Christ and the Canaanite Woman, Juan de Flandes, c. 1500

A sermon by Jean-Daniel Cathèll-Williams, Director of Youth Ministries, Mystic Congregational Church, Mystic, Connecticut.

A reading from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, chapter 15, verses 21-28.

Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

The Good News of Jesus Christ.  Thanks be to God.

I just said “the Good News of Jesus Christ.”  An ancient and traditional way to conclude a formal reading from one of the four Gospels.  So ancient and traditional, some of you may have been content to just let me do that.  To call that passage good news.  Yet maybe among us are some more sceptical or more attentive people who are wondering, why I have the nerve to get up here and tell you a story where Jesus calls a woman a dog is good news.  The easy explanation is that the story has a happy ending: “And her daughter was healed.”  All’s well that ends well, right?  Let’s not all fret about who called whom what.

The honest explanation is that it bothers me too.  It’s been bothering me all week.  In our United Church of Christ tradition, as in the Catholic Church and several other Protestant denominations, sermon texts are suggested by a rotating list of passages called the Revised Common Lectionary.  We use this guide because it unites with Christians around the world, and sometimes more impressively, with other churches in our town, knowing that millions upon millions of Christians are being inspired and/or puzzled by the same words we are.  We use it to help nudge our preachers into touching upon the whole variety of the Christian message, rather than falling into the tempting trap of just preaching our favourite stories in an endless rotation.  We use it so that the youth minister and seminarian in the pulpit on a summer Sunday does not squirm away from the hard parts of the Bible, the parts where Jesus seems, frankly, to be mean.

When I was a teenager, I wore a bracelet, a woven cloth bracelet embroidered with the letters, “WWJD.”  Trust me, in the 90s, this was cool.  The acronym, “WWJD” was designed to be a reminder to me to pose the question, “What would Jesus do?” No question was too large or small for me to, at least on my good days, first ask, “What would Jesus do?”  Would Jesus lie?  No.  Would Jesus have a Snickers bar and Pepsi for lunch?  Maybe. Would Jesus skip class?  No.  But what about if it were to talk to and comfort a friend who is sobbing?  Hmm…

The problem I quickly discovered is that I did not actually know what Jesus would do.  The Bible doesn’t cover everything.  Even if it had, it was long and had lots of big words, so I can’t claim I had read it all anyway.  So I created a fake Jesus, and I know I am not the only one to have done this.  I created a comfortable, imaginary Jesus.  Jesus was the perfect example, so I assumed he behaved perfectly, or at least what my preconceived ideas about what “perfectly” would mean.  Jesus the nice guy, Jesus the well-mannered, Jesus the rule-follower, the Jesus of Emily Post’s Etiquette guide.

Our answers to the question what would Jesus do risk taking on a life of their own and may lead us into creating a Jesus far removed from what Jesus in fact did.  The Jesus of the Bible was not Jiminy Cricket, a chipper little voice of conscience.  The Jesus of the Bible did not wander the streets of Jerusalem with a ceaseless grin and a t-shirt that said, “Free hugs.”  As a teenager, he got exasperated when his mother asked him, “Hey son, where have you been the last few days?”  He seemed exasperated with her again as young adult when she asked for a little help in the kitchen at a wedding that was stressing her out.  “Woman, my hour has not come yet.”  That’s just King James for, “Not now, Mom.”  Jesus was not all smiles.  He got angry sometimes, and he openly wept sometimes.  Jesus called people “broods of vipers,” once accused his best friend of being “Satan,” ran through a sacred temple screaming and flipping over tables, and he implied that a woman in desperate need was a dog.

So not only is the Jesus of the Bible not actually what we often picture when asking “What would Jesus do?” we’re faced with the harder reality that perhaps we would not like it if others behaved as Jesus did.  If a perfectly polite, endlessly accomodating, easily pushed-over man preached in ancient Judea, it was not the man who enraged both a mob and the Empire so viciously that he was crucified on Calvary.

So to find real Jesus, we go back to Matthew 15.

A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”

What does the Bible mean when we read about someone being “demon-possessed”?   Are there marauding actual, evil spirits eagerly conquering the bodies of innocent young maidens?  Is Matthew using a vivid metaphor?  Is the mother simply using her culture’s only available understanding of what perhaps we would call a mental illness?  All three are common Christian understandings, but let’s focus on the mother’s full description, “My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”  “Suffering terribly.”  However we describe the reality of demon possession, the daughter’s suffering was utterly real.

