Sermon

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (RCL, Year A, Proper 15)
August 17, 2008

The Reverend Kay Johnson

I’d like to start out by asking *you* about these lessons that we just heard, As you think back on them, what jumps out at you? What “caught” your attention?

What I’m going to start with is probably not the most important part of the lessons, but it’s the one that, this week, I thought might be most disturbing for us to hear, here at St. Mark’s. It’s Jesus’s line to the Canaanite woman: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Whatever you think about Jesus, either as a historical figure or as the embodiment of God in a human being, this does feel really strange, doesn’t it? Much less comprehensible even that Jesus’s anger in the temple, when he throws the money-changers out. Comparing someone to a “dog” is a mark of high contempt...just what we called in the Collect this morning a sign of the abscense of God...not God’s presence.

In the passage just before this one, Jesus has been denoucing the Pharisees for their perversions of the faith, for the ways in which they have been upholding the ritual laws of Israel, and also their own self-interest, and have been destroying the moral law. It is often said that Jesus understood himself not to be creating a new religion but to be revitalizing the religion of Israel, getting it back to its spiritual and ethical roots. But that religion of Israel always had two strands -- one of exclusion, in which God is the God of Israel only -- we see this in God’s triumphs over the gods of other cultures -- and one of inclusion, in which Israel’s mission in the world is to draw all the nations to Yahweh, the one true God. (And we heard that promise of inclusion -- of God’s promise to all people -- in the reading from Isaiah this morning.)

So perhaps one thing that is going on for the very human Jesus this morning is that he grows -- he moves, during the course of the story, from an understanding of Israel as the only people of God to a more inclusive vision of God’s purpose of healing and wholeness.

He says, plaintively, in the face of the woman’s shouting: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," he says. “I am here only for their sake.” But paradoxically, notice that Jesus isn’t in Palestine anymore...he has left home in this story -- he is actually the foreigner here, for he is outside of Israelite territory -- Phoenicia -- which is where Tyre and Sidon are, in what is now Lebanon. When the people of Israel entered the Promised Land, it was Canaan they were entering. The Canaanites are the indigenous people who surrounded the people of Israel but never accepted -- and therefore in some way threaten -- the God of Israel. So a woman of Canaan is not just an outsider to Israel -- she has the particular danger of the outsider who is right there on the doorstep, pressing in on us. (Does that remind you of anything in America today??)

So here is this Canaanite woman (and of course she is also an outsider by virtue of not being a man), shouting at Jesus, begging him to heal her daughter. What should he do? He's not here for her sake, he thinks. He's a home boy, called to take care of his own.

But with all that richness in the story, what hooked me in the story this time around was the sentence, "But he did not answer her at all." Why didn't Jesus respond to the woman when she first cried out to him? What was that silence all about? What was going on for Jesus?

I think that Jesus didn't know what to say. Jesus was real flesh and blood. A creature of his time. Take a moment to reflect on your own flesh and blood. Look down at your body. Slide your eyes sideways and be aware of your neighbors in the pews -- all of us here in church with you. Think about how ordinary we are, how limited we are, how many mistakes we make, how much we don't know, how confused we get. Jesus shared our humanity. Jesus sitting in this church would look just like one of us. And might have some of the same complicated thoughts going around in his head. Jesus born of Mary. Jesus, human being.

And yet he is also the Son of God. As we too are sons and daughters of God. Deep in Jesus’s heart the knowledge has to be burning in him that the love of God is not for some people and not others. Deep in his mind the divinity of Jesus has to be telling him that God is far too large to be contained by any one people, any one group. What about us? When a homeless person approaches me on the street I suffer from that same incoherent confusion? “He’s not mine to deal with? But he is God’s person. What shall I do?”

Jesus lets the Canaanite woman talk to him. The disciples are clustering around him, worldly voices, voicing the world's wisdom: Send her away. Don't let her in. She is different. She is an outsider, a woman. God's love, God's healing is for us good guys, for the in-group. We're the ones who dress right. Who have the right words to say. Our skin is the right color. We speak the right language. God is for us. Not her.

