Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, 8/16/2020 | Sermon on Matthew 15:21-28 (ESV) | Pastor Paula Murray |
We Share the Blessing of God’s 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, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” 23But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and begged Him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” 24He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25But she came and knelt before Him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26And He answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 27She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
God’s blessings are more apparent at some times than others, as is the need to share those blessings. At a time of uncertainty, when we don’t know what is about to come down the pike at us next, God’s rock hard steadfast faithfulness is clearly seen as the blessing it is, even if we don’t understand why things seem so very rough at the moment. Hey God, what’s with that? Pandemic, earthquakes, riots, fires, and floods, what’s next, aliens from outer space? Some people are really up for that last one. 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. I am asked, “Hey Pastor, should I be watching for the four horsemen of the apocalypse?” To which the only right answer is, “Sure, but you should always be looking for them, not just now.”
This too shall pass, says the Bible, and surely it shall, both faith and history tell us so. We might wonder whether or not we shall be around to see it. 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. 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. Additionally, most of us are well-fed and well-sheltered. 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’s provision for our needs in difficult times is to sing hymns of thanksgiving like the psalm we read earlier. “Let Your ways be known upon the earth, Your saving health among all nations. Let the peoples praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise You.” Now we’re 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. And second, we will begin to find ways to share our God given blessings to those who have need of them. 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.
Prior to the sharing, prior even to the praising of God for His gifts, that plan must be made known to us. We turn to the Scripture for understanding of God’s will with regards to our lives and our salvation. 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. Today’s reading from the Prophet Isaiah begins with a prophet’s usual admonition to “keep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come.” The next turn in the Prophet’s thought is a bit less usual, for he says to Israel, “And 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 – these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer.” In other words, to be joined to Abraham’s and Moses’ covenant with God you need not be born a Jew but may be made one by faithfulness to God. To emphasize the point, God says, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
The psalmist reinforces the point. Israel prays that God teaches His ways to all the people upon the earth, and that His salvation may be for all peoples. 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.
The reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans is one long and loving defense of the Jews, from which people both Paul and Jesus both came. Calling himself an “an Apostle to the Gentiles,” Paul reminds his fellow Christians that, “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable,” meaning that God does not go back on His promises, including those special promises we call covenants God made with the Jews. 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. In the end, says Paul, God has “consigned all to disobedience, meaning we are all sinners, so He may have mercy on all.”
That universal mercy is very much evident in the Gospel story of the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel reading, one of my very favorite stories of Jesus. You’ll remember from our earlier readings from chapters 13 and 14 of Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus has tried to find time alone to grieve the death of John the Baptist, to pray, and probably simply to recharge. But alone time has been rare, for the crowds’ needs are enormous and Jesus’ compassion for their suffering larger still. Now He and His disciples find their relief in the country of the Gentiles. But it’s 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. Suffering is suffering we say to ourselves; do that Savior thing o Christ, for a little girl. But Jesus, in a land not His own, surrounded by people not His own, says to the desperate mother, “I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 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, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 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. But she does not respond in anger and hurt because nothing matters more to her than the healing of her daughter. “But even dogs,” she says, “eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” 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. Given what He says at the end of the story to the Canaanite woman, I think the second option is the way to go. “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” 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. Only this second option is in accord with what we already know about God. God does judge all the peoples with equity.
The differences between peoples that matter now are not the differences that mattered to the Spirit inspired writers of the Bible. There is, for instance, no talk of race. Race is a modern construct, not ancient. 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. The dark color of a bride’s skin is mentioned, with approval, in the Song of Solomon, where the bride says, “I am very dark, but lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem.” Her groom agrees, repeatedly, “Behold you are beautiful my love, …behold you are beautiful my beloved, truly delightful.” She, in turn, describes her beloved as, “radiant and ruddy,” which sounds to me like a person with a bad case of sunburn. In the books of Job and Lamentations sick and starving people are described as having blackened faces as a consequence of their illness. But most of the time when any darkness is ascribed to people the problem is spiritual, not physical. They are, often, ignorant, willfully ignorant, of God and His will. Their skin color is inconsequential; the state of their spirits is what matters.
The differences between peoples that matter in the Scriptures largely have to do with who or what they worship. 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. They are unclean not for reasons of their genetics but because their religion has been blended with other faiths. 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. What matters is faithfulness to the God who is faithful to Israel.
Faithfulness requires that Christians know their faith well to navigate today’s troubled waters. In Matthew 10 Jesus tells the first twelve disciples and us latter day disciples to be, “wise as serpents, innocent as doves.” 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.
Take the recent nonsense over Christian art. Calls to tear down and destroy paintings and sculpture because they depict Jesus Christ in the form of a European are stupid and destructive. 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. 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. European artists used Europeans as their subjects as they drew and painted and formed their art. 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.
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. There is NO physical description of Jesus in Scripture, none. We know nothing about His skin color, His hair color, or the color of His eyes. We don’t even know if He was a big guy for His era or small, well-muscled or not. We can only speculate on His appearance given what little we know of His life before His ministry. 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. That’s what we know, and we know that because that is what is important.
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. 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. He is always faithful; knowing that brings peace and strength and hope despite the troubles of this present day. 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. That is simple human kindness, to share the remedy for sin and sorrow with everyone regardless of their color or ethnicity or whatever. But there is this, too, we cannot allow ourselves to fear the consequences of sharing God’s faithfulness to all with all peoples without becoming faithless ourselves.
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.
Pastor Paula Murray
St. Jacob’s Lutheran Church
Glen Rock, Pennsylvania
Deutsch 
English (UK) 
Português do Brasil 
Dansk 
Español