What would Jesus do?  My imaginary Jesus would turn around immediately and say, “I’m so sorry.  How can I help?”  But what did Jesus do?

Jesus did not answer a word.

This does not seem like the Jesus I prefer; my imaginary Jesus who would spin around with a ready hug and a ready miracle.  So this may not be the Jesus I prefer, but it is the one I often know.  This seems exactly like the God to whom I pray.  I wonder if I could find someone who has ever prayed, who has never felt like their cry, “God, someone I love is (or I myself am) ‘suffering terribly,” has felt that God “did not answer a word.”

Perhaps when God does not seem to be coming through for us, good Christians will.

So [Jesus’] disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

How could they?  They did not plead for her cause, they pled for her to go away.  A clue is that Matthew tells us she was a Canaanite woman, an ethnicity the Israelites had lived in side-by-side anymosity for centuries.  A nation that Old Testament biblical authors were quick to blame for nearly every Israelite crisis.  She was the kind of woman that these disciples just did not want to be bothered by or hear from or help.  Before we modern readers are too quick to condemn them, I wonder what word each of us could use a subsitute for “Canaanite” in our lives.  Which of God’s beloved sons and daughters do we wish would leave us alone or go away?  Would just shut up and get out?  Republican, Democrat?  Rich, poor?  Immigrant, old money?  Young, old?  Telemarketer?  Well, surely Jesus would not allow any human divisions to influence his ministry, right?

Jesus answered [the disciples], “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

For a religious leader of his time and place to behave this way is not surprising.  Interfaith ministry does not seem to have been a spiritual priority yet.  What is surprising is that Jesus is not surprising here.  I want him to extraordinary, but he just behaves in the most ordinary, culturally expected way.

The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

What remarkable faith indeed.  She is a woman who knows she is a precious daughter of God.  She knows God’s blessings are hers to claim as much as anybody else’s.  No matter what the good religious folk say, even the religious leaders, she will not be put down, shut up, or shoved aside.  She knows where she stands with God, and is not seeking affirmation but recognition.

Based on this story, we need to rethink asking ourselves, “What would Jesus do?”  We need to ask, as the Rev. Peter Gomes, my college chaplain, suggested “What would Jesus have me to do?”  You see, in this story, Jesus is not the one whose example we should follow.  He is a teacher, prodding his student to do something for herself.  What are the two things his apparently rude actions spurned her to do?

First, when she shouted at him, he didn’t listen.  It was not until she knelt down before him in humility that he listened.  Requiring someone to kneel before us as a prerequisite for helping them would be sheer hubris if done by anyone other than the Son of God.  We do not want to live in a world where everyone behaves like he’s the Son of God!  So it’s not Jesus’ example, but hers which we should follow in this story.

Secondly, she discovered that shouting to God or counting on supposedly good Christians like the disciples is often not enough.  Jesus cornered her into standing up for herself and for her daughter.  How much I wanted Jesus to be the nice, polite Jesus in this story, but had he been, he would have traded his calling as perfect teacher for perfect manners.

She was a Canaanite and she needed to be treated as an equal in the kingdom of God, not just for her sake, but for the sake of a daughter whom she loved.  Ever since God chose to let humans in the church, human divisions have been in the church.  People needing fellowship and healing and love, people with genuine gifts to offer the work of God, have been labelled and cast aside, told to get out, told to sit in the back, told to stay away from the pulpit, told to stay away from the communion table.    What does Jesus teach the Canaanite woman, and us, to do when we or those we love are dismissed as dogs unworthy for the blessings of the church?

Kneel before God and then stand up for yourself and those you love.  You can’t just scream at God.  And sadly, you can’t count on good Christians, the disciples to advocate for you.  Sometimes they, more than anyone else, just want to you to shut up and go away.  Sometimes, like the disciples, their prayers and pleas to God will not be that you see justice, but that you give up.

Our tradition, American Congregationalism, does not have a pure, innocent history.  After all, we trace our religious heritage to the Puritans, equally enshrined in history as intensely persecuted and intense persecutors.  I am pleased, though, that we do have a tradition of repenting early and often.  We were the first American Protestants to ordain a black pastor; the first to have a woman pastor, possibly in world history; among the first to allow our gay sisters and brothers to serve as pastors.  Critics have claimed at each of these moments that we ignored the Bible.  Yet, these changes occurred not by ignoring the Bible, but by believing it.  By believing Matthew 15, where Jesus prods the Canaanite woman to stands up for her right to eat from the master’s table with, “You have great faith! Your request is granted.”

