Our text this morning is about Jesus seemingly being indifferent to someone in desperate need, about a tenacious outsider, and dogs, crumbs and healing. Max—wasn’t what I expected as a Christmas gift, he was a gift that kept on giving. He was a pedigreed pup, easy to train unlike our other dog, Shelby. When Max arrived we set stringent guidelines for him. No table scraps, no begging at meals. But Max knew just what slight degree the rules could be bent; and so whenever we would eat at the dinner table, he would take his place right where Ann’s feet should go, under the table in front of her chair. A good place to stretch one direction or another to grab whatever stray crumb might fall during the meal! Then as time went by, the table rules got bent a little more. He was so much a part of us, more and more not a foreign breed. He understood our speech and we came to understand his much fuller vocabulary of whimper, posture, body language, claw, touch, nudge, stare, ear twitch. And so when we ate breakfast together, Max eventually got a bit of toast and at the end of dinner, a choice bite of steak would be saved for him or a bar-b-cue rib would be given to chew on outside. Soon, if we lingered too long before offering it, we would notice a chin delicately laid on a knee, or a sigh and a nose just poking up over the table—just a reminder. He lived heartily for eight years, and then suddenly he was gone. Missing him as we do, I look back now and realize what happened: gradually he changed my mind about the demarcation that we call "etiquette," about "table rules," about ritual purity. I found myself turning around, letting go of all our rules, all our contrived distinctions; knowing that what was important was not that he be differentiated from us like some lesser creature; but that the life he had be nourished. Max’s presence had changed me; until I would have lifted him up onto the table if only it had meant that he could eat. It was another "dog" who changed Jesus’ mind too. Let’s look at our text, Matthew 15:21-30. I like to read between the lines, or I should say dramatize in my minds eye a passage of Scripture I’m reading. I like to look for clues, as an investigator. We're given a clue as to the look on her face. A frantic, desperate mother came begging for her sick daughter to be healed. It's not difficult to imagine the look on her face. What I want to know is the look on his face. The look on the face of Jesus when he says to the woman, in essence, that she's a dog—and her sick daughter as well. Is the look on his face matter-of-fact when he says, “It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs.” After all, the woman was "a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth." In other words, she was not a Jew, not one of the Chosen People, not a true "child of God." Or was the look on his face harsh and full of judgment? How dare someone from outside the chosen circle presume on him and the kingdom he represented for this kind of special treatment. She was, after all, a Gentile, a foreigner, a woman, and God-only-knows-what-else. Or was the expression Jesus wore a poker face, because he is in fact merely testing her faith in him and trying to teach the thick-headed disciples a lesson. (That’s you and me by the way…) He wants to know what she believes, beyond her desperate need to have her daughter healed. Apparently she passes the test when she says that "...yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." In other words, she and her daughter have just as much right to the bread as any one else. For this saying, Jesus tells her, her daughter is healed. At that tenacious comeback, I think a wry smile broke out on Jesus face. The text doesn’t say that, it’s just my imagination. It’s nice to think that the look on the face of Jesus was one of amusement and jesting. His knowing half-smile immediately conveys to this woman that though this business about bread and dogs is the conventional wisdom, he doesn't buy it. She responds with an equally knowing relieved smile, uttering a saying which speaks of a wisdom that far surpasses anything conventional. Yes, it would be comforting to think it happened this way. What we can be sure about is this: Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, this woman knew she was not a dog. She knew she had every right to ask that her daughter be healed. And she knew all of this before she met Jesus. Behind this story lurks a question in the underground of the gospels as to whether Jesus' mission was consciously just to the Jews or intentionally extended to the Gentiles. Whether a definitive answer can be given in terms of scholarship, at least the biblical record is clear. Jesus never turned away anyone, Jew or Gentile, who sought his help. The kingdom he was proclaiming was above all a kingdom of grace, open to everyone. Later on, in the days of the early church, the question had shifted to whether one had to become a Jew first before becoming a Christian. As far as history is concerned, Paul's way proved more telling than Peter's. The grace of God was offered freely, without the need for circumcision or a particular religious pedigree. Now some two thousand years later, this question has emerged in yet another way. It comes to us by the growing awareness that Christendom as we have known it in the West – first in Europe, and now certainly here is no longer is a revered religion in the world, but is considered one of the ways to God with the growing visibility of diversity of the many other religious and spiritual traditions in the world. For me at least, the question is no longer how to make the world Christian. The new emerging question is: What does it mean to be a Christian in the world? This is a question that should confront us daily, in whatever we do, wherever we are. For one thing, I have come to understand that people experience what Christians call the grace of God, and respond to it, without being a Christian. And this certainly is first always the case for Christians. What do I mean by that? Think for a moment, those of you, who, at some point in your life, made the conscious decision to become a Christian. Did you not, then, after your