This week, my son, who has a very eclectic taste in music, was listening carefully to the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence.” He asked me what it was about, and I talked about it being written during the protest era for civil rights in the 1960s.
I started really listening to the lyrics of this song again, and what struck me is the power of the sound of silence, particularly when that silence is in the face of hatred and prejudice. We live in a time of distractions by the neon gods we ourselves have made, things that distract us, things that entertain us, things that we try to use to fill the holes in our lives that should be filled by real, honest relationships with each other. Silence, like a well, can swallow hopes and dreams when no one dares to break it and speak the truth. Silence can infect our common life together and spread like a malignant force, encouraging complacency in the face of injustice and oppression.
Our gospel account of the Canaanite woman asking Jesus to heal her daughter reminds us that silence often gets you nowhere. Society at that time expected her to be silent, as a woman and as a Canaanite speaking to a Jewish man. Canaanites and Jews had been enemies for as long as people could remember. Yet in her interaction with Jesus, powered by love, she does not stay silent but pleads for healing for her child. And in her approach to Jesus, she betrays a deep understanding of who this man was, regardless of her different ethnicity and religious background. The Canaanite woman asks for healing for her child, will not be denied, and actually argues back to make her case. Only one who believes that Jesus could actually do something, that he is a powerful healer, would be so determined.
Her actions are also deeply liturgical. She uses the language of intercession, words that we repeat in our prayers of the people and in the Kyrie eleison: “Lord, have mercy.” She kneels before him, humbly yet defiantly, demanding that he see truly see her. And yet, unlike other stories we hear in scripture when confronted by people who seek healing, Jesus at first does not respond to her, and then when he does, he insultingly rejects her request. Yet, this unnamed woman alone of all the people who interact with Jesus in the Bible manages to go head to head with Jesus in a debate, and win. When he insults her, she doesn’t deny it, but turns his words to her advantage. Powered by love, she resolutely keeps demanding that Jesus see her and her daughter as worthy of acknowledgment, and of the blessing of wholeness. Although at first Jesus answers rudely to our ears, her great faith and love eventually turns his heart—and that faith makes her daughter well.
Throughout Matthew’s gospel, the plea “Have mercy on me, Son of David!” is used by people asking Jesus to be healed. In each case of healing, Jesus makes it clear that their healing comes about through their faith, and this Canaanite woman is no different. Her faith is so great that she believes that Jesus can heal an outsider’s daughter regardless of distance. Her powerful love for her daughter and her faith in Jesus overcomes all obstacles, and wins her the healing for which she prays. Love wins.
Here is where also we see the tie with the claims in Romans by Paul—God’s grace and mercy is for everyone, and no one is left out, not Gentile or Jew or anyone. Where we might expect Jesus to proclaim this himself, here we see an outsider CLAIM this for herself and her daughter. The teacher is taught something by the student he is inclined to disdain. This epiphany to Jesus reminds us again that he was fully human as well as fully the Son of God, and could learn things and be surprised by them.
It also reminds us that far too often are we prone to see others of different backgrounds as the enemy when in fact they are our brothers and sisters, with just claims upon us that should stir just responses, grounded in empathy and mercy rather than resentment. God’s grace and mercy are universal, not limited to just people who hold the correct sets of beliefs or lineage. The healing of the Canaanite woman’s daughter, brought about by her, yes, “dogged persistence” and great faith fueled by love, bears this out.
This woman was not willing to stay behind the barriers that were placed between her and her dreams for her daughter to be restored to wholeness. Her assigned gender role, her religion, her ethnicity and her location all were supposed to serve to prevent her encounter with Jesus. Yet she relentlessly breaks through every one. She learns of his approach, and goes out to meet him in the margins in between Jewish and Gentile territory, and loudly places her claim upon Jesus’s help, refusing to let anything get in her way.
Our communities today are in desperate need of healing, and it seems at times that there are just too many barriers that are placed in the way for that healing to begin. To some of us, it is obvious that there is a demon that has seized some of our brethren, and especially the events of the last few days from Charlottesville to Barcelona have raised the specter of fascism, prejudice, religious divisions, and hatred.
In the face of this threat, some people choose silence, wrongly equating silence with peace. But the kind of peace silence would create leaves the wound in our communities in place. It does not lead to healing. It leaves far too many groups feeling abandoned, isolated, and physically threatened by those whose deadly ideologies. Too many people who already HAVE a voice and take their voices for granted, and just like Jesus’s disciples, they don’t want to hear the voices of those they consider to be a stranger, or worse, an enemy, claiming the need for healing and reconciliation from them. They want to portray those protesting against the open or hidden cultivation of hate-filled ideologies as being the ones who are out-of-bounds, as strangers, as enemies.
Yet the fact that some of us march in the streets gives me hope, for such actions cannot be rooted in destruction or despair. Instead, I am convinced these protests are acts of faith just as strong as the faith of that Canaanite woman. Faith that we CAN be better than this. Faith that we can overcome our divisions and meet together at the margins. Faith that, here in the US, we can live into our nation’s motto of E pluribus unum—from many, one.
What would it be like if we allowed the surprising faith of those on the margins, despite all the odds, to grow into the spaces that currently divide us, and help create bridges and unification instead? If even Jesus can grow into new understanding through the claims of the Other and overcome his initial rejection, can’t we have hope that as disciples of Jesus we can look at our own refusal to see the full beauty of God in others, and learn how to do better? We CAN defeat the forces of hate if we remember the power of the love that drove that woman to her knees before Jesus, demanding that he see her and hear her cry for healing as a child of God as well.