To add a personal detail, a little over a year ago, shortly before any of you had met me, my wife and I made an excrutiatingly difficult decision to leave the denomination of our youth, a church we had served with commitment and dedication and a church to which we are indebted for many of our greatest blessings in life, including meeting each other.  Part of the reason for that decision to leave was that as I looked into my young daughters’ eyes, I could not justify telling them that because of their chromosomes, because they were born female, that they could not be a religious leader like me.  I do not know if my daughters will even want to be pastors, but I am grateful to be in a community of Christians where they will never have to doubt that they can be.

So when we ask what would Jesus do, we have to wonder if that is the same question as “What would Jesus have me to do?”  Because he when he wants you to do something, when he wants you to stand up for yourself and those you love, he does not want you to be polite, he wants you to be bold.  Jesus taught me that being polite is overrated.  Amen.

This sermon was originally given in April 2010 at the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Good morning, sisters and brothers.  Allow me to begin with a reading from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 34 through 40.

“The King [shall say] unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

 

We call ourselves Christians (Acts 11:26) and we call Christ our King (John 12:13).  Hopefully out of gratitude for His love, often out of fear of His power, we exhaust ourselves trying to please Him.  We make lists of commandments, feel self-righteous when we keep them well, or at least better than others do, and feel guilty when we don’t, or at least not as well as others seem to.  When the futility of perfection weighs down on us, we often justify ourselves by arguing we follow the more important rules.  I have fallen into this trap as often as I have witnessed it.

One hot afternoon in Encinitas, California, my mission companion and I were racing along El Camino Real and we had a decision to make, a decision which at the time surely felt like it had eternal consequence, should we go out of our way to go to our apartment and get our suit coats.  You see, we were running late, and the detour surely would have made us even later for our appointment.  Yet on the other hand, a firm decree from the mission president had been sent across San Diego and Orange Counties that all missionaries within the sound of his voice must wear dress coats after six in the evening.  Faced with such a profound moral dilemma, my companion and I had a difference of opinion—which was the greater sin, to be late or to be coatless after six.  Looking back on the episode, eavesdropping on our arguments and re-imagining our inflated senses of superior righteousness, the words of Paul, “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1) come to mind.  Because Paul warns, without charity—without pure love—all speaking in tongues of men and angels, all our legalist obsessing are at best distractions.

It’s not that commandments don’t matter.  But the point is that some do, in fact, matter more than others.  In Matthew 22, beginning verse 36, a lawyer, a man we may safely assume thought often of questions of law and precedence, approached Jesus and asked, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

“This is the first and great commandment.

“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

If we remember the Parable of the King with which I opened, we realize just how like unto the first commandment the second truly is.  How do we love God?  “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

To piece together the biblical principles we have learned so far: from Matthew 22, love for God and our fellow humans are the most important commandments; from Matthew 25, serving our fellow humans is how we love God; and from 1 Corinthians 13, without love all else we do is just noise.  Or in other words, if we are not loving, little else we do matters.  Therefore, we believe in doing good to all men and women.

How does a Christian, one who holds Jesus as Lord and supernal example go about doing good?  Three biblical principles are crucial: Jesus loved individuals.  His love knew no boundaries.  And we do not serve others because of our religion.

First, Jesus loved and served on an individual basis.

This week while reading for one of my classes, I read a debate between two political pundits about poverty in America.  One argued that poverty was caused by societal circumstances, and therefore that society had an obligation to lift the poor out of poverty.  The other argued that poverty was the result of individual shortcomings and said the poor would be served by simply working harder.  Their proposed solutions, of course, each reflected their respective assumptions.  Now the dangerous question—whose view is Christian?  Well, neither, because Jesus did not operate on generalizations, like public policy invariably does.  He operated on the level of individual ministry.  And thus no amount political advocacy, for either party, on our parts can relieve us of the Christian duty to individually help others.

Jesus did not march around the wedding at Cana ordering the demons out of thirsty guests, he did not command the blind to walk, and he did not tell the lame to see.   He did not give the woman caught in adultery some fish to eat, he did not raise the hungry crowd of five thousand from the dead, and he did not offer the Lazarus a glass of wine.  The best service requires truly knowing those we serve.  Jesus did not act out of generalizations, he did not stereotype, he did not put preconceived political opinions above actual reality.  And while we must never limit our acts of love to our own families and church or even our own community, this principle perhaps helps us understand why acts of love within our families, churches, and communities are often the most effective in changing lives immediately and drastically.

