“John said to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’” This morning our Gospel reading seems to find the hapless disciples engaged in divine tattle tailing. “We saw someone…” I grew up with a sibling; I am all too familiar being on both the giving and the receiving end of that line. “We saw someone…”
As a kid it was always super frustrating when I would get in trouble for this line, because obviously, what I was reporting was something worth knowing. Surely my parents wanted my keen observations on all of the things my brother was doing that he was not supposed to. Certainly I was just trying to be helpful in pointing out the things that they couldn’t see.
But, shockingly, my parents never saw it that way. As the older child, if said incident was dangerous, there was some expectation that I should stop it. And if it wasn’t, then they seemed to feel that the best plan was for me to ignore it. They seemed to feel it really wasn’t any of my business what trouble my brother was getting into. His actions, for good or for bad, were their responsibility, not mine, and they did not need or want my help in raising my brother.
Jesus, it seems, also does not need the disciples help in policing workers for his mission. And actually, there’s an even deeper level of irony in John’s comment to Jesus this morning. So, this is Mark nine, verse thirty-eight, but listen to this story from just twenty verses earlier, Mark nine, verse eighteen. A man brought his son to Jesus saying, “Teacher, I brought you my son, he has a spirit…I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.” John is calling out someone for doing something in the name of Jesus that he himself could not do. It’s not like the guy has even done anything wrong. This would be like me complaining to my parents that my little brother had done my math homework for me.
Of course, John’s not concerned just because the guy’s casting out demons that John himself could not cast out—though, let’s be honest, pride is probably part of the problem here—John’s concerned because he doesn’t know who this guy is or whether he can be trusted. I mean, he’s not one of us, after all. Sure, right now it’s all ok, but what could happen in the future. What sort of trouble could this outsider cause?
We human beings are notoriously wary of outsiders. We have actually evolved to be that way, to trust people from our own group, who look like us, think like us, act like us, believe like us. This was a trait that served us well on the African savannah, where the thing that didn’t look like us could very possibly be a lion wanting to eat us. But our evolutionary tendency to prefer sameness is actually a hindrance to us now, and a hindrance to the spreading of God’s love. And that’s the problem Jesus pointed out to John in our Gospel text this morning. “Don’t stop him,” Jesus said. “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
Whoever is not against us is for us. That is a great sound bite. It sounds very noble and open-hearted and wise. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels even more unfair then why I should get in trouble for calling out my brother. I mean, think of it this way. Say we have a pie. No, say I have a pie. A whole pie. It’s delicious, it’s, I don’t know, pick your favorite type of pie. And then you come along. And you’re not trying to steal my pie. You’re not going to throw the pie in my face. You’re for me, you’re on my team. But now, I have to share with you my pie. So now, even though we’re on the same team, I only have half a pie. And even though we haven’t lost any pie and we’ve gained each other, it kind of feels like I’m losing. And I think that’s the disciples concern here. They are the disciples. They have Jesus full and complete attention. And then this interloper comes in and he’s casting out demons in the name of Jesus, and suddenly they have to share Jesus with someone else. So sure, demons are being cast out, and that’s great, but now there’s not as much of Jesus to go around.
I think we tend to view life this way. We live in a world driven by a fear of scarcity. As if it is some zero-sum game where if you have enough than I must not, so the only way for me to be ok is if I take it from you. This isn’t our fault, we’ve been trained, our culture has taught us that this is the way the world works. But guess what friends, this isn’t the way the world works. It’s not the way the world works, because it’s not the way that God works. God is not a zero-sum game, God is exponential expansion. God is I have a pie and you come and you bring a pie, and suddenly because this seems to be the way with potlucks, the freezer is full of pies. God is wherever two or three are gathered, there God is also. God is five loaves and two fish become a meal for the multitudes. God is eleven out-of-work fishermen start a movement that now counts two billion people. God is even death is not death, because three days after Jesus died he rose again, how’s that for abundance. Abundant life burst forth from the tomb.
