No Dress Code: Sermon Proper 23A October 15, 2023

Ah, another Sunday, another gospel reading that seems to portray God as vindictive and violent, and uses religious differences to back that up.

Another Sunday where we misunderstand parables and their symbolism. So let me start out asking these questions:

Do we believe that God is a slave-owning king willing to slaughter anyone who offends him?
Do we believe that scripture portrays God that way, and do we ourselves experience God in that way?
Do we believe that people are FORCED into the kingdom of heaven, measured, and then found wanting?
To be specific, do we believe God would condemn to eternal hell people who do not wear the right clothes to a party to which they were not initially invited? And if so, should we put that on our website in the section for visitors under “What to expect?”

Once, again, NO. And for those of us who are survivors of the kinds of Christianity that DOES promote ideas like that, let me say this: HELL NO.

Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says this about hell:

“I am among the 78% of American Jews who do not believe in hell. On the other hand, I do like the idea. In my less generous moments, I have delightful thoughts of sentencing people there. Then I stopped, both because I realized such thoughts are ungracious and because I do not believe that eternal pain helps any one. To whether there are postmortem punishments in hell, or rewards in heaven, that I do not want to know personally for a very long time: getting through each day on earth is complicated enough.”[1]

And yet, some of us WANT a God who smites sinners and leaves people we don’t like to roast in hell for all eternity. We especially want that when we ourselves feel victimized or powerless. But I wonder— is this a case of making God in our own image, rather than allowing God to remake us in God’s own image?

We know that this parable has been especially misused by a whole lot of people who like to imagine God to be vindictive and violent to justify their own vindictiveness and violence, which is usually tied to a toxic masculinity and patriarchical model of Christian leadership. This has become, in particular, a deeply dangerous political idea.

To be frank: I am persuaded that this parable has been misused historically when it has been about who is thrown out into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. We gloss over the images of abundance and welcome that are embedded in this story, and in the readings we heard before this gospel in our lectionary. And we may be allowing our resistance to real gospel values to suppress the growth of our spiritual understanding.

First of all, we need to stop believing that we can separate our spiritual lives from our daily lives. We modern Christians keep wanting to separate our daily lives from our spiritual lives—to think about the kingdom of God only on Sundays—and not even every Sunday, since our lives are overscheduled and there are other things to do.

But here’s a truth: your spiritual lives ARE your everyday lives. It is how we live outside these walls that truly reveals our spiritual values and our spiritual compass. And so we are being urged here to understand that we are being called to spiritual renewal.

We overlook the fact that the king invites EVERYONE in, and asks only that they put on the clothing of abundance. I wonder if a more fruitful interpretive lens to hold up to this passage is the universal abundance and universal grace we hear in our first three readings.

In our passage from Isaiah, we hear of rich feast prepared by God for those who live in exile and oppression. Hardly the image of a God who seeks our everlasting torment.

Then, there is the 23rd Psalm. Is there any more beloved and precious depiction of God’s determined love, care, and protection in scripture than this beautiful poem?

And then Paul’s closing thoughts to the Christians at Philippi, urging them to not let a disagreement between two of their members to keep them from embodying the “mind of Christ”—specifically describing the mind of Christ and therefore the mind of God, as being true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise.

The three parables that we have heard the last three weeks about Jesus’s authority make it clear that those in power had rejected Jesus’s invitation. This third parable makes it clear that Matthew’s community believes that because the leaders and now Jerusalem itself have rejected God’s message sent to them through numerous prophets and finally God’s own son, as last week’s parable made clear, the invitation is going to be extended to people that powerful people usually wouldn’t associate with and denigrated: the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the riffraff, the nobodies, the blind and lame, the people who thought they’d been forgotten. People just like us, just as broken as us, just as in need of grace as us.

When we start trying to exclude people from entering our doors, from sharing in communion with us, from hearing that they are beloved by God, we are behaving EXACTLY as those Jesus is shown here as criticizing.

There is no dress code for God’s kingdom.

When God invites us into the wedding feast, God provides everything that is needed—including the robes. But the robes are not something external. The robes symbolize the inner transformation of living by embodying that same grace and mercy we have received for others.

What if the person who is found without a robe does not symbolize not being the right sort of person by birth or ancestry, but by refusing to be transformed by the banquet? What if that lack of robe is actually a refusal to adopt the mindset of community and gratitude that Jesus makes central to one’s ministry in the world?

Once you’ve come in to the feast, you are expected to put on the garments of love—the same characteristics that Paul lists as necessary to living the faithful life: whatever is true, honorable, just, and pure—and this is about internal purity in the sense of allowing love, not condemnation, to shine out of us.

