Reflecting on today's Gospel - Matthew 15: 21 - 28
What is it like to be outside
of a group, unwanted, not taking notice of, isolated and alone in your need
because you are different?
What is it like when everyone
else gets something and you get nothing?
What is it like when there is a
warm welcome but not for you?
While on holiday I did
something very rare, I sat and received worship led by someone else twice on a
Sunday. We did one Methodist and one Anglican service. The Methodist
congregation in Sidmouth were extremely welcoming, possibly because we were
about 25 years younger than anyone else there that morning so they were a bit
excited!
The Anglican 1662 Prayer Book Evensong “miserable offenders” brigade
at Ottery St Mary didn’t really expect visitors, but they were thrilled we walked
in. They told us not to sit under the falling masonry one side of the choir
stalls! Opposite us was an elderly man with an elderly dog. He asked loudly who
we were, then exclaimed even more loudly “foreigners!” After the service as I
walked round the church to have a look at it, some of them came up to me and
said “go and rescue your wife” as Lis was being got by him! “Change your hair
colour” he told her “I like something smooth!” Then he told us how his wife was
a “dreadful woman”! Anyway, you don’t go to church to be called a foreigner do
you and be insulted?
The world we live in today likes to keep with its own sort, and it likes to exclude and make the
“different” feel even more different by shutting them out, often violently.
Every Saturday afternoon as I sit in my study writing my sermon I think “I’m
not going to mention Donald Trump this week” but every week I have to. It is
surely no coincidence that the world has become more exclusive and nasty since
January 20th is it?
Someone wrote on social media
from America this week they thought they’d done some time travel and had woken
up in the 1960’s with threats of nuclear war and racial hatred boiling over on
the streets. The scenes in Charlottesville were shocking. Then what sort of world
do we live in when people think in their brain let’s go and drive a truck or a
van into a crowd of tourists and cause carnage. We remember Barcelona this
week. It isn’t the first time this has happened. What sort of a world do we
live in where there brutal stabbings, this week in Finland and in Russia? What
sort of world do we live in where there continues to be tragedy like in Sierra
Leone after horrific mud slides, caused according to Fitz who I was chatting to
on Friday, by people ignoring the plea not to build houses for the poor where
it could be dangerous. This is not the first mud slide in that country where
poor people have nothing.
Hasn’t it been a relief to
have a lighter story at the top of the news? While sad Sir Bruce Forsyth has passed
on, we have for a while been diverted with remembrance of a British icon in
entertainment. Didn’t he do well? What a lovely audience you are, so much better than last week!
The problems of the world are
all about discrimination and disharmony, of one group believing it is more
important and has more rights than the other, of one group being threatened by
another and doing all it can to eradicate it. It is reminiscent of the Nazi
ideology of Hitler in the 1930’s and during the war. All be the same, get rid
of the other. Or ignore it and it might go away, pretend it isn’t there. In
affluent Storrington where I lived before here, there was a council estate,
which they thought was rough even though it wasn’t. I used to walk through it
from church to home every day. My folk would say “how can you walk through that
estate?” The village planted trees on the edge of it so you couldn’t see it
from the pretty road it was inconveniently nearby. People were excluded from
village policy and were deemed a problem. “Young people” were causing
trouble in the village. I got in trouble for pointing out a) they were only
sitting on a wall and b) they were bored as there was nothing in the village
for them to do, but they were labelled and didn’t stand a chance.
Psalm 133 reminds us how good and pleasant it is for us to live in unity. Together. With
difference, on a shared pilgrimage. And we say it is, but let’s not include
women, or young people, or those who are gay, or people who vote Labour, or
vegetarians, or those who have different opinions, or those who are left handed
(remember that left handed people when they tried to make you write with your
right hand at school? Abuse! Us lefties have to stand up for our rights to be
lefties!) and let’s definitely not include as our man at church thought
“Foreigners!”
Jesus came to offer God’s love
to everyone, didn’t he? But then you read this passage in Matthew’s Gospel. He
seems to struggle with everyone being included.
He’s moved north out of Israel
into what we know as Lebanon, to the ancient cities of Tyre and Sidon.
Immediately a woman accosts
him, not with a polite request, but with shouting.
In her pleading, her shouting,
she asks first for mercy and then for healing. Apparently Jesus keeps on
walking, but she follows. She doesn’t give up. Jesus, however, is silent. Even
his disciples, embarrassed at her shouts, ask him to respond, to send her away.
They, too, are certain that because she is not a Jew she doesn’t have the right
to ask him for anything.
Now Jesus says something not
to her or to them: It’s obvious that he is examining a question in his own
mind: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” This is his
mission as he has known it up to this moment.
And he has worked at it every
moment of his days – to bring his own people back to God.
The woman hears his words, but
she is the kind who is not deterred by national and religious differences. She
will not let them keep her from seeking help.
Jesus uses language that
separates those who think they are God’s chosen from those whom they consider
outside God’s grace. The Israelites are the children, and the outsiders are the
dogs. In our age and our culture this is serious language. Bread is the essence of life. It must be given to the
children.
