August 14, 2005 - 13th Sunday After Pentecost - Father Andrew Green

(8:00 A.M. Service)

FIRST READING: Isaiah 56: 1, 6-8
PSALM: 67
SECOND READING: Romans 11: 1-2a; 29-32
GOSPEL: Matthew 15: 21-28

First of all, I want you to know that I can say, "inestimable". When we have morning prayer, Rite I, the general thanksgiving has "inestimable" in it, and I have to tell you that, for as long as I said that in the Rite I version, I messed it up virtually every time I did it, and I looked forward with trepidation to the times when I would be leading a service and have to say that word. But, indeed, I can come through, if necessary, and pronounce it.

Either Friday or Saturday - I don't remember which it was - a parishioner called me up and said, "Father, you have to turn on the radio. Bishop Spong is on there, and he is being interviewed; and they are talking with him". So I thought, "Oh gee, so I need to go through this". So, I turned on the radio and went to AM and listened to it, and Bishop Spong was involved in an interview (it must have been some kind of National thing). As usual, whenever I deal with Bishop Spong, who is kind of known as the great heretic of the Episcopal Church, I find myself really mixed, because he seems to occupy two roles. One of them is to get people thinking about stuff and challenging things, and so that shaking-up is always perceived at least two different ways. For some people, that shaking-up is refreshing. For other people, it challenges the underpinnings of their beliefs, and they look at it as a threat. And, I am not really trying to suggest that one or the other is the only way to look at him, but, as I listened to this interview (and I only got to listen to about four or five minutes of it), I found myself really being engaged. He is an engaging speaker, and the message underneath what he is trying to say is wonderful; but, indeed, it does challenge. I found myself, as I was listening to him, challenged, which caused me to go back to the things that I believe and spend time reflecting on them, to think about and to look back to the Scriptures that underpin all of those beliefs. Whenever I listen to Bishop Spong, or anybody, even some of the people I quote here on Sunday mornings in a sermon, I never just listen to that and say, "Oh, that is the truth now!" and go off in a new direction. But I find that these kinds of challenges enable me to engage my faith on a more realistic level. Instead of it being last week's or yesterday's faith, it allows it to be something that is current and leads me to a new and direct experience of my relationship with Christ.

So, having said all of that, I want to talk a little bit about a challenging interpretation of this Gospel today, which, by the way, did not come from Bishop Spong - don't write the Bishop and say I was preaching Bishop Spong to you!

Now, last week, if you remember, we had Jesus talking to His disciples, and I was trying to suggest that maybe "Ye of little faith" wasn't an insult, but was rather a term of endearment. Now, we have this Canaanite woman, who has just engaged in a rather interesting argument with Jesus, and, at the end of it all, she is not given any term of endearment like "O, you of little faith", but she is recognized as someone of great faith. "Great is your faith, woman".

Well, first of all, there are some challenges in this particular passage. The first challenge, and the thing that maybe goes under our radar screen because of our cultural norms, is that for a woman to show up in any place out in public and to engage a man in conversation was not done. You didn't go out in public without a member of your family there, and you didn't talk to men outside of your family in a public setting. All you have to do is to look around parts of the Arab world today, and similar kinds of expectations about the roles and the differences between how men and women interact are still there. There are some of the roots of this in this Gospel.

Not only that, but Jesus wasn't just any man; Jesus was a Rabbi, and a rather notable one. And so, if you didn't interact with just anybody, you certainly didn't interact with somebody who was of some importance; because, in that society, in particular - not like our society is totally different from that - but, in that society, in particular, there was a lot about who was up and who was down, or who had face in a particular relationship and who experienced shame in a particular relationship. So, one of the things that I learned this week was about this interchange between Jesus and this woman, this Canaanite woman. She comes up, and she begins to ask Him for help; and He completely ignores her. Now, if Jesus had responded to her, He would have been acknowledging her as His equal, so, just under traditional rules of interaction, He couldn't do that. But she wasn't satisfied with that.

Here is where I want to talk about the difference between what I would consider the traditional interpretation of this and another way of thinking about it - a way to play with this in your mind.

