Sermon by Reverend Dr. John W. Mann | September 8, 2024

Mark 7:24-30

Something I’ve always appreciated about being a church pastor is meeting so many interesting people. People of all kinds, from all walks of life; the full spectrum of humankind. Along the way, some of these folks are a likely factor in the need for my blood pressure medication, but they are interesting. That’s life.

There was a woman who lived across the street from the church in Clarion who liked to look at the world from behind the curtain of her living room window. We can refer to her as Gladys Kravitz. She played bridge with the mother of our church secretary Cheri, so I would sometimes hear about the supposed goings on around the church.

One day Cheri said, “You’re not going to believe the latest story from Gladys.”

“Probably not, but it’s bound to be good.”

The story that was told at bridge club was that I had been kidnapped by a gang of Mexicans.

I said, “She must not like me very much because if I was being kidnapped, she never called the police.”

The real story was that a guy from the meat locker called me and said they wanted to donate some beef to the food pantry. Enough that I would need a pickup truck to haul it. So I called a guy I knew who had a pickup and he and his friends came over and I hopped in the back with the other guys. Off we went. Mrs. Kravitz might have seen us return with the beef, but she was more interested in telling a tall tale.

It’s an easy thing to despise people for being different. Different country, different culture, different politics; whatever the difference is between us, it’s becoming more acceptable to hate the “other.” That attitude becomes a heavy burden to bear. It weighs heavy on the heart and soul.

We do we do? What do we do about them? Underlying the questions is the struggle to see “them” as people, as human beings – as people and as human as any of us, as all of us. The struggle reveals a deeper question – What do we do with ourselves in relation to them?

Life is a process of coming to terms with new realities, different ways of thinking, seeing and being. Unless our mind is made up. Then we know what we know and we don’t have to know any more. We can rest upon our tidy set of beliefs and not have to worry about any that might be different – or anyone who might be somehow foreign.

It is a human trait to fear the unknown. Fear is part of our survival instinct. When people are part of the unknown then we are wary of them. We wonder about their differences, about where they are from and whether that makes them safe, or a threat. It’s easy for the foreigner to become the foreign object – the object of our fear and loathing – the object to upon whom we place responsibility for what ails us, i.e. the Scapegoat.

The challenge, as always, is to wrestle with the question of how we as people of faith respond to the world around us. There are times when we have to face our fears; when we must reach out of our safety zones and build a bridge over what divides us.

When are those times? The simple answer is, whenever we would seek to be the people God calls us to be. Which basically means, always.

If we seek to find a way in life with a sense of faith, with a sense of spirit, then we will encounter the challenges of “other people.” The challenge is to not run away from our differences, but to find our common humanity.

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 thinks or 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 even Jesus 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. Maybe he just needed to get away and recharge his soul. The crowds were always following him and demanding miracles from him. How much could he give before he had nothing left to give?

But maybe Jesus had some questions about his path in life. If God was calling him to reach out to people, to reveal God’s intention for human life, then was God exclusive to one people and one religion? Perhaps Jesus needed to go to a foreign country to wrestle with his own sense of the breadth of God’s inclusive realm.

But word spread that a holy man with special powers was in town. People started to come around to the house where he was staying.

A woman showed up. She is described as a “Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin” which means simply she was from that place. It was her town; he was the foreigner. But to him she was the outsider.

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. But it also reveals a deeper Jesus. A human being, like all of us who had things to learn. Like us, experience was his teacher too.

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.”

I find it interesting that she didn’t try to pull at his heartstrings – nothing about her daughter just being a poor wee girl – no “please sir, take pity on me.”

Jesus used a word for children that carried the meaning of immediate family. She used a different word for children, one that carried the meaning of members of a wider household. She was telling him that children in God’s household include those beyond the immediate family, but also of the servants, the tenants and even the slaves. Even the least considered members of the household (in those days at least) the dogs, were happy to eat the crumbs that fell from the children’s table.

There’s no way of knowing how long of a pause there was. In any event, this is an example of Jesus being presented with an argument that causes him to change his opinion. And by changing his opinion he changed his entire world view.

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 my supposed kidnappers in Clarion was a guy named Reynaldo. We had become good friends. He was working as a maintenance engineer in a local factory. He and his family joined the church where I was pastor. One day I commented on a jacket he was wearing. It had holes in it that had been sewn up. They were bullet holes from when he had been shot five at point blank range. He was a former member of a Chicago street gang and when he wanted to leave, that was his way out.

Jesus once said, “I came to seek and save the lost.” Sometimes, like the Syrophoenician woman, he had to open his mind to see just how expansive God’s horizons are. When we follow him, we open ourselves to cross barriers, learn new things and meet some interesting people along the way. Amen.