The Church may bill itself as the representation of God’s banquet—the kingdom of heaven in Matthew’s terminology on earth. That’s beautiful—except for the times when the Church falters in living up to the ideals espoused in the gospel. The fact that we fail as the Church should surprise no one, since the Church is made up of fallible human beings who do not shed their pain, wounds, or sins at the door, but bring them right on in. After all, this community is where the healing can take place. Jesus’s healing of people’s physical ailments throughout scripture was all about restoring people to relationship. And that is necessary work today as much as it was in Jesus’s time.

We as the Church can start to embody the kingdom of heaven rather than mirroring the wounds of our society--IF we are intentional about recognizing that fact, and become very intentional about how we respond to each other and treat each other as we learn this new language of love and life that Jesus’s gospel calls us to. IF we start by constantly examining the way we treat each other here within our communities of faith, and try to change the ways we relate to each other so that we put on those wedding garments.

When we align this parable with the epistle and the gospel, we are led to a reminder that our spiritual life and our daily lives must align within a joyful embodiment of sharing what we have received from God with those around us.

We are led once again to awe at the abundance of God’s mercy and provision in all four of our readings. We are also led to an understanding of the way that God calls us into true community with each other, regardless of our differences. If God can prepare a rich feast for us even while we are inclined to fear and anxiety with our enemies surrounding us, and if God invites EVERYONE to the wedding feast of the kingdom, who are we to harbor hatred, division, or defeatism ESPECIALLY in our spiritual lives OR in our daily lives when we are confronted with the opportunity to toss people out or condemn others?

I have known people throughout my life who were angry, judgmental, and unkind. I have known people who have held others to impossible standards of behavior that they themselves did not meet, but were always searching for some pretext to feel superior to others and to cast others out with curses and condemnation. And all too often, they justified division and cruelty and even aggression in the name of Jesus. And the worst part was, many of these people call themselves “Christian.” And in doing so, they have tarnished the gospel of Christ in the eyes of thousands. We hear actual statements of this from people who have left the church—especially young people—because not only were they not welcomed, but they saw people who claimed to believe in Jesus acting absolutely opposite of Jesus’s example.

What if this parable is meant to remind us that God does not call the perfect, but God asks the called to work toward perfection—and by perfection, I mean those hallmarks of Jesus that actually imitate Jesus: being true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise, as Paul puts it in our epistle.

Grace is grace because it is not only generous, it is unexpected and unearned. Grace goes against everything for which our human-made systems stand. As Rachel Held Evans writes in our book study book, Searching for Sunday:

The church is positively crawling with people who don’t deserve to be here…starting with me. But the table can transform even our enemies into companions. The table reminds us that, as brothers and sisters adopted into God’s family and invited to God’s banquet, we’re stuck with each other; we’re family.[2]

We all are invited to the banquet, and we bring with us our anger, our flaws, our fears. But just as we are accepted as we are, we are also invited to allow the grace of the sacraments and the community to change us and heal us. Putting on the wedding garment means allowing yourself to be transformed by the miracle of community that the wedding feast is, that we are called to truly re-enact every time we worship together. The point is not to just sit and observe and then go back to our business. The point is to be amazed and transformed by the abundance God places before us in every moment—and to take that into our hearts and souls and share that good news with the world.

Come in to the feast—and let the feast change you. Let the feast change our communities by changing us. And by that, we change the world. No dress code required.

Amen.



Preached at the 505 on October 14 and the 8:30 and 10:30 am Holy Eucharists on October 15, 2023 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14


Citations:
[1] Amy-Jill Levine, The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings, p. 101, Kindle edition.
[2] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving Leaving, and Finding the Church, p. 152.

Skipping Stones: Sermon for Easter 5B

We all knew that 2020 was a tough year for entertainment. Movie theatres were shuttered; Broadway dimmed its lights. Sports were hit especially hard: Major League Baseball and the NFL played abbreviated seasons and still saw outbreaks among the players, and the NHL operated under bubbles in Canada. Thanks to the pandemic, the NBA’s season from start to finish covered 355 days. But for rock-skipping, one sport’s loss was another sport’s gain, and the Mackinac Island Championships last year were even featured on ESPN.

Yes, there are rock-skipping championships for grownups, and one of the quirkiest is on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron. Each year there is a tournament where grown men with nicknames like “Hard-Luck”, “Mountain-man,” and yes, unimaginatively, “Skip,” bend themselves double to send six rocks dancing across the waves in search of glory, a trophy, and 48 pounds of Mackinac Island fudge, which is considered a year’s supply in someone’s bizarre accounting. 

