Proper 18 B
Sermon Given September 9, 2012
By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart
At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Mark 7:24-37
James 2:1-17
I would like you to imagine something in your mind. I would like you to imagine that there is an Amish pastor who discovered that he had a gift for healing. All the Amish people would come in their buggies and he would preach, and if he laid hands on people, they experienced healing. So among the Amish he became rather well known. One of the people said we have other Amish people who live in Harrisburg Pennsylvania. We should go to them so you can teach them and heal them. So they made arrangements to do that. They rented a hall in Harrisburg and went there by buggy. When they got there and they invited all the Amish people they knew to come for an evening lecture.
A reporter found out about it so there was a little article in the newspaper. Not a big article, but a little article, about this famous healer who was coming. The evening for the big talk comes and all the people are gathered. They have walked there or taken buggies, some of the ones who are a little progressive may have taken a bus. The women all wore bonnets and long dresses with sleeves that came down to their wrists. The men wore their suits. They were ready to listen.
Just as the Amish pastor began to speak they heard a roar outside the hall. It was the sound of a motorcycle pulling up. That got everybody’s attention. They all looked at the door as it opened and in walked a woman with short shorts, boots and long black hair was falling in beautiful curls around her shoulders carrying her motorcycle helmet. She had on a top that was sleeveless and low cut so that all of the tattoos would show. She also had lots of piercings, her nose, her mouth her ears, you name it. She was chewing gum as she walked up to the pastor and said, “Hey, you’re the guy, right? My daughter has been sick and I have taken her to every doctor and nobody can help her, but I think that you can. Please help me.” Now you can imagine how quiet the hall was at that moment and you can imagine what might be going through the pastor’s mind.
He looked at her and said “I’m not going to give the children’s food to swine like you.” Pretty insulting. How would you feel if you were that woman? Would you want to crawl away after being insulted like that?
But instead she didn’t. She just looked at him and said, “That God of yours has got more than enough love and more than enough healing for everybody.”
So the pastor thought, “Hmmm. How can I deny that?” So the woman’s daughter received a healing that day.
Now this is kind of what it was like for Jesus in this little story of the Gospel today. Except it was probably more extreme in the Gospel. You see Jesus was in Tyre.Tyre was a city on the coast of the Mediterranean in what is now Lebanon. It was one of the biggest ports of that time. Very rich, very worldly, very Greek. Why Jesus went to Tyre is not quite clear. All we know he had gone into a gentile city. We can guess that he had gone to talk to the Jews who lived there. He is staying at what was undoubtedly a Jewish home and this woman walked in, and remember that the we all think we now what the women of Bible wore because we have seen the movies. They would wear long skirts. They would have something over their heads to cover their hair. They would be very modest, dressed very modestly, and probably even walked very modestly. Women had no political or economic power in the Jewish state of that time. So that was what was expected in the behavior of women.
When this Syrophoenician woman walked in she would have been Greek. She would have been dressed like the Greeks, and Greek women wore sleeveless togas. You have seen pictures of that, beautifully hanging sleeveless dresses. They often wore Jewelry, so this woman probably had a gold band around her head to hold her hair that was long and free flowing. She certainly would not have a shawl over her head. She probably wore jewelry on her arms. Also, she was raised as a Greek woman in a rich town, so she probably had some money. She certainly had a lot of courage or “chutzpah” as they might say. She probably was educated, given the answer she gave to Jesus.
She would not have walked in with body language that said “Oh I’m just a woman.” She would have walked in like a Greek woman with her shoulders back and her head held high, knowing that she was equal to anybody. She probably had taken her daughter to all the different temples of the Gods and Goddesses that she worshiped. She had probably sacrificed to Hera, taken her to Aphrodite gone to whatever doctors there might be available.
There is no indication in this Bible story that she had any relationship with the God of Jesus. None. It never says that she does. But somehow, somewhere she heard that Jesus had the power to heal.
She cared about her daughter, and her love for her daughter drove her to go to beg Jesus to heal her child.
And what does she get for that? “You don’t give the bread of the children to the dogs.” Jesus called her a dog. He called all of her people “dogs”. To call someone a dog in the Middle East, even today, is a great insult. Back then it was the worst insult you could say about somebody. Much worse than us calling people swine. This is as insulting as you could be. And he didn’t just insult her, he insult all of her people.
But she had a lot of courage. She didn’t slink away as I might in that kind of a situation. She looked at him and she said, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She didn’t argue with him about his evaluation of her as a dog. What she said was your God has more than enough. If your God is really what you say your God is there is more than enough love, there is more than enough healing, not just for the people of Israel, but for everyone.
Jesus ha to acknowledged that she was right, and her daughter was healed.
Now there is a real question of what was going on in Jesus during this particular time. No one can know for sure whether he really at that point in his ministry was just there for the Jewish people, that he believed, like a lot of his followers, that the Messiah was to come for the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone.
If that was so, this woman reminded him, opened his heart and mind to realize that the Messiah was for all people.
The other explanation is that he was doing this for his disciples, because in the Matthew version of this story it says that the disciples came to him to ask him to quiet this woman down and get rid of her. So, he might have been using it as a teaching opportunity, knowing that some of his followers were critical that he was going to anyone anywhere outside of Israel. We don’t know.
How you interpret this will depend upon what you think of Jesus. Whether he fully knew everything all the time or whether he was able to learn from a woman.
What we do know is the response. We do know from that moment on his ministry was to everyone. When he left there the reading states that he went to the Decapolis. The Decapolis was made up of ten gentle cities (deca meaning ten). North of the Sea of Galilee. Very few Jews lived there, yet he went into that area.
The next thing we hear is him healing a person deaf and dumb who was probably not Jewish. He was probably gentile.
This issue, this question of who did Christ come for who is the Messiah for, who is included, was there from the very beginning of the church. When we read acts and we read the letters we see That the question of who can be a Christian is very important. Was Jesus’ Way just for people who were Jewish, or could non Jewish people become Christian? Did the men have to become circumcised? Did the people who wanted to be Christian have to follow all the rules that the Jewish people followed?
It was an importabt debate in the early church. Who is in? Who can receive this great love and grace and mercy that Christ brought to earth? Are there any restrictions?
What we read in the letter of James today is that he is very disappointed, very upset, that there are some Christian congregations where when a rich person walks through the door the people get all excited and give them the best seats. Imagine coming in through the door of that church. Someone who is very wealthy and famous and well known is greeted and brought up to the front pew but people who are poor were ignored or told to sit in the back or sit on the floor.
James makes it very clear that that is not what it means to be a Christian. He makes it very clear that if you have faith in the Christ that loves you. If you have faith in that mercy that you have received, if you have faith and you say you believe in Christ you should demonstrate it by how you treat other people.
That is what he means by faith without works is nothing. It is not that we earn our way to heaven, but if you really believe, if you really have faith, and believe what Christ has offered us, you don’t make distinctions between people. You love your neighbor as yourself. You welcome everyone. Or as a bumper sticker that is up on my refrigerator says “God loves everyone, no exceptions.”
If we truly have faith in the one who loves us and forgives us, and shows us mercy, we should show that faith by making no distinctions. Amen
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