They hung in the Lobby for more years than I’d care to admit. They were well past their prime. Their bright colors faded. Missing pieces left both contraptions lopsided and unattractive. Still, I couldn't remove them.
I’m referring to the mobiles that hung from the Lobby ceiling until just a few weeks ago. They were made by youngsters in our Wednesday youth bible study years ago, to celebrate Pentecost. Originally, each mobile ferried eight doves made of bright paper. Written on one side was the name of the child who’d traced and cut the dove from a pattern. On the backside of their paper dove, each child had written these words: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … God has anointed me to proclaim Good News!
While the words paraphrase Jesus’ first sermon (see Luke 4:16-21), my reasons for keeping these increasingly unsightly objects in a space of honor was sentimental, not theological. I left these wobbly, colorless mobiles in the Lobby because both pairs of dowel rods, and the fishing lines that suspended the cut-out doves, had been fastened together by Pastor Chuck Schroeder. He completed this task at least two years before his death in 2004.
Removing them, unsightly as they were, was a “departure” I could not make. In the end, what persuaded me was my realizing that the mobiles were single-handedly responsible for nearly fifteen false burglar alarms. It seems our motion sensors were overreacting to the unusual flight pattern these mobiles took on windy days and nights!
No doubt the mobiles could have been moved to another room, or put some place where I reverence way too many treasures from days gone by. But in reality, it was long past time for them to go.
Jesus said, in John 3:8, “You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it's headed next. That's the way it is with everyone 'born from above' by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.”
As a new season of Pentecost unfolds, the Spirit keeps calling us not only to new places, not just to new opportunities for mission, but to new heights of intimacy and belonging with God and with each other. Experiencing this newness will require our making a departure from our comfortable “now,” to what might be an alarming future.
Please pray with me that our “letting go” and our “departing” moves more readily than my redecorating!
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Religion's Anti-Toxin: Jesus' Bread and Wine
Our kitchen’s being remodeled. By 7:15 Friday morning, there were three workers in that small place. At one time, seven men, six workers and me, crowded there. As the day wore on, three more came and went. The last carpenter left at 7:20 that evening.
Through the day, I took and made phone calls finalizing plans for Bethlehem, New Orleans benefit banquet. It was a fabulous evening. Larry and Patti, along with their friends Laurie and Bill, played terrific jazz. Yatz restaurant provided great Cajun food. Pastor Patrick Keen inspired us all. Generous Christians from across the Indianapolis conference donated upwards of $8,000 to support that mission.
Frazzled by the day and jazzed up by the evening, I couldn’t sleep. At midnight, still tossing and turning, I turned on Charlie Rose thinking some boring talk might lull me to sleep. It didn’t occur to me to play a tape of one of my sermons.
Charlie’s first guest was comedian, Bill Maher. Maher’s riffs against the president meant no sleep for me, yet! The second guest was a British author, Christopher Hitchins. Here, I thought, is a fast-acting sedative.
In his intro, Charlie spoke of Hitchens’ latest books. The first, he said, praised Thomas Jefferson for taking a razor to the New Testament and editing out the miracles. That left, Hitchins says, Jesus as philosopher and moral teacher. A second book was, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. I have no clue!
Charlie then said, “You’ve never been a fan of believers of any sort. Why am I not surprised by the title of your latest book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything?” I rushed downstairs to finish watching the show. Finally, in bed again at 1:15, I still tossed and turned. This time arguing with Hitchins where I thought he has it wrong and fighting with myself over what I have to admit Hitchins has right.
At one level, Hitchins doesn’t say anything new. Way back in 1711, Jonathan Swift, who authored Gulliver’s Travels, wrote, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
Both Christopher Hitchins and Jonathan Swift are onto something. Each of them, though, misses the richness of the banquet table’s food, by focusing mostly on the corruption of those who:
• operate the hall
• select the ones to be invited as guests
• serve the diners
• as well as, how some of the welcomed diners behave both before and after the meal.
This, too, is nothing new.
Before we heard Jesus’ instruction to his disciples at their last supper together, in John 13:31-35 we heard Peter’s testimony about how God worked through Peter’s dream and Peter’s following through on that dream, for the benefit of Cornelius and his whole household, in Acts 11:1-18. I’m using the word, “testimony” not to describe Peter’s inspirational witness of faith. Testimony is the most accurate word because this event, happening not more than a few weeks or months after Jesus’ ascension, is the New Testament’s first recorded church fight and heresy trial. I find that to be way cool!