This multiplication trick of God’s economy isn’t restricted to the Bible either. I mean, think of it in practice in our community. The world’s economy says the women of the Co-op can’t share because they already don’t have enough as it is. If they give away what they have, they will have nothing. But we see in God’s economy that by sharing what they have, they also get what they need, and everyone has enough. The world’s economy says we shouldn’t partner with St. Peter’s, because there’s only so many Lutherans in Battle Creek, and if we work together, there might not be enough. But at our Easter Vigil, we had exponentially more than we ever would have had if either congregation had tried on our own. The world’s economy may even say that we as a congregation shouldn’t exist. There’s only a handful of us, what value do we possibly add. But God’s economy says here’s a congregation that gives housing to the Co-op and Creating Change, that speaks out against economic injustice, that bought fourteen pigs for families in need. Here’s a congregation that wants its neighbors and everyone who comes through its door to know that they are loved and valued and precious in God’s economy, even as the world says they are not. It is a value system that we live out with our very existence in this neighborhood. By staying in Post-Franklin when so many others have fled, despite the very real possibility that we would do better economically in a more prosperous area, we are living out this promise that God’s economy works different from the world, and that God’s grace is most abundantly clear in the places and ways the world has chosen to ignore.
Of course, there’s challenge in this too. Because, if God’s economy is so much bigger and grander and more expansive than us, that means that sometimes God’s work is being done by people who are not like us, maybe even in ways we do not trust, maybe even by people we do not like. Today’s Gospel forces us to accept the fact that we cannot control where God might chose to act. But in fact God’s work may be done in the world in ways we wouldn’t do it by people we can’t keep tabs on. This means that the guy at the community meeting that won’t stop talking may have a good idea. That the hymn you can’t stand is probably somebody’s favorite. What feels like a waste of time might be the project someone else needs to be doing. It means we won’t always agree, and in fact it might be in our disagreements that God is choosing to work. We tend to want to harken back to a day when all Christians agreed with each other and everyone was on the same page, but there never was such a day, because the church is made up of people. Even the disciples bickered. Just last week they were fighting over who was the greatest.
Which, I think even that to a certain extent is OK, because think how boring and uncreative our faith would be if we all thought the same. Think about how little we’d get done if we all had the same ideas. The man casting out demons in the Gospel today was doing work that John could not, and Christ’s ministry was the better for it. Jesus ended his teaching to the disciples this morning not with a call to uniformity, but with the command to have salt. Salt is an interesting seasoning because its purpose is not to have its own flavor, but to heighten other flavors. We use salt to enhance how something tastes, to make the flavors pop, to bring out the brightness and the richness in a dish. So too do our diversities bring out the brightness and the richness of the kingdom of God. By working with others who are not like us we can find our own lives renewed, our own ideas refreshed, our own saltiness restored. And we too can do that restoring for others. So let us rejoice in the amazing multitude of ways that God is at work in this world, through us and through others. And let us be challenged, amazed, and renewed at a God so vast that God’s power would show up in such a diverse multitude of places. Thanks be to God. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Monday, September 21, 2015
Yes, Jesus Loves Me: A Sermon on Mark 9:30-37
This morning for the hymn of the day we are going to see one of the great old Sunday school classics, “Jesus Loves Me.” This song has a really special place in my heart because it was one of my grandmother’s favorite songs. Later in her life, as dementia took a stronger hold and she lost more and more of who she was, one thing she held onto was Jesus Loves Me. She used it as a self-soothing tool, singing it quietly to herself every night as she went to sleep. I remember sitting in the front room of her small apartment with the home health aide, listening to her sleepy voice over the baby monitor, singing the refrain of “yes, Jesus loves me” followed by her traditional sign-off, “Good night, sleep tight, I love you very very very very much.”
The song also became a bit of a family joke. Since it was her traditional good night song, it wasn’t long until it became the way she would indicate she wanted to take a nap. We’d be sitting around in the afternoon and if Nana started singing, “Jesus Loves Me,” you knew that was your not-so-subtle hint that she was ready for you to go. In those instances the number of verys in her sign-off indicated how serious she was about the proposition. The first round she would love you very much, but for each additional round, she’d add a very, her voice ever so slightly edging up in frustration at your continued presence. We didn’t always leave at the singing, as a good Swedish Lutheran, she could usually be distracted from her desire for a nap by the offer of a cup of coffee. At her funeral, we drank coffee and sang Jesus Loves Me.