From the first "plink" to the "pittypat" of a smoothly spun stone launched at an optimal 20 degree angle at its release, a team of judges, with their tongues firmly in their cheeks and away from that fudge, count each distinct contact of stone and wave. Competitors still upright after hurling their stone stand squinting, praying to avoid a “gerplunk” in which the stone drops into the water like a, yes, rock; or an “agnew,” in which the stone hits a bystander, a judge or, worst of all, a real person wondering what the heck these weirdos are doing. 

At the very least, rock skipping seems to provide the answer to the question from Monty Python of whether witches float, and someone asks what also floats? Suggested answer? Bread, apples, and very small rocks. And ducks.

As for myself, I am, when it comes to rock-skipping, a purist. I believe in rock skipping for the simple joy of it, unsullied by the taint of competition. Rock skipping brings back a combination of childhood nostalgia and sensory memory: the feel of of finding your likely stones on rocky banks, inhaling the tangy scent of muddy lake water, and hearing Grandpa yelling at us dang kids to stop scaring the fish away.

Yet I have found the purest test of stone skipping was on still water, especially a pond on a still summer’s day, with skill and arm strength alone propelling that rock forward. Sometimes, the best part was after the stone had sunk beneath the surface in silence. Then, we could count the overlapping rings where rock and water had met. On days like that, we would reverently wait as the rings moved ever outward, their edges growing finer and thinner, until the surface of the water was once again smooth and undisturbed. We’d often let out a little sigh as the surface became glassy like a mirror rather than blurry and rippled once more. And then after a few moments, one of us would start the process of finding and launching a well-shaped stone all over again, just so we could admire that throw and the chain of beautiful rings linked and then wisped away like smoke. In my life skipping stones has been more of a contemplative practice.

Sometimes, then and now, I would think about how skipping stones can be a metaphor for life. The interplay of stones and water violates all illusions of predictability: here’s a heavy thing that just for a little while levitates and dances over the most yielding of surfaces. Sometimes we are the rocks, uprooted from where we’ve been hanging out by something beyond our control, suddenly spun and flung out and plunged into an environment we’ve never considered and didn’t ask for. Other times, we’re the placid body of water, minding our own business until some fool comes along and starts trying to disturb the calm surface we’ve so carefully cultivated.

As I grew older, I realized that there have been many people who have skipped across the surface of my life—random encounters with strangers in which, for some reason, eyes meet and notice is taken, and some small kindness is offered, some pleasant conversation is exchanged, some finding of common ground is recognized. Maybe it lasts only a few minutes. But we walk away reminded of the divine spark that rests within each of us and flares to life when we truly see each other and honor each other rather than hoping we avoid eye contact, when we recognize our commonalities rather than our differences or indifferences.

In our reading from Acts today, we hear the story of just such an encounter, as the Holy Spirit skips like a stone across the surface of the lives of Philip and an exotic stranger, leading them to plunge into a small body of water in an act of discovery, joy, and faith.

I imagine that that water alongside that road 2000 years ago was just as smooth and undisturbed as the sun reached its zenith. Most people had the sense to travel in the cool of the morning. And for the last several weeks, things had been in a turmoil in Israel, as if boulders had been tossed into the Sea of Galilee, all because of the work and the execution of a strange Galileean rabbi. His life and his death had created a lot of waves. The authorities were hoping that now that he and his little band were properly cowed, the tumult could cease and, at least on the surface, things could calm down once more.

They thought they had put an end to him and his so-called “good news,” which was nothing but a bunch or tricks and rabble rousing—at least from the leaders’ perspectives.

They did not count on the Holy Spirit. People often don’t. But here the Holy Spirit reaches down and plucks Philip out of what he has been doing, out evangelizing among the Samaritans, even though they were outsiders. Instead, the Holy Spirit sends an angel to tell him to go stand by that wilderness road leading from Jerusalem, even if the heat of the day made that sound crazy.

And instead of an empty road, along comes an ornate chariot, and in that chariot is an astonishing, arresting sight: a court official from Ethiopia, practically the ends of the known world, treasurer for the Queen herself, reading aloud from the writings of the prophet Isaiah. His dark black skin, his voice, and his smooth face implied that he was a eunuch and a foreigner—the ultimate outsider. Yet here were the words of the prophet Isaiah coming from his lips! His sumptuous clothing, carriage, and the fact that he was in possession of a scroll of a prophet indicated his wealth, sophistication, and power. His status as a eunuch made him non-binary in a world that insisted on either/or for everything, and made him not quite male in a world in which only males mattered.

But the Holy Spirit cares for none of these things, then or now. The next thing Philip knows, he has called out to the stranger, skimmed across that road and is clambering alongside the eunuch, first explaining the passage he was reading, and then the good news, or gospel, of Jesus. The passage from Isaiah becomes a stepping stone and a skipping stone at the same time, drawing together seeker and disciple despite all barriers. The gospel of Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophetic promises that all nations, and people of all whom humans might exclude through physical or national prejudices, would be drawn to God, and it is through Jesus that that happens.

