"The Outsider's Hope"
August 14, 2011

Isaiah 56:1-8

Thus says the Lord: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed. Happy is the mortal who does this, the one who holds it fast, who keeps the sabbath, not profaning it, and refrains from doing any evil.

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. 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, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.


Matthew 15:21-28

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

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The other day, I started reading a book called Traveling Mercies, written by Anne LaMott. Early in the book she describes growing up in a household that didn’t go to church – in fact, her parents were hostile to religion. Her grandfather had been a Presbyterian missionary overseas, and growing up in that difficult family setting had made her father hate Christianity in general, and especially Presbyterians. Despite that family environment, she writes that as a young girl, she occasionally went to the local Catholic church with one of her friends, and she loved it – the smell of the incense, the ornate altar, the statures, the votive candles, the Stations of the Cross in stained glass, the curlicued plasterwork, the gold-leaf artistry on the ceiling – the tradition and mystery of it all. She envied that. As opposed to her own freewheeling and untethered life, as she puts it, they had all that stuff holding them together, and they got to be so conceited because they were Catholic.

Her words might sound a little harsh, but when I read it, I think I understood what she meant. When I was the same age, my family didn’t go to church, either. And until the time I hit high school, almost all of my closest friends were Catholic – or Orthodox, which as far as I could see was pretty much the same thing, just with more mystery and incense. Growing up with them, I came to sense that same feeling that Anne LaMott was trying to describe. There always seemed to be some special bond, some secret code, that they all understood that I didn’t. To be Catholic was a system, a package. You didn’t have to worry much about reading the Bible; you had a priest, or a bishop, or a Pope to tell you what the important parts were, and what those parts meant. And in all the years of tradition, they’d established an official answer for just about any question you might ask about the faith. It was a package. My friends always knew exactly what was going to happen at church, and when, even down to the exact words, every Sunday. There may have been mystery in the faith, but there was none in the actual words of the Mass. Or if you wanted to sleep in on Sunday morning, you could always go to church on Saturday night, which I always thought was a nice perk of being Catholic. The Catholic kids that went to the local parochial school would walk in a long, straight line across the street to our public school every weekday for lunch, since they didn’t have a cafeteria of their own and apparently, the two schools had worked out some arrangement. Right after lunch, the nuns would reform the column, and they’d disappear back across the street, the boys in white shirts and navy pants, the girls in white blouses and blue plaid skirts, leaving the rest of us behind in our public school Sodom and Gomorrah.

Whatever being Catholic really meant – as opposed to the way a kid perceived it – it was quite clear that they were all part of a special, privileged group – and it was made just as clear that I was not. Even though my Catholic friends and I were very close, in this regard it was clear that I was on the outside looking in.

The Jews of Jesus’ time saw themselves in a similar special category. They didn’t just se themselves as the people chosen by God to reveal his plan of reconciliation of the world through. They believed that this made them superior to the other people around them. This was especially the case regarding the non-Jews and part-Jews living in the regions surrounding them. These people were most definitely not part of the club. In the passage we read today, Matthew tells us that Jesus had managed to poke a stick in the eye of the Pharisees yet again, and then he traveled north to the cities of Tyre and Sidon, just north of modern-day Israel into what is now Lebanon, on the shore of the Mediterranean. There were Jesus and all of his followers – all of them Jews, part of God’s chosen – filing down the road in the midst of the great unwashed Canaanite people around them. And one of them, a woman, is following along beside them as they go, making a pest of herself, calling out to Jesus to help her by healing her ailing daughter. The disciples don’t want her bothering them, and when they ask Jesus to send her away, based on his words he doesn’t want to deal with her, either. First, he ignores her. Then, when he does speak, he says something to her that was so harsh and rude that we Christians have been cringing over it, and trying to explain it away ever since. It just doesn’t sound like the Jesus we carry in our hearts. He tells her that he hasn’t come for her or her kind, but rather, just for the people of Israel. And he goes on, saying that it wouldn’t be right to give the children’s food to the dogs – a particularly scornful and dismissive insult that struck right to the bone. And even in the midst of that hurtful insult, she comes back with the very perceptive comment that even the dogs get the scraps off the table – that God even cares and provides for the outsiders of the world. I felt something like her hurt when I went to church with my Catholic friends as a child, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in Communion with them – I felt like the dog who wasn’t worthy to be given the scrap of a Communion wafer from the table of the supposed privileged ones.
Now, I’m telling you my story about feeling like an outsider with my Catholic friends when I was a kid, only because Anne LaMott’s words brought those particular memories back to me. But each of you undoubtedly has your own story, some other personal example of when you felt like an outsider – in school, at work, with friends, neighbors, even in church. In some way, we’ve all felt how the Canaanite woman felt. We’re all outsiders in one way or another.