My grandmother hung on to Jesus Loves Me long after all her other touch points to faith were gone. I remember one afternoon when a woman from my grandmother’s church came to bring her communion. My grandmother listened along, even repeating the words she knew so well, “on the night in which he was betrayed…” When Mary paused for a breath, my grandmother piped up, “who said this?” Mary responded, “Jesus, Jesus said this.” “Oh,” my grandmother paused, reflectively. “He sounds like a really nice young man.” Mary agreed that, yes, Jesus was a very nice young man. And then Mary began the Lord’s Prayer and my grandmother, who couldn’t remember who Jesus was, repeated every word of the prayer she held not in her mind, but in her heart.
One of the themes of the Gospel reading this morning is the nature of faith. That’s kind of what Jesus was getting at when he asked his disciples, “what were you arguing about back there?” Karoline Lewis points out that what the NRSV translated as “argue” can also mean “discuss, consider, reason, ponder.” Rather than offering the disciples a corrective on their clearly-wrongheaded discussion about who was the greatest, Jesus instead invited them into further conversation on the nature of faith, of what it meant to be one who journeyed with Jesus.
But what is the nature of faith. So much of what passes for preaching these days tries to make faith a decision. “Have you made a decision for Jesus yet?” “Have you welcomed Jesus into your heart?” Friends, I’m a pastor and there are days I can’t make a decision for 1 percent or 2 percent milk, let alone my eternal salvation. Decision theology makes it sound so cut and dry, like I can just find the magical door in my heart that I can open and Jesus comes strolling on in and I never again question, or wonder, or have doubts or confusion. But here’s the truth, milk is the least of my concerns. Every year I hear the story Jesus told the disciples, about how “the Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” And I believe it to be true. I know it in my soul that resurrection comes through death on a cross. I have experienced the truth of this resurrection hope in my life and it is the only way I can possibly make sense of the world. But there are days when if pressed I too, like the disciples, do not understand what he was saying and would be afraid to ask him.
They traveled along further and when they came to Capuernaum, they entered a house, and Jesus brought up the conversation on the road. “What were you arguing about on the way?” After the conversation about Jesus’ death and resurrection had ended they’d moved on to other topics, namely, who among them was the greatest. So Jesus again asked them a question and again they were silent. Again, they did not know what to say. Like a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar, the disciples were caught boasting in a faith they didn’t understand.
But Jesus didn’t chastise them. Instead, he called them together around a little child. And he told them, “whoever wants to be first must be last” and “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
Faith is not intellectual assent. It is not understanding or getting it right or having all the answers. Faith is welcome. Faith is leaning into the questions you cannot understand. And faith, most importantly, is a journey led by Jesus. As they traveled through Galilee, listening to Jesus teach words they didn’t understand the disciples didn’t know that the very steps they were taking were making Jesus’ words come to fulfillment. In their walking and their talking, their arguing and yes even their confused and embarrassed silence, they were being swept up in God’s divine story of salvation. They were becoming God’s kingdom come on earth.
In my grandmother I saw the promise of a life of faith. Not because she could tell me about Jesus, but because she couldn’t. For my grandmother, faith was no longer an intellectual pursuit; it was a lived experience. My grandmother could not testify to her faith. She could not tell you her name, let alone give any sort of explanation of Jesus. The promises made to her in faith were carried for her in places and people too deep for memory. They were in murmured whispers of the Lord’s Prayer, and declarations of Jesus as “a nice young man.” They were in the church community who sang Jesus Loves Me when her voice failed, and in the pastor who proclaimed ashes to ashes, dust to dust at her graveside. Faith, Jesus demonstrated to us and to the disciples in our gospel reading for this morning, is not found in being able to answer questions, it is found in the journey. It is found in walking along, sometimes not understanding, sometimes misunderstanding, sometimes fighting over the wrong thing all together, but still journeying. Still walking along the path, in fits and starts, alongside the one who holds all understanding.