The traditional way is to see Jesus as testing this woman. He ignored her, not because He really didn't care, but because He wanted to see how great her faith was and give her opportunities to push the envelope a little bit. Indeed, as she pushed the envelope, He said, "But, you know, I was sent here for the children of the House of Israel", and she said, "Lord, help me anyway!" He said, "It's not good to give the children's food to the dogs". Well, we, of course, don't think Jesus was not compassionate. We don't think that He had it in for Canaanites or anybody else in particular, so we have to come up with some way to put a better face on His calling her a dog. Traditional interpretation - Jesus is testing her and is pushing the limits to see how she will respond; and then she responds; and then He acknowledges that she has passed His test.

But what about something else? What if Jesus actually learned something from this woman? What if Jesus interacted with this woman and actually learned something? What if He changed an opinion as a result? Now, here is the part that I think tends to get us challenged, because, again, we see Jesus, the Son of God, the Risen Christ, and we separate Him from just Jesus, the person. So, for us to accept that Jesus had to learn something - and, frankly, for some folks, it is challenging that Jesus learned it from this lady, who approached Him on the road - it upsets our apple cart, in a way. But, I want to suggest that it actually shouldn't upset it that much, that we have ample evidence that God seems to learn and change the direction God is going in throughout Scripture, and that it shouldn't be a surprise to us that Jesus is willing to take any relationship and any interaction and use it to develop and further extend the mission that He is on for God.

Can you think of places in the Bible, particularly in the Hebrew Scriptures, where God changed His mind? - where God had been headed on one course and then decided, "Oh! I don't want to do that", or "I don't want to do that again"? Can you think of any place? Abraham and Isaac - the binding of Isaac. We have it in one of our windows over here, up above, of Abraham and Isaac, where he was supposed to go and sacrifice Isaac, and, at the last minute, the angel of God said, "Don't do it".

Another place - how about Noah and the ark? God told Noah to build an ark and get on it, and then he wiped out everything else. Then, when it was all done, God said, "I never want to do that again. I am never again going to wipe out all the earth just because of people's sin". And then God put the rainbow in the heavens as a sign that God would not do what, at least at one time, God thought was an appropriate response to sin and evil.

Can you think of another? Elijah pleading with God to spare the Israelites. Actually, if you go to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and you get down to Moses eventually, Moses was shameless in his willingness to argue with God and to get God to change the direction that God had chosen.

But, the one that I think of the most is Jonah, and you can go home tonight and read the Book of Jonah. It will take you about 15 minutes. In the Book of Jonah, at the beginning of it, God has a message that Jonah is to give to the city of Nineveh, that great city. He is to take a message that, in Hebrew, is only four words, "In 40 days, Nineveh will be wiped out". That is the message that he had to give them, and we know the story. Jonah runs away from God and ends up on a ship. The ship is in trouble, so they toss him overboard. A fish swallows him up, and he spends three days in the belly of the great fish. And then he is vomited up on the shore - if you are going to brunch, try not to keep that in your mind - he is vomited up on the shore, and then God says, "I have a message I want you to take to Nineveh". And Jonah says, "O.K., I'll go". And then he takes that message to Nineveh, and he starts preaching it as he is walking across the town; and, before he is even a third of the way across the town, everybody has heard the message. The message has spread ahead of him. From the king all the way down to the lowest person, including their animals - cattle and, I assume, dogs and cats, if they had them - they decided that, if they repented and showed God how sorry they were, maybe God wouldn't wipe them out. So, they ripped their clothes; they put on sackcloth; and they anointed themselves with ashes to show their sorrow. And do you know what? God looked down at all that and said, "Oh! They're really sorry! I won't wipe them out!"

It is important to understand that, when God gave that message to Jonah, He did not say, "Jonah, tell them, if they don't say they are really sorry, I am going to wipe them out". No - He told Jonah, "Give them 40 days to clean the house; it's gone". And then, when they repented, when they told God and showed God in various ways that they really understood that they had messed up badly, God looked at them and loved them and said, "I can't wipe them out". And, do you know who really was upset about all of that? Jonah! Jonah was upset about it. He said, "I knew You would do this! That's why I ran away in the first place! I knew You were a God who always showed mercy, and now they are laughing at me! I walked all the way across that town saying "40 days and Nineveh is going to be overthrown", and, if it doesn't happen, I am going to look stupid!" So, he went and made a tent for himself and pouted on the hillside, waiting for God to wipe out Nineveh so that Jonah wouldn't look stupid.