The mother, however, does not
budge. “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the masters’
table.” This poor outsider understands that God’s mercy is so great that even
the tiny bit that escapes from the chosen ones is enough for healing and for
doing good.
This is what faith means. She
knows who he is and she knows that only Jesus can heal her daughter. The rest
does not matter. And Jesus responds to this faith instantly. In those few
minutes, he recognizes that his mission has expanded. A poor woman has shown
him this much: He did not come just for the children of Israel. His mercy
extends to everyone.
Full of admiration, he
responds first to her great faith, and then to her wish for her daughter: “Your
faith is great. Your daughter is well.”
He struggles with it, and
alters his mind when he sees her faith and perhaps realises he was wrong. Jesus
is infallible and must have made mistakes. It’s only for my sort, not for her
sort.
Jesus engages Pharisees,
disciples, and Canaanite women, revealing the expansion of the heart of God to
include foreigners and outcasts. God is an inclusive God; those we despise are
our brothers and sisters, too. We may want to send them away but God brings them
near, even to the master’s table. Crumbs are enough for the Canaanite. It may
not be what everyone else receives, but she’s grateful for even a little piece
of bread—because in the brokenness of that crumb, her daughter finds healing.
She fights for a little piece of the dream so that her child’s nightmare can
end.
And it does end, because Jesus
has mercy on her. Jesus welcomes her and her daughter—however
begrudgingly—despite cultural, religious, and gender differences.
This scriptural border
crossing brings to mind “The New Colossus,” the sonnet by Emma Lazarus
inscribed on a plaque on the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of
Liberty, the “Mother of Exiles”:
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome . . .
“Give me your tired, your
poor,
Your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your
teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the
golden door!”
A poetic remix might add, Give
me those you consider dogs. Send these to me: the refugee, the alien, the
foreigner, and more. Send the wretched refuse, the ailing daughters of
ostracized women, because they yearn to be free. The unnamed Canaanite woman
reaches out to touch the golden door of God, to set her daughter free. They are
words for Trump’s America this morning and for other places we just don’t know
what to say about.
We believe in a God who in
Jesus embraces, loves, welcomes even after an internal debate – we forget he
would have been educated in Jewish ways perhaps some of his Rabbis were
exclusive. But there is also that vision we had in Isaiah where foreigners,
unlike opposite Gil in Ottery St Mary Parish Church are included, listened to
and learnt from.
An article I read about
Charlottesville reminded its readers that in 1967 there were riots in our
streets, poverty and unbridled racism in our midst, and a war far away tearing people
apart at home. In that moment, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a
book, his last one, with a message that rings poignant today. It was titled, “Where
Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
One of his insights then was
that a moment of crisis is always a moment of decision. It was true then and is
true now. Where do we go from here? Chaos? Indifference? Avoidance? Business as
usual? Or Beloved Community?
Through the way of love, he
has shown us the way to be right and reconciled with the God and Creator of us
all. Through his way of love, he has shown us the way to be right and
reconciled with each other as children of God, and as brothers and sisters. In
so doing, Jesus has shown us the way to become the Beloved Community of God.
The writer goes on to say:
“I know too well that talk of
Beloved Community, which Jesus was describing when he spoke of the kingdom of
God in our midst, can be dismissed as nice but naive, idealistic yet
unrealistic. I know that.
But I also know this. The way
of Beloved Community is our only hope. In this most recent unveiling of hatred,
bigotry, and cruelty, as Neo-Nazis marched and chanted, “The Jews will not
replace us,” we have seen the alternative to God’s Beloved Community. And that
alternative is simply unthinkable. It is nothing short of the nightmare of
human self-destruction and the destruction of God’s creation. And that is
unthinkable, too. We who follow Jesus have made
a choice to walk a different way: the way of disciplined, intentional, passionate,
compassionate, mobilized, organized love intent on creating God’s Beloved
Community on earth.”
Pondering the
world I ask myself what church is for.
Surely we have a task to make
sure everyone is included, welcomed, listened to, part of us.
Surely we are here at the
heart of this community to create community. Perhaps today like Jesus we need
to grapple with stuff. Perhaps people don’t do church like they did, or behave
like we do. Perhaps people outside of the religious norm need to find faith
differently and it might be messy but that love and care are there to be found
and we need to be open to new ways.
.
Surely we are to rejoice
together when people find faith no matter who they are or where they come from.
No one is outside of God’s
love. That is certainly the Methodist way.
There is no one outside the
realm of God’s love, even if we don’t like it! The Kingdom of God comes when
everyone is included, together in an amazing community of diversity. Imagine
this morning if all of us were the same. Wouldn’t it be boring and dull.
Surely we have a task to try
and alter the wrong in the world. Surely when there is evil in the world we
need to name it but also the love that will defeat it. Surely we need to pray
and also have our prayers met in equal measure by our actions to dismantle
systems of injustice and oppression that dehumanise and deny dignity to some of
God’s children who have just as much right to that dignity as we do.
It is the only way things are
going to change. A woman pushes boundaries and reminds us that always is
it about us not just me. And everyone can have that love that we know.