This morning we celebrate as Leah begins this walk of faith. And in the baptism of children, I think we see this beautiful, clear example of faith as God’s doing. Because Leah, like my grandmother, like the disciples, and even, some days, like us, cannot make a decision for Jesus. Leah is not choosing baptism this morning. In fact, there will probably be times in her life when she will not believe, when she will question the events of this day. But in these waters we know that God is choosing Leah. That God is naming Leah as a precious child of God and God is claiming Leah as God’s own. Not because of anything Leah or Janelle or Robert are doing, but because of what God has done through Christ for us. And the promise God makes to Leah this morning will be true for the rest of Leah’s life. For the times she totally understands, and the times when, like the disciples, she doesn’t understand, or she is afraid or embarrassed or confused. God promises this day to be with Leah through all of those times, faithfully and truthfully, forever.
The baptism of infants reminds us that those same promises are true for us as well. That our status as children of God does not depend on our ability to understand it, but on God’s promise to journey with us forever. Because, as the song reminds us, Jesus loves us. The Bible tells us so. Amen.
The song also became a bit of a family joke. Since it was her traditional good night song, it wasn’t long until it became the way she would indicate she wanted to take a nap. We’d be sitting around in the afternoon and if Nana started singing, “Jesus Loves Me,” you knew that was your not-so-subtle hint that she was ready for you to go. In those instances the number of verys in her sign-off indicated how serious she was about the proposition. The first round she would love you very much, but for each additional round, she’d add a very, her voice ever so slightly edging up in frustration at your continued presence. We didn’t always leave at the singing, as a good Swedish Lutheran, she could usually be distracted from her desire for a nap by the offer of a cup of coffee. At her funeral, we drank coffee and sang Jesus Loves Me.
My grandmother hung on to Jesus Loves Me long after all her other touch points to faith were gone. I remember one afternoon when a woman from my grandmother’s church came to bring her communion. My grandmother listened along, even repeating the words she knew so well, “on the night in which he was betrayed…” When Mary paused for a breath, my grandmother piped up, “who said this?” Mary responded, “Jesus, Jesus said this.” “Oh,” my grandmother paused, reflectively. “He sounds like a really nice young man.” Mary agreed that, yes, Jesus was a very nice young man. And then Mary began the Lord’s Prayer and my grandmother, who couldn’t remember who Jesus was, repeated every word of the prayer she held not in her mind, but in her heart.
One of the themes of the Gospel reading this morning is the nature of faith. That’s kind of what Jesus was getting at when he asked his disciples, “what were you arguing about back there?” Karoline Lewis points out that what the NRSV translated as “argue” can also mean “discuss, consider, reason, ponder.” Rather than offering the disciples a corrective on their clearly-wrongheaded discussion about who was the greatest, Jesus instead invited them into further conversation on the nature of faith, of what it meant to be one who journeyed with Jesus.
But what is the nature of faith. So much of what passes for preaching these days tries to make faith a decision. “Have you made a decision for Jesus yet?” “Have you welcomed Jesus into your heart?” Friends, I’m a pastor and there are days I can’t make a decision for 1 percent or 2 percent milk, let alone my eternal salvation. Decision theology makes it sound so cut and dry, like I can just find the magical door in my heart that I can open and Jesus comes strolling on in and I never again question, or wonder, or have doubts or confusion. But here’s the truth, milk is the least of my concerns. Every year I hear the story Jesus told the disciples, about how “the Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” And I believe it to be true. I know it in my soul that resurrection comes through death on a cross. I have experienced the truth of this resurrection hope in my life and it is the only way I can possibly make sense of the world. But there are days when if pressed I too, like the disciples, do not understand what he was saying and would be afraid to ask him.
They traveled along further and when they came to Capuernaum, they entered a house, and Jesus brought up the conversation on the road. “What were you arguing about on the way?” After the conversation about Jesus’ death and resurrection had ended they’d moved on to other topics, namely, who among them was the greatest. So Jesus again asked them a question and again they were silent. Again, they did not know what to say. Like a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar, the disciples were caught boasting in a faith they didn’t understand.
But Jesus didn’t chastise them. Instead, he called them together around a little child. And he told them, “whoever wants to be first must be last” and “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
Faith is not intellectual assent. It is not understanding or getting it right or having all the answers. Faith is welcome. Faith is leaning into the questions you cannot understand. And faith, most importantly, is a journey led by Jesus. As they traveled through Galilee, listening to Jesus teach words they didn’t understand the disciples didn’t know that the very steps they were taking were making Jesus’ words come to fulfillment. In their walking and their talking, their arguing and yes even their confused and embarrassed silence, they were being swept up in God’s divine story of salvation. They were becoming God’s kingdom come on earth.
