“Lessons in Inclusivity”

Mark 7:1-37

A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley

November 10, 2002

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

Jesus was on vacation.

I know what you may be thinking.  God does not take a vacation, ever.   And you are right.  The God who dwells in the heavens and in our hearts is always active, always urging us toward wholeness whether or not we are willing or able to admit it.  Although we may take a vacation from God from time to time, God never takes a vacation from us.

But Jesus was not only God, he was also a human being.  And human beings need vacations.

Some people try to act like God and try to work all the time without ever taking a vacation.  Although these people are often respected in the workplace, their home life and their physical and emotional health often pay the price for their workaholism.  Each of us needs a vacation: some down time in order to make our up time more productive and our lives more healthy and happy.  In short, to make us nice people.

Jesus was on vacation in this scripture.  He had been arguing with the Scribes and Pharisees about weighty theological matters like washing your hands.  He had had enough.  He needed a break.

And we can imagine that he went to his favorite vacation spot, far away from the controversy that he had been stirring up.  Jesus went to the coastal district of Tyre and Sidon.  It was kind of the Middle-East's version of Bluefin or Grand Marais.

Jesus needed some down-time.  Some time away when he didn't have to fix all of the world's problems.  Some time to be alone, walk on the beach, contemplate his naval and read a good scroll.  Jesus was on vacation.

I think all of us can relate to the need for a vacation every once in a while.  I am so thankful that I work among people who not only are conscious of my need for a vacation, but who insist upon it.

Kim and I went Nova Scotia for our honeymoon over two lifetimes ago.  We spent about a week driving around the islands and staying at Bed and Breakfasts.  We came to the realization then and there that a lot of lonely people run Bed and Breakfasts.

When we came in from dinner on our last night, the proprietor met us at the door saying, "Would you like to sit down and talk for a minute?"  She was so anxious and we were so polite that we said yes.

She began to tell us about the crops on the farm and the tales of running Bed and Breakfast.  Since Kim and I are both in the helping professions about 10 minutes into our conversation, we began feeling like we were at work.  Word got out that Kim worked in a hospital which launched her into a detailed description of her husband's illness and the pain which she has which accompanies that.  Not wanting to be impolite, we both put on our active listening ears.

 

 

It was not until she asked me what I did for a living that we really started getting in trouble.  It turns our that she is a Baptist.  It also turns out that she has had many ministers stay with her.  "By the way, do you know Rev. Beals, an itinerant evangelist who dresses up like Peter and Paul and drives around in a Winnebago?"  No, I didn't know Rev. Beals.

Then she started telling us about the troubles in her church and how the pastor was supposed to solve all of the problems.  He didn't, so they got another one.  He didn't solve all of the problems either, so they fired him and got another one who just isn't working out.  "What we really need is someone young and energetic..."  Realizing where this conversation was going, I gently tried to say that perhaps the problem wasn't with the pastor but with the people in the church who were unwilling to deal with their own problems.  This launched her into a detailed story about the infighting among the Deacons.

Kim and I had been on the edge of our seats for clearly a half hour waiting for a minute to go off to the privacy of our room.  We finally feigned a yawn or two, said we were tired and needed to get our sleep.  Sometimes it is hard to truly get away.

While Jesus was walking the streets, admiring how relatively calm it was in comparison to towns near the sea of Galilee, a woman recognized him. The writer of the Gospel of Mark calls her a Greek, a Syro-Phoenician.

The woman was a half-breed.  She was partly from Phoenicia and partly Syrian.  She had darker skin than Jesus and his bunch.  She probably spoke a little bit funny.  She was what people called a Canaanite.  All of the proud native nations of the Holy Lands are called Canaanites by the writers of the Bible.  It’s what the European settlers did to the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Algonquin and the Ojibway.  They called them all Indians.  They called the Bantus, the Zulus, the Swahili all Negroes.  It’s like lumping all sexual minorities from the dykes on bikes to the leather folk, to the monogamous family, to the questioning community, the flamboyant to the conservative under the rubric of the “Gay lifestyle.”  All of these categories become caricatures and they represent a narrow understanding of their experience. We know that in the abundance of God, life is much more complex than our little boxes.

The last powerful Canaanite woman in the Bible was married to a King of Israel by the name of Ahab.  Her name was Jezebel, a Syro-Phoenician woman, a Canaanite who used her influence to worship Canaanite gods alongside the God of Israel in the Temple.  This sister of Jezebel, this unnamed Canaanite woman dared to talk to Jesus.  But not only that, she dared to talk to Jesus while he was on vacation, while he was tired and while he was fed up.