It is amazing how much that looks like the Church we represent today, sometimes. We get these ideas, and we want to make sure God wipes out those folks so that we won't look stupid. Do you have the idea? To be honest, throughout the history of the Scriptures, God changes direction on a number of occasions. I would suggest that, theologically, all of this is leading toward God's ultimate Will, which is revealed even in creation, and which, as human beings, we misunderstand, causing God to have to kind of like shift directions to get our attention. But then you get to the New Testament, and Paul talks about, "Behold, In Christ we are a new creation". So, things do get to change.

Here is the idea. Jesus is interacting with this woman. Jesus is very aware of His mission. He has been sent by God to reach out to the House of Israel - not because the Israelites are necessarily any better than anybody else, but just because they are the folks that God has made God's special people - and they still aren't getting it, so Jesus is sent to them first. And so, He had a good answer for that woman, but, do you know what? When she questioned Him, He did respond. He said, "Hey, I was sent to the children of the House of Israel, not to you". He interacted with her. He accepted her as an equal. He lost face in order to respond to her with integrity. And then, He pushed it even further. "It is not right to throw the children's food to the dogs". He learned something from this woman, because she responded, but not about the insult. How many times do we hear an insult in something that somebody says, and, instead of focusing on the main issue, we now focus on the fact that they insulted us? She wasn't focused on that. What was her main focus? Her daughter - her daughter is being tormented by a demon, and she needs help; and, as far as she is concerned (and I have to tell you that this is pretty much a quote from somebody else; I don't remember who the person was that I am quoting, but this is not mine), she needed help because her daughter was tormented; and, frankly, a crumb was still bread, as far as she was concerned. When you are without bread at all, even a crumb from Jesus will help and heal your daughter. She was completely focused, and so, as a result, Jesus said, "Great is your faith; it will be done for you as you wish"; and the narrator tells us that the daughter was immediately healed. In this passage, I think we see Jesus learning and Jesus expanding His mission, which wasn't His direct intention, but was certainly within the realm of what God wanted Him to do in the first place.

Now, what does that mean to us? I think it is incredibly important for us to understand that, in our understanding of God's love for us, we often try to take possession of that love, as if God's love for us is a gift that it is up to us to manage and to decide who gets it - that it is up to us to really distribute that and decide the rules and everything else. So, as soon as forgiveness is offered, the Church, and individuals, kind of decide on what the rules are for who gets it and who doesn't. This goes back to some of that scarcity stuff that we talked about - there is not enough to go around, so we have to set up rules to make sure the wrong people don't get it. But Jesus is not operating from that place. Jesus encounters somebody who is not part of the primary mission, but certainly is somebody beloved by God and in need of God's mercy, and willing to believe and accept that Jesus is the one from whom that mercy can be received. So Jesus says, "You know what? Despite all the obstacles, you have really hung in there. Your faith is great!" We hear Jesus learning from a Canaanite, from a woman, from someone who was not supposed to be even talking with Him.

The message for us is that there is nothing that we should not be willing to bring to God in prayer and in request. There is no desire of our hearts - and I don't mean if you feel like you need a new Cadillac, or you would rather have a Mercedes than whatever it is that you are driving; I am not talking about those kinds of requests - that we can't take to God. When there is something that is really breaking your heart and tearing you up inside, there is nothing you can't take to God. That doesn't mean, necessarily, that you are going to get everything you want, but it means that the door is open. There is nobody - there is no priest; there is no Church; there is nobody - who can tell you that that is not something you can bring to God. There is nobody who can set the rules up and say, "Oh, that is not an acceptable question to ask of God". Because, the reality is that real inclusive love is open to everybody, but belongs to nobody. Nobody has authority to tell you or me or anyone else that they don't deserve what God has to offer in God's mercy.

We need to let go of our ownership of some of the good things we have received of God, to realize that they are God's to give, and they are ours to share, but they don't come with any ownership on our part. The Canaanites are as welcome as Israelites, Democrats and Republicans - all of us share in God's love and in God's mercy.

AMEN