We Share the Blessing of God\u2019s Faithfulness with Everyone<\/p>\n
21<\/sup><\/em>Jesus went away from Gennesaret and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22<\/sup>And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, \u201cHave mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.\u201d 23<\/sup>But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and begged Him, saying, \u201cSend her away, for she is crying out after us.\u201d 24<\/sup>He answered, \u201cI was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.\u201d 25<\/sup>But she came and knelt before Him, saying, \u201cLord, help me.\u201d 26<\/sup>And He answered, \u201cIt is not right to take the children\u2019s bread and throw it to the dogs.\u201d 27<\/sup>She said, \u201cYes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters\u2019 table.\u201d 28<\/sup>Then Jesus answered her, \u201cO woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.\u201d And her daughter was healed instantly.<\/em><\/p>\n God\u2019s blessings are more apparent at some times than others, as is the need to share those blessings.\u00a0 At a time of uncertainty, when we don\u2019t know what is about to come down the pike at\u00a0 us next, God\u2019s rock hard steadfast faithfulness is clearly seen as the blessing it is, even if we don\u2019t understand why things seem so very rough at the moment.\u00a0 Hey God, what\u2019s with that?\u00a0 Pandemic, earthquakes, riots, fires, and floods, what\u2019s next, aliens from outer space?\u00a0 Some people are really up for that last one.\u00a0 Me, I remember the Twilight Zone episode where apparently kindly aliens showed up to solve all our problems, but only because they wanted us healthy when they ate us.\u00a0 I am asked, \u201cHey Pastor, should I be watching for the four horsemen of the apocalypse?\u201d To which the only right answer is, \u201cSure, but you should always be looking for them, not just now.\u201d<\/p>\n This too shall pass, says the Bible, and surely it shall, both faith and history tell us so.\u00a0 We might wonder whether or not we shall be around to see it.\u00a0 The likelihood is yes, even those of us whose brown gave way to gray long ago will likely be around to see the resolution of it.\u00a0 God has been faithful and good and we have not suffered the grave oppressions of those whose intent and actions are driven by the evil one.\u00a0 Additionally, most of us are well-fed and well-sheltered.\u00a0 We have clothing sufficient to our needs and our medical needs, even in the era of a viral pandemic, are largely met. Despair is not a faithful response to the events of 2020. The first faithful response to God\u2019s provision for our needs in difficult times is to sing hymns of thanksgiving like the psalm we read earlier.\u00a0 \u201cLet Your ways be known upon the earth, Your saving health among all nations.\u00a0 Let the peoples praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise You.\u201d\u00a0 Now we\u2019re livestreaming worship this morning, not because of Covid but because the church flooded when the water heater ruptured and spewed at least 600 gallons of water through two-thirds of the facility. But even so we will still praise God for His faithfulness to our needs, all of our needs, including the need for a really great clean-up crew and hands and feet to move the furniture back.\u00a0 And second, we will begin to find ways to share our God given blessings to those who have need of them.\u00a0 A part of being faithful to God is to be faithful for His divine plan for our lives in His creation, and that plan includes sharing what we have been given.<\/p>\n Prior to the sharing, prior even to the praising of God for His gifts, that plan must be made known to us.\u00a0 We turn to the Scripture for understanding of God\u2019s will with regards to our lives and our salvation.\u00a0 What comes through really clearly this morning is that the salvation God the Father offers through His Son our Lord Jesus Christ is for everyone.\u00a0 Today\u2019s reading from the Prophet Isaiah begins with a prophet\u2019s usual admonition to \u201ckeep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come.\u201d\u00a0 The next turn in the Prophet\u2019s thought is a bit less usual, for he says to Israel, \u201cAnd the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to Him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be His servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast My covenant \u2013 these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, to be joined to Abraham\u2019s and Moses\u2019 covenant with God you need not be born a Jew but may be made one by faithfulness to God.\u00a0 To emphasize the point, God says, \u201cMy house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n The psalmist reinforces the point.\u00a0 Israel prays that God teaches His ways to all the people upon the earth, and that His salvation may be for all peoples.\u00a0 All the peoples and all the nations are to praise God, for He has fed them with His generous hand and He judges all with equity.<\/p>\n The reading from Paul\u2019s letter to the Romans is one long and loving defense of the Jews, from which people both Paul and Jesus both came.