August 20, 2017 at Old First Reformed Church, Brooklyn

Art: Marc Chagall, Exodus (1952-1966)

Psalm 133

Romans 11:1-2, 29-32

Matthew 15:10-28

In the story of the Canaanite woman, I see a side of Jesus that is unfamiliar to me. This is not the friendly Jesus who takes all the children into his arms, and is freely giving to all who come to him. In this story, Jesus sees national boundaries  Jesus discriminates.

A Canaanite woman comes to him asking for help, and he rejects her three times, because of her nationality. He calls her a dog. And she accepts this insult, and she asks again.

This is a difficult story for our modern sensibilities, particularly as we witness the rising of hateful speech and acts of discrimination against vulnerable groups in our society.

Does this story suggest to us that good things will come when you humbly accept the insults of others?

Someone should teach that Canaanite woman to stand up for herself. Here’s what I’d like her to have said: “Jesus, thank you for the healing, but… can I pull you aside for a minute? I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of your disciples. The disrespect you showed me back there was totally inappropriate for how the son of God is supposed to act.”

But that’s not what happens. The Canaanite woman is humble.

And Jesus marvels at her faith.

She realizes that she does not deserve anything. She compares herself to a dog under the table. But even so, she persists in asking for mercy.

Her family is hurting and she longs for healing,

But she comes not in self-righteousness, judging the world for the wrongs it has done her,

not in self-pity, accepting the darkness in her life with shame and resignation,

But she comes with an absolute faith in the power and mercy of God for all creatures.

It is as if she said, in response to Jesus’ rejections,

“Teacher, I understand there is nothing outside, that going in to me can defile me.

Your rejections and your insults cannot defile me. A demon in my family cannot defile me.

Not because I am good, not because I am owed something by God.

But because God is good: God who created me, who created dogs, who created dirt! because you are good-- I will receive whatever you give, and I will keep asking with an open heart until you give.”

How strong is this woman’s faith!

How different from my fragile faith, my wanting to maintain my delicate sense of righteousness.

How afraid I am, everyday, of being defiled-- by the rejection of others, or the judgments of the world. How I let that fear build up into evil intentions.

How although I have everything in this life, more than any generation before, instead of dwelling in gratitude, I am always wanting more, always deserving something better.

This overlaps with a common religious attitude, certainly in Christianity, of feeling that the grace, the gifts I receive from God make me better than others. Better than non-Christians, better than atheists, better than Jews, better than Muslims.

This attitude is a large part of the problem we face today as a nation and a world.

The fact is that Christian arrogance created much of the anti-Semitism we still see in the world today. Christian arrogance killed millions of Jews, over long centuries of anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust of Nazi Germany.

And Christian arrogance also supported centuries of exploitation and colonialism. In the American continents, Christian cultures, including our own, killed millions of people who had lived on this land for thousands of years, and destroyed entire cultures. Across the globe, since the 1500s, Christian nations seized land and oppressed millions of people.

Paul was already witnessing the potential for anti-Semitism within the Christian Church when he wrote his epistle to the Romans. Many scholars believe this letter was written during the middle of the first century, a time of heightened anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire. Sometime around AD 50 the emperor Claudius expelled all Jews from the city Rome, and perhaps laying the foundation for anti-Semitism among Roman Christians. Paul spends several chapters in this letter describing God’s devotion to Israel, perhaps to refute this anti-Semitism among Gentile Christians.

Paul’s defense of Israel culminates in our reading today: “God has not rejected his people-- for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

And indeed all the blessings we receive as Christians-- the law, the prophets, the Messiah Jesus-- come on the foundation of God’s eternal relationship with Israel-- from God’s first encounter with Abraham, when God promises him: “in you, Abraham, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Our faith in Jesus rests on God’s promise to Israel, and God’s everlasting love for the Jewish people.

We see in our gospel story, that Jesus came for Israel-- he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

And in God’s mercy and love for all people, God also gave Jesus for all the people of the world, through Israel, and God invites all people to be God’s people.

But this is not something we deserve or earn, through the appearance of good behavior or through staying clean from defiling things. No, the invitation to be God’s people is a gift.

This is what the Canaanite woman understands. She does not have faith in her own righteousness, but in God’s goodness.

As Jesus teaches in a parable in the gospel of Luke, when you are invited to a banquet, do not think to take the position of honor! But take the lowest place, and perhaps you will be invited to move up.