What’s cool isn’t the fight, obviously. What’s cool is that God inspired the believers who experienced it to record the whole messy event for our benefit. See, it never occurred to them that we might hear a story like this and find it to be poison.
Hitchins says religion poisons everything because so many believers hold that by obeying a few simple rules and holding some rather bizarre ideas, they will be rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. We’d have a hard time arguing his point. And if he’s completely correct, we’d also have to wonder why Bear and Lilly not only support this step we celebrate in Sarah’s and Paul's faith walk, they encourage it.
Here’s where Hitchins has it right. Religionists, then and now, work overtime to turn who the Bible says God is, and what this God does, on its head. Here’s where Hitchins has it wrong. Being Christian, becoming Christ-like, doesn’t have to make you a religionist.
What makes it hard to argue against Hitchins is that it often looks like there’s more evidence for his conclusion than there is for mine, for ours, for what Jesus commanded us to be and to do: By this will everyone know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
Today, in this banquet hall, where everyone is welcome as guest, we inept discipling, caterers are serving a rich food and drink to Sarah and Paul for the first time. Whatever it is we have not done before this meal, whatever it is we may fail to do after we’ve eaten, doesn’t change the One who is this Meal’s true Host. Nor does our doing or not doing change how Jesus, as our Host and this table’s food and drink, can transform Sarah and Paul, as well as us.
What God has in mind at this meal, what’s going on in Jesus’ heart in this meal, is that we become nourished and strengthened to join what God always does, what Jesus accomplished in his life, by his death, and now in his resurrection. Namely, that we might have life, and have it so abundantly that we, like Jesus, will give it away. We’re called to give our life away not as burden, or as a test, not as sacrifice, but as rich grace, as priceless, costly gift, from one beloved to another.
Martin Luther’s insight here, against religionists, with whom we still differ, is this. Eligibility for belonging in this body, criterion for welcoming by disciples of Jesus, entitlement for table service from the likes of us is not a reward for right rule keeping.
This banquet, as Jesus commanded it, is not open only to those who can afford a ticket. This dine-in experience is neither repayment for holding correct beliefs, nor is this an incentive for a promised place in heaven. Rather, the talk, the action, the visioning, the dreaming of rootednesses, relatedness, belonging and becoming in God start here, at this simple meal, the foretaste of the feast to come.
What God desires, what Jesus longs for, is that we become what we eat: breaking open persons, a pouring out people. What God desires, what Jesus promises, is that we who maintain this hall prepare and share this meal with all those whom God loves, keep on listening to God still speaking. That’s what obeying commands means – listening to God still speaking, following God still loving. That’s a far cry from the poison pill that makes folk run roughshod over people for the sake of rule keeping.
This morning, in their young faith, Sarah and Paul move beyond what they can see, and touch, and taste to listen to the command and to trust the promise that, somehow, Jesus is in this bread and in this wine, for each of them, for all of us. That’s, in part, a testimony to what they’ve seen as our faithful listening and trusting.
As their dining here continues, those of us more mature in faith, now get to model something else for Sarah and Paul. We can show them that it’s possible and desirable to move into and through what we see, and touch, and taste, to believe that despite the inept things we do before we eat, the God who is the true host of this table, remains truly for us. We can show them that by this eating and drinking, regardless of those corrupt things we do after we eat; this God still desires the kind of intimacy with us that nourishes us toward becoming Christ-like, out there.
Here’s a simple prayer to keep us all alert for God’s doing that and make us all acute to hearing that godly-call: God is great. God is good. Let us thank God for our food. Amen.
Through the day, I took and made phone calls finalizing plans for Bethlehem, New Orleans benefit banquet. It was a fabulous evening. Larry and Patti, along with their friends Laurie and Bill, played terrific jazz. Yatz restaurant provided great Cajun food. Pastor Patrick Keen inspired us all. Generous Christians from across the Indianapolis conference donated upwards of $8,000 to support that mission.
Frazzled by the day and jazzed up by the evening, I couldn’t sleep. At midnight, still tossing and turning, I turned on Charlie Rose thinking some boring talk might lull me to sleep. It didn’t occur to me to play a tape of one of my sermons.