\u00a0 Calling himself an \u201can Apostle to the Gentiles,\u201d Paul reminds his fellow Christians that, \u201cthe gifts and calling of God are irrevocable,\u201d meaning that God does not go back on His promises, including those special promises we call covenants God made with the Jews.\u00a0 Once we, the Gentiles, were disobedient and they, the Jews, were faithful, says Paul, but now their faithlessness to Jesus, a faithlessness which was a factor in His crucifixion, makes His mercy available to us.\u00a0 In the end, says Paul, God has \u201cconsigned all to disobedience, meaning we are all sinners, so He may have mercy on all.\u201d<\/p>\n That universal mercy is very much evident in the Gospel story of the Canaanite woman in today\u2019s Gospel reading, one of my very favorite stories of Jesus.\u00a0 You\u2019ll remember from our earlier readings from chapters 13 and 14 of Matthew\u2019s Gospel that Jesus has tried to find time alone to grieve the death of John the Baptist, to pray, and probably simply to recharge.\u00a0 But alone time has been rare, for the crowds\u2019 needs are enormous and Jesus\u2019 compassion for their suffering larger still.\u00a0 Now He and His disciples find their relief in the country of the Gentiles.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not just Jews who suffer fear and desperation, so a Canaanite woman cries out to Jesus to have mercy on her and heal her daughter, possessed by a demon.\u00a0 Suffering is suffering we say to ourselves; do that Savior thing o Christ, for a little girl.\u00a0 But Jesus, in a land not His own, surrounded by people not His own, says to the desperate mother, \u201cI was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.\u201d\u00a0 He appears to be telling this woman that His power to heal and to give life is only for Jews, not Gentiles. And when she kneels at His feet and begs help from this Man who routinely wears Himself out to heal the sick, comfort the poor, and save the dying, He simply says, \u201cIt is not right to take the children\u2019s bread and throw it to the dogs.\u201d\u00a0 Jesus calls this woman a dog, a nasty though common insult in the Middle East, not because she is a woman, but because she is a Gentile.\u00a0 But she does not respond in anger and hurt because nothing matters more to her than the healing of her daughter.\u00a0 \u201cBut even dogs,\u201d she says, \u201ceat the crumbs that fall from their master\u2019s table.\u201d\u00a0 We can take this story in two ways, first, as a bigoted Jesus treating a Gentile woman terribly badly, something which does not line up with anything else Jesus does. \u00a0Given what He says at the end of the story to the Canaanite woman, I think the second option is the way to go. \u00a0\u201cO woman, great is your faith!\u00a0 Be it done for you as you desire.\u201d That second option is simply this, that He is teaching the men following Him and who will soon be responsible for preaching His Gospel to the whole world that the love and mercy of God is not limited by human differences.\u00a0 Only this second option is in accord with what we already know about God.\u00a0 God does judge all the peoples with equity.<\/p>\n The differences between peoples that matter now are not the differences that mattered to the Spirit inspired writers of the Bible.\u00a0 There is, for instance, no talk of race. Race is a modern construct, not ancient.\u00a0 It is not that skin color is not mentioned, it is, rarely, but usually by inference as the text might refer to someone from Cush, a part of deep Africa where most people would expected to be black.\u00a0 The dark color of a bride\u2019s skin is mentioned, with approval, in the Song of Solomon, where the bride says, \u201cI am very dark, but lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem.\u201d\u00a0 Her groom agrees, repeatedly, \u201cBehold you are beautiful my love, \u2026behold you are beautiful my beloved, truly delightful.\u201d\u00a0 She, in turn, describes her beloved as, \u201cradiant and ruddy,\u201d which sounds to me like a person with a bad case of sunburn.\u00a0 In the books of Job and Lamentations sick and starving people are described as having blackened faces as a consequence of their illness.\u00a0 But most of the time when any darkness is ascribed to people the problem is spiritual, not physical.\u00a0 They are, often, ignorant, willfully ignorant, of God and His will.\u00a0 Their skin color is inconsequential; the state of their spirits is what matters.<\/p>\n The differences between peoples that matter in the Scriptures largely have to do with who or what they worship.\u00a0 Even onetime Jews like the Samaritans, though intermixed with people of other lands, are a distress to the Jews because they no longer worship YHWH as the Jews do.\u00a0 They are unclean not for reasons of their genetics but because their religion has been blended with other faiths.\u00a0 The strong prohibition against mixing even socially with other peoples is designed to prevent Israel from falling away from the God of their covenants, not for reasons of racial purity.\u00a0 What matters is faithfulness to the God who is faithful to Israel.