Today our churches meet for our annual picnic. Due to the heavy rain, we will meet at First Presbyterian Church, Elizabeth at 11am instead of Round Hill Park. Same plan; informal, bring a dish to share, etc... just a different location due to the weather.
I'm preaching, but do not have a worship outline to share, so here is today's sermon.
Crumbs Are Enough
Matthew 15:21–28
There are some passages of Scripture that we love because they reassure us, passages we return to because they sound exactly like the Jesus we have come to know and trust: passages like Jesus welcoming children, Jesus touching and healing lepers, Jesus feeding hungry crowds, Jesus forgiving sinners, Jesus telling frightened disciples not to be afraid. And then there are passages like this one, passages we might prefer to hurry past because Jesus does not behave the way we expect Jesus to behave. In fact, Jesus sounds harsh, dismissive, and even cruel.
A Canaanite woman comes to him because her daughter is suffering, and she
cries out, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She is not asking for wealth or privilege. She is not trying to get ahead. She is a mother asking for mercy for her
child, and Matthew tells us that Jesus doesn’t answer her at all. He doesn’t say a word to her.
And when the disciples become irritated by her persistence and ask Jesus
to send her away, he finally speaks, but what he says doesn’t make the story
any easier: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, you are not one of them.
You are outside the circle. My mission, my mercy, my healing, is not for you or
for your daughter.
But she refuses to leave. Instead,
she comes closer, kneels before him, and says perhaps the simplest prayer
anyone can ever pray: “Lord, help me.” And
Jesus responds, “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the
dogs.”
There really is no comfortable way around examining those words. We can explain the cultural setting, we can
soften the translation, we can point out that the word Jesus uses may refer to
household dogs rather than wild dogs, but when a desperate mother asks for help
for her suffering child and the response compares her to a dog, the distinction
doesn’t help very much. This may be “the
cruelest comment Jesus makes in all of scripture.”
Matthew has given us plenty of reason to imagine that Jesus is tired. His
hometown has rejected him. Religious
leaders continually challenge him. His
disciples repeatedly misunderstand him. Crowds
follow him everywhere, wanting to be healed, wanting to be fed, wanting
something from him. Jesus had reached
that painfully human place where everyone seems to want his time, his gifts,
and his energy, while very few seem interested in who he really is.
Most of us know something about that feeling. It may be the one parent who realizes that
everyone in the family needs something from them at exactly the same time. It may be the caregiver whose telephone never
seems to stop ringing. It may be the
teacher who has finished a long day only to open an inbox filled with messages
from parents and students. It may be the
person who volunteers at church and discovers that once you have demonstrated
that you are willing to do something, everyone assumes you will be willing to
do everything. Or it may simply be any
of us scrolling through the news on our phones, seeing war and hunger and
refugees and floods and fires and poverty and violence, until eventually
compassion itself begins to feel exhausting.
There is a phrase for that now; it’s called: compassion fatigue. We see so much suffering that eventually
something inside us begins to shut down. We know we should care, but there is only so
much emotional energy available, and eventually we draw a line. We have to draw lines, don't we? We can’t answer every request. We can’t solve every problem. We can’t give money to every organization. We can’t carry every burden. We can’t personally heal everything that is
broken in this world.
The problem comes when the lines we draw to protect our limited resources
become lines that determine whose life matters.
Because we are very good at drawing lines. We draw lines between citizen and immigrant,
Republican and Democrat, conservative and progressive, Christian and Muslim,
rich and poor, rural and urban, straight and gay, housed and homeless, educated
and uneducated. We draw lines around
neighborhoods and churches and social circles, sometimes without ever
consciously deciding to do so, and eventually we can begin to believe that the
people on our side of the line deserve the bread while the people on the other
side should be grateful for whatever crumbs happen to fall their way. And then, like this Canaanite woman, someone
crosses the line.