Charlie’s first guest was comedian, Bill Maher. Maher’s riffs against the president meant no sleep for me, yet! The second guest was a British author, Christopher Hitchins. Here, I thought, is a fast-acting sedative.
In his intro, Charlie spoke of Hitchens’ latest books. The first, he said, praised Thomas Jefferson for taking a razor to the New Testament and editing out the miracles. That left, Hitchins says, Jesus as philosopher and moral teacher. A second book was, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. I have no clue!
Charlie then said, “You’ve never been a fan of believers of any sort. Why am I not surprised by the title of your latest book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything?” I rushed downstairs to finish watching the show. Finally, in bed again at 1:15, I still tossed and turned. This time arguing with Hitchins where I thought he has it wrong and fighting with myself over what I have to admit Hitchins has right.
At one level, Hitchins doesn’t say anything new. Way back in 1711, Jonathan Swift, who authored Gulliver’s Travels, wrote, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
Both Christopher Hitchins and Jonathan Swift are onto something. Each of them, though, misses the richness of the banquet table’s food, by focusing mostly on the corruption of those who:
• operate the hall
• select the ones to be invited as guests
• serve the diners
• as well as, how some of the welcomed diners behave both before and after the meal.
This, too, is nothing new.
Before we heard Jesus’ instruction to his disciples at their last supper together, in John 13:31-35 we heard Peter’s testimony about how God worked through Peter’s dream and Peter’s following through on that dream, for the benefit of Cornelius and his whole household, in Acts 11:1-18. I’m using the word, “testimony” not to describe Peter’s inspirational witness of faith. Testimony is the most accurate word because this event, happening not more than a few weeks or months after Jesus’ ascension, is the New Testament’s first recorded church fight and heresy trial. I find that to be way cool!
What’s cool isn’t the fight, obviously. What’s cool is that God inspired the believers who experienced it to record the whole messy event for our benefit. See, it never occurred to them that we might hear a story like this and find it to be poison.
Hitchins says religion poisons everything because so many believers hold that by obeying a few simple rules and holding some rather bizarre ideas, they will be rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. We’d have a hard time arguing his point. And if he’s completely correct, we’d also have to wonder why Bear and Lilly not only support this step we celebrate in Sarah’s and Paul's faith walk, they encourage it.
Here’s where Hitchins has it right. Religionists, then and now, work overtime to turn who the Bible says God is, and what this God does, on its head. Here’s where Hitchins has it wrong. Being Christian, becoming Christ-like, doesn’t have to make you a religionist.
What makes it hard to argue against Hitchins is that it often looks like there’s more evidence for his conclusion than there is for mine, for ours, for what Jesus commanded us to be and to do: By this will everyone know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
Today, in this banquet hall, where everyone is welcome as guest, we inept discipling, caterers are serving a rich food and drink to Sarah and Paul for the first time. Whatever it is we have not done before this meal, whatever it is we may fail to do after we’ve eaten, doesn’t change the One who is this Meal’s true Host. Nor does our doing or not doing change how Jesus, as our Host and this table’s food and drink, can transform Sarah and Paul, as well as us.
What God has in mind at this meal, what’s going on in Jesus’ heart in this meal, is that we become nourished and strengthened to join what God always does, what Jesus accomplished in his life, by his death, and now in his resurrection. Namely, that we might have life, and have it so abundantly that we, like Jesus, will give it away. We’re called to give our life away not as burden, or as a test, not as sacrifice, but as rich grace, as priceless, costly gift, from one beloved to another.
Martin Luther’s insight here, against religionists, with whom we still differ, is this. Eligibility for belonging in this body, criterion for welcoming by disciples of Jesus, entitlement for table service from the likes of us is not a reward for right rule keeping.
This banquet, as Jesus commanded it, is not open only to those who can afford a ticket. This dine-in experience is neither repayment for holding correct beliefs, nor is this an incentive for a promised place in heaven. Rather, the talk, the action, the visioning, the dreaming of rootednesses, relatedness, belonging and becoming in God start here, at this simple meal, the foretaste of the feast to come.
What God desires, what Jesus longs for, is that we become what we eat: breaking open persons, a pouring out people. What God desires, what Jesus promises, is that we who maintain this hall prepare and share this meal with all those whom God loves, keep on listening to God still speaking. That’s what obeying commands means – listening to God still speaking, following God still loving. That’s a far cry from the poison pill that makes folk run roughshod over people for the sake of rule keeping.