In my grandmother I saw the promise of a life of faith. Not because she could tell me about Jesus, but because she couldn’t. For my grandmother, faith was no longer an intellectual pursuit; it was a lived experience. My grandmother could not testify to her faith. She could not tell you her name, let alone give any sort of explanation of Jesus. The promises made to her in faith were carried for her in places and people too deep for memory. They were in murmured whispers of the Lord’s Prayer, and declarations of Jesus as “a nice young man.” They were in the church community who sang Jesus Loves Me when her voice failed, and in the pastor who proclaimed ashes to ashes, dust to dust at her graveside. Faith, Jesus demonstrated to us and to the disciples in our gospel reading for this morning, is not found in being able to answer questions, it is found in the journey. It is found in walking along, sometimes not understanding, sometimes misunderstanding, sometimes fighting over the wrong thing all together, but still journeying. Still walking along the path, in fits and starts, alongside the one who holds all understanding.
This morning we celebrate as Leah begins this walk of faith. And in the baptism of children, I think we see this beautiful, clear example of faith as God’s doing. Because Leah, like my grandmother, like the disciples, and even, some days, like us, cannot make a decision for Jesus. Leah is not choosing baptism this morning. In fact, there will probably be times in her life when she will not believe, when she will question the events of this day. But in these waters we know that God is choosing Leah. That God is naming Leah as a precious child of God and God is claiming Leah as God’s own. Not because of anything Leah or Janelle or Robert are doing, but because of what God has done through Christ for us. And the promise God makes to Leah this morning will be true for the rest of Leah’s life. For the times she totally understands, and the times when, like the disciples, she doesn’t understand, or she is afraid or embarrassed or confused. God promises this day to be with Leah through all of those times, faithfully and truthfully, forever.
The baptism of infants reminds us that those same promises are true for us as well. That our status as children of God does not depend on our ability to understand it, but on God’s promise to journey with us forever. Because, as the song reminds us, Jesus loves us. The Bible tells us so. Amen.
Monday, September 14, 2015
I Wouldn't Have Picked this Text: A Sermon on Mark 7:24-37
Wow, this is a rough text this morning. These are the weeks I wish I was not a lectionary preacher. I felt it last week but even more strongly this morning, I am not ready for this abrupt jump back into the heat of Mark. After five long weeks pondering one speech of Jesus, the fast-paced, abruptness of the Markan narrative feels harsh and abrasive. Just about every reading from here to the end of the year will start “then he went, then they traveled, when they arrived,” etc. Jesus is on the move in Mark’s Gospel, and the best we can do is hold on for the ride.
This constant travel is tiring, and this morning we encounter a Jesus who is tired. He’d just finished scolding the Pharisees for their manipulation of the law, and now he set out to go to Tyre to get away from the crowds for a bit, to take a break. The text tells us he entered a house and didn’t want anyone to know he was there. But the crowds found him anyway and a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit came, bowed down at his feet, and begged for healing. Even on vacation, Jesus cannot catch a break. And on top of that, the woman was not even a Jew; she was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She was not a part of Jesus’ direct mandate to the people of Israel.
But all of this justification still doesn’t explain what happened next. The woman came and knelt at Jesus feet and begged for healing for her daughter, and Jesus sent her away. “He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’” I read a lot of commentaries this week, trying to make sense of this sentence, and let me tell you what, there’s no easy way to make sense of these words. There were a couple attempts to make a plea for economic justice, the Jews were the farmers of the region, whose food was often taken and given to the wealthy, or there were efforts to soften the word “dogs.” Well, he meant like a joke, like with a twinkle in his eye, or like a house pet, like a puppy. But, really, that’s not what that means, and softening it doesn’t make it better. Most commentaries don’t even make an attempt to explain it. “Jesus gets caught with his compassion down,” one quipped.
