Our reading today is based on the text from Mark 7:24-30.  To read that now, click here.

To hear the audio recording of the message, click here.

A story is told of Clarence Jordan, who was a man of unusual abilities and commitment. He had two Ph.D.s, one in agriculture and one in Greek and Hebrew. He was so gifted and so intelligent, he could have chosen to do anything he wanted. He chose to serve the poor. In the 1940s, he founded a farm in Americus, Georgia, and called it Koinonia Farm. It was a community for the poor, both poor whites and poor blacks.

As you might guess, such an idea did not go over well in the Deep South of the '40s. Ironically, much of the resistance came from good church people who followed the laws of segregation as much as the other folk in town. The town people tried everything to stop Clarence. They tried boycotting him, and slashing workers' tires when they came to town. Over and over, for fourteen years, they tried to stop him.

Finally, in 1954, the Ku Klux Klan had enough of Clarence Jordan, so they decided to get rid of him once and for all. They came one night with guns and torches and set fire to every building on Koinonia Farm but Clarence's home, which they riddled with bullets. And they chased off all the families except one black family which refused to leave.

Clarence recognized the voices of many of the Klansmen. Some of them were church people.  One was the local newspaper reporter. The next day, the reporter came out to see what remained of the farm. The rubble still smoldered and the land was scorched, but he found Clarence in the field, hoeing and planting.

"I heard the awful news," he called to Clarence, "and I came out to do a story on the tragedy of your farm closing." Clarence just kept on hoeing and planting. The reporter kept prodding, kept poking, trying to get a rise from this quietly determined man who seemed to be planting instead of packing his bags. So, finally, the reporter said in a haughty voice, "Well, Dr. Jordan, you got two of them there Ph.D.s, and you've put fourteen years into this farm, and there's nothing left of it at all. Just how successful do you think you've been?"

Clarence stopped hoeing, turned toward the reporter, and said quietly but firmly, "About as successful as Jesus was on the cross. Sir, I don't think you understand us. What we are about is not success but faithfulness. We're staying. Good day." With that he went back to work with his hoe, and beginning that day, he and his companions rebuilt Koinonia and I understand the farm is still going strong today. Clarence Jordan was faithful.

A man by the name of Mark Hatfield tells of touring Calcutta with Mother Teresa and visiting the so-called "House of Dying," where sick children are cared for in their last days, and the dispensary, where the poor line up by the hundreds to receive medical attention. Watching Mother Teresa minister to these people, feeding and nursing those left by others to die, Hatfield was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the suffering she and her co-workers face daily. "How can you bear the load without being crushed by it?" he asked. Mother Teresa replied, "My dear Senator, I am not called to be successful, I am called to be faithful." 

The woman in our Bible passage this morning had incredible faith.  Yet she was not a follower of Jesus. Nor was she a Jew. The story goes that Jesus arrives in Tyre, which was on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, about 120 miles north of Jerusalem. This was his first visit to this region. Prior to this He had remained in Judea and Galilee. It is interesting to me that he went there at all. 

This was an area of the Canaanites, who were traditionally enemies of Israel. This dates all the back to the Exodus. After getting out of Egypt they traveled to the land of Canaan, which was the Promised Land, the land that God had promised to Abraham. The people of Israel left Egypt, traveled across the desert, and were there, poised to enter this land. They sent in the 12 spies to scout out the area and report back. The spies come back with glowing reports about the land. It is beautiful and very fertile land. But the people that live there are powerful people. Eleven of the twelve reported that there was no way they could win. 

God punished them for their lack of faith, and as a result of this lack of faith and their disobedience in not going into to take this land that had been given to them, they were destined to spend the next 40 years wandering the desert. 40 years later they came back, and they took the land, and the Canaanites that weren’t destroyed moved further north, to the land of Phoenicia and current Sidon. 

That’s where we are in this passage. Why did Jesus go there? It is speculated that he may have went there for a rest, seeking some solitude, some quite time to rest and recharge. It had become impossible for him to find this solitude in Galilee, where he was so well known. Perhaps he traveled this far north looking for this solitude. 

