Nevertheless, she persisted...a sermon on Matthew 15:21-28

Grace, Peace, and Mercy are yours from the God of abundance. Amen. 

 

It is a joy and an honor to be sharing the Word today at All God’s Children. My name is Amy Hanson, I am an MCC transfer clergy member. I was originally ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I work full time as staff chaplain at Regions Hospital in St Paul.  It is truly a gift to be a part of this community of faith. 

 

I love Gospel stories where the main character is a woman.  It means that what is going on so significant, that the patriarchy begrudgingly allowed it to be included.  And that is exactly what we have going on with this Gospel text.  

To set the stage, this part of Matthew’s Gospel is a long series of healings, pronouncements, and miracles.  We have Jesus healing the sick, feeding the 5,000, and just last week, we heard about Jesus walking on the sea. After today’s Gospel story, we have Jesus going on to Galilee to do more healing and to feed an additional 4,000 people in another one of his miracles. 

 

​Jesus left Jerusalem and went on to Tyre and Sidon.  A Canaanite woman from that region came and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David, mydaughter is tormented by a demon!”  But Jesus ignored her. And his disciples came to Jesus and said, “Send her away because she keeps shouting at us.” Jesus said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep 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 responded, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”  Then Jesus answered her, “Great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” Then her daughter was healed instantly. 

 

​It is necessary to unpack this text a bit more to understand just how revolutionary and forthright this Canaanite woman is in her persistence. First, there is the obvious fact that she is a woman talking to a man. This alone would have been frowned upon in this day.  The disciples indicate their irritation and frustration with her desperate shouting. Next, she is from the land of Canaan, a Canaanite.  She is not part of the People of Israel. She is “other.”  Finally, unlike many people in Matthew’s Gospel, including the disciples themselves, she recognizes that Jesus is someone revolutionary. That he is in the world to do a new thing.  She calls him “Lord”, which is usually used to refer to God the Creator, and she calls Jesus, “Son of David” which implies his kinship in the line of the great King David. 

 

​But Jesus doesn’t respond in a way that most of us would find satisfactory.  This is one of those Gospel stories that I refer to as “Jesus is being a jerk again.” At first Jesus completely ignores the woman.  And the disciples urge him to send her away, because she keeps shouting. Nevertheless she persisted. Jesus says to the woman, “I was only sent for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. I was only sent to tend those who are part of the people of Israel, God’s chosen people.”  Nevertheless, she persisted. She kneels before him, and begs plaintively, “Lord, help me!” Jesus answers, “It is not fair to take what is promised to the children of Israel and feed to other people.”   And the woman retorts, “But Lord, even the dogs get to eat the crumbs from the masters’ table.” And somehow this final plea gets through to Jesus. He responds, “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” And the narrator tells us that the woman’s daughter was healed instantly. 

 

​What happened in this moment? Did the woman’s persistence for her daughter’s healing change Jesus’ mind? This feels like a slippery slope to go down, given that we all have at one point or another prayed without ceasing for something that may or may not have come true. Is it that if you have great faith, good things will come to you? This doesn’t feel true either. I meet many people in the hospital with great faith who still suffer and experience grief and loss. 

 

​What if in this moment, the woman recognized that the blessing of Jesus was not just for the people of Israel, but for all people? It is really remarkable that she recognizes Jesus as Lord, and Son of David, when the disciples don’t seem to get it yet. The woman recognizes that Jesus’ kingship is not just for the house of Israel, the chosen ones. It is for all people.  She has so much faith that even a “crumb” of Jesus’ power is enough to heal her afflicted daughter. 

 

Who is God for this woman that she could persist in this way? She really is a model for us. As the beloved community of MCC, how often have we felt like the good news of the Gospel, the promise of Jesus, and the reign of God belongs to someone else? God for the Canaanite woman is a beacon of hope in a dark world.  As the MCC, God’s promise belongs to US! God’s abundant life belongs to US! The Canaanite woman teaches us that the abundant new life that comes from Jesus is too big and too much to be contained by human structures of who is in and who is out.  

 

This Canaanite woman can teach us something.  “This Jesus news is too abundant to say that I must wait.” She is reflecting Jesus’ own ministry back to him. The Canaanite woman calls out the misguided idea that God’s love is only for a chosen few. 

