We’re All Part of the Same Story

I’ve said before that sometimes there are lessons in the lectionary that just make you want to say, “Ugh!”

This is one of those weeks.

Jesus calling a woman and her daughter dogs just doesn’t fit with my vision of Jesus.

My vision of Jesus is the unconditional lover of humankind.

The includer.

The one who went to people on the margins—tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and foreigners—and not only ministered to them but also sat down and ate meals with them.

So, the idea that he could dismiss another foreigner as a dog, that just never felt right to me.

We could just skip the text.

We could make excuses.

He was tired and not himself.

He was just testing her.

That’s not really what he said or what he meant.

We could talk about the historical conflict between Israelites and Canaanites.

But I think it’s important that we accept that Jesus said something that was distasteful, if not downright awful.

And it’s not just the name calling.

The woman comes to Jesus because her daughter is suffering.

She is desperate.

She knows Jesus has the power to heal her daughter.

But he refuses—at least initially.

The disciples appearing to have no compassion: “Please get rid of her! She keeps calling after us.”

And, instead of rebuking his students, Jesus rebukes her saying, “My mission is only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.”

But she is undeterred.

She prostrates herself before him and pleads, “Help me, Rabbi!”

To which he replies, “But it isn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

I don’t know about you, but I found it shocking.

It’s one of the few times that Jesus seems to act out of character.

I went to Amy-Jill Levine, the Jewish New Testament scholar, to see if she had any insight on this disturbing exchange.

Dr. Levine reminds us that Jesus is operating within the boundaries of his own mission, his own people, his own religious and ethnic world.

The woman is an outsider.

She is a Canaanite—a people with whom Israel had a long and complex history of conflict.

Yet, she refuses to accept that boundary.

She challenges Jesus by saying, “True, Rabbi, but even the dogs get to eat the scraps that fall from the table.”

Her persistence penetrates Jesus’ defenses and he finally relents, “Woman, you have great faith! Your wish will come to pass.”

And at that very moment, her daughter was healed.

Now here I’m going to do something that I don’t normally do.

What I normally do—or at least I think I normal do—is lift the gospel out of Scripture and see how it applies to our world.

We’ll get to that.

But first, I want to stay in Matthew's gospel and connect a few dots.

If you’ve read Matthew’s gospel, you know it opens with Jesus’ genealogy.

And the interesting thing is the genealogy that Matthew recounts includes women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, “the wife of Uriah”, and finally, Mary.

This was counter-cultural.

Women were not included in ancient genealogies.

Furthermore, the women he lists were outsiders and had complicated histories.

Tamar was a Canaanite who struggled for justice.

Rahab was a Canaanite woman from Jericho.

Ruth was a Moabite.

“The wife of Uriah” was Bathsheba, who married a Hittite.

Dr. Levine points out that the common characteristics that these women share is a “higher righteousness.”

They are people without conventional power who act decisively when the people with power fail to do what is right.

The thing that this disturbing story calls us to pay attention to is that Matthew begins the story of Jesus by telling us Jesus comes from a family in which outsiders belong.

Jesus comes from a family in which foreigners are not an embarrassment to be hidden, but ancestors to be revered.

Jesus comes from a family in which women who lived on the margins of respectable society became agents of God's will.

Then comes this week’s gospel.

If we remembered Matthew’s genealogy, we’d be prepared for Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman.

Before Jesus can say, “My mission is only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”, Matthew has already told us that Jesus' own family contained outsiders—including Canaanites.

Before Jesus meets this foreign woman, Matthew has already told us there are foreign women in his family tree.

So, the Canaanite woman is not being overconfident.

She’s thinking, “you know who I am.

You know where I come from.

You know people exactly like me are already part of your story.”

She refuses to let Jesus—or anyone else—cast her aside.

And this is the point where we look at this gospel and see how it applies to our world—our current context.

Because we are living in a country where the question of who belongs gets asked every day.

Who has a right to be here?

Who gets to cross the border?

Who gets to stay and who has to leave?

Who is our neighbor and who is a threat?

In our country, those questions are increasingly answered by governmental power.

The current administration is pursuing the most inhumane and un-Christian immigration enforcement agenda in history.

More than 175,000 visas have been revoked.

Temporary Protected Status has been terminated for almost a million people.

Tens of thousands of asylum seekers are threatened with deportation.

These are people seeking safety from gang violence or an escape from persecution because of their religion, sexuality, or gender identity.

These are some of the very same people our RIC status has committed us to welcome—and protect.