She has everything working against her. She is a woman approaching a male religious
teacher in a culture where that alone could be problematic. She is a Gentile. Matthew deliberately calls her a Canaanite,
reaching back into Israel's oldest memories of enemies and outsiders. She belongs to the wrong people, comes from
the wrong place, and worships within the wrong tradition.
Yet she recognizes something in Jesus that many insiders have failed to
recognize. “Lord, Son of David.” The outsider, not the insider, not the ones
that Jesus has been speaking to all these months, knows who he is. And there is something wonderfully disruptive
about that, because throughout Scripture God – I say this often to my own
congregation – that throughout the story of Scripture God has an irritating
habit of allowing outsiders to see things insiders miss.
Sometimes the person who teaches the church what grace looks like is the
person the church assumed needed to be taught about grace. Sometimes the person who teaches us about
generosity is the person we assumed had nothing to give. Sometimes the person who teaches us about
courage is the person whose life we never bothered to understand. And sometimes the person standing on the
other side of the boundary is the one God uses to show us that the boundary
never belonged there in the first place.
I think about the way many congregations have discovered this over the
years. A church may say, “Everyone is
welcome,” and sincerely believe it, until someone actually arrives who does not
look like the people already sitting in the pews, does not know when to stand
or sit, does not know the words to the Lord's Prayer, brings children who make
noise, asks uncomfortable questions, has a complicated history, or sees the
world differently. Suddenly we discover
that there is a difference between welcoming people into our church and
allowing their presence to change what our church looks like.
This Canaanite woman doesn’t simply enter Jesus' space. She changes the conversation. Jesus says, “It’s not fair to take the
children's food and throw it to the dogs.”
And this remarkable woman does not walk away. But she does not insult Jesus in return. She does something far more powerful. She takes his own metaphor and turns it
around.
“Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their
masters' table.” In other words, You
say I am outside the circle? Fine. But surely God's mercy is bigger than your
circle. You say the bread belongs to the
children? Fine. I am not asking you to take away anyone's
bread. I'm asking for a crumb.
Perhaps she understands something about grace that we are always
forgetting: when God's love is given to someone else, there is not less left
for us. Grace is not a pie. Mercy is not a bank account. Love is not diminished by being shared. But we live in a culture that teaches us to
think in terms of scarcity. If somebody
else gets ahead, we must be falling behind. If another group gains something, my group
must be losing something. If someone
else's voice is heard, mine must somehow be silenced. We have been trained to imagine life as a
table with too little bread and too many hungry people, so naturally we begin
guarding what is ours.
But the gospel keeps asking us a different question: What if there is
enough? What if God's table is
bigger than we imagined? What if God's
mercy is bigger than our categories? What
if God's love is bigger than the bread box in which we keep trying to contain
it?
For anyone who has been paying attention to Matthew's Gospel, Matthew has
been offering a paradigm shift in our understanding. Jesus has recently fed thousands of people
with five loaves of bread and two fish, and when everyone had eaten their fill,
there was food left over. This is not a
God of crumbs. This is a God of
abundance.
I think that her words bring Jesus back to his Divine self, away from the
tired human self and suddenly Jesus sees her.
Not a category. Not a Canaanite. Not a Gentile. Not an interruption. A woman.
A mother. A person of
extraordinary faith.
“Woman, great is your faith! Let
it be done for you as you wish.” And her
daughter is healed. The line that the
human Jesus had drawn disappears, the limits expand, and God's purpose becomes
larger than the boundaries that had previously contained it.
I realize that some Christians are uncomfortable saying that Jesus
learned something from this woman. They
would rather say that Jesus knew what he was doing all along and was merely
testing her faith. That interpretation
is certainly possible. But I’m not sure
it is necessary to protect Jesus from his humanity. Luke even tells us that Jesus “increased in
wisdom.” Hebrews 5:8 tells us that Jesus,
“Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” Our faith confesses that Jesus was not
pretending to be human. He was human.
