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August 17, 2008- RCL Year A, Proper 15
The Rev. Mark Byers
“Children of God”
Jesus called the crowd to him and said to them, "Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles." Then the disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?" He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit." But Peter said to him, "Explain this parable to us." Then he said, "Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile."
Jesus left Gennesaret 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. [Matthew 15:10-28, NRSV]
There’s an old saying. It’s actually from Aristotle, the Greek philosopher. “We are what we repeatedly do.” Aristotle goes on to make the point that “Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” As Christians, we might be less concerned about the philosophical category of “excellence,” and more concerned about things like “holiness” or “Godliness.” But the idea is that not merely agreeing with a thought, but practicing it until it becomes part of us, integral to who we are, is at the heart of faith. More than just thoughts, too: true faith involves assuming an identity that we don’t yet have, but that we visualize through scripture, and that takes form through knowing and understanding as our own the story of how God has loved us throughout history. C. S. Lewis compares the practice of faith to wearing a mask that gradually changes the form of the features beneath it from ugliness to beauty.
We are what we repeatedly do. Or, we are what we believe, what we practice, what we live. In this story today, the issue between Jesus and the Pharisees is very much something that we face today. No one, Jesus included, would say that it makes no difference what we take into our bodies. In other words, our consumption, of food, of ideas, of consumer goods, of anything, has an effect upon us. The Pharisees got that right. But what Jesus said in response to this is: “How and what we consume is not really the key. Who we are, and who we are becoming, begins in our hearts.” As he put it, “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.” Hygiene matters. But more important than being actually or ritually clean is what choices we make from the heart: hearts are capable of evil, or of self-sacrificing love. They are capable of adultery and promiscuity, or of great and abiding love. They are capable of deceit and malice, or of gentleness, honesty, and mercy. And they are also capable, it goes without saying, of mixing all these things up, and making it difficult to tell exactly what is coming from them. Which makes for confusing life stories for us, and for all of humanity.
God, of course, understands precisely how our personal stories are unfolding, as well as the story of all humanity. Every nation, faith community, and category of person has a story or several stories. Wisdom consists in understanding that every story is merely a thread within a greater story, a master narrative that we see most clearly in scripture. I see a couple of paragraphs of scripture, and in the spirit of simplicity, I might simply weave a sermon that teaches an important lesson, something to take home and stick on the refrigerator. I have, on my refrigerator, lots of those sorts of nuggets from lots of different stories. There are cartoons cut from the newspaper that make special sense to Jessi and me because of the story we share of being parents, or of being people who have lived in a particular place. There are pictures the kids have made, nuggets of our shared story of parenting. And there are magnets from different places we’ve visited together: fragments of the story of our marriage and family.
None of them, of course, makes as much sense to you as it does to us if you find yourself standing in front of the refrigerator. It’s just a jumble. And so is scripture, unless you know what story it is you’re reading, and whose story it is you’re reading.
The story of scripture runs roughly like this: God created the heavens and the earth. Human beings, who were made to have a special sort of relationship with God, were also created with the reality of moral autonomy. This means that we are able to choose not just what God might choose for us, but things to which God is either indifferent or opposed. This opposition is not simply God’s way of making life more complicated for us: it is God knowing what qualities in our character and choices in our lives will rebuild our relationship with God, rather than tearing it down further.
God acts, and acts repeatedly and faithfully, to lay the foundations for the rebuilding of our relationship with him. He established a covenant with the people we call Jews, and then with Christians, precisely to rebuild this relationship we were created to have. He sent prophets to guide us. If God is repeatedly and faithfully rebuilding this relationship, then the counter-story of humanity is our desire to unmake what God is doing. God establishes covenant people: they disorder themselves by seeking ways that defy God. Injustice. Cruelty. Idolatry. Impurity of life. These are concepts, because of the profound power of our counter-story, that seem archaic to us. But these are nevertheless deeply of concern to God, not because of God’s concern over what we take in, or whether or not we washed our hands first, but because these things that very often come out of us defile what God has made: the earth which is our beautiful home, and the people of the earth. We were created for so much more than wardrobe malfunctions, shiny new cars, perfect sex lives, home entertainment centers, and bright, gleaming houses that light up the night sky in their millions while others go hungry or suffer from the cruelty of their neighbor.
There is God’s story and any number of counter-stories, and if we don’t know what our story is, if all we see are just pieces, without any notion of what is unfolding around us and inside us, the danger is that we’ll accept one of the many counter-stories as the authentic representation of our lives, as individuals, as nations, as children of God.
I heard a story once about someone, an American, meeting a local during a visit to a little Italian town. It’s supposed to be a true story, but who knows. The Italian, when he realized that the person was American, stood up straight, and began to sing, “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce! Special orders don’t upset us!” The whole song. The American started laughing, and the man looked hurt. Some bystanders said that the man was wondering why the American was laughing at his national anthem. Then it came out that some American servicemen had taught him the song as the national anthem one evening… Which seems funny until you consider that most of us know fast food menus better than our own history and Constitution. If you don’t know the real story, either as a supposed insider, or as an outsider, you’re liable to accept any nugget of a counter-story without thinking. You might even create a new story that’s easier than the true story.
