppose there could be a universe without awareness, without singing, without meaningful patterns. There could be a universe without beauty. There’s beauty in this one, and that’s a generosity.”
In another account Daniels tells of getting lost in the woods while hunting a grouse for supper. But he has the time to keep going and see what there is to see in this part of the woods he had here-to-for not explored. He finds a spectacular sugar pine, five or six feet in diameter soaring into the air above him. I don’t know if he hugged it. If it were I, I would have. He ended that story saying, “That got me thinking that maybe I know how to hunt after all; I just shouldn’t prejudge what it is I’m hunting.”

Paying extravagant attention isn’t about prejudging what we are hunting. It is keeping open to Light wherever it shines as we live our seeking lives.

The Pharisee was hunting faithfulness but the god to whom he was trying to be faithful was too small, looked too much like him. There was beauty in his longing but ugliness in his practice.

The One whom Jesus called God is immense, beyond our description, comprehension or control. But this God can be seen, felt, even to some measure understood when sought with eyes open to the Light that shines forth in beauty, truth, kindness, compassion and justice.

We can see this Light, this Godliness wherever it shines if we have the discipline, take the time to pay extravagant attention the way Jesus did, does. Let those who would have eyes to see pay extravagant attention to the Light that shines in each of us, in all persons, in all creatures and things in the Creation. Seeing this Light brings joy, a joy that finds its expression in gratitude. Amen.