Who knows how long Philip spoke? But no matter what, the eunuch heard, and believed. It was at that moment that the gospel of Christ, once confined among mostly the poor of Galilee and Jerusalem, suddenly spun across the surface of that Ethiopian’s life and began to expand from disbelief to certainty. The gospel spins out to the edge of the world, carried to someone as different from those early church member as he can be, in every single way.

“Here is water!” the Ethiopian exclaims. “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Was it a demand? Or was it a plea, expecting rejection? Either way, Philip had no defense. He had no objection that seemed to stand any more, although others might point to his counterpart’s exotic status, his foreignness, his mutilated body, any number of things. But we do not hear any resistance from Philip. It’s shocking, after all, this profligate power of love that breaks down any and all barriers. It was one thing to preach the good news to the Samaritans—at least they were distant kin and neighbors of the people of Israel. But this man was an “other” and a stranger and outsider in every possible way.

Too often, we tend to avoid encounters with those around us, much less the forming of real relationship. We are too prone to hold ourselves aloof from those different from us—maybe through contempt, maybe through suspicion, maybe through fear of being vulnerable. All of those things could have prevented this encounter between these two very different people—but God broke through. And so without hesitation, this unlikely pair enters the water beside the road—and as they emerge, both are changed by the encounter with each other, which is also an encounter with God. Where these two men might have approached each other with hesitancy if not outright disdain, they instead become kindred in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, each praising and testifying to God in the aftermath, each flourishing as branches of Christ the true vine brought together by the love God has for all humanity.

Even this early in the Book of Acts, we see the gospel’s reach expanding and spreading like those interlocking ripples on the surface of the water—and Paul, Apostle and champion of the Gentiles, hasn’t even been converted yet—that’s the very next story. This story sets the stage for Paul’s mission, as the Church finds its way to being insular or inclusive—a question that hangs over every Christian parish to this day: Do we sit back and wait for people to come to us, or do we go out and let the love of God break down all barriers and divisions?

Here we see the interlocking rings fanning out from the gospel as it dances improbably like a skipping stone. The disciples at first confined their preaching to fellow inhabitants of Israel, then to co-religionists living all around the Mediterranean. Then the ripples grew wider, and entered into Samaria, and now into the court of the ruling family of Ethiopia. God has been made visible in the most unlikely of places by the unlikely meeting of these two very different people, and neither one of them emerges from that water unchanged. For the Ethiopian, there is a new understanding of God, who sends Jesus to us despite the cost to show us the way of living that brings not just existence, but LIFE. For Philip, further proof that God shows no partiality and the gospel will break free and take root beyond any barriers humans might try to use to control it or limit it. But the Holy Spirit is asking us to skip across our resistance, our hesitancy, and be willing to spread let the gospel by our love, and let that love radiate out from us like ripples on water.

Love cannot be caged. The Holy Spirit will carry the gospel where she will through the discipleship of you and me, and those until it breaks loose of all barriers our prejudices and fears may try to erect around it. As today’s epistle so insistently reminds us, twenty-nine times over, the basis of true worship of God is rooted in love. Love as action. Love that does not exclude but calls all things and all beings to share in the joy of eternal life rooted in the now. Not in limiting the good news only to certain times or certain people, but in encountering each other with joy, empowered by the good news of Jesus, so that we recognize the bonds of love that are meant to link us all together. Like a stone skimming across the surface of the water, the gospel touches down where it will, and the effects of that good news ripple ever outward with no signs of abating.

Can we likewise welcome the Spirit’s dance over the still waters of our lives, stirring up joy and faith, come what may? Can we welcome the stirring up of our hearts’ waters for the sake of a world that desperately needs the good news of a God whose love binds us all together? The Ethiopian’s question hangs over us as well: What is to prevent us from embracing our baptism, from embracing the gospel and being transformed? Isn’t that transformation the meaning and essence of Easter and resurrection itself?

Love calls us forward and calls us to dance over the waves. Despite all barriers we might like to erect and despite all resistance we may have to being vulnerable to the promise of God’s love for us all. We have nothing to lose but our fear.


Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 online and limited in person service of Holy Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO on May 2, 2021.

