August 14 , 2005
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
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Psalm 133
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Matthew 15:21-28
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Towards the Larger Life
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
13th Sunday after Pentecost – August 14, 2005
Rev. Samuel Schaal
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Psalm 133
Matthew 15:21-28
Before I was in ministry, I worked in corporate communications for a health benefits company. Sometimes I would work with our outside advertising agency. One day the agency was presenting its concept for an upcoming print ad campaign.
I remember one particular ad. The creative director said it was a “category buster.” That is, it would challenge the reader’s preconceived notions and get their attention. I forget the whole point of this campaign, but this ad featured an Asian man as a cowboy. Now, this was in Texas where, indeed, in the ranching industry, there are still honest-to-goodness cowboys and, yes, cowgirls. And as I recall, this wasn’t a model hired to look like an Asian cowboy, this was a real-life, working Asian cowboy.
This was a “category buster,” because of course the Asian culture doesn’t usually have western-styled cowboys in jeans, boots and spurs. But it was a symbol of an emerging reality, of an ever-diversifying culture. Indeed, we live in a global culture where we work with, perhaps live close to, have encounters with, people from various parts of the nation and the world. We live in a world that invites us into an ever-larger awareness of people different from us.
This Asian cowboy was a category buster, a person who lives outside the assigned categories of his time and culture. Likewise, the faithful Canaanite woman was a category buster. And even Jesus, in this story, busts the usual categories that he occupies, for he seems to be downright rude and even racist in his initial encounter with this woman.
Let’s first try to understand the story from the viewpoint of the culture of the first century. The woman was a Canaanite, from part of the province of Syria. This is to say, she was a Gentile. So we have Jesus the Jew, representative of God, facing the Gentile woman.
The Gospel of Matthew is very concerned that Jesus be shown as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. For example, in the genealogy of Jesus, Matthew traces Jesus back to King David, the great king of Israel. Luke in his gospel – and Luke is likely a gentile himself – traces Jesus back to Adam. And John of course, given his highly mystical and theological point of view, traces Jesus back to God, back to the very beginning of creation.
So we have to understand something of the viewpoint of each gospel writer. This is not to say that one is more accurate than the other, but it is to see that each gospel teller has certain themes which he thinks is important and so emphasizes those themes in the telling of the story. And here we know that in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ message and mission to the nation of Israel will be emphasized.
In this text, this is certainly obvious. From a Jewish point of view, the woman was an outsider in several ways. She was a woman who was apparently single. She is alone during this encounter with Jesus and it seems likely that her husband or father or other male protector would have been there to help her. She has a daughter and an ill daughter at that. Daughters were not as highly valued as sons in those days and often cost money, in that they needed a dowry. And most importantly, she is Gentile, an ethnic outsider. So this first-century woman has three strikes against her in the culture of her day, and yet she still dares to approach Jesus. She recognizes Jesus as her Lord, even though she is a Gentile. She addresses him as Lord several times.
She asks for the healing of her daughter. Jesus at first ignores her. The disciples tell Jesus to send her away and he responds to them that he was sent to take care of the children of Israel, not the Gentiles. She tries again, kneeling, “Lord, help me.” Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread (that is, bread for Israel) and throw it to the dogs.” In that era, Jews often referred to Gentiles as “dogs,” which was a racial slur.
Still the woman persists, for a third time. “But even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” At this point I begin to wince, for she seems to accept the racial slur and persist in her faith about Jesus.
It is then we see something remarkable. Jesus himself is changed. “Great is your faith!” he says. And he heals her daughter, instantly. This turnabout of Jesus’ seems odd. So often we think of Jesus as the “same today, tomorrow and forever.” And so, speaking of his divine nature, he is. And yet here Jesus is changed, changed by a persistent woman of great faith, a woman widely regarded as “other” and hated in that culture. What’s going on here?
Perhaps it points us to something about the very nature of Jesus himself. In classical Christian thinking, Jesus is fully human and fully divine. And yet we often emphasize the divine over the human and fail to see here and there where Jesus struggles, where Jesus identifies with our humanity.
