Sermon: 8/20/17: Nevertheless She Persisted

Sermon  8/20/17            Matthew 15:10-28

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord, Jesus Christ.  Amen

Nevertheless she persisted.

For some in this room that’s a political hand grenade even to say out loud. It either feels like a rallying cry or an offense. It may either straighten your spine in affirmation or in irritation.

But persistence has been happening long before it became part of the cultural and political blogosphere or 24 hour news cycle.

SHE persisted because her daughter was suffering. Tormented by a demon. And as a mother, she was willing to go to any length to save her. I’ll bet we have a lot of persistent mothers in that way here today.

She was even willing to approach this teacher. This enemy teacher who had a reputation for healing and for mercy.

For that’s what he was for her. An enemy. Son of David. And she would have known that for him, she was an enemy too. His people had hated hers for centuries.

But somewhere along the line someone must have told her “He serves a God of Justice. Of mercy. He will help you.” So she took a chance.

At first anyway, he was unwilling to help. And not just unwilling. He was mean. He seemed cruel. Not like anything she’d heard about him. He gave in to his disciples’ shouts to send her away when she begged him for help. He called her a dog.

Maybe she was used to that. Maybe he wasn’t the first. Maybe she’d been called worse even. She let it just roll off her back as if she were used to it.

But she persisted, turning his own words and his canine image against him.

“Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

And it seems that was when he saw it. Maybe he’d just been distracted. Maybe he had focused too much on how his people had hated the Canaanites for centuries and held that against her. Maybe he’d simply been testing her or giving an example about the Pharisees he’d just condemned.

No one knows. We can’t crawl into Jesus’ mind and discover what it was he was thinking when he called her a dog.

But what we can see in that moment, what he shows us in that moment is that at least then he remembered the words from Isaiah:

Maintain justice and do what is right …For my house shall be called a house of prayer for ALL peoples.

For all peoples. Even foreigners. He remembered.

He remembered this reminder of who his people were called to be. He remembered God’s promise to Abram that his people were to be a blessing not simply to themselves but to the nations. To the world.

He remembered that the holy house of God is for everyone.

He remembered what the Kingdom of God was, just as his follower Paul would later remember and remind us that there is no longer Jew or Greek; slave or free… or I’m sure you can come up with a few others.

We are one.

A woman persisted and she reminded Jesus of that message. An ENEMY woman persisted and he remembered that message. She was audacious and tenacious; offensive and impudent; determined, and yes…dogged.

And Jesus heard her. Saw her. He saw a faith that he called great: the first and only time in this gospel of Matthew that he called a faith great.

A faith in a God of justice. A faith in a God of deliverance. A faith in a God of ALL.

Jesus saw this faith in this woman and his vision expanded. He remembered Isaiah. He remembered that justice is not just a vague vision meant for a select few. It isn’t just for our tribe or our religion or our skin color or political bent. But it is a specific vision meant to save even a woman who was the enemy: the outsider.

That’s the vision we as Christians have inherited. One that says that ALL are welcome to the house of prayer. All. All. ALL.

And when anyone in our Christian tradition says otherwise – when they say no to that vision of ALL, ALL, ALL, – well, there’s the rub.

What then?

Because I’m guessing I don’t need to tell you how wide and expansive the love of our God is. I’m guessing you know it. I don’t need to tell you that Jesus isn’t only like us. That God doesn’t simply share our views of the world here in Chester County Pennsylvania in the United States of America.

I believe we all know that already. But is knowing it enough?

Or must we persist in living it as if we know it as well. Showing the world we know as well.

So when someone claims a narrative counter to this inclusive justice of God, or Christianity, is it enough to know that it is wrong or do we also remember to denounce it as wrong.

To remind those who say otherwise that for God in Christ ALL means ALL.

To remind them that every single time we draw a line in the sand between who is in and who is out – who is brother and who is other – God in Christ will show up on the other side of that line and embody the very person we have named our enemy.