And as both a preacher and a person of faith, I don’t know what to do with this text. I don’t know what to do with this very human Jesus, who seems ready to turn away from someone in need because she does not look like him, because she is not from his same ethnic background. We shouldn’t, theology professor Micah Kiel wrote, be surprised to find ethnic tension or problematic gender dynamics in patriarchal early Christian writings.* But I am surprised, because Jesus. So what then? What to do with this text?
Enter the Syrophoenician woman. She is not amazed or surprised at the response to her, but when it comes, she also doesn’t accept it. Instead, she stood up to it, flipped the slur on its head, and reclaimed it as her own, saying, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Call me what you will, but even if your words are true there is enough here for me as well. So give me what I am due and heal my daughter. And Jesus, who normally overwhelmed his opponents in any verbal sparring match, demurred. “‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.”
The Syrophoenician woman stood up to Jesus and demanded that he see in her her full personhood. That he see in her the full worth of the glory of God’s creation. That he see in her his mission to the world, his creative, redeeming, sanctifying mission of love and grace and truth. The Syrophoenician woman demanded that Jesus act on what he already proclaimed to be true, that the kingdom of God was about border crossing and boundary breaking, and the Son of Man was the savior for all of humanity.
This text makes me uncomfortable, and I think that is its purpose. I think the purpose of this text is to force me to ask the question of who are the marginalized voices in our world today that are speaking out, that are demanding to be heard. And am I hearing them? Am I, like Jesus, allowing their words to enter into my heart and remind me of God’s glory and God’s grace and God’s expansive love? Or am I pushing them aside? Am I waiting until “the children” get fed, and missing the obvious abundance that goes uneaten at the banquet of the Lord?
What the Syrophoenician woman points out to us is that there is enough grace, healing, abundance, at the banquet of the Lord for everyone. Even after the children are filled, the remnants pour out across the floor such that the real waste is not sharing it; the real waste in fact, is thinking there is any need to wait at all, the real waste is restraining it, is setting any limitations on who or in what order grace should be obtained.
I still wrestle with this text. But when I wrestle with this text or any text, I remember that we have a God whose love is bigger than our understanding. There are stories in the Bible that I just do not get, and that’s OK, because God is vaster, more mighty, more wonderful than me. I don’t know what Jesus is doing here, I don’t know what message I’m supposed to take from Jesus actions, and I tell you what, explaining this story will be on the short for questions I hope to have answered someday when all knowledge is revealed. But, the good news I take from this text is that it’s OK to be wrong. What Jesus gives us in this text is a beautiful model for how to admit our errors and move forward. To hear a word of grace that was different than I may have realized, and to adapt, to change my perspective by the meeting of another. One commentary I read wrote that “The miracle [of this story] is the overcoming of prejudice and boundaries that separate persons.”** And isn’t that, in a world of increased borders and boundaries, separation and division, a miracle that our world so desperately needs.
So be uncomfortable. Lean in to the spaces and places where you don’t know if you fit. Question and wonder and welcome. Clearly and directly and specifically. And if you fail, and we will fail, it’s part of the wonderful brokenness of humanity, don’t be afraid to change your mind. Don’t be afraid to expand your thinking. God is waiting in our questions, with abundance that spills out over the table, and there is enough, enough grace, enough love, enough healing, for everyone.
* Micah D. Kiel, “Commentary on Mark 7:24-37,” Working Preacher, 6 September 2015, < http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2624 >, accessed 2 September 2015.
** Pheme Perkins, “The Gospel of Mark: Introductions, Commentary, and Reflections,” The New Interpreter’s Bible: Volume VIII, Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN, 1995, pg. 611.
This constant travel is tiring, and this morning we encounter a Jesus who is tired. He’d just finished scolding the Pharisees for their manipulation of the law, and now he set out to go to Tyre to get away from the crowds for a bit, to take a break. The text tells us he entered a house and didn’t want anyone to know he was there. But the crowds found him anyway and a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit came, bowed down at his feet, and begged for healing. Even on vacation, Jesus cannot catch a break. And on top of that, the woman was not even a Jew; she was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She was not a part of Jesus’ direct mandate to the people of Israel.