We talk an awful lot about feelings nowadays in our society. And that’s fine—except when we talk about or privilege feelings above reason, facts, or the quest for justice. Feelings of superiority and inferiority, fears of losing status or rights if others gain them drive much of the current backlash against the drive for full civil rights for oppressed or marginalized peoples within our society and throughout the world. Yet rights, like blessings, are not diminished by more people having them: it’s not pie, as the punchline goes. Rather the extension of rights and equality to others makes the continued possession of rights by those who already enjoy them MORE secure, as equality leads to justice and freedom for all—the very bedrock principles we espouse but still struggle have yet to fully achieve for all.
In Jesus’s time and in our own, there are multiple man-made barriers that separate one group of people from each other, contrary to the common heritage we all share as beloved children of God. Our faith that we affirm in our baptismal covenant calls us to renounce the forces of evil and respect the dignity of every human being. Those are not just empty words. They are part of a sacred call and covenant which we reaffirm repeatedly throughout our lives not just at Pentecost or All Saints’ Day, but in our words and actions. We are called not only to believe in the healing and saving power of Jesus, but, as the motto of the Diocese of Missouri puts it, to make and be disciples of Jesus for the life of the world. A world that is too shattered by hate and violence.
The fact of the matter is, many of us in this particular section of the Jesus movement don’t talk much about what “being saved” means. We ARE Episcopalians, after all.
Here’s one part of it: God created us in freedom, and that freedom includes the freedom to love, and the freedom to hate. One part of this problem may lie in our difficulty with accepting that we NEED to be saved from our tendency to resent and fear each other. Another part comes from the other direction, internally in each one of us, where we cannot believe we are worthy of God’s love and attention, that God would be interested in us either as individuals or as members of communities that are struggling to find peace, justice, and hope.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is not only a great theologian, but also a great leader in the struggle against hatred and division in South Africa and around the world. In his book God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, he says this:
“MANY OF US can acknowledge that God cares about the world but can’t imagine that God would care about you or me individually. But our God marvelously, miraculously cares about each and every one of us. The Bible has this incredible image of you, of me, of all of us, each one, held as something precious, fragile in the palms of God’s hands. And that you and I exist only because God is forever blowing God’s breath into our being. And so God says to you, 'I love you. You are precious in your fragility and your vulnerability. Your being is a gift. I breathe into you and hold you as something precious.' But why, we ask in our disbelief and despair, would God care about me? The simple reason is that God loves you. God loves you as if you were the only person on earth. God, looking on us here, does not see us as a mass. God knows us each by name. God says, 'Your name is engraved on the palms of My hands.' You are so precious to God that the very hairs of your head are numbered. ‘Can a mother,’ God asks, ‘forget the child she bore?’”
As I pondered those those words, I thought of this unnamed woman in our gospel today. God loves us as a mother, as the very best mother any of us could ever hope for. God loves us as fiercely as that Canaanite mother loved her child. And like any mother, God has dreams for us of healing and wholeness and unity.
These are simple words, yet they are powerful. They are words that, if we dare to hope and believe in them, call for the transformation ourselves, and then of the world around us, because if they are true of you and me, they are true of everyone. And that hatred that is spilling out into our streets here and across the worls is rooted in a denial of the truth of those words. Each one of those torch-carriers and bombers has lost sight of God’s love for them, and God’s love for every other living thing in creation. And yet God loves them, too, the lost as well as those who are trying to be found.
But the story of the Canaanite woman and Jesus remind us that ALL are beloved children of God, worthy of recognition, worthy of being heard when we cry out to God and to each other from the depths of our need. But we also have a part to play in tearing down the barriers of suspicion and fear that lead us to deny the humanity of others. We are called to recognize the beauty of God in ourselves, and in others. As Christians, we are called not to remain silent but to turn to God when we are in need of healing, and have faith that the power of God is more than enough to heal the wounds in ourselves and in our communities. The power of God is the power of love.
And love heals. If we will let it.
Our readings today promote the idea of justice, mercy, unity, and above all love as being the foundations of the beautiful dream God holds for each of us, and for ALL of us. As we have watched the protests against racist and fascist ideologies in Charlottesville and Boston and across the nation in the last many days, we can hear an echo of the Canaanite woman’s cry and make it our own:
Have mercy, Lord, for we stand before you in need of healing.
Have mercy, Lord, for we have denied our brothers and sisters and kindred the hearing and response their claims deserve.
Have mercy, Lord, for we have denied your goodness in ourselves, in each other, and in the world around us.
Heal the breaches that divide us, not through our silence, but through a willingness on our part to examine our hearts, and live into the promises of freedom that have hung over us, waiting to break through the clouds of injustice and prejudice for too long.
I dream of a day when we can break through the silences that seek to cover over our divisions in the name of a false peace that is grounded in denial of justice to those oppressed by evil systems of exploitation.
I dream of the day when we too can sing of how good and pleasant it is when brethren live together in harmony, when we listen to each other with open hearts and recognize our common humanity.
I dream of a day when we live into taking seriously God’s promises of abundance, grace, and healing, and responding in kind to each other.
We can break through the silences that serve to divide us. God calls us to real unity, grounded in justice. If we have faith, and believe in the power of love to bring us together, strangers no longer, but beloved kindred in God.
(Preached at Christ Church Cathedral, August 20, 2017)
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