 

We are God’s beloveds. God’s promise is for us. Abundant life and blessing and healing and good things are for us. Amen. Amen. Amen. 

What is the will of God?…a sermon on Mark 3:20-35

Grace, peace, and mercy are yours from the Triune God.  Amen.

Wow! This Gospel text has all the ingredients for a particularly pungent fire and brimstone sermon. Satan, demons, blasphemy, the fire of the Holy Spirit, eternal sin and the will of God. And it appears to offer a simple solution, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Basically, if you do what Jesus tells you to do, you will be “true kindred.” But since I am about the farthest thing imaginable from a revival preacher and have no intention of scaring you into following Jesus, there will be no fire and brimstone today. We need to dig a little deeper.

Jesus has just returned to his hometown after wandering through the countryside, healing and casting out demons.  He has appointed his disciples.  And he has caught the attention of the authorities. At this point, we hear that the crowd is pressed so closely into Jesus that he cannot even raise his hands to eat. There have been murmurings of discontent among the religious authorities when Jesus and his disciples have not adhered to religious laws regarding fasting and the Sabbath, but it is this massive crowd trailing Jesus that prompts the big guns from Jerusalem to make their way to Nazareth.

Even Jesus’ own family is concerned about all of this attention that he is getting. Instead of a welcome banquet, his family has decided to stage an intervention. Jesus has been doing all sorts of socially unacceptable things and hanging out with generally undesirable folks.  Jesus seems to have amassed a ragtag collection of groupies that follow him everywhere he goes, and he has caught the attention of everyone. His family decides that it is time to get this behavior under control, because it is reflecting badly upon them, and they go out to restrain him. Not exactly the most hospitable homecoming.  At best, Jesus seems to have boarded the express train to insanity, and at worst, he is possessed by a demon.

We would like to see the religious authorities as evil, because we have the benefit of hindsight and we are reading the story knowing who Jesus is. But the scribes who come down from Jerusalem are enforcing order to prevent chaos. At the time, possession by a demon was the default explanation for any sort of behavior that was outside the rigidly controlled social and religious norms. Because it was believed that closely adhering to the laws that ordered the world, would save you. This crazy Jesus character, I imagine him as filthy and unshaven, sunburned and weary, was casting out demons and healing. He was doing it all without the involvement of the temple priests and temple offerings and in doing so, was threatening the economic system that was intertwined with the religion of the day. But perhaps even more troubling he was threatening the status quo, by bringing socially undesirable folks right into the consciousness of the community, when they were typically relegated outside the city gates, and was providing an uncomfortable reminder of the systems of power that perpetuate oppression. In some ways, we are not really all that different from the religious authorities attempting to order a disordered world.

We attempt to control the chaos in our world with social, religious, and political norms.  Those who are progressive think that those who are conservative are evil and those who are conservative think that those who are progressive are cavorting with Satan. We want to see ourselves as loving our neighbors, yet we perpetuate systems of injustice through our complicity in power and privilege that oppresses the most vulnerable among us. We eagerly move into newly gentrified urban neighborhoods and pay skyrocketing rents without consideration for those forced out by mixed-use development. We fiercely cling to the myth that financial prosperity or even financial stability, is a result of our own hard work instead of a mixture of our social location and privilege. Perhaps most painful to consider, we are inclined to see ourselves primarily as individuals instead of part of the great human collective, the body of Christ.

Jesus makes a powerful statement to the religious authorities with his confusing little parables in the middle section of this text. They say that he must be possessed by Beelzebub, Satan or demons.  He says that there is no way that Satan can cast out Satan. They say he must be motivated by evil, because such a threat to the carefully constructed social order must be evil, Jesus says that anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness. This pronouncement is harsh and it is intended to be. Jesus is saying that “eternal sin” is to fail to see the work of God in the world, to attribute Jesus and his work to the devil. To fail to see God in Christ walking among us. To deny the continued creative and life-giving activity of God’s spirit in the world is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. And it is an indictment of us too.

