A Homily for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on August 20, 2023, the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.

Too often, reflection on the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman hinges solely on the question of whether Jesus is having a bad day and then snaps at her out of his hungry, angry, lonely, tired, stressed frame of mind, or whether he was testing her–using a racial slur to provoke in the Canaanite woman a recognition of herself as a beloved child of God regardless of whether she is defined by the Jewish religious order as ritually unclean, defiled… a dog. 

I can see it both ways and don’t really feel the need to pin it down one way or the other. I’m ok with Jesus being a person of his culturally-conditioned time and place who suddenly wakes up to the humanity of the woman in front of him through relational encounter and changes his mind–fully human means fully human. And I’m ok with Jesus playing the role of provocateur/wisdom teacher who uses, as they say, “a thorn to remove a thorn.” However, seen in the context of the two feeding miracles that frame this encounter (the first to the Jews and the second to the Gentiles), the story’s place in the broader arc of Jesus’ mission and ministry is plain and simple: interrogate and step across all human constructed divisions between people as boundary-crossing love, feed from abundance, and mercifully heal. “God loves you. No exceptions.” Buy the t-shirt at the Ministry Fair.

Where it gets interesting is in how Jesus’ ministry of radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality is drawn out from those who keep his company. “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). So radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality are not skills, or techniques, or even programmatic church strategies that we can apply in order to get us from “here” to “there.” Welcoming Love is already here. Done. Finished. Accomplished. Rather, it’s a question of attending to, of bringing to light all that blocks, covers, occludes, clouds, this love from shining forth towards ourselves and towards others. Attending vigilantly to what blocks the presence of the indwelling Risen Christ heart is the way. The obstacles are the path. It’s a process of subtraction not addition. We’re not here, after all, to leapfrog over the ways we pen ourselves and others up in the cages of diminishing stories and say banal things like, “Well, I just love everybody.” Discipleship is seeing all the ways that we don’t allow ourselves to be loved and how that translates into blaming/judging others, or more often, simply not even seeing them. Gently attending to what blocks the heart is already the beginning of love that is worked in us by grace.

How, I wonder, does a distraught woman pleading with Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter, appear to the admirably benighted disciples as mere inconvience? How is broken-hearted, desperate importunity heard by the disciples as annoyance, a fly-in-the-ointment in the midst of their cherished Me-time with Jesus? “Send her away,” the disciples sniff indignantly, “for she keeps shouting after us.” She is, “harshing on their mellow,” as the Valley Girls and Surfer Dudes used to say in the 80s. Can we enter into both the cracked-open, end of her rope, faithful urgency of the Canaanite woman who calls out for help, and the stick to the plan, stay in your lane rigidity of the disciples? Can we see aspects of ourselves in each one?

The disciples, and the Jewish people in general, “have beef” with the Canaanites. It hasn’t been an easy time and there are hard feelings on both sides. In Deuteronomy 7: 1-2 we read: 

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations — the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you — and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. (Deuteronomy 7:1-2)

In human-all-too-human-ways, the minds of the originators of these stories imagined that God wanted the Jewish people to mercilessly slaughter their enemies. They projected their desire for vengeance on their enemies onto God and so baptized, like Saul generations hence, ethnic violence. We can empathize with the habitual way in which this projection takes place (if you haven’t prayed for God to smite your enemies, you’ve never prayed), but we don’t have to think that somehow the “no more of this!” God revealed to us in the peace-breathing person of Jesus somehow sanctions violence, or condones discrimination, racism, or injustice. Just because that was how people long ago heard God speaking doesn’t mean that is how we have to hear God speaking to us. Or haven’t we learned the lesson of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac?

By going into Tyre and Sidon, Jesus and the disciples are going into enemy territory. They are in the language of our day “triggered,” as soon as they cross the border into the Land of Canaan. All the old stories passed on from generation to generation around the dinner table get dredged up and they are literally just waiting to find fault, and perceive offense. Blinded by what the physicist David Bohm used to call “neurochemical fog,” they can’t see clearly, let alone feel compassion (literally “suffering with”) for the Canaanite woman calling out on behalf of her sick daughter.