When anyone in our Christian tradition says “no” to that vision of God’s inclusive love and justice and deliverance, we are called to resist that claim. We are called to persist in our view of God’s expansive love, and be vigilant to help those who are being excluded from it.

Sometimes the voice that reminds us is from a mother crying out for justice for a suffering daughter: pleading for healing for her child, persisting and moving mountains to get the enemy teacher to see her. To hear her. To help her.

Sometimes it's a Charlottesville mother crying out for righteous action after her daughter was slain while protesting the white supremacist rally that brought violence and hatred to that city.

Susan Bro likely didn’t expect to wake up one morning and be a voice crying for justice in the wilderness.

It was her 32-year-old daughter Heather Heyer who was the activist. And unlike the Canaanite woman, there was nothing Susan could do to save her daughter.

Yet her daughter’s passion would move her to cry out.

“They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well guess what?” she said at Heather’s memorial. “You just magnified her. I’d rather have my child, but by golly if I’ve got to give her up, we’re going to make it count.”

She persisted.

Any preacher will tell you that there comes a moment at some point in their preaching life where they have to face a choice. Where something so big has happened in our shared experience and we face the fear of ruffling feathers if we speak out about it.

Where the blue and the red, or the white, black, or brown blend and meet and bump up against each other and you realize that you can either generalize and be vague, or you can be intentional and specific, remembering that the Gospel, with its proclamation of unmerited grace, IS offensive by its very nature to the way the world works.

And then you get this Canaanite woman. And you get Isaiah, and you get the aftermath of Charlotteville all showing up on the same Sunday and you realize that generalizations just aren’t going to hack it.

This Canaanite woman is a model for what it means to not be afraid to ruffle feathers.

She changed the mind of our Lord. She persisted and made him remember the expansive inclusiveness of God’s dream for the world.

She persisted and reminded him that the table is wide and open for all.

Maybe it’s scary or off-putting to imagine that Jesus wasn’t already in control of this situation: that this Canaanite woman needed to remind him. Maybe it is more comforting to think that Jesus was testing her or that he was using her to show what blind guides the Pharisees were.

Or that by calling her a dog he was giving an example of how what comes out of the mouth is what defiles a person.

Or maybe, we can remember what the writer of Luke told us: that Jesus – that God in the flesh who walked among us – grew in wisdom and stature. He learned. Just like we do.

We can remember, as religious writer and speaker Adam Ericksen says about this text that: “Matthew wants us to see that ALL humans, even Jesus, need to have our cultural prejudices challenged and uprooted.”

There’s that word again. All.

For the disciples, for the Pharisees this woman was a walking defilement. And yet, through her, Jesus grew in wisdom.

Can we?

Can we remember through this woman’s persistence that knowing God is a God of all is not enough? That knowing God loves even those who are different from us is not enough?

That when groups who claim a Christian heritage march and assert racial superiority – when they hold Nazi flags, the symbol of the deaths of six million people, or Confederate flags, the symbol of slavery of millions, and chant against any one else who is other – that it is not enough simply to know that is wrong?

We have to denounce it as wrong. We have to say it is wrong. We have to live as if it is wrong. As if it is sin.

This year marks the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, and there isn’t a better time to remind ourselves that our Lutheran heritage wasn’t always on the right side of history with White Supremacy. Not with some of Martin Luther's own writings, and not in Nazi Germany certainly.

That cannot be our witness in this year that marks a half a millennia of Reforming.

And so today we hear from this one woman who persisted. Who cried out for her daughter. A woman who was the other. A woman who wanted to be part of Isaiah’s vision.

A woman Jesus first ignored, then called a dog, and then, as his vision opened up, he helped. And he learned from. And he called her faith great.

From there he would go on and expansively heal, and feed and offer the gift of his body and blood.

And he would offer it to all. Not some. All.

So we today receive that body and blood and we will go out. Called to persist in spreading this wide, generous love of a God for all of creation, resisting any claim to the contrary and being vigilant to the cries of those who get left out and called “other.”