So what’s really going on between Jesus and the woman in this passage? Some people have suggested that Jesus truly believed what he’d said to the woman, “plain meaning.” And that when the eternal Son of the Trinity lowered himself to become flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, he set aside some divine knowledge, and in his human nature Jesus didn’t fully perceive the fullness of God’s good news for the world, until after his resurrection. And that this persistent Canaanite woman got the better of him in this exchange, teaching him a surprising and valuable lesson. Others say that Jesus was well aware that he’d come for all people, Jew and Gentile alike – certainly, other things that he said made that pretty clear – and that he was just being artificially harsh and rude to the woman, just to test her faith and persistence.

It is clear in the scriptures that God’s plan of reconciling the world to himself is to reveal himself first to the Jews, and then broadened out to include all peoples and nations. This is an important theological point, a way we understand how God has broadly structured his intentions for us. But in the case of the Canaanite woman, and in other cases too, it becomes clear that our theology isn’t absolute, and God isn’t enslaved or bound to any theology, not even this one which was proclaimed by Jesus himself. As valuable as theology is, God will never allow it to stand in the way of his divine compassion or our human faith. That’s what this story is all about. The stubborn, persistent faith to keep asking for God’s mercy, refusing to accept that God would be the kind of God who would ignore her just because of the conventional religious wisdom and theology of her time. In her bones, the Canaanite woman knew that God was bigger than that. And in Jesus’ answer to her, and in the healing of her daughter, he made it clear that she was right. Her persistence was a sign of her faith in that bigger God. It was that faith that made her an insider.

And it’s our faith that makes us insiders, too. Our belief that God is bigger than our own problems and our own current conventional religious wisdom; the belief that God’s love and compassion for us will not be bound by human understanding of the rules or by our best, neatly laid out systematic theology. Some people who want a neatly packaged, systematized faith, might call that heresy. In this passage, Jesus calls it great faith. It’s the kind of faith that Jesus wants us to have.

But the good news for us in this story is that while we’re all equally outsiders, we’re also all equally loved by God. And God is willing to bend and even break the rules in order to extend that love to all of us. That’s the outsider’s hope. That’s our hope.

But we don’t just have hope, we have a responsibility. We’re called to treat those around us in that same way. Since God has bent the rules and bent over backward to consider us insiders, better than we deserve, we’re called to treat those we come into contact with in the same way. Loved. Better than they deserve. Insiders. And if we use our religion to make others feel like outsiders, we’ve missed the whole message of the gospel.

After she became an adult, after a very rocky start in life – and no doubt with her father spinning in his grave - Anne LaMott found faith in Christ, and she was eventually baptized in a small Presbyterian church in Marin City, California. Right out of college, one of my best childhood friends went on to seminary and has been a Catholic priest ever since. And now, I’m a Presbyterian pastor. And each one of us – and each one of you, as different as we all are, and with the vastly different ways of understanding our faith that we all might have – are all equally considered insiders by God, only by God’s grace; by God’s decision to bend the rules, finding a way to reconcile us through Christ’s death and resurrection. Because of that reconciliation that we all have through Christ, now we’re all considered worthy not just for the table scraps, but to sit at the table with Christ himself, enjoying the great eternal feast God has prepared for all of us. Because of God’s bending of his own rules through Christ, none of us – none of us - are outsiders any more.

Thanks be to God.