After this exchange with the religious authorities, we return to the conversation between Jesus and his family. Still wanting to do their intervention, Jesus’ mother and brothers remain outside the house where he is teaching a large crowd.  They call for him, and someone conveys the message to Jesus.  “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.”  And Jesus replies, “Who are my mother and my brother?”  He gestures to those sitting around him, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

This doesn’t feel like good news. Jesus’ family is feeling compelled to explain Jesus’ behavior and wants to prevent him from further embarrassing them or himself.  They want to whisk him away, take him home or ship him off to a 90 day rehab where he can learn how to behave respectably again. Yet Jesus is stating that he does not know them and would rather call the crowd surrounding him family. This is not the kind of Jesus that we want. We want to see Jesus as gentle and loving and oriented towards family. This Jesus is rebellious and insistent and abrasive. For his family, who wanted the best for him, this was probably unbearable. None of this really seems like good news until we put ourselves into the place of the crowd. 

The people who pressed in to see Jesus were desperate for a word of healing and a word of belonging.  They were the outcasts of the time, the people who had mental illness or disfiguring ailments or who were homeless or otherwise not part of respectable society.  We would probably see them lining up outside the Denver Rescue Mission or struggling to survive in a Syrian refugee camp or imprisoned in part of our prison industrial complex. The belonging and acceptance and even healing offered by this prophet and teacher Jesus who wandered the countryside, was good news.  To be called brother and sister and mother, to be part of a family, when you felt nothing but indifference and disgust from those around you, this was the good news of Jesus.  Jesus looks to those gathered around him, and says, “These are my brothers and sisters.” 

We are not that different from the crowd pressed in to see Jesus. In a world that seems to value individual fortitude above all things, we crave solidarity with others to bear the burdens of being human. In a world where relationships crumble and leave us aching and heartbroken, we need to feel loved and cherished. Many of us have come from faith communities that have hurt us or tossed us out because of who we are, or perhaps we have been afraid to venture into a church until now because we have heard how others have been hurt. And many of us come from families who aren’t sure how to love us.  Or from families that don’t understand us or who have abused us.  We come to this place, this community called church, because we need to hear that we belong. We yearn to hear that we are loved. Even when we feel like we have no where else where we belong, we belong to Christ and in the body of Christ.

But we tend to get stuck on what Jesus says next, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Because it is a basic human impulse to want to control our destiny and make sure we are doing it right, we make our best guess at what God’s will would be, which is often strangely similar to what our will would be, and make belonging to the body of Christ contingent doing those things.

Jesus calls us family FIRST, then calls us to do God’s will.  Our belonging is not contingent on doing something right first.  Belonging to the Body of Christ has nothing whatsoever to do with what we do, but rather, what has been done for us. We already belong to Christ, and we begin to follow God’s will by drawing close to Jesus and bringing our brokenness and our whole selves with us. But we are not invited to bask in our belonging in a community of faith, we are sent out for the good of the world. What we do in our work as disciples flows first from our identity as Christ’s beloved. Doing God’s will comes from our being freed in Christ to serve our neighbors. It means recognizing that we are part of a community and that what we do or fail to do has a rippling effect on those around us. Because we have a voice, we can advocate for affordable housing in our neighborhoods and we can vote for political representation that attends to the needs of the community, not the needs of business. It means speaking out and acting for justice and mercy, because that is the way of Jesus and the will of God. Whatever your particular passion, whether that is rights for transgender youth or equitable mental health care or early childhood education, live deeply into that calling for justice and mercy.  Engage in work that makes our world a better place, by using your God-given time, talents, and treasure to invest in loving your neighbors. Do your paid work for the glory of God. Engage in volunteerism and advocacy and financial giving for the sake of the world. This is the will of God. Beloved community, you belong to Christ and we belong to each other. Thanks be to God! 

You already belong…a sermon on John 10:1-10

A. Hanson, Ameugney.
This is the closest thing to a gate I have.

Grace, peace, and mercy are yours from our resurrected and living God.  Amen. 

Jesus as the Gate.  Among biblical metaphors, this is one of the stranger ones. We call this particular Sunday in the church year, the fourth Sunday of Easter and halfway to Pentecost, “Good Shepherd Sunday”, but our Gospel text from John is not actually about Jesus as a shepherd, it is about Jesus as a gate.  And this image of Jesus is far from the bucolic and soothing idea of a good shepherd leading a flock of sheep through green pastures and beside still waters. We are generally uncomfortable with the idea of a gate, because in our understanding, it brings to mind something that separates those on the inside from those on the outside.  Gates keep people out, gates keep people in. Gates can serve as protection, such as when we fence our yards to provide a safe place for children to play, or gates can be a sort of privilege, such as with gated housing communities where a cushion of wealth can keep out those who are undesirable. Gates can be opened for us or slammed in our faces.