I remember being late for class in seminary one time. It was snowing and I was, of course, out of gas. Dashing down to the Esso station I was hurriedly filling the tank all the while telling myself some doomsday story about how the professor was going to be displeased with me, how I didn’t have what it took to be a priest, and what was I doing in Seminary at all? Neurochemical fog. A woman approached me in the midst of my self-concocted melodrama asking if it knew how to change a tire. “Sorry, I’m late. I have to get to class.” Get to class where we’re studying the Gospels! “Ok, sorry to bother you,” she replied as she hunched deeper into her winter jacket and trudged back to her Civic. I finished pumping my gas and was about to hurry off to learn about Jesus, when the absurdity of it all struck me. Was I really going to leave her there in the snow with a flat because I was afraid of disappointing my professor? A few cranks of a jack, a spare tire, and five minutes later we were both on our way. I got to class 15 minutes late, only to discover that school was cancelled due to weather.

How easily those fear-driven stories blind us, deafen us, harden our hearts. Jesus, I think, knows this all too well. Jesus, in his encounter with the Canaanite woman, says what everybody is already thinking in order to expose it to the light of day, to expose it to the light of boundary-crossing love: “the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (Luke 2:35). “Sorry, can’t help you with your flat tire, I have to go learn about loving my neighbor.” “No, sorry, b-word, I’m only here for the shiny, sparkly, people who have it all together.” “But,” she counters entirely up to a little illusion-dispelling repartee with the Son of God, “Don’t even the dogs need to eat?” Doesn’t everyone deserve love? Doesn’t everyone rely on God for their very being? Is there anyone, or anything, outside of loving, liberating, and life-giving presence of God? Isn’t mercy for all? Isn’t your house a house of prayer for all people?”

And quickly, the gig is up. What blocks the heart has been named, voiced, owned, revealed for the sham it is. Lifted high on the cross for all to see and be healed of. Jesus, the second Joshua, exposes the historic inequity, injustice, and violence at the heart of his own culture, and in so doing opens a way to reconciliation and beloved community centered on healing, feeding, and the irrevocable dignity of every human being. As Brian McClaren writes of this second conquest of Canaan, “[it represents] a new kind of conquest — not with swords and spears, but with bread and fish; not to destroy, but to serve and heal. Jesus seizes the old narrative, shakes it, turns it inside out, and offers a new story that reframes a future radically different from the past.” 

Working with our neurochemical fog is not easy and it’s always done in the company of Jesus who shows us where we’re stuck and what blocks his love from flowing through us. The human condition is such that what comes most naturally is the automatic, conditioned, reactive response: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” Working with habitual patterns and stale stories we take to be true means asking questions like, “What is my most believed thought about this person or situation?” and “How are things supposed to be?” and “What ‘should’ is running the show?”  in order to open a little space of curiosity in which the new song God is always singing in Christ the Stranger might be heard, and attended to. We ask the question, get curious, and make a little open, allowing, receptive space so that the dance of love, the dance of compassionate, healing, feeding action might be joined. 

Difficult questions like these call our enclosed, self-sufficient way of seeing, being, and navigating gently into question. They are honest, humble acknowledgements that we don’t see clearly and can’t go it alone. These questions are really no different from Peter’s call last week, “Lord, save me!” and the Canaanite woman’s plea, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” The Good News is that coming into relationship with Jesus brings all that blocks the flow of love to light. All that blocks God’s love for us. All that hinders our love for others. All is brought to light, seen through, in the simple act of trust in the Trustworthy One. All we have to do is stop thinking we have it licked and open to the stream of feeding, healing mercy that is already here. A little crumb of calling out is all it takes: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David. Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David. Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” It really is that simple.

Amen.