This morning, in their young faith, Sarah and Paul move beyond what they can see, and touch, and taste to listen to the command and to trust the promise that, somehow, Jesus is in this bread and in this wine, for each of them, for all of us. That’s, in part, a testimony to what they’ve seen as our faithful listening and trusting.
As their dining here continues, those of us more mature in faith, now get to model something else for Sarah and Paul. We can show them that it’s possible and desirable to move into and through what we see, and touch, and taste, to believe that despite the inept things we do before we eat, the God who is the true host of this table, remains truly for us. We can show them that by this eating and drinking, regardless of those corrupt things we do after we eat; this God still desires the kind of intimacy with us that nourishes us toward becoming Christ-like, out there.
Here’s a simple prayer to keep us all alert for God’s doing that and make us all acute to hearing that godly-call: God is great. God is good. Let us thank God for our food. Amen.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Mother's Day with Jesus' Other Mother
Would we have a Jesus worth having if it were not for this Canaanite mother? Even though Mother’s Day thrives on sentimentality, let’s stop being sentimental about Jesus. Sentimental comes from the Latin word sentire. It means to form a judgment or hold an opinion based, primarily on feelings rather than thoughtfulness.
As Matthew tells the story, the meeting between this foreign mother and Jesus comes well after his Sermon on the Mount. That is, by the way, another of our opinions about who Jesus is, as well as what he said and did, that we hang onto, more sentimentally, than thoughtfully. We just love those sweet sounding “blesseds” don’t we? Look quickly at Matt 5:43ff. 43You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? Nice happy thoughts, huh, but not many of us go there much.
We can’t, in all honesty, square the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount with the Jesus who meets the Canaanite woman. 21Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22Just 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." 23But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." 24He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 25But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." 26He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." 27She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." 28Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly (Matthew 15:21-28). This is Jesus’ Don Imus moment. Look how he is.
First, in verse 23, he flat out ignores her. Now you can’t make the case that he hasn’t heard her. In the same verse his disciples say, “Yo, you deaf? Can you hear that screeching? The Greek word they use is kradzo. It means to croak, or to screech like a raven.
Most likely to shut them up, he brings them up short with his, suddenly much narrower vision of who he’s to shepherd. Back in 9:35-36 Matthew tells us that after healing the woman with hemorrhages, after raising the synagogue official’s daughter from the dead, seeing crowds of needy people flocking to them in Jewish synagogues, Jesus was moved with compassion.
Here, it seems, seeing this outsider, this foreigner, this Gentile, Jesus is moved with contempt. “It’s not fair,” he says “to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Not a phrase our mothers or grandmothers stitch on our throw pillows, is it? I’m tellin’ you, this is Jesus’ Don Imus moment.
Let’s step back. Who is this woman? Start there. Back then, women don’t start conversations with men they don’t know. Women don’t roam the streets unescorted. Canaanite women, or men, don’t go seeking out any Jew, much less some sort of a rabbi. All that said, who we have here is a person with her back up against the wall. Most of us know that feeling, as well as the thoughts that go with it!
What she wants to know is, does this Jesus, and the God who he claims sent him, have anything to offer folk who have their backs against the wall? She seems to have found a flaw in Jesus’ his inclusive humanitarianism. The wisdom of his God (Proverbs 2) - that those who truly seek God will come to understand righteousness and justice and equity - seems to have escaped Jesus’ footpath.
To be fair – and, no, I’m not going to offer any excuses at all for Jesus’ arrogance, classism, racism, or sexism, this is a question that folks with their backs against the wall have been asking Christians for years. Does the Christ we Christians profess, offer a Good News that is concrete and relevant to particular experiences of real, bad news?
Most Christians have still the nasty habit of proclaiming an exclusive Gospel. We also make our proclamations of Good News more burden than grace. We preach a Jesus who asks folk to take up a cross, then we abruptly declare their current states of injustice, oppression, inequity not inhumane conditions which followers of Jesus ought to rail against, but burdens of faith they must bear, as they give out of their neediness to those who have less!
Like Jesus, whose narrow mission focused on the maladies of insiders, we are quicker to talk about the bounty of membership than we are to act in ways that make God’s blessings available to all God’s children. This mother, and all those still walking in her shoes, will have none of that from Jesus. Neither will they abide that kind of alienation from us; no matter we offer it in the name of God.