All of them are real human beings: adults and children, men and women.

Somewhere in our very own state, there is a person sitting in an immigration courtroom without a lawyer, trying to understand what is happening in a language they don’t understand.

And here is something that many people don’t understand.

The immigration justice system operates differently than the criminal justice system.

In the immigration system, there is no presumption of innocence.

There is also no guarantee of representation.

So, about half of the people in deportation proceedings do not have a lawyer, even though it is a critical success factor in having a successful asylum outcome.

I will concede that we need just laws that govern immigration.

There are legitimate questions about borders, national security, and how to control immigration.

But, as Christians, we are called to look at this as more than a control issue.

We are asked to see the children of God in front of us.

We must ask ourselves, “What is happening to this sibling standing in front of us?”

Because today’s gospel reminds us that the Canaanite woman before Jesus is not just a demographic.

She is a mother under duress.

And the disciples want to send her away—not unlike our current administration’s desire to do the same with all black and brown immigrants.

Send them away.

They don't belong here.

They should have come legally.

They are dangerous.

But notice what the Canaanite woman does.

She does not accept the rejection.

She says, “Even people like me belong at God's table.”

Christian Nationalists would have you believe that Christianity is fundamentally about protecting our group.

Our nation.

Our culture.

Our race.

Our religion.

Our people.

But today’s gospel rejects that.

The gospels remind us that Israel's story was always larger than our human boundaries.

God didn’t just bless Abraham.

God went on to say, “all the people on the face of the earth will be blessed through you.”

And that brings us back to our theology of abundance.

That theology doesn’t allow boundaries around God's blessing.

It is about allowing God's goodness to overflow.

The Canaanite woman understands that.

She understands abundance.

She understands that God's mercy is an unlimited resource.

There is enough bread.

There is enough healing.

There is enough grace.

There is enough room at the table.

God's abundance is greater than our scarcity.

And that is the message that our country desperately needs to hear.

Because immigration debates are always about scarcity.

There aren't enough jobs.

There isn't enough housing.

There aren't enough resources.

There isn't enough security.

There isn't enough room.

The Canaanite woman refuses to believe in scarcity.

And Jesus ultimately affirms her.

He says, “Woman, you have great faith!”

Jesus ultimately rejects the disciples’ call to turn her away and praises the outsider.

I believe the lesson for us is that we need to become more careful about who we call “other.”

Because maybe that immigrant at the border has something to teach us about faith.

Surely the asylum seeker has something to teach us courage.

There’s no doubt that the undocumented worker has something to teach us about perseverance—and hope.

The mother separated from her child certainly has something to teach us about lament—and prayer.

Maybe the people we’ve been told to fear are just other human beings saying the same thing the Canaanite woman said: “Help me!”

And, God help us, our Christian response cannot be: “Please get rid of them!”

Because Matthew’s gospel has already told us that the Canaanite woman is family—like Tamar and Rahab and Ruth and Bathsheba.

The Canaanite woman is family.

The immigrant is family.

The stranger is family.

We cannot claim to understand Jesus and his message without understanding that God's family is always been bigger than of the categories we’ve constructed for ourselves.

There is one final point.

The Canaanite woman changes Jesus.

Jesus' encounter with her expands the boundaries of his ministry.

In the story, the woman becomes the teacher.

The outsider is the one who reveals something about God's abundance.

And what that means for us is that we are not simply called to minister to immigrants.

We are not called to simply welcome strangers into our congregation.

We are called to listen to them.

We are called to allow them to change us.

To recognize their faith.

To recognize their wisdom.

To recognize their gifts.

The Bible tells us over and over again that God shows up in unexpected people.

God often chooses the outsider.

Time and again, we see God cross a boundary that we thought was sacred.

The term “outsider” is a construct of our own imagination.

No human being is outside of God’s love.

So, the lesson for today is, when we are tempted to say, “Please get rid of them!”

Perhaps we should say, “Come in.”

When we look at someone and think, “they don’t belong”.

We need to remember, “they are already part of God’s story”.

When scarcity tells us, “there isn’t enough”.

We need to stay grounded in our theology of abundance and say, “there is enough grace for all of us”.

And rather that reject the stranger, our faith demands that we say, “child of God, you are welcome here”.

We are all part of the same story, my friends.

All of us.

We share one table.

We are fed by one grace.

We are held by one mercy.

And we belong to a God whose abundance is always greater than our fear.

May this meditation on God’s word keep our hearts and mind on Christ Jesus. Amen.