At first glance, this metaphor of Jesus as a gate seems more problematic than it does promising, particularly when looked at in the context of the body of Christ.  To proclaim Jesus as a gate seems that there might be an insider community and also a community that is outside the gate.  And because it is our human nature, we want to do everything possible to make sure that we are part of that insider group.  This is rooted in our need for security.  We look for ways to make sure that we can be included in this select group.  Whether that is by believing the “right” things (whatever those might be) or making sure that we are “good” enough through our own actions. Or perhaps we despair of ever really belonging to the body of Christ and we drown in our own shame and regret. Maybe we feel too young or too old or too poor or we feel depressed when everyone else around us seems to be filled with joy.

The church has in many ways contributed to creating this sense of who is in and who is out. This text has been preached as a sort of guide to salvation.  That Jesus is a shepherd and opens the gate to abundant and eternal life, and all we have to do is just follow him through that narrow gate and then stay the course with him. Also, the church has at some times and places decided who is good enough to be a follower of Jesus based on one’s actions, identity, or some other measure. It’s like the church itself, or the people that compose the institution, have decided to be the gatekeepers that open the doors to let the sheep pass through unimpeded…or not pass through. This does not sound much like the good news of the Gospel to me, and it makes it extremely difficult to see Jesus as the gate promising abundant life. 

I spent most of this last week at a retreat in Northern Wisconsin.  This retreat was for publically identified gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender ELCA clergy and seminarians and hosted by an organization called Proclaim.  While the theme of the continuing education retreat was faith-based community organizing, for me, the greatest gift in learning was to feel a part of a community that knows how it feels to have gates slammed shut in front of them and knows what it is like to have their lives controlled by gatekeepers.  But this retreat was not a time of lament, nor was it a time of fostering solidarity in the face of oppression, it was a time of abundant life and joy and belonging as beautiful people that compose the body of Christ.  This past week was my first experience meeting other gay and lesbian clergy and I felt the deep joy of belonging. And I read this text in an entirely different way because of my experience on this retreat.

How might our experience of Jesus as a gate change when we realize that we already belong to the body of Christ?  In this text, Jesus is not the gatekeeper.  Jesus is not the one who decides who is in or who is out.  Jesus knows his sheep, he “calls his own sheep by name” and “the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”  We are known to Christ and we are saved. But this is not just the eschatological, life after death, kind of salvation.  This is at an earthier level. We are given abundant life now.

We miss something if we do not look at this text in the greater context of John’s Gospel.  The story immediately preceding this text is that of the man born blind, which we read on the fourth Sunday in Lent. Yes, it is a story of healing.  Jesus restored the man’s sight.  But also, he is restored to beloved community.  The man born blind had been alienated and marginalized.  He did not belong. The gatekeepers of his community had shut him out.  But Jesus restored this man’s sight, and in doing so, also restored his place in the community.  In the story of the man born blind, abundant life is not just a metaphorical nice idea.  It is given flesh and blood. We need to hear this story of abundant life being given in order to emphasize the promises that we hear in the Gospel today. If we merely see Jesus as a good shepherd leading the simple sheep into a serene pasture, we miss the flesh and blood, incarnational, aspect of it all.

 The abundant life that is promised to us through Jesus comes not as some far-off promise to be realized in the future, but rather, comes right now in our midst. Just as Jesus calls the sheep by name and leads them, we too are called by name and led. We belong to a community called the body of Christ and we are known intimately by God. And in a world where our human institutions seem hell bent on division, on determining who is in and who is out, we need this promise more than ever. 

And we need one another to realize this promise.  Just as I learned the joy of being known in a community this past week on retreat in Wisconsin, just as the man born blind was restored to belonging in community, we all have a need to be known and to belong.  As we go out from this place, I ask you to consider:

To what communities do you belong? 

Are there communities in which you feel like an outsider?

How can you help to create a sense of belonging for others in your communities?

Let us pray:

Gracious God, you have called us by name and you know us.  We belong to you.  Help us to live out our calling as members of your body, that we might ever be reminding one another of that belonging. Amen.