Readings:

Acts 8:26-40

Psalm 22:24-30

1 John 4:7-21

John 15:1-8

Citations:

1. Details about the Mackinac Island Stone Skipping Championship can be found here: https://stoneskipping.com.

2. For more on the physics of skipping stones, go here: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.2631

Astounding Grace: Sermon for Proper 15A

I don’t know about you, but I love the underdog. Whenever I see a competition, and I don’t have a particular dog in the hunt, I usually end up rooting for the side that is most disdained or overlooked. This probably is partially due to the fact that I grew up as a sports-loving girl, which in a time when Title IX was just getting started, made me already an underdog. I was good enough at sports that the boys actually asked me to come out and play. Football, baseball, soccer—all through elementary school I was out on the playground with a few other sporty girls and the guys, even in the summer time.

Then I got to junior high, and things got weird, and many guys didn’t want to compete with girls and risk “losing” to girls, and suddenly they got to grow another foot tall while we girls didn’t. And so suddenly, as a girl, for a while there, I and my female sporty friends became the underdog, the overlooked, when it came to sports.

And then, I grew up in a state which had no professional sports, which is how—and I can confess this to you because there is no one actually IN the nave right now to throw things at me-- I grew up to be a Cubs fan.

Yes. Because when cable TV came to Tulsa, the Cubs games were always broadcast on WGN. And during the time I was a Cubs fan, although the Cubs had many talented players, like Greg Maddux, Leon “Bull” Durham, Ron “the Penguin” Cey, and my favorite, Ryne Sandberg, they never had much success. They were supposedly under a curse having something to do with a goat, we were told. Whatever. They were always the underdogs. The discounted. The excluded.

Todays’ reading all feature discussions about underdogs, about those who are excluded, about the tensions between having “insider” status and having “outsider” status. In our story from Genesis, we once again skip a whole lot of the good stuff in the story about Joseph, and jump to the end. Now Joseph has gone from being slave to being the master of Egypt, and his brothers have had to come to Egypt during a famine to try to buy bread for the large family of Jacob to survive. They do not recognize Joseph, who now goes by an Egyptian name, dresses like an Egyptian, walks like an Egyptian, has an Egyptian wife and half-Egyptian children, and is second only to Pharaoh in power. And maybe because he has come out on top, Joseph forgives his brothers for considering murdering him, and then selling him into slavery.

But this story is placed here for the sake of our gospel reading to remind us of an important point about the identity of the people of Israel, as Biblical scholar Wil Gafney points out. “Joseph's complicated family history teaches us that Israelite identity was a cultural and religious one and not an ethnic or even national one in his time -- and for some time to come. In Joseph's story the Israelites and Egyptians are not pitted against one another. There will be enough food for all because of his stewardship.” But the This point will be important later.

As we have been reminded especially at the start of the COVID pandemic, when suddenly all kinds of necessities disappeared from our store shelves even in the American Land of Plenty, in the face of scarcity, the temptation is always to cut others out, to hoard and store up for ourselves. And we certainly see that fear leading some in our society to try to lock others out, especially those in need. Even before COVID, we saw that fear play itself out on our borders, and it continues even though we are distracted by a global pandemic.

It’s human nature to look for some markers so that we can draw bright, circular lines around groups of people. The people on the inside of that line? That’s “us.” And those on the outside of that line? That’s “them.” They’re the “others.” The outsiders, the unworthy.

And in times of stress, or crisis, or scarcity, those we label as “other” risk being seen not just as different but as the enemy, as competition for scarce resource whose needs must be denies so that then insiders can, if not prosper, then at least have “enough.”

Note I said it was human nature. But the question is: is this tendency to exclude a part of God’s plan and vision for God’s kingdom, for the creation of God’s family here on earth than Matthew’s gospel calls “the kingdom of heaven?”

That’s where the story of our Canaanite woman in our gospel today comes in. Hers is the third scene in chapter 15 of Matthew’s gospel. We missed scene one, where Pharisees come and criticize Jesus and his disciples for not observing "traditions of the elders" regarding washing hands before eating and so on. Jesus argues back that violating traditions is not nearly as important as violating commandments, especially the commandment to be generous and expansive in taking care of those in need.

Scene two in this chapter is what we see at the beginning of today’s gospel portion, where Jesus explains to his disciples that true righteousness starts not from the outside of a person, but from the heart—from the inside. For Jesus, true purity and righteousness is about relationships, not about legalism—about how we care for others rather than making a big show of how perfect we ourselves are. Jesus exasperatedly explains that what comes out of the mouth originates in the heart, and bad intentions from the heart leads to real impurity. The six specific impurities he mentions all have to do with broken relationships.

Jesus is accused in the first part of our gospel reading of not having respect for the Law, tradition, and his own culture. In the second half of our gospel, he starts from a prejudice rooted in his culture, and is brought to new amazement by a demonstration of faith where the prejudices of his time would least expect them—from a Canaanite woman. We also have one of the times when Jesus appears to be rude to a woman (remember also his response to his own mother when she asks him to perform the miracle at the wedding at Cana in John’s gospel).

