Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Pentecost 14
September 10, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

“Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.”

Our gospel passage for this morning begins with Jesus making several important transitions.

• He travels from Jewish territory to Gentile territory.
• He goes from talking with and making pronouncements among his own people to interactions with those who are not his own people.
• And finally, he goes from taking about the importance of what’s in a person’s heart and the words and actions that can “come out” of the heart to seeing and hearing it in action.

Jesus travels to Tyre, one of the two leading cities of ancient Phoenicia, Gentile territory where he enters a house in the hope of finding seclusion. But the word gets out, and a Gentile, a Syrophoenician woman, uninvited and unannounced, comes to the house where Jesus is staying.

We’re not told much about her, only that she’s heard of Jesus and that she has a little daughter who is possessed with an unclean spirit. Upon meeting Jesus, she bows down at his feet, begging him to cast the demon out of her little girl in a gesture of reverence.

What follows her request is odd. Rather than respond to her directly, Jesus repeats what must have been a saying of the time: "Let the children be fed first,” he says, “for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." He is suggesting that he has come to bring the kingdom of God to the people of Israel first, the “children” who are seated at the table. He has not come (yet) to take what is meant for the children of Israel and to give it to the “dogs” as he calls them, those not seated at the table but wandering about under it.

What will these chilly, even insulting words bring out of her?

Instead of silent acceptance of Jesus’ response, or angry railing against his response, something else “comes out” of the woman’s heart, out of the woman’s mouth: "Sir,” she says, “even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

It is these particular words that take Jesus’ less than flattering images and expand them that cause Jesus to respond and do as she asks. "For saying this (word),” he tells her, “you may go—the demon has come out of your daughter."

So in this story some important things have happened.

• A Gentile instead of a Jew has demonstrated what it is to express the true, expansive generosity of God. We see this in the words that come out of the Syro-Phoenician woman’s mouth in her conversation with Jesus and Jesus’ response to it.
• Through her mother’s actions and Jesus’ response, an unhealthy spirit has “gone out” of a little Gentile girl. She has gone from looking for crumbs to feasting on the bread of the healing power of the kingdom of God.
• Finally, those who were previously under the table or not worthy to be at the table have taken their place at the table. No more dogs—all are children.

For me, such a story has a number of different dimensions to it.

First, it’s a story about the kind of society the reign of God comes to proclaim and to inaugurate. It’s a society in which, in God’s eyes, no distinctions are made between people. All are worthy of respect. Under God’s reign all our assumptions are challenged about who counts and who doesn’t count.

It’s also a story about our parish community, a story of challenge to us about the way we enact the reign of God here, the way we treat each other, the way we welcome strangers and visitors, the way we interact with all those here in our neighborhood. Is there anyone here we are tempted to treat like a dog? Do we see and respond to each as a child of God? Is that what “comes out” of us as a community?

And finally it’s a story about ourselves, our own hearts and minds, souls and bodies, about our own internal psychological and spiritual processes that, in order to be whole, must on some level be willing to invite to the table those parts of ourselves that we’ve perhaps kept under the table or have sent away into the corner—both places from which they gather strength and can skew or even poison what “comes out” of us.

And, of course, all these dimensions are connected to one another. Society, community and the individual are all bound up together.

In a little known book entitled The Hidden Wound, Wendell Berry sets forth a fascinating thesis about the root causes of racism and classism in societies down through the ages. His thesis is that all societies tend to identify and hold down a group of people to do the work that they will not do for themselves, to do and to be what they themselves have rejected in themselves and for themselves. Racism, whether it is related to the way the Irish were treated, the way African-Americans are treated or the way Hispanics and Latinos are treated, is for Berry rooted in a society’s unwillingness to own its full human identity and all the dimensions of life and work this means. This unwillingness to own these things means that a society finds a class of people who are held down, put under the table, so to speak and made to carry this part of our and to do the kind of work we will not do for ourselves.

Berry puts it this way: “The root [problem of our failing communities] is in our inordinate desire to be superior—not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people—but to our condition. We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves, of each other, or of our country.”

More specifically about the history of race relations in the U. S., Berry goes on to say: “Martin Luther King understood that the real gift to America of the struggle of black people (is this). In accepting the humanity of the black race, the white race will not be giving accommocation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of is own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost.”

The story of the Syrophoenician woman, the outsider who with humility and an assertiveness of heart and tongue we usually see in Jesus alone, is the story of the expansive goodness of a God who invites those under the table or away from the table to rise up and to take their seats. It is also the story a God who invites those who are already seated at the table to meet themselves in a new way. This new way is through a table fellowship to which we bring all that we have but at which we discover all that we are through the features of other’s faces.