But Jesus doesn't listen to them and begins a dialogue with the woman. Now hear his words as though they’re spoken in a ruminative tone -- questioning -- searching. "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Then she calls him "Lord." She knows who he is. He goes on...he’s trying to get clear: "If we were having dinner, it wouldn’t be fair to take the kid’s food and throw it to Lassie, would it?" I'd like to help you, but I have to take care of my family. When you come in to church here, it just isn’t going to feel so comfortable anymore. I wish I could give more money to help the hungry, but what shall I do about the new sofa we're saving up for? What about all those undocumented workers? -- how come we let them in to America when there aren't enough jobs for people who were born here?

The woman says, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." She picks up on that image of a family and its animals sitting around a table for a meal. She is saying: We are all one family. Call us children, call us dogs -- whatever you name us, it is all one table -- one God -- one home.

And Jesus says, "You're right." And he shares his holy self with her, and the healing begins.

So much has happened. Jesus has seen something new. Jesus has changed. And the woman? She is a hero. She has spoken truth to power, as the Quakers put it. She has dared to challenge authority, to stand up to accepted ways of thinking and doing.

Jesus says to the woman, “great is your faith.” We could even say here that her faith is greater that Jesus’s, because she pushes for a deeper, broader understanding of God’s love than he had before he met her. Faith is not an unblinking, unthinking adherance to a set of rules or to a certain way of looking at the world. Faith is the courageous encounter with meaning and truth...daring to go on looking, seeking, challenging, questioning until you arrive -- for the time being -- at a place of healing.

Throughout the history of our faith there have always been two models: is God just for the chosen few, or is God for the whole vast, heaving, messy, ugly, confusing mass of humanity.

Human beings tend to set boundaries. It's a way of keeping ourselves safe. Think about ethnic profiling. Should security staff at airports pay more attention to men who look like Arabs? That makes sense...If we can't make distinctions, we think -- between people, between groups, between ourselves and others -- then how can we go about the ordinary business of simply living our lives?

And we don't just set boundaries between ourselves and other people. We also set boundaries within our own selves. The Canaanite woman can also represent things going on inside me, the parts of my own divided self. These are my good thoughts and these are my bad thoughts. This is what I have a "right" to do and this is what I am ashamed of doing. This is the good me and this is the bad me. And because we hate, or fear, parts of ourselves we are what's called "alienated" from ourselves. Within our own selves, we set up boundaries that we are afraid to cross -- and so we are not comfortable even in our own selves...we wander homeless in a foreign land. The Canaanite woman can be an image both for people who are foreign, unacceptable to us...and for the "foreign" parts of ourselves is... If we don’t love ourselves, it is hard to love other people. The more we are at ease with ourselves, the more we can be at ease with other people. The more we can accept the damaged, hurting, lashing out parts of ourselves, the more we can accept the whole hurting world.

God sets no boundaries. God is home and God brings us home. God takes all that is not lovely in me -- all that the "desciples" in me want to send away- all the things I am ashamed of, all my fears, my sneering hatreds and my violent jealousies, my selfishness and my self-regard - and God touches all those ugly foreigners in me with the open, growing love of Jesus the healer. God heals me, because I cannot heal myself.

In this foreign land in which we wander, this confusing world where we want to love our neighbor but don't even love ourselves, the image of God as our home is an image of freedom. Because I am at home, I can dare to be honest with myself and I can dare to ask the hard questions. How do I help feed the hungry and still manage to live a decent life with my family? What do we do as a world family to care for one another across distances and cultures? How do I stay open and responsive to the myriad troubles of the world and still remain focussed enough to walk my daily path? Those are real questions and the answers are not clear. It would be alot easier not to ask the questions. To close the borders and just keep out other people -- other nations -- other problems...and those other parts of ourselves. But when we close the borders, then we are trapped within them. And then we can't get home.