But all of this justification still doesn’t explain what happened next. The woman came and knelt at Jesus feet and begged for healing for her daughter, and Jesus sent her away. “He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’” I read a lot of commentaries this week, trying to make sense of this sentence, and let me tell you what, there’s no easy way to make sense of these words. There were a couple attempts to make a plea for economic justice, the Jews were the farmers of the region, whose food was often taken and given to the wealthy, or there were efforts to soften the word “dogs.” Well, he meant like a joke, like with a twinkle in his eye, or like a house pet, like a puppy. But, really, that’s not what that means, and softening it doesn’t make it better. Most commentaries don’t even make an attempt to explain it. “Jesus gets caught with his compassion down,” one quipped.
And as both a preacher and a person of faith, I don’t know what to do with this text. I don’t know what to do with this very human Jesus, who seems ready to turn away from someone in need because she does not look like him, because she is not from his same ethnic background. We shouldn’t, theology professor Micah Kiel wrote, be surprised to find ethnic tension or problematic gender dynamics in patriarchal early Christian writings.* But I am surprised, because Jesus. So what then? What to do with this text?
Enter the Syrophoenician woman. She is not amazed or surprised at the response to her, but when it comes, she also doesn’t accept it. Instead, she stood up to it, flipped the slur on its head, and reclaimed it as her own, saying, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Call me what you will, but even if your words are true there is enough here for me as well. So give me what I am due and heal my daughter. And Jesus, who normally overwhelmed his opponents in any verbal sparring match, demurred. “‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.”
The Syrophoenician woman stood up to Jesus and demanded that he see in her her full personhood. That he see in her the full worth of the glory of God’s creation. That he see in her his mission to the world, his creative, redeeming, sanctifying mission of love and grace and truth. The Syrophoenician woman demanded that Jesus act on what he already proclaimed to be true, that the kingdom of God was about border crossing and boundary breaking, and the Son of Man was the savior for all of humanity.
This text makes me uncomfortable, and I think that is its purpose. I think the purpose of this text is to force me to ask the question of who are the marginalized voices in our world today that are speaking out, that are demanding to be heard. And am I hearing them? Am I, like Jesus, allowing their words to enter into my heart and remind me of God’s glory and God’s grace and God’s expansive love? Or am I pushing them aside? Am I waiting until “the children” get fed, and missing the obvious abundance that goes uneaten at the banquet of the Lord?
What the Syrophoenician woman points out to us is that there is enough grace, healing, abundance, at the banquet of the Lord for everyone. Even after the children are filled, the remnants pour out across the floor such that the real waste is not sharing it; the real waste in fact, is thinking there is any need to wait at all, the real waste is restraining it, is setting any limitations on who or in what order grace should be obtained.
I still wrestle with this text. But when I wrestle with this text or any text, I remember that we have a God whose love is bigger than our understanding. There are stories in the Bible that I just do not get, and that’s OK, because God is vaster, more mighty, more wonderful than me. I don’t know what Jesus is doing here, I don’t know what message I’m supposed to take from Jesus actions, and I tell you what, explaining this story will be on the short for questions I hope to have answered someday when all knowledge is revealed. But, the good news I take from this text is that it’s OK to be wrong. What Jesus gives us in this text is a beautiful model for how to admit our errors and move forward. To hear a word of grace that was different than I may have realized, and to adapt, to change my perspective by the meeting of another. One commentary I read wrote that “The miracle [of this story] is the overcoming of prejudice and boundaries that separate persons.”** And isn’t that, in a world of increased borders and boundaries, separation and division, a miracle that our world so desperately needs.
So be uncomfortable. Lean in to the spaces and places where you don’t know if you fit. Question and wonder and welcome. Clearly and directly and specifically. And if you fail, and we will fail, it’s part of the wonderful brokenness of humanity, don’t be afraid to change your mind. Don’t be afraid to expand your thinking. God is waiting in our questions, with abundance that spills out over the table, and there is enough, enough grace, enough love, enough healing, for everyone.
* Micah D. Kiel, “Commentary on Mark 7:24-37,” Working Preacher, 6 September 2015, < http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2624 >, accessed 2 September 2015.
** Pheme Perkins, “The Gospel of Mark: Introductions, Commentary, and Reflections,” The New Interpreter’s Bible: Volume VIII, Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN, 1995, pg. 611.
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