Here we see Jesus moved to a new consciousness about the inclusion of Gentiles in the kingdom. Some scholars have suggested that the story is not so much about the encounter of Jesus and the woman, but an expression about the concerns of Jewish and Gentile relations in the church. For indeed, the tension in the early church between Jewish and Gentile Christians was strong. Especially in the church at Rome, in the letter Paul writes to the Roman Christians, that congregation had tension between the Jewish and Gentile Christians. Paul asks if God has rejected the Jews because of Israel’s rejection of the gospel. Paul answers his own question, no, of course not. God has not rejected the Jews, but God has opened up the gospel to the Gentiles, or to all people. The covenant has been extended.
So these texts were addressing real differences of the first century – the tension between particularity and universality. Today these labels of Jew and Gentile mean little to us today outside of their historical Biblical context. Most of us are Gentiles ethnically and in reality we are, many of us, composite ethnicities, living in a world that is getting smaller and smaller each day and living in a community that is ethnically and racially composite, not homogeneous.
But there are other labels that define us, that separate us, that make some people “the other” – sometimes that demarcate individuals as severely from the majority culture as the Canaanite woman experienced.
We are told by the media that our culture is more heavily dichotomized that usual; that there is a greater than usual separation of so-called red and blue states, between politically liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican.
So red/blue divisions are part of the labels we today use as “the other.” Who else is “the other” today? Racial and ethnic categories probably top the list—we have made much progress, but we are certainly not there yet, particularly here in the Milwaukee area where racial tensions remain high, and there is distrust on both sides of the racial divide.
Gender differences are not nearly as pronounced as in Biblical times, but stereotypes persist and indeed in other parts of the Christian world women are denied leadership roles in churches. Also, many faith traditions are now grappling with the place of gay and lesbian individuals in the church, especially regarding marriage and ordination.
These are all examples of how the particularities of our human existence confront us. They help define who we are. For those of us who find ourselves in these various categories as being on the majority side, we may have difficulty understanding what it is like to be “the other.” We may have trouble understanding what it is like to be a Canaanite woman, an outsider, trying to find healing in a cruel world.
But if truth be told, even for those of us who aren’t defined by the culture as minority or as “other,” we can still wake up one day and realize we have become the other, when we have become marginalized. When we become seriously ill. When we lose a loved one. When we lose a job or lose income, shifting our wealth and thus our position in society. When we suffer. When we grieve. When, despite our best attempts, we can’t get back into the mainstream of life, the mainstream of our former life.
Our opening hymn speaks of some of these differences, as it affirms that all of us gather for worship in our particularities: the lost and forsaken, the blind and the lame, the young and the old. “Give us the courage,” the hymn says, “to enter the song” amid these human conditions.
So indeed, many of us are, or have been, or will be, “the other,” the person marginalized, the person outside the mainstream of society. In fact, in just reading this gospel account today, it is hard to read this story and not understand the woman’s otherness. It is told, written, from her viewpoint more than from Jesus’. We feel with her Jesus’ turnabout, declaring this marginalized woman as having great faith.
In fact, that is a frequent theme of the gospel accounts, how Jesus accepts those society scorns, how Jesus turns the world upside down, where the first are last and the last are first. How the Kingdom welcomes those the world does not value highly.
Paul speaks of this in Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” When we get past the surface differences, when we move closer to the life divine, when we follow Christ even across the human divides of our culture and our time, we experience an erasure of social distinctions, we get down to the true humanity and reflection of divinity that we are. “In Christ, there is no east or west, in him no south or north.”
This is not to pretend that we don’t have human differences. This is not to pretend that these differences don’t matter. This is not to strip us of our important distinctions, the things that help make us who we are, but it is to get closer to the heart of the gospel. It is to move away from the tension of particularity versus universality, and to see the particular, but in the context of the universal. This is to know that God speaks to our particularity and leads us toward the universal.
The church ought to be a place where all kinds of people find welcome. The church ought to be a place that moves us to the larger life, to the life of God. To the life that is constantly changing, sometimes and often despite our desires. It is to find healing from the wounds of living in a world which does not always value us.
It is toward living in the larger life of the universal, ever-present, ever pressing in on us, God. The one who calls us to be who we are, to be more of who we ought to be, and more importantly, to enter into relationship, even with those who are unlike us. Even with the Canaanite woman of old.
Amen.