We must also never forget that our hour of individual need will surely come.  The first time I ever went to visit Utah, long ago in the days before Bank of America came to New England I had a bank account with FleetBoston Bank. I drove across the country, and as I traveled I spent money at gas stations and diners in states I had never before visited, in which I had never before spent money, and I made purchases more frequently than I ever had before.  When I arrived in Utah, Fleet Bank in its finite wisdom concluded my card had been stolen and cancelled my debit card.  Thousands of miles from home—the only place Fleet would have mail a new card—or even the nearest bank branch—the only place I could then withdraw money—I was effectively and suddenly broke, homeless, hungry, and stranded.  I was only saved by a kindly loan of a church member which ultimately funded by return trip East back to my own bank account.  When we pass beggars on the streets, do we remember how quickly we could be caught there ourselves?

Secondly, Jesus did not let boundaries limit his love.

In his ministry, Jesus healed the righteous and the sinful alike.  He dined with the hated and the powerful.  He healed the Roman centurion’s servant, he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well.  He preached to Pharisees and peasants.  His love extended all ethnicities, all incomes, all ages, and even all levels of righteousness, if such could even truly be measured.  So must ours.

There will come times when we are forced between looking righteous and actually doing good.  Jesus Himself made this choice when he kept company with tax collectors and sinners.  He loved those who needed his love, not those whose company would impress the self-assumed righteous.  Even Paul’s wise counsel to “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thes. 5:22) bows to the commandment of love when it must.  In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, found in Luke 10, Jesus tells of an unfortunate traveler who was beaten by thieves.  Then Jesus says, “A Levite walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side.”  Keep in mind the Levite could not, wasn’t supposed to, touch anything unclean, like this suffering man.  But Jesus does not hold up the man who followed the rules as the good example, but the “one showed mercy.”

Jesus’ own commitment to loving service pinnacled in his great atoning sacrifice.  The Gospel of Mark, chapter 10 verse 4, teaches us that Jesus “came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom” for all of us.  So we should strive to minister, more than we seek to be ministered, and to offer our lives in the service of others.

Finally, if we want to live a life of Christian service, we must jettison the idea that we serve because of our religion.  Loving others is our religion.  The Epistle of James, written by the brother of Jesus who was not the most powerful apostle but likely the one who knew the Lord most intimately, tells us simply, in chapter 1 verse 27, “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”  When I say we do not serve others because of our religion, I know I am making a semantic distinction, but it’s an important one.  Serving others is not one of many things on a divinely-given “to do” list.  It is our religion.

Home teaching [a church program of visiting assigned families monthly] is not our religion.  Serving the fatherless, the widows, the needy in their affliction is, and it is likely that home teaching is one of the best means to do so.  Being deliberate in our clothing or entertainment choices is not our religion, but it may be an effective means to “keep unspotted from the world.”

Sara and I have been richly blessed by the loving and Christian service we have been rendered here. After four wonderful years in this congregation, we are moving soon to exotic New Haven, Connecticut.  So much of my understanding of the word service I have learned as the recipient of love here in Hingham.

Allow me to conclude with an example.  When Sara and I arrived, we did not own a car, and Brother Vernon Harrison kindly left us use of his car whenever he went on business trips, only asking for rides to the airport in exchange and the only condition being that I be seen driving car whose bumper stickers contradicted all my own opinions.

My dear wife Sara called Vernon a few days after one such loan.  “Vernon, I think I left one of our plates in your car—under the driver’s seat.”

“No problem, I’ll get it back to you,” Vernon cheerily responded.

It had been a sweltering few days since we had returned the car.  “Well,” Sara continued, “There’s another problem.  I left my burrito on it.”

In an act that can only be described as pure love, Vernon continued to let us borrow his car.

So often I have been the least of this congregation.  We have had times of poverty, tragedy, and medical crises, we have needed car repairs, furniture, moving help, and babysitters.  At every turn, our attempts to serve have been outdone by the service rendered to us.  For that we thank you all.

It is my prayer that the love of Jesus Christ, so freely given to us, will flow through us in all our dealings with our sisters and brothers on earth.  That we will love individuals in their time of need, that we will love without limits, and that we will prioritize love in its rightful place.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.