Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | August 20, 2023

Matthew 15:21-28

One time I served as the “Interim Moderator” for a church in Glasgow. Ibrox Parish Church. One of my roles was to act as a gatekeeper in the search for a new pastor. Ministers interested in the church would send me their resumes and I would pass them along to the vacancy committee. Or not pass them along.

One fellow I knew called me and said he was interested in the Ibrox church. There was a strong Muslim population in the parish. My colleague said that he felt God was calling him to Ibrox so that he could preach the word of God to the Muslims. He was also of the opinion that “the Jews” – as if all people of the Jewish faith or heritage are somehow all the same – that “the Jews” were somehow in collusion with the events of 9/11. I dutifully passed along his resume, telling the vacancy committee what I knew. They wisely chose to follow other leads.

There are people who will tell you that they know exactly what God is thinking on any given subject. In such cases, God tends to think what they think. And what they and God think together usually involves a fairly narrow view of who is good or bad. A few like themselves are good, and everyone else is bad. Which means going to hell in some form or fashion.

If I encounter such folks, I tend to ignore them and move on. Whatever; have a nice day. But they can do damage. Real damage. Years ago, I was volunteering at the Mash Ka Wisen treatment center near Sawyer, MN. I would listen to patients tell their 5^th step stories. I also led small group discussions.

I remember one guy named Jim. Jim had been sober for a good while and then he relapsed and started drinking again. He said he had been going to a church and they supported him in his sobriety. But when he relapsed, they didn’t want to have anything to do with him. The pastor of the church told Jim that he needed to pray his way out of it, but that it was especially important that he not pray from his native tradition or pray in his native tongue. He said God doesn’t like mumbo-jumbo prayers.

Fortunately, Jim found his way back to treatment. He was sad because he didn’t think he could be a Christian any longer. I listened. He wanted to know what I thought. I said I had one question for him. I asked him to imagine that he were Japanese, and that Japanese was his only language. Would God understand his prayer if he spoke Japanese?

He thought about it, and it was as if a light turned on. Of course, God understands Japanese. Just as God understands Objibwe. We don’t even have to say anything, and God understands. I asked Jim to pray the Lord’s Prayer with me. I would pray in English and he would prayer in Objibwe. That’s what we did.

People get so wound up in the rules and regulations of church, that they somehow convince themselves that they own God; they convince themselves that God has to be protected and preserved and kept apart from the sinners who couldn’t possibility truly appreciate God.

The God Jesus revealed was One who loved and welcomed everybody. What he tried to do was to show people that God’s love is not conditional on what a person does or doesn’t do. God’s love simply is. God loves each and every one of us because we are God’s children. Experiencing life as God intends is not a matter of measuring up to some ideal of religious perfection. It’s more a matter of seeing ourselves as God sees us. But Jesus was not born knowing that. Like us, he had to learn some things along the way.

One time he left town, so to speak by leaving the country. About a hundred miles up north to the town of Tyre in Syria. There were Jews up there – people he could stay with for a while. People might not have known him there as “Jesus of Nazareth” but his visit revealed that at the least a holy man was in the neighborhood. A prophet of sorts. Someone with power.

A woman went to the house where Jesus was staying. She is described as a “Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin” which means simply she was from that place. It was her town and he was the foreigner. She needed help – she thought Jesus could help her. Her daughter was ill with some sort of unclean spirit. She explained the situation with her daughter. Jesus could help her; he could heal her.

That placed him in an awkward position. There was not much he could do about having his holiday interrupted. But the folks up in Tyre were Gentiles. They were not his people; they worshipped different gods and had different customs. He could probably see why someone would reach out to him as an act of desperation, but he had a certain standard to uphold.

He tried telling it to the woman. Essentially what he said was, “Madame, I am a Jewish holy man. God’s children are my mission. In all honestly you people are dogs. I can’t take food from God’s children and throw it to the dogs.”

This story can be disturbing because it presents us with a Jesus who seems unlike the Jesus we have come to know and love. Jesus here seems a bit of the fundamentalist cleric. As a human being, like all of us he had things to learn. Like us, experience was his teacher too.

When he was dying on the cross and he prayed, “Father forgive them, they don’t realize what they are doing.” Those words were learned behavior.

The woman said to him, “Dog I may indeed be in your estimation, but all I’m asking for is a crumb. Sir, even dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

There’s no way of knowing how long of a pause there was. In any event, this is one fine example of Jesus being told off. Not like the Pharisees who were always trying to set him straight; not like how they were always trying to trip him up over some fine point of the purity codes. No, this was a straight up setting the man straight. “When it comes to my little girl, I have no pride. If you say I’m a dog, then so be it; then give me some crumbs.”

What he recognized in her response was a bit of himself. She had employed the very same tactic with him that he so often used with his detractors. He had called her a dog – one outside of God’s concern. She had used the same word but in the context of family pet, a member of the household.

In effect Jesus said, “I guess you told me. And for the telling your daughter is made well.” What else could he do?

This story is obviously a lesson about barriers and the categories to which we assign people that effectively label them as “other.” Jesus crossed the barriers and he had some broken down for him. It’s a story that we revisit often in our journey of growing and learning.

One of the barriers broken in this story involves our view of God. If we think of God as having limited resources, then there will never be enough to go around. “We need to take care of our own people first!” is practically a hymn that religion sings on a weekly basis. There’s not enough for both us and them.

But if we believe that Jesus brought God’s realm into human experience then we can see this story as one that reveals both sharing and inclusiveness. If God has abundant resources, then our task is to share. And in order to truly share, we have to travel outside the gate of our own safety zones.

Some years ago, one of my colleagues who was a hospital chaplain at the Children’s Hospital in Glasgow asked if I could do him a favor. He described a family he had been dealing with for a many months.

Tilly was born with multiple health issues. She spent the first year of her life in the hospital. Now she was nearly two years old and able to be at home with her parents. He described Tilly’s parents David and Amanda as “not particularly religious,” but they wanted to somehow thank God for bringing their wee girl through her ordeal. They asked him if he might be able to find a church where the minister would be willing to provide a blessing service.

The first thing he did was to call the minister of the parish where they lived. That minister laid out the protocols they would need to follow which placed so many barriers in their way as to make it impossible. A few more calls led to similar results. Eventually he called me.

I met with David and Amanda and they said how they were “not particularly religious” but they wanted to somehow acknowledge God and thank God for the life of their daughter. We decided that we would have a “blessing service” on her second birthday which was a few months away.

Then they asked, “Do we have to come to church, you know like attend a certain number of services beforehand?”

I said, “You don’t have to attend church. But you might want to just to see what the place is like. Come and see for yourselves.”

We left it at that. The next Sunday they came to worship. And the Sunday after that and pretty much every Sunday after that. By the time the blessing service rolled around, wee Tilly had won over the congregation and her blessing was a celebration with family, church and community.

Tilly’s parents joined the church, her mother served on the board. One time when she was around four years old, after worship and coffee fellowship, people were getting to leave and Tilly ran out of the fellowship hall. Her parents said, “Tilly, we’re leaving now!” She ran into the sanctuary and said, “But I have to say good-bye to the church first!”

Jesus said, “Great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” Thanks be to God for the crumbs that fall off the table. Amen.