Proper 15A – George Yandell
Some of you know that Susan as a Christian is also aligned with Buddhism. She told me a while ago she had rescued a turtle in the middle of Old Burnt Mountain Road. She stopped her car, got out and carried the turtle to the edge of the road it had been aiming for. She infected me with the same urge. A week later I too found a turtle in the road, stopped and carried it over to avoid it getting crushed. This has happened for both of us numerous more times. It got me wondering, “How did the turtles process these events we intended as rescues? Did they think, ‘Whoa, what did that human mean putting me over here? Didn’t it know I had just turned around to go back home because I left the coffee pot on? NOW I have to go all the way back across the road to the side I intended.’”
Consider how Jesus treated the Canaanite woman who shouted at him for her daughter’s relief from a demon. Did you hear how Jesus ignored her? His disciples urged Jesus to send her away because she was bothering them. Jesus seems to have heeded them, saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” But she knelt at Jesus’ feet, gainsaying him with “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” She persuaded Jesus to heed her request. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” He praised her and instantly her daughter was healed.
In this encounter I hear a paradigm of how Jesus encountered and engaged folk. His paradigm moves in the tension between Restoration vs. Transformation– restoring relationships vs. transforming those he met, creating new relationships. So often Jesus was regarded as the one who came to restore Israel. Yet the actions he took moved far beyond restoration- he was opening people to a transformed world. He showed his friends that Canaanite women were as worthy as Jewish men to enter that new reality. Yet first, he made them ask for it. Maybe the turtles need a more thorough engagement before we take them in hand! How often did Jesus say to the lame, halt and blind, “Do you want to be healed?”
For us, healing more often than not comes from unbidden meetings, sometimes from confrontations. Our world views are often exploded by people outside our operational circle. The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) once said, “Prejudice is the reasoning of the stupid.” His wit and provocative writings challenged the thinking and actions of his compatriots. In these days all over our country, people are so polarized that confrontations too quickly resort to violence. Our nation’s attitudes desperately need mediation and transformation.
The story is told of Jeremy Cohen, a Texan, who, with his family, became host to a rabbi from Moscow one Christmas. To treat the rabbi to a culinary experience unavailable to him in his own country, Cohen took him to his favorite Chinese restaurant.
After an enjoyable meal and pleasant conversation, the waiter brought the check and presented each person at the table with a small brass Christmas ornament as a complimentary gift. Everyone laughed when Cohen’s father turned his ornament over and read the label “Made in India.”
The laughter quickly subsided, however, when everyone saw tear running down the rabbi’s cheeks. Cohen asked the rabbi if he were offended at having been given a gift on a Christian holiday. Smiling, the rabbi shook his head and answered, “No, I was shedding tears of joy to be in such a wonderful country in which a Chinese Buddhist restaurant owner gives a Russian Jew a Christmas gift made by a Hindu in India.”
C. S. Lewis once wrote an essay entitled “The Inner Ring,” in which he points out that in any playground or office or church there are little groups or circles of people who are on the “inside”— leaving others on the “outside.” Those who fail to enter the inner circle don’t get picked at playtime, they stand on their own in the lunchroom—and are generally left out of the life of the group. Lewis says that the existence of such rings is not necessarily bad. We’re finite beings, and we can only have deeply intimate friendships with a limited number of people.
But he warns that the desire to gain status or self-worth by being part of an “inner ring” is deeply destructive. It causes one constantly to compare oneself with others, to feel anguish when getting left out—and even deeper despair when someone “less worthy” gets let in. Worst of all, once you’re in, you want to keep others out, because it’s the exclusive nature of the group that makes you feel worthy.
Perhaps only Jesus could so effectively challenge this very human tendency to the point that miraculous healing results. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus refuse people seeking faith. The Canaanite woman believes that an impure “foreigner” may rightfully claim what the Covenant people fail to accept.
And she is right. “‘Great is thy faith.’ [Jesus] has never said this to any of His disciples who left all for His sake,” writes Helmut Thielicke in The Silence of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1962). “To only one other had He said it, and that was again to