Part of the story of God’s people is that, after God brought the Israelites, the Jews, out of slavery in Egypt, he guided them to the Promised Land, a place called Canaan. But people already lived in Canaan. So of course, things grew complicated and bloody. In order for Israel to be established, the people believed, the Canaanites had to be overthrown. And they did it. They moved into the land and founded their new nation. And people suffered. Why? Because Israel accepted both God’s story and the story of neighboring empires simultaneously. In order for us to prosper, it is necessary for others to be cast out or down. It’s a common story, and happens all over the world throughout history: invasion and migration, and then the establishment of a new order, usually by the suppression of the old one.
“Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” It would be very easy simply to say that this is what we’re supposed to get out of this passage. And we would treat separately, or ignore entirely, the following paragraph, the encounter with the Canaanite woman. It’s a disturbing little bit of dissonance, anyway. He’s not very nice to her, on the surface of it at least.
But it’s part of the story. It’s not just coincidence or some random encounter put in for color commentary. Jesus wasn’t just a guy who was wandering around correcting the teachings of the local religious establishment. He is the Son of God, He is the Messiah, the one anointed by the Creator God to move our story forward toward completion. He is what Israel is supposed to be, what the church is supposed to be, the answer to the questions people had about what had happened to their Promised Land, “How did we go from be chosen and having our own nation to being the subjects of an emperor who claims the authority and position that God alone is suppose to have?”
Religious institutions have a tendency to do things simply because “that’s what we’re supposed to do.” So Jesus critiques ritual purity laws in the first paragraph, saying that the function that our faith practices serve should be to build up Godly people. It’s not simply a matter of ritual impurity or purity, but of expressing consistently through our lives what God has planted within our hearts. And what happens next? Jesus encounters a woman with a problem. Not just any woman or any problem, but a Canaanite woman whose daughter has a demon, a force that defies God and twists her life into torment. Why is it significant that this is a Canaanite woman? Because the disciples and everyone else would assume that right or wrong, Jesus is operating within the limits of God’s relationship only to Israel. What happens to an outsider, a foreigner, is not their problem. But Jesus is redirecting the story, both the one they tell themselves and the actual one that God is telling.
Not only, Jesus tells us, is faith a matter of the heart for every observant Jew, but it is a matter for non-Jews, too. A person from outside the counter-story comes in and interrupts it, and the disciples want to drive her off. But Jesus engages her, although appearing to turn her away. He’s showing us our own counter-story, the way I do sometimes with my children. The disciples, and my kids, know what our family’s values are, and so they’re keenly aware when something is said or done that is at odds with them.
“Deeda, she has my toy.”
“Maybe you should push her and take it back.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“She’s my sister.”
“What should you do, then?”
“Maybe I should ask her for it back, or play with something else.”
“That sounds like a much better idea.”
You can see the stories bumping up against each other: the one that begins, “I will make of you a great nation, and all nations will be blessed through you,” colliding with “This woman is descended from the unworthy people we kicked out.” The Canaanite woman is asking for healing from the God whose chosen people subjugated hers, and thus this conversation between them, with the disciples listening, is changing their understanding of the history of the two peoples, reconciling, at least in this encounter, conqueror and conquered. Here is the truth: God is love not just to one group, but to all. God is healing not just to one group, but to all. God’s story is the story not just of one group, but of all groups. And the way God’s story is meant to be told in our midst is not as a story of “us and them,” but of, “you are us as much as we are.”
I hope this passage grabs you right around the heart and shakes you up, because it does me. I get discouraged when I see the church condemning people or making pronouncements to folks who haven’t even had a chance to know that they aren’t Canaanites to us, people we’re walking over as we create our own personal patch of Promised Land. The Good News of God brings people together and teaches all of them, together, the true story, or it isn’t Good News. I don’t preach the Gospel to you, as if I have it and you don’t. I preach the Gospel to all of us, me included, because I need this story, the true story, as much as anyone. If I don’t know that about myself as a Christian, and you don’t know that about yourself as a Christian, or as a guest trying to find out more about us, we’ll never amount to more than a bunch of people staring at magnets on a refrigerator, or hearing a song that makes no sense.
What did the Canaanite woman know about the people of God before that conversation with Jesus? She knew, probably, a little bit about their symbols, about the practices they had in public, maybe some stories that went around in her neighborhood about them. Much as people who aren’t active Christians, or who are even farther removed from us than simple inactivity, know. They know the Jesus fish on the back of the minivan. They know the cute bumper sticker that says, “In the event of the rapture, this vehicle will have no driver.” They know the talking heads, the pastors who comment on “social issues.”
They don’t know about our boundary-breaking, healing God, or the true story about our Savior who loved us so much that he died for us. They don’t know the God who wants all his children to have not just the crumbs from under the table, but a rich and everlasting feast. What the disciples learned that day, and what we must always remember, is that not only does faith mean living life with a loving heart, but extending our arms to sisters and brothers we never would have embraced before. That’s at the heart of the story that we should be telling.
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