In her neediness, with her back up against the wall for the sake of her daughter’s wellbeing, she accepts Jesus’ vulgar description of her ethnicity. Kneeling before him in a submissive position, addressing him with a title of reverence, she adopts the oppressive identity he’s used to put her down and says, “Even B-words get to eat scraps from the master’s table. You got any scraps left for the B’s, Mister Rabbi? Cuz I’m thinkin’ Lord Master, that the One who made us both, and my daughter too, in God’s image and likeness, draws on a wisdom that prefers equity to fairness.” See that? She’s doin’ the dozens on him.
By the strength of her “right back at ya” faith in that kind of God, this woman, whose ethnicity, race and gender were held by Jews in Jesus’ day to embody all the wickedness and godlessness of every non-Jew, works a conversion is Jesus’ heart. He now calls her, “Woman,” the same word used in Genesis, for who it was that God made from Adam’s rib. It’s a word reflecting dignity, worth and belonging.
More than that, Jesus describes her faith as great. This is the only place in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus uses that word to describe someone’s faith.
Standing on and in the dignity and worth of her creation as woman, this Canaanite mother does nothing short of rebirthing Jesus. The one who brought the new teaching from the mount, be perfect, literally, be complete and whole as your Father in heaven is complete and whole, is moved to wholeness and completion by the heart of soul of this one who was called godless and wicked.
Here she represents all that God has in mind for the women who would share God’s own life-giving, freedom-bringing, home-making mission for all God’s children. Here she demonstrates for us the height and depth, the length and breadth God is willing to go to make life whole and complete for all those whose backs are up against a wall.
Were it not for her stamina, the charge Jesus gave his disciples, the command we call the great commission, to go out and make all nations disciples of this now inclusive Gospel, might never have been uttered. Were it not for her willingness to suffer the travail Jesus laid on her, we, so-called honorary Jews (Krister Stendahl), would not share in either the grace or the faith she experienced.
She is, for all of us Gentiles, the mother of our faith. By grace, most of us can claim an experience of a woman who has suffered travail for us. By grace most of us can name an encounter with a woman who has borne indignity to bring about our wellbeing. By grace most of us have a relationship with Jesus based on the great faith of a woman we call mother.
Today is a good day not to just find warm feelings for your mama. Today is a good day to make time to think about your mama. Remember her travail. Recall the indignities she bore on your behalf. Remind yourself of her stamina. Reminisce about the ways she sought to distinguish fairness from equity. Recollect her courageous faith.
When you’ve got all that thinking done, notice how you feel, then give God thanks for the gift of God’s own wisdom and presence you’ve seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled and relished in, with the Mama God chose just for you. Like the Canaanite woman, against all kinds of odds we seldom call to mind, she mothered you best she could.
As Matthew tells the story, the meeting between this foreign mother and Jesus comes well after his Sermon on the Mount. That is, by the way, another of our opinions about who Jesus is, as well as what he said and did, that we hang onto, more sentimentally, than thoughtfully. We just love those sweet sounding “blesseds” don’t we? Look quickly at Matt 5:43ff. 43You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? Nice happy thoughts, huh, but not many of us go there much.
We can’t, in all honesty, square the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount with the Jesus who meets the Canaanite woman. 21Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22Just 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." 23But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." 24He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 25But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." 26He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." 27She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." 28Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly (Matthew 15:21-28). This is Jesus’ Don Imus moment. Look how he is.
First, in verse 23, he flat out ignores her. Now you can’t make the case that he hasn’t heard her. In the same verse his disciples say, “Yo, you deaf? Can you hear that screeching? The Greek word they use is kradzo. It means to croak, or to screech like a raven.
Most likely to shut them up, he brings them up short with his, suddenly much narrower vision of who he’s to shepherd. Back in 9:35-36 Matthew tells us that after healing the woman with hemorrhages, after raising the synagogue official’s daughter from the dead, seeing crowds of needy people flocking to them in Jewish synagogues, Jesus was moved with compassion.
Here, it seems, seeing this outsider, this foreigner, this Gentile, Jesus is moved with contempt. “It’s not fair,” he says “to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Not a phrase our mothers or grandmothers stitch on our throw pillows, is it? I’m tellin’ you, this is Jesus’ Don Imus moment.
