Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from September 10, 2006

“Giving It Back”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

James 2:1-17

Mark 7:24-37

These aren’t the texts I would have chosen for today.  Given that I haven’t seen some of you all summer long,  it’s hardly a great place to start.  All I can think of is that Jesus must have been having a bad day because this isn’t how we usually encounter him in Scripture.

What is depicted here doesn’t fit the image of a gentle, loving, embracing teacher.  This scene kind of fits in with other instances in Scripture when Jesus appears to lose it—cursing the fig tree for having no figs (even though it wasn’t fig season) and that little scene in the temple where he busts up the place and yells at a bunch of people.  Justified or not, it’s a little uncomfortable.  And this one—calling an unnamed woman a dog and, at least initially, refusing to heal her child—it’s not the Jesus we usually meet on the pages of Scripture.  Biblical scholar Sharon Rindge delicately suggests, “Jesus was caught with his compassion down.” 

Whether this is an eyewitness account of an actual encounter or some combination of stories that came together for a larger purpose is anyone’s guess.  For myself, I tend to think of this and many other biblical stories in the same way as folk singer John McCutcheon thinks of the stories his ballads tell.  They’re not factual but they’re true.  This story may or may not be factual but there are lots of truth for us to discover that jumps across the centuries to enliven our faith and inform our spirits.

Like all the Gospel writers, Mark’s audience was disciples, believers, people just like you and me.  The time of Mark’s writing is about 40 or 60 years after Jesus’ earthly ministry, death and resurrection.  His audience is second-generation believers because the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life and ministry were dying off.  This new generation of followers was trying to get a handle on who Jesus was and what it meant to be part of the developing community of faith that gathered in his name.

As in every generation, there were some unique challenges and the writer of Mark’s gospel wasn’t above using hyperbole to make a point. There are some pieces of this story that are almost intentionally over the top, just to make sure folks or his listeners didn’t miss the point. 

A recurring theme in Mark’s gospel addresses the age-old problem of who’s in and who’s out when it comes to the church, what is God’s grace and favor in the Kingdom both present and to come.  We see the battle played out in churches today between those who favor and do not favor things like women’s reproductive rights, civil rights for marginalized populations, not to mention differing perspectives about war and peace, the blending of church and state and our responsibility to the poor, the homeless and the dispossessed.

In the early years of the church, it was about the place of Jews and Gentiles.  Some believed you had to be a Jew before you could be Christian.  Others said, “No, it didn’t really matter whether you’d been a Jew or a Hottentot.”  Still others believed you couldn’t be a “real” Christian unless you’d been born Jewish.  It just went on and on and on.

Mark has Jesus stepping right into the fray by calling an unnamed Syro-Phoenician woman and her ailing child dogs and reaffirming that his mission was to the lost tribes of Israel.  I don’t know about you but I just think it’s not pretty at all.

Some biblical commentaries try and soften the text by suggesting that Jesus used a diminutive form of the noun meaning puppy.  But nothing in my scholarship suggests that that’s true. Even if it was, I’m trying to figure out how it helps.  Jesus calls this woman a dog which was a common first-century racial epithet for Gentiles.

It illustrated the social and political tensions between the Jews and Gentiles.  It cannot be underestimated here, particularly with the folks who are named from this particular region—the folks from Tyre and Sidon which is where these encounters take place.  Suffice it to say that, under the best of circumstances, these folks would have had a hard time being in the same space and speaking civilly to each other.  Think of Fred Phelps and his Baptist cohort hooking up with the folks from the local Unitarian Church and you get a sense of what the tenor of the encounter was like.

It's an odd exchange.  Jesus is confronted by a Gentile woman with a request for healing on her daughter's behalf.  Jesus insults her.  She banters back and doesn’t break down.  Jesus changes his mind and heals the daughter.