conversion, begin to look back on your life, and see that the grace of God had already been at work? Or those of you who grew up in a Christian home, who have always thought of yourself as a Christian - was not that grace present in your home, prior to your consciousness or understanding of it? Whether converted or reared from childhood, did it not happen like this: through a particular person or community, in the midst of a particular situation, through an experience of forgiveness, healing, gratitude, joy, love, even despair, something was at work. Something which you responded to, with or without being able to name it as grace. And whether or not you responded, or you name it as such, this grace was there first, in fact, had to have been there first. An experience of grace that Christians in fact proclaim is offered by God to everyone, at all times, all over the world—and I would add, offered whether a person responds or not, or calls it the grace of God or not. Of course, that's what Christians know it as. We call it grace and know it as grace when we experience or see it because we saw it lived out in one named Jesus of Nazareth. At the core of our being says grace is getting what we don’t deserve. Such a perspective, of course, has implications for how Christians might think about the Church and its mission. You've probably heard the saying, "The Church has God's mission in the world." What is important to note is the order: the church first, then God's mission, in the world. A wise pastor I know loves to turn that saying around to say instead: "God's mission in the world has a Church." God first, whose mission in the world has a Church. The implications are two-fold. On the one hand, it is an affirmation of the Church. What God wants to accomplish in the world has a vehicle, the Church. On the other hand, it leaves open the possibility that God's mission in the world is larger than the Church. That from a Christian perspective God can also be at work in other ways, through other people, and other traditions. But the mission of the Church is to point the world to Christ who is the way, the truth and the life. Before she ever met Jesus, the Syrophoenician woman knew her worth. Call it by the grace of God, call it by whatever you want, at least what she knew was a reality for her. The only question facing her and the healing of her daughter was: did Jesus know it? From the story we know he did. The question for those of us who claim to follow him is: do we know this as well? What is the look on your face, and mine, when we give our answer? To be found within the Christian faith are the reasons and the resources to love our neighbors, whatever their religious or spiritual tradition may be. We are called by God to treat each and every one of our fellow human beings with respect and care, to actively work for their well-being, and to work with them for peace and justice in the world we all live in. I believe I am called to do this whether or not my neighbor is a Christian, or even becomes a Christian. Rather, I believe I am called to do this because I am a Christian. The biblical scholar and homiletician, Fred Craddock, tells the story of a missionary sent to preach the gospel in India near the end of World War II. After many months the time came for a furlough back home. His church wired him the money to book passage on a steamer but when he got to the port city he discovered a boat load of Jews had just been allowed to land temporarily. These were the days when European Jews were sailing all over the world literally looking for a place to live, and these particular Jews were now staying in attics and warehouses and basements all over that port city. It happened to be Christmas, and on Christmas morning, this missionary went to one of the attics where scores of Jews were staying. He walked in and said, "Merry Christmas." The people looked at him as if he were crazy and responded, "We're Jews.” "I know that," said the missionary, "What would you like for Christmas?" In utter amazement the Jews responded, "Why, we'd like pastries, good pastries like the ones we used to have in Germany." So the missionary went out and used the money for his ticket home to buy pastries for all the Jews he could find staying in the port. Of course, then he had to wire home asking for more money to book his passage back to the States. As you might expect, his superiors wired back asking what happened to the money they had already sent. He wired that he had used it to buy Christmas pastries for some Jews. His superiors wired back, "Why did you do that? They don't even believe in Jesus." He wired back: "Yes, but I do." Being a faithful people is all about changing the table rules and getting changed yourself! It’s about who gets to be at the table, and who will be at the table in spite of us; and thereby about the social implications for relations between poor and non-poor, genders, orientations, abilities, pedigrees. It is about a banquet for dogs. Suddenly the persona of the God enfleshed in Jesus does not only have to do with chosen people. Not only with purebreds—Shelties and Great Danes and German Shorthaired Pointers—but with mongrels. Mutts. Half-breeds and Heinz 57s. The ones that track mud into our sanctuaries and shake pond water all over our doctrine, who hungrily snarf up any little morsel that falls and don’t know how to sit and stay. The secret we must all discover from outsiders like the Canaanite woman is that if we hold their name up to a mirror, we come face to face with the Holy name. And those we wrote off as "dogs" become revealers of God. I went and sat where Max used to sit at suppertime—halfway under the table. From down there, you can’t see the whole spread, only the rim of a plate, perhaps whatever is set within a few inches of the edge. It makes you hungry. But with faith, and a good nose, you can imagine the truth: there is more than crumbs there, for a little dog with the audacity to sit close. May the mark of our lives and ministries be this: that we are not too proud to go sit under the table for a bit, listen for the language of the outsider and thereby learn about the feast of the kingdom to come. Amen. |