Let’s step back. Who is this woman? Start there. Back then, women don’t start conversations with men they don’t know. Women don’t roam the streets unescorted. Canaanite women, or men, don’t go seeking out any Jew, much less some sort of a rabbi. All that said, who we have here is a person with her back up against the wall. Most of us know that feeling, as well as the thoughts that go with it!
What she wants to know is, does this Jesus, and the God who he claims sent him, have anything to offer folk who have their backs against the wall? She seems to have found a flaw in Jesus’ his inclusive humanitarianism. The wisdom of his God (Proverbs 2) - that those who truly seek God will come to understand righteousness and justice and equity - seems to have escaped Jesus’ footpath.
To be fair – and, no, I’m not going to offer any excuses at all for Jesus’ arrogance, classism, racism, or sexism, this is a question that folks with their backs against the wall have been asking Christians for years. Does the Christ we Christians profess, offer a Good News that is concrete and relevant to particular experiences of real, bad news?
Most Christians have still the nasty habit of proclaiming an exclusive Gospel. We also make our proclamations of Good News more burden than grace. We preach a Jesus who asks folk to take up a cross, then we abruptly declare their current states of injustice, oppression, inequity not inhumane conditions which followers of Jesus ought to rail against, but burdens of faith they must bear, as they give out of their neediness to those who have less!
Like Jesus, whose narrow mission focused on the maladies of insiders, we are quicker to talk about the bounty of membership than we are to act in ways that make God’s blessings available to all God’s children. This mother, and all those still walking in her shoes, will have none of that from Jesus. Neither will they abide that kind of alienation from us; no matter we offer it in the name of God.
In her neediness, with her back up against the wall for the sake of her daughter’s wellbeing, she accepts Jesus’ vulgar description of her ethnicity. Kneeling before him in a submissive position, addressing him with a title of reverence, she adopts the oppressive identity he’s used to put her down and says, “Even B-words get to eat scraps from the master’s table. You got any scraps left for the B’s, Mister Rabbi? Cuz I’m thinkin’ Lord Master, that the One who made us both, and my daughter too, in God’s image and likeness, draws on a wisdom that prefers equity to fairness.” See that? She’s doin’ the dozens on him.
By the strength of her “right back at ya” faith in that kind of God, this woman, whose ethnicity, race and gender were held by Jews in Jesus’ day to embody all the wickedness and godlessness of every non-Jew, works a conversion is Jesus’ heart. He now calls her, “Woman,” the same word used in Genesis, for who it was that God made from Adam’s rib. It’s a word reflecting dignity, worth and belonging.
More than that, Jesus describes her faith as great. This is the only place in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus uses that word to describe someone’s faith.
Standing on and in the dignity and worth of her creation as woman, this Canaanite mother does nothing short of rebirthing Jesus. The one who brought the new teaching from the mount, be perfect, literally, be complete and whole as your Father in heaven is complete and whole, is moved to wholeness and completion by the heart of soul of this one who was called godless and wicked.
Here she represents all that God has in mind for the women who would share God’s own life-giving, freedom-bringing, home-making mission for all God’s children. Here she demonstrates for us the height and depth, the length and breadth God is willing to go to make life whole and complete for all those whose backs are up against a wall.
Were it not for her stamina, the charge Jesus gave his disciples, the command we call the great commission, to go out and make all nations disciples of this now inclusive Gospel, might never have been uttered. Were it not for her willingness to suffer the travail Jesus laid on her, we, so-called honorary Jews (Krister Stendahl), would not share in either the grace or the faith she experienced.
She is, for all of us Gentiles, the mother of our faith. By grace, most of us can claim an experience of a woman who has suffered travail for us. By grace most of us can name an encounter with a woman who has borne indignity to bring about our wellbeing. By grace most of us have a relationship with Jesus based on the great faith of a woman we call mother.
Today is a good day not to just find warm feelings for your mama. Today is a good day to make time to think about your mama. Remember her travail. Recall the indignities she bore on your behalf. Remind yourself of her stamina. Reminisce about the ways she sought to distinguish fairness from equity. Recollect her courageous faith.
When you’ve got all that thinking done, notice how you feel, then give God thanks for the gift of God’s own wisdom and presence you’ve seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled and relished in, with the Mama God chose just for you. Like the Canaanite woman, against all kinds of odds we seldom call to mind, she mothered you best she could.
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