And if Jesus could encounter another person and allow that encounter to
enlarge the way he understood his mission, perhaps that is not a weakness. Perhaps that is part of the divine miracle. Because if Jesus can listen and be brought to
compassion, surely we can listen, too.
If Jesus can cross a boundary, surely the church can cross a boundary. If Jesus can allow another human being to
enlarge his understanding of God's work, surely we can admit that we do not yet
understand everything God is doing.
That may be one of the most important lessons the church can learn right
now. We live in a time when everybody
seems absolutely certain. We choose our
news sources and social media feeds, gather around people who already agree
with us, and then gradually become convinced that people who see the world
differently must either be ignorant or malicious. Algorithms are very good at
giving us more of what we already believe. Every click becomes another brick in
the wall around our certainty.
And then the gospel places a Canaanite woman in our path. Someone we did not expect to teach us
anything. Someone whose story does not
fit our assumptions. Someone from the
other side of whatever line we have drawn.
And she says, in effect, Your understanding of God is too small.
I wonder who those people are for us.
Who are the people we have stopped listening to because we already think
we know what they will say? Who are the
people we talk about but rarely talk with?
Who are the people whose experiences challenge our understanding of what
justice, mercy, welcome, or faithfulness actually require?
Perhaps they are younger people who have walked away from the church and
are trying to tell us why. Perhaps they
are immigrants trying to tell us what it is like to live for years with
uncertainty hanging over their families.
Perhaps they are people who have been wounded by the church and whose
anger makes us defensive. Perhaps they
are those who spent years being told that there was no place for them at the
table. Perhaps they are people
struggling economically whom we discuss as statistics without ever sitting
across a table and hearing their stories.
Perhaps they are people whose politics are completely different from
ours, whom we have reduced to labels rather than seeing as complicated human
beings.
We do not have to agree with everything another person believes, in order
to listen. But we do have to remain open
to the possibility that God may speak through someone we never expected
God to use. Because the Canaanite woman
is still showing up. And she is still
refusing to stay behind the lines we draw.
We draw the line. God rubs it out. We draw another. God makes the circle larger. We say, “These people belong.” God says, “What about them?” We say, “Surely there must be a limit.” And somewhere from the other side of the
boundary comes the voice of a persistent woman saying, “Even the dogs eat the
crumbs that fall from the table.”
And suddenly we discover that what we thought was the edge of God's grace
was only the edge of our imagination. Maybe
that is the good news of this strange and difficult story. We are all still learning how big God's table
really is. The disciples were learning. The early church was learning. Matthew's community was learning. Even Jesus, perhaps, was still learning. We are all still learning.
Every generation of Christians inherits some lines from the generation
before it, boundaries that seem perfectly obvious until someone has the courage
to cross them. Again and again, the Holy
Spirit pushes the church beyond those boundaries, sometimes gently and
sometimes through the persistent voice of someone who refuses to go away.
So perhaps the question this passage leaves with us is not simply whether
we have enough faith. Perhaps the
question is whether our faith is large enough to be changed. Can we believe that God may still surprise
us? Can we believe that someone outside
our familiar circle may have something to teach us about God? Can we believe that God's grace might extend
farther than our theology, our politics, our traditions, or even our
imagination? Can we believe that there
is enough bread? Because the woman was
willing to settle for crumbs.
Even Jesus realized that there was something much greater than crumbs
available. There was mercy. There was healing. There was grace. And there was a place at the table, even for
her. The invitation of the gospel is to
stop guarding the crumbs and start trusting the abundance. To listen when someone crosses one of our
carefully drawn lines. To look into the
face of the person we have called an outsider and wonder whether God might
already be there.
And when God rubs out another one of our boundaries—and God will—perhaps
instead of rushing to draw it again, we might have enough faith to step across
it or welcome them in. By doing so, we
may discover something about our neighbor.
We may discover something about ourselves. And, most of all, we may discover that God
has been there all along.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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