This woman has all the marks of not just an underdog, but an outsider. She is called a “Canaanite,” to remind Matthew’s audience that she is by birth not just an outsider but an enemy of the people of Israel, a competitor for scarce resources— space, land and water. And she is a woman, and women were to be seen and not heard. Yet heard she most certainly is. She comes out and trails behind Jesus and his crowd of followers, caterwauling and braying at the top of her lungs—first from behind the crowd, and then, when she is ignored, she comes around and throws herself down on the ground right in Jesus’s path. She makes it impossible for him to ignore her.

The Canaanite woman asks her favor, will not be denied, and actually argues back to make her case. Only one who believes that Jesus could actually do something would be so determined. In fact this unnamed Canaanite woman is the only person in scripture to be depicted winning a debate with Jesus.

Although at first Jesus answers rudely to our ears (answering rudeness for rudeness, perhaps, but still rude), he does eventually note the power of her faith—and that faith makes her daughter well.

By acknowledging Jesus as the “son of David,” she shows, outsider or not, a familiarity with the Jewish scriptures. The term is also used ten times in the gospel of Matthew alone starting with the very first verse of the gospel. She also uses the language of prayer, “Lord, have mercy,” the same language used in many of our own prayers of intercession, or in the Kyrie eleison. In fact, this short scene is drenched in liturgical action, as she also kneels before him in a position of petition.

Four times in Matthew’s gospel, the plea “Have mercy on me, Son of David!” is used by people asking Jesus to be healed: the two blind men of 9:22-32 and two more in 20:25-21:1, who repeat the plea twice; and here, by the Canaanite woman. In each case of healing, Jesus makes it clear that their healing comes about through their faith, and this Canaanite woman is no different. In each case, the person seeking healing seizes the initiative.

The Canaanite woman is different in that she is a mother seeking healing for her daughter, who is not present. Her faith is so great that she believes that Jesus can heal an outsider’s daughter regardless of distance.

Here is where also we see the tie with the claims in Romans —God’s grace and mercy is for everyone, and no one is left out. 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 claim upon us that should stir a just response rather than resentment. This also reminds us, as we noted in our reflections on Paul, that God’s love is universal, and is not limited to just people who hold the correct sets of beliefs or lineage.

I don’t know about you, but BOY is this a message for our time! Almost every policy discussion surrounding economics and the social safety net revolves around who does and does not deserve help.

So is tenacity a part of faith? What else is faith but perseverance and tenacity even in the face of obstacles? Faith, like any spiritual muscle, is strengthened especially when it is under stress. Only a few days ago we heard the story of Jacob wrestling with God/the angel in the middle of the night in a literal no-man’s land. Jacob couldn’t win, but he refused to back down until he endured a “cheap shot” to his hip—and then demanded a blessing.

Just like Jacob, this woman won’t let go until she, too, gets her blessing. She perseveres. In a popular phrase from our own time, “Nevertheless, she persists.” And in doing so, she invites Jesus into living deeper into the claim he had just made—that God’s grace is not just amazing, as the song goes, but astounding and boundary-exploding.

In the first part of our gospel, Jesus reminds us it is not what goes into a body that defiles, but what comes out. People are not “in” or “out” by accident of birth—where they are born, or who their parents are, or the color of their skin or the language they speak or whether they are outwardly good at following rules while inwardly cruel and hard-hearted. At some point in your life, you are responsible to choose whether to follow God and God’s expansive vision of community or not.

We see it a lot in our society right now, all over what was formerly known as “Christendom.” There are people who were born into Christian homes, and brought up with going to Church. They even absorbed knowledge of Bible stories and perhaps can quote the Lord’s prayer and the 23rd Psalm. They’re “culturally Christian”—nominally fluent in the language and rituals of the Christian religion. But unless they decide for themselves to walk in the Way of Jesus, no matter how imperfectly, their knowledge doesn’t translate into faith.

Luckily, if we can hear this message of radical generosity and inclusion, it means that as we embark on our journey of faith, we are assured that we are not only never outsiders, we are never alone. We not only have Jesus. We have each other. We are called to deny the forces of the world that seek to exclude, to divide, and instead to embrace those we encounter, especially those who call out for help. We ourselves have received astounding grace and mercy. It’s time to demonstrate that same grace to the world around us—especially when everything around us tries to make us hard-hearted and afraid. That’s how the light of Christ will shine, even in this time of fear and darkness. It will shine from inside us, once we embrace each other in true charity and empathy.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online worship service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO during the cessation of in-person worship due to COVID-19.