As it turns out, this woman was also a mother with a child who was tormented by a demon.  Back in those days, being tormented by a demon was another way of saying, her daughter was either physically or mentally ill.  This woman was probably at her wit's end and she had heard she could count on Jesus.  She fell at his feet and asked him to heal her daughter.

But when this half-breed Canaanite woman, another race and another gender than Jesus asked him, “help my little daughter”, do you know what he said?  He said “no!”  But not just “no!”  He went on to add, “I have no responsibility, no obligation, no time for you.  You’re not one of us.  What! Should I take the children’s food and give it to the dogs?”  He called the woman who asked for healing, a dog—a female dog. 

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus encounters this woman right aftertelling the scribes and the Pharisees that dietary laws don’t matter so much.  What really matters is what comes out of our mouths.  What matters is what we say.  What matters is if we are loving and compassionate.  And then as if to tell us that we all make mistakes, even God, Jesus goes out and defiles himself by his own words.  Luckily the woman caught him on it.

I know we like to think, as Paul says, that Jesus was "without sin."  God knows there are plenty of theologies around which say that Jesus was perfect and never made a mistake in his life.  But to say that elevates Jesus the man to a higher and more unattainable plane where he is just too far away for many of us.

Try to imagine that Jesus took on the sins of the world including the sins of prejudice and downright meanness.  Imagine God became human in Jesus, a first century Jewish person who had been taught who to love and who to hate.  Imagine for a moment that it was this Gentile woman who was placed in Jesus' life to make him repent of his old prejudices.

Jesus the man fed up and on vacation, had just insulted a mother who was not going to give up. But this was a woman who knew where her power came from.  This woman was a mother and no holy man would disrespect her and get away with it.

She answered Jesus' put-down with the greatest come-back to Jesus in the New Testament.   (Jesus always had a great come-back for everyone else, now he had a taste of his own medicine.)  "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat crumbs that fall from the master's table."

She got him.  Don’t you love her for saying it?  I do!  Jesus was exhausted, irritable, out of the country where he thought he could be anonymous.  She imposed herself on him, and he shot back with the old, exclusivist Hebrew doctrine, wrapped around a stinking racist and sexist prejudice.  He rejected her as a Gentile bitch.  But she called him on it.

And right there, I like to think that Jesus realized what he had done.  On behalf of centuries of racism, sexism, prejudice and discrimination he said, "I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have been so mean to you.  Of course your daughter has been healed."  And this strong, persistent, faithful mother from another country with a hated heritage was the only person in the whole Bible to win an argument with Jesus.

Because she called him on it, I like to think that Jesus realized the mistake he had made.  I like to think that Jesus repented of his classism, his racism and his sexism.  And from there on out, the ministry of the Gospel went to the Gentiles and not just to the Jews.  All because of the chutzpah of the Syrophoenician woman.

We need to be reminded that inclusivity is not only the welcoming and affirming of others, but also an ongoing process of unlearning the toxic prejudices that we retreat to when the going gets tough.  It’s so much easier to categorize people and judge them without knowing them.  We are prone to exclude people we don't understand, or whom we have been told are our enemies.  We can do that with fundamentalists, with homophobes, with folks who don’t vote like we do.

In this day and age, we are faced with so many opportunities to disassociate ourselves with those whom our society, our nationalities, our families and even our religion deem as outsiders.  But we follow the one who has been there.  The one who has said the exclusive and hurtful words and then repented.  We too must do the same.

And by the grace of God, we can.   We can because we follow one who has become human: the one who knows our human pain, our human joys, our human potential and also our human limitations. 

And through the wonderful miracle of incarnation, God has redeemed us and showed us a better way, today through the persistent faith of a foreign mother.

It’s no accident that this story of Jesus’ own repentance is sandwiched between Jesus’ talk and action around defilement.  It’s what comes out of your mouth that defiles you.  And the seventh chapter of Mark ends with Jesus taking spit out of his formerly defiled mouth and using it as a tool in a mutant’s transformation.  Because of the Syrophoenician woman, what came out of Jesus’ mouth no longer defiled another, but it brought healing.  That’s what should happen with everything that comes out of our mouths, too. 

We are called to be at one with the human family. We are called to break down the barriers that divide us.  We have even changed our Affirmation for this Sunday to reflect that we need to get beyond our prejudices.  Just as the Syrophoenician woman taught Jesus a lesson in inclusivity, we need it, too.  And we need it so that we can have new insight, new revelation, new wisdom that can only come when our eyes are opened and we see ourselves and another in a new light.  When we do that, then the blind truly see. And we might even approach the day when nothing defiling comes out of our mouth, but only love, honesty, compassion, mercy and peace. 

That’s when we see ourselves and the world clearly. 

That’s when we know we have been visited by holiness.

AMEN.