Biblical scholar Sarah Dylan Breuer notes, “When Jesus answers the woman, regardless of what he specifically says, he is recognizing the woman’s right to speak with him.”  And that was radical for the time.  Women did not address men in public, and if they took the risk and did so, it was usually because they were prostitutes.  Women were summarily dismissed by most and generally ignored by all.

“Just by making the request, she is implying that she has a right to Jesus’ time and attention … by arguing, she implies she is worthy of challenging him.  And by answering, Jesus affirms that she has that status in his eyes.  It is a profoundly counter cultural recognition of her dignity.”  (Breuer)

That Jesus calls her a dog is less important than that he addresses her at all.  The act of arguing is a way of honoring this woman’s presence, of making visible one who was otherwise invisible.

J. Barry Vaughn, an Episcopal priest suggests that this text invites us to celebrate the place of pushy women (and, sometimes, men) who challenge the social constructs of the time in order to right a wrong and draw the circle of inclusion of God’s love bigger and bigger all the time.  Going a step further, I’d like to think this text calls us to celebrate those who, though different, are unashamed of their difference, so comfortable in their own skin that they are unwilling to slink off quietly to the sidelines for the sake of another’s fear-based comfort, prejudice or projection.

People like Rosa Parks, Cindy Sheehan, Martin Luther King, Jr., the theologian Parker Palmer, Matthew Fox, Sister Helen Prejean, and countless others whose names we will never know who stand in the tradition of elucidating and celebrating differences and inviting us to the table of God's grace that is always set with faces that look far different from our own.

This text is an invitation to remember that we are as likely as Jesus himself to make our faith and the institutions that express it into a culturally bound reflection of our own faces. Like the unnamed Syro-Phoenician woman, there are those in our time who challenge us by their very presence and their refusal to remain silent in their marginalization.  They are witnesses to the gospel of grace, and it is we who have the invitation to be changed. 

Walter Brueggemann writes, "The essential work of justice is figuring out what belongs to whom and giving it back."  In a very real way, that means changing the structures and institutions that embody prejudice.  In a more subtle way, it also means that, in doing so, we have our humanity restored at a deeper level.  In the invitation to come together as one human family without the blinders of race, status, gender, education, age, and language, there is something vital restored on both sides of the table.

It never fails that, when in a city of any size as I am out and about, I am approached by a homeless person and asked for money.  I am sure it happens to you, too.  I am often reluctant to give it, worried that it will be used to buy drugs or alcohol.  Yet, on the other hand, I feel dreadfully guilty if I just pass by without so much as a hello.  If I am alone (which I often am, as I travel for business and consulting), then I always have that added concern for my personal safety.  I sometimes keep a pocketful of change readily accessible so I can at least give enough for a cup of coffee without having to stop and rifle through my purse.

One day, I reached into my pocket for a couple dollars worth of quarters and gave them to a man whose age was difficult to guess because it was clearly clouded by years of hard living. His skin was very leathered, he had few teeth, his clothes were tattered and filthy, and he smelled of alcohol.  When I gave him coffee money, he looked me dead in the eye and said, “God bless you.”  In some ways, nothing had changed.  I knew that he would drink again.  I knew that he would beg again.  I knew that one day I would fumble for change with another homeless, nameless person on another day in another city.  But in another sense, everything changed because in that brief moment, there was blessing exchanged.

Sometimes we have the opportunity to be agents of mercy.  At other times, we are humbled in the receiving.  Sometimes, the lines between the two are beautifully blurred. Either way, it is clear, as Judith Gundry-Wolf commented, “…God’s mercy is not doled out along ethnic, gender or socio-cultural lines.”  

Those who are marginalized by those things know much better than most of us the truth of those words.  When they stand in the full stature of their own understanding of what it means to be a recipient of God's grace and partner with God in creating a world of justice and peace, they will oftentimes be in our face.  It will often make us uncomfortable.  Perhaps, one day, we will learn to give thanks.

If Jesus' mind can be changed, there's hope for the rest of us; that we, too, can continue to reach for the full stature of partnership with God in the gracious, holy and wonderful of giving it back.  Amen.