Whatever the reason, he quickly found that he was known here too. It appears that as soon as he arrived, the woman in the story comes to him. He entered the house and tried to keep it quiet that he was there. The passage reads that as soon as she heard about him, she came and fell at his feet. Jesus is trying to keep people quiet about his presence, but she heard about him being there. 

Who was she? What do we know about her? She was a Canaanite woman, a Greek Gentile, a people hostile to the Jews. She was presumably married, she had at least one child; but that’s about all we know. We don’t know whether she was a good woman or a bad woman. We don’t know her name. All we know of her is in the account of this single encounter with Jesus. We know that she had a daughter that needed help. And she probably didn’t know much about Jesus, but she was sure that he could help. That much she knew. He could help.

Some people think that Jesus’ response was a little harsh. In the Matthew version, as she was begging for help, he keeps quiet. It wasn’t until the disciples spoke up, asking him to send her away, that he says anything at all. First, He tries to explain that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. She persists, and he replies that it is not right to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs. Dogs in Israel were considered very unclean animals. Perhaps for this to make more sense to us today, we might substitute “pigs.” This sounds a little harsh, but Jesus probably quoted an old proverb, and he said it to test her. By making it sound hopeless, he was testing her resolve, her faith. What will she do, will she again persist, or will she give up hope and quietly leave?

She persisted. How many of us would keep the faith in a hopeless situation like this.

Because of her persistence and her faith, the rendering in Matthew reports that Jesus told her, “Great is your faith”. Only four words, but imagine. Great is your faith. These words, coming from Jesus! We can trust these words as being true because the true expert on faith spoke them. Think about this, Jesus searched for faith, as a gem collector might look for fine jewels. He did not always find this faith in his disciples. We never read of his saying to Peter, James, or John: Great is your faith. More often he told them: You of little faith. In fact, only on one other occasion did Jesus praise a person for their faith. Interestingly enough, that was a Roman soldier stationed in Capernaum.

We pay more attention to this woman now, where before she was just an unclean woman with a fairly large request. Now, she is a woman of great faith. What did she do to get this comment? What must we do to have the Lord see our great faith? She came and fell at his feet. She begged Jesus for help. She acknowledged that she didn’t deserve this help, She acknowledged that she was a dog, or a pig if you will, she wasn’t worthy of Jesus’ time, but could she just have table scraps? She acknowledged that she didn’t deserve the full grace and mercy of Jesus, but could she just get a scrap? And finally, she approached Him with the total and complete confidence that He could help her. He was perhaps the only person that could help her. That’s why she was so persistent. She couldn’t give up, her daughter’s very life depended on it. 

How can we apply that to us today? How should we approach Jesus to demonstrate our faith? We need to be humble, she was certainly humble. But first, we need to come and fall at his feet. That was her first step, wasn’t it. How do we today, in the 21^st century, come and fall at the feet of Jesus. Through prayer. Spend some time alone in prayer. Completely humble yourself before God in prayer. Just you and your God. 

God is so good. He is so gracious and so merciful. He loves us so much. But we rarely love him back. We rarely give him the glory and the praise he so richly deserves. We are often more like the dogs under the table, than the children of God we’ve been called to be. We need to acknowledge that before our Lord. 

Just as the women was convinced that her daughter’s very life was at stake, our spiritual lives are at stake. And before you discount the spiritual, before you place too much emphasis on the spiritual qualifier and discount the importance of it, remember that it’s our spiritual side that will live forever. 

We think our physical life is so important because we can touch it, we can feel it, we see it every day. We place so much emphasis on our physical body, that we often discount our spiritual side. We can’t see it. We can’t touch it. But the paradox is, our physical bodies will die. Our souls will live. We’re putting our emphasis on something that is certain to fail us. And when our body does fail us, and our souls get to heaven, will Jesus know us? 

I believe time is running out. We need to get the urgency back. We need to come to the Lord as the women in our story went to the Lord. Humble, for we have so often failed him. And as hard as we try, we don’t always measure up. But at the same time, we need to be persistent. You see, there is a sense of urgency. We’re dying. We need God’s grace and mercy. We need God’s help to save our souls. We can’t do it ourselves. We can’t afford to take no for an answer. We can’t afford to continue to be complacent. Humble yourself before him, but persist until you’re with him forever. Our very lives depend on it.