<\/p>\n Faithfulness requires that Christians know their faith well to navigate today\u2019s troubled waters.\u00a0 In Matthew 10 Jesus tells the first twelve disciples and us latter day disciples to be, \u201cwise as serpents, innocent as doves.\u201d\u00a0 Wisdom follows knowledge and experience, and wise old heads know that, as my Godparents told me, even the devil quotes Scripture, or misuses Church tradition and practice.<\/p>\n Take the recent nonsense over Christian art.\u00a0 Calls to tear down and destroy paintings and sculpture because they depict Jesus Christ in the form of a European are stupid and destructive.\u00a0 Where ever the Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached and received and the seeds of faith sprouts, so also grows pictures and icons and sculpture that tell the story of God among us, and they tell that story using the skin colors and the clothing of the people and the day.\u00a0 Europe has largely been Christian for almost two millennia and most art was religious because the most important story to tell is the story of the salvation offered to each of us through Jesus Christ.\u00a0 European artists used Europeans as their subjects as they drew and painted and formed their art.\u00a0 As Christianity spread throughout the world, art was again utilized to tell the story of our salvation through Jesus Christ, only the subjects artists used to form their art are the people and the cultural artifacts of that part of the world and that time. There is an enormous body of work featuring Jesus looking like He is Korean, Indonesian, Nigerian, Ukrainian, whatever surrounded by Asian looking temples or African dwellings, or Slavic stone villages.<\/p>\n And this is fine, even though we know that Jesus, born a Jewish male in Judea, likely looked like a Mediterranean male with brownish skin, hair, and eyes.\u00a0 There is NO physical description of Jesus in Scripture, none.\u00a0 We know nothing about His skin color, His hair color, or the color of His eyes.\u00a0 We don\u2019t even know if He was a big guy for His era or small, well-muscled or not.\u00a0 We can only speculate on His appearance given what little we know of His life before His ministry.\u00a0 What matters in Scripture and in our faith and practice, is that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity wrapped His divine self in human flesh and was made incarnate of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 That\u2019s what we know, and we know that because that is what is important.<\/p>\n Many a person or group seeks to distract Christians of all colors and ethnicities away from what is important, the saving grace of God through His Son Jesus Christ.\u00a0 To allow ourselves to be distracted by such people, people whose aim may be to diminish if not destroy our belief and practice so they may remake our world in their own image, is to rob ourselves of the knowledge of that which provides the only true comfort in times of trouble, the faithfulness of God.\u00a0 He is always faithful; knowing that brings peace and strength and hope despite the troubles of this present day.\u00a0 We want that peace and strength and hope for ourselves and for our loved ones, but we also want it to be a part of the lives of all peoples.\u00a0 That is simple human kindness, to share the remedy for sin and sorrow with everyone regardless of their color or ethnicity or whatever.\u00a0 But there is this, too, we cannot allow ourselves to fear the consequences of sharing God\u2019s faithfulness to all with all peoples without becoming faithless ourselves.<\/p>\n So buckle up, everyone, it is bound to be a rough ride for a while, but be faithful, for God is ever faithful to us.<\/p>\n Pastor Paula Murray<\/p>\n St. Jacob\u2019s Lutheran Church<\/p>\n Glen Rock, Pennsylvania<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, 8\/16\/2020 | Sermon on Matthew 15:21-28 (ESV) | Pastor Paula Murray | We Share the Blessing of God\u2019s Faithfulness with Everyone 21Jesus went away from Gennesaret and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, \u201cHave mercy on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1392,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,157,108,110,472,349,3,178,109],"tags":[],"beitragende":[],"predigtform":[],"predigtreihe":[],"bibelstelle":[],"class_list":["post-3168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-matthaeus","category-beitragende","category-current","category-engl","category-kapitel-15-chapter-15-matthaeus","category-kasus","category-nt","category-paula-murray","category-predigten"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3168"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3184,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3168\/revisions\/3184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3168"},{"taxonomy":"beitragende","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/beitragende?post=3168"},{"taxonomy":"predigtform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtform?post=3168"},{"taxonomy":"predigtreihe","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtreihe?post=3168"},{"taxonomy":"bibelstelle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bibelstelle?post=3168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}