Sermon: Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The first sermon I ever preached in this sanctuary was from a text talking about divorce. I remember thinking as I wrote that first manuscript, geez… it really can’t get worse than this. What am I supposed to talk about? I can imagine God having a quiet chuckle thinking about what I was going to find in a text in the middle of August in 2008, because if it was up to me, I would want to take a bottle of white-out and cover up all the pages of your bibles that hold Matthew 15: 10-28. I don’t like the Jesus we confront in our text for this morning, in fact, I think this passage makes him sound like someone I certainly wouldn't want to know.
Jesus and the disciples are in the district of Tyre and Sidon, when this Caananite woman comes wandering into the picture. The people who live in this region aren’t Jewish, they worship Phoenician gods, and so they are pagans. The Canaanites were descendents of Canaan, a son we hear a bit about in the old Testament. He was the son of Ham. According to the story, after the great flood Noah got a little drunk. He laid naked in his tent, and Ham walked in. Seeing his father’s nakedness, he tells his brothers in a half joking fashion, and those brothers, appalled that their father is lying naked, cover him. Waking, Noah is so angry at what Ham has done that he curses Ham’s son, Canaan, making him the slave to all these brothers. Later in the book of Genesis, God gives Abraham the land of Canaan, then in Dueteronomy, tells Joshua to kill the people and take their lands and their cities.
This woman carries all this with her- historical slavery to the Jews, curses on her people and her land. She is the victim of long-held racial prejudices, she is ignored and despised by good Jewish people. So when we find her screaming about some sick daughter, following Jesus and the disciples around, it doesn’t seem surprising that she appears a little off her rocker. That she won’t be quiet, that she keeps following them crying out for help.
And this is where I don’t really get Jesus’ response. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t say anything. In fact, this is the only time in the entire gospel that Jesus does not respond to someone’s cry. He ignores her. How can the Jesus I know do that? The disciples ask him to please tell her to go away, with her carrying on the way she is. And Jesus says, you know, my ministry is for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He doesn’t send her away, but he doesn’t bless her either, because she is far outside of his ministry to the lost sheep of Israel.
Now let us remember what Jesus is all about- so far in our gospel we know he is all about the lost, he is all about the kingdom of heaven, he is all about healing and eating with tax collectors and sinners. He is all about challenging the in-group, in the face of incredible opposition. So is he just having a bad day? Because to me, this seems like a great teaching moment- when he can tell those disciples, well, my friends, you might think that this woman is outside of our ministry, but she is certainly not, because no one is. She is a child of God just as you are, so get out of the way and send her down because I have a healing ministry to get going. This, of course, is not what we hear from Jesus. In fact, the text seems to get even worse. This woman falls at the feet of Jesus, and she begs him to heal her daughter, sick, even dying and possessed by a demon. And Jesus says to her, “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Is this a misprint? Because I can’t figure out how that could ever be a nice thing to say. I can’t even figure out how Jesus just fed a crowd of 5,000 people with a couple loaves and some fish, and now he is calling this woman a dog and telling her there isn’t any food left. This just doesn’t square with who Jesus seems to be.
And I am not the only one who seems a bit stuck on this point. Scholars have battled with this passage, trying to figure out a way for Jesus to be meaning something nice. Some suggest that he was really just trying to prove a point, calling this woman a dog to her face so that those slow to learn disciples would really understand that all people are included in the kingdom of God. Others suggest that perhaps he was saying these terrible words to her in order that she could learn more about who she was, she could learn to stand up for herself even in the face of abuse. Others suggest that Jesus was trying to make a point, speaking out against prejudice to all who would hear this text. And others suggest that Jesus was tired, having a bad day, annoyed with all the miracles he was doing. The writer of the gospel of Matthew just doesn’t tell us. The writer doesn’t include a conversation later with the disciples where Jesus explains what he was doing, all we have are the words recorded in our lesson for today.
I battled with this text all week. I sat in my office and tried to figure out what to say. And I came home and fell asleep thinking about what Jesus was doing here. I think the problem is that I don’t know if I buy any of those other explanations. But then, I realized, perhaps we don’t have to.
I’m Lutheran by background and Scandinavian by heritage, so I know that in my upbringing the mark of strong person, the mark of a good leader was to stick it out no matter what kind of decision you made. Good leaders don’t change course. They don’t make mistakes, they don’t go back on their word and try something new. This kind of thinking happens in the church all the time. It happens in our jobs, when we know we’ve really screwed something up, and rather than turn around, we plow forward in order to save face. Or in our families, when we have made a bad decision, or done something hurtful or unfair, and rather than admit that we were angry, or tired, or scared, we just keep on enforcing that decision even if it doesn’t make any sense. We see it in politics. We see it in churches. Good leaders don’t change course, because it means that the first course was wrong.
And that is where I found some good news. Because, right there, in that messy passage in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus changes course. Without shame, without anger, he is challenged imagine something new. This woman teaches him something new. This woman asks him to consider that his mission and ministry might be a lot bigger than he first imagined. It isn’t just to the lost sheep of Israel, it is just as much to the poor, broken, pagans in Canaan. It is to the people that no one could have ever imagined were included.
Our call to ministry- ministry in the church, ministry in our jobs, ministry in our families, is marked by love for God’s people. As one writer put it, just when we think we’ve seen the limits of God’s love, that love grows. I think this woman in our text for today taught Jesus something. I think she taught Jesus that his ministry was bigger than he could ever have imagined, that it extended to the ends of the earth, past those places where good Jewish people could be assured God’s love did not go. So, we, too, can find something here. Faith points us down strange roads, and sometimes we are forced to change course. This woman, cursed since the time of Noah, alone, afraid, kneels at the feet of Jesus and reminds him of who she is. Because she is no dog. She is a woman of great faith. Faith that was profound enough to teach Jesus something. She, despite being cursed and ignored, reflects to all those wandering through her land, the face of God. Amen.