Readings:

Genesis 45:1-15
Psalm 133
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

Prayer 2218: Based on sayings of John Wesley

God of Abundance,
we raise our hearts to You in praise,
and ask your Spirit to guide us in wisdom and love.

Help us, O God,
to be rigorous in judging ourselves,
and gracious in judging others,
remembering the repeated forgiveness which upholds us.

Even when we cannot think alike,
help us to love alike, Blessed Savior,
making us of one heart
even if not of one opinion.

Rather, let us love one another fully,
embracing all who seek You, O Holy One,
by doing all the good we can,
by all the means we can,
in all the ways we can,
in all the places we can,
at all the times we can,
to all the people we can,
as long as ever we can.

Spirit of Love, set us ablaze with a holy fire,
and fill us with courage
to witness to the power of God's love in our lives,
as we ask your blessing upon these beloveds.

Amen.

(Written as the United Methodist Church opens a special session of their General Conference here in St. Louis to address whether they will fully accept all members, including LGBTQ members.)

Being Open: Sermon for Proper 18B

After all the arguing with the Pharisees for the past many chapters, Jesus is apparently weary, and wants to get away for a break. So he goes into Gentile territory to the north of the borders of Israel, hoping that, at least there, he can be anonymous. Perhaps he was still brooding over the repeated rejections of his message by those who heard it—not just the Pharisees but even his own followers. No doubt he was exhausted from having to explain things over and over and over and receiving at best only puzzled looks in return.

Just like all of us, Jesus needed periods of rest. And by now, the only way he was going to get that was by going away, by going to places outside the boundaries of Israel and Judea. So he went up to Lebanon, to the city of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast, an ancient city, originally founded by the Phoenicians, the people who gave us the alphabet. And yet, even there, immediately he is approached by a woman of the area, who falls down before him at his feet, a position of both worship and pleading. It’s also a wise position, strategically, because it is impossible—and incredibly rude-- to ignore someone who has thrown themselves at your feet.

This woman is an outsider on three important levels. First, she is a woman, approaching a strange man whom she does not know. Second, she is a Gentile, of Phoenician and Syrian heritage. Third, the inhabitants of the region of Tyre were typically prosperous, as it was a busy trading hub with a highly lucrative economy as compared to the poorer agricultural area from which Jesus came around Galilee.

So Jesus responds in a way that is not exactly welcoming—maybe it’s the exhaustion talking. Or maybe he is a little resentful of her forcing herself upon him as he is seeking some peace and quiet. So Jesus tries to turn her away, and he even implies that she and her people are dogs, fit only to cringe outside the doors of the children of Israel. And maybe Jesus, fully human and worn out and frustrated, hopes that like a dog she will slink away. But the love this woman has for her daughter, and the fear this woman has for her daughter, has led her this far in powering through all the obstacles of race and gender that should keep her completely powerless. Perhaps she anticipated that this Jewish holy man would reject her, as expected, and had prepared her counterarguments with that probability in mind.

What we see here is that there are several times in the gospels where Jesus himself is astounded and surprised by someone who by rights should have less than zero understanding of him and faith in his message—tax collectors, women accused of impurity, centurions and members of the Roman legions occupying Israel, Samaritans, and now this uppity Syrophoenician woman who won’t take no for an answer.

None of these people are considered insiders. All of them are considered impure or defiled for one reason or another. Yet all of them teach even Jesus about the borderless power of faith. Faith respects no boundaries, but grows where it will.

“Maybe I am a dog, sir,” she responds, humbly, refusing to be thrown off by any attempt to provoke her. “But even dogs are grateful to accept whatever scraps and crumbs fall their way.” And in this way, she draws Jesus up short, and leads him to reconsider. He himself has just gotten finished arguing that nothing on the outside of a person can make them unclean. And now, standing before him, is living proof of exactly that message.

What we see here is that Jesus really is fully human, and that’s vitally important for us. We have hope because God became fully human in Jesus, and Jesus, just like us, got tired and hungry, mourned for his friend Lazarus, and got tired and frustrated. That’s the reality and the comfort of the incarnation. Jesus emerges from this encounter, just like his tempting in the wilderness and his baptism, changed. He has been reminded that even he has to be mindful to understand that God’s love for the world shows no partiality and admits not lines of division. No one is outside the bounds of God’s grace. No one. 

The Syrophoenician woman asks that Jesus be open to the idea that all are equal in the eyes of God, no matter who they are or where they come from. And just like with the synagogue official or the centurion’s servant elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus pronounces the woman’s daughter healed, effecting this healing from a distance.

Yet he is still looking for some rest, and for a perhaps a chance to consider the implications of his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman. So he moves even further to the north away from his homeland toward Sidon, further up the Mediterranean coast. 

Yet even here, his fame as a holy man and a healer cannot be escaped. “They”—and we don’t know who “they” are, bring him a man who cannot communicate due to an impediment in his hearing. And in the next part of our gospel, we see the effects of that encounter with the unnamed woman of faith. Instead of turning this man away, a man who also is isolated by his inability to communicate, Jesus takes him aside, touches him, and heals him with this important command: “Ephphatha.”

“Be opened.”

The Syrophoenician woman reminded Jesus and reminds all of us, every single day, to be opened to a crucial reality—a reality still coming into being due to our own resistance and fearfulness. A reality that therefore can never be repeated enough to break through our human tendencies to exclude those different from us. That challenging reality is that God’s reconciling, healing love truly has no limits. 

God’s love is a generous, abundant love. God’s call is a generous, abundant call to all. This reminds us that our discipleship too must be open to all. We don’t exist as a community of faith merely for ourselves or for those who are similar to us. We exist as a community of faith to serve as disciples and witnesses to the world outside these doors, both when we are acting as a community and when we are acting as individuals. Even when we think no one is looking.

Being open to the movement of the Spirit of God in our lives is the foundation of salvation and discipleship, but it's also scary. It means being open to God’s will wherever it may lead us, and we like to be in control of where we are going. It means being open to being surprised. It means being open to acknowledging that God’s ways are not our ways of exclusion and setting people up for failure. Instead God's ways are always about regeneration of heart and spirit.

This command to be open to the untamed power of the Spirit moving freely among us reminds me of this story, which I've never shared with you, although I have elsewhere. In April, Pope Francis was visiting with the children of a working-class parish in Rome. The children took turns asking the pope questions. One little boy, probably about 7 or 8, however, lost his nerve when he approached the microphone, and he started to cry.

So the pope urged the little boy to come up to him and whisper his question. Pope Francis embraced him and they spoke to each other in whispers, and then the little boy returned to his seat. The Pope then said the little boy, named Emanuele, had given his permission for the Pope to share what was troubling him.

The little boy’s father had recently died, and had been a non-believer. However, even though a non-believer, he had had his four children baptized, and had been a good man and a beloved father. The boy’s tears for his father, which the Pope characterizes as “brave,” proved that Emanuele’s father had been a good person.

“Is my father in heaven?” the little boy whispered, tormented.

“The one who decides who goes to heaven is God,” the Pope explained. “But what is God’s heart like with a dad like that? What? What do you think?” he asked the crowd of schoolchildren. He paused. “A Father’s heart. God has a dad’s heart. And with a dad who was not a believer, but who baptized his children, and gave his children that courage, do you think God would leave him far from himself? Do you think? Speak up, with courage.”

The crowd murmured, “No!”

“Does God abandon his children?” the Pope continued.
“No!” the crowd responded, stronger this time.

“Does God abandon his children when they are good?”
“No!” came the immediate response.

“There, Emanuele, is your answer,” the Pope said, looking at the little boy now in his seat. “God surely was proud of your father because it is easier as a believer to baptize your children than when you are not a believer. Surely this pleased God very much.”

The pope makes an important point here. We humans are the ones who try to limit and create barriers—and we are really good at doing that, even in the Church. In doing this, we diminish God and close our ears and our hearts and our eyes to God’s grace. “Be open!” God calls to us!

Be open, even if it goes against everything our society tells us about who is in and who is out. Be open, ESPECIALLY because it goes against everything our society tells us about who is in and who is out.

We are known as Christians by our love—by the fruit we produce to build up the kingdom of God, whose foundation is love, as our epistle from James keeps reminding us. As Pope Francis pointed out, the fruit of the father’s life that we had before us in this short episode showed a life grounded in love, especially in love for his children that lives on in his children. 

The Syrophoenician woman was faithful despite being an outsider and brave because of her love. God has no partiality and includes all regardless of status. And we are called to do the same. God gives generously to us, and we are called to be open to embodying that same generosity as part of our living witness to God in all aspects of our lives.

Be open!

May we hear God’s command, and respond. But, more importantly, may we hear God’s promise of love within that command. May we open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts, and offer everything we have and everything we are to the One who loves US that much.

Amen.


Preached at the 505 on September 8, and at 8:00 and 10:15 am on September 9, 2018, at St. Martin's Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9. 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17
Mark 7:24-37

Illustrations:
1) Jesus and the Canaanite woman, modern icon.
2) David Croker, Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman.
3) Icon, the Syrophoenician Woman.
4) Ephphatha graphic, from The Sacred Heart Messenger, at https://sacredheartmessenger.com/tag/ephphatha/ .
5) Pope Francis embraces Emanuele.
6) Pope Francis urges Emanuele forward.