~~

Amidst all the division and lines of battle being drawn in our country today, our Psalm tells us: “How good and pleasant it is to live in unity!”

If this statement were coming from anyone but God, it would be hard to take it seriously.

I think we wouldn’t know how to be united, even if we wanted to.

Unity seems to be the last thing we care about. We much prefer contempt.

It takes courage to speak against evil and injustice, or to present one’s body at a protest where there is very real possibility of physical harm.

But often, we see such actions done with an attitude of scorn.

It is a very common attitude among the political left in America today, that our political views, our level of education, the issues that are important to us, make us better than other people.

This is a kind of political supremacy. Different from white supremacy or religious supremacy in the exact measurements it uses to determine a human beings value, but otherwise operating the same way. Human supremacy makes a claim about what defiles. And, what defiles is always somebody else, some other group, something outside the body, anything, anyone, except my own heart-- failing to recognize it is only my own hard heart that can defile me.

And now we face in our nation the reality that many people are rallying around ideologies that proclaim the destruction of human life, and the destruction of God’s creation.

Naziism and white nationalism proclaim out loud “you other people: you immigrants, you Muslim people, you Black people, you Jewish people-- you who are different from me, you have no value. Only I am worth anything.”

This is the very opposite of Christ’s love. It is the message of the anti-Christ.

Christ gave up his own life, for all people and for the whole world.

Christ’s love embraces the entire creation, the entire universe which God saw from the beginning to be very good.

Christ died to redeem the world, to bring us into the harmony and unity of the good creation through the word of God, which says: “I love you more than my own life. I love you so I will die for you.”

But the message of the anti-Christ enthrones the self at the expense of the other.

And this message is found not only in loud rallies and torches, but is woven into the fabric of our country-- in the founding documents of the United States, which contain what may live in history as one of the foulest hypocrisies devised by humankind: the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” while the Constitution declares that enslaved people shall be numbered as three-fifths of a human being, for the purposes of taxation and congressional representation. Under the capitalist economy human slaves were treated not as human beings, holy creations of God, but as property of the white man, existing solely for the purpose of increasing the wealth of their owner, valued in dollars on the auction block as much as someone was willing to pay.

Today, slavery is outlawed in the books of our law. But we have made God’s earth into our slave. We treat our world as something to be bought and sold. We consider first whether an action will increase the money in our pockets, and perhaps afterwards we consider what the impact will be on our environment and communities.

We likewise treat labor as something to be bought, and abused, and sold. We do not consider the sacred value of labor: that our energy, our time, our passion, our ability to transform our world and others through our work, is a sacred gift.

The Bible begins with the labor of God, who made Heaven and earth and all that is in them.

Our Holy Gospels describe the Holy labor of Jesus, who worked on this earth, healing, teaching, and casting out demons. And who carried the cross and the burden of all human sin, and who was executed on the cross, by the Roman Empire. And in his resurrection, as we read in the Book of Acts and the Epistles, Jesus sent out his disciples to labor in joy with the Holy Spirit, baptizing, and teaching, and bringing the good news to all people.

Our resistance to white supremacy and Nazism, and the many other forms of human supremacy that drive injustice, must take many forms. Congregation, I invite you to dream boldly how to resist injustice, how to stand and speak defending the creation of God! Dream wildly, dream with courage! Let Christ be the Lord of your heart, and do not be afraid of sin or defilement.

For we do not sin only as individuals. We are coming to understanding that sin dwells also in our communities, in our nations, and indeed in our whole human race, in ways that are beyond the control and comprehension of any of us individuals.

But we are not called to Christ as individuals. We are not redeemed as individuals, but God calls us as a community, as the elect, the chosen people of God, as the universal catholic church we confess in our creed.

And God’s church is indeed the universal church, encompassing all humanity and the entire universe. As Paul writes to us, “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.”

We are experiencing in our nation and our world the great labor of belonging to a church composed of all races, all nations, and all religions. This universal church was a labor for the Apostle Paul, being both a Jew who loved his people dearly, and a follower of Christ who was called to serve the Gentiles who often misunderstood or hated the Jewish people.

This universal church was a labor for Jesus, who was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, but was asked by a humble and brave Canaanite woman, that he embrace her as well.

The labor of the Universal Church is love:

The great love of the cross that redeems the whole world, the cross on which Jesus emptied himself of everything, even life, in obedience to love:

And the labor God does through us, when hurting on whatever cross we carry, we empty ourselves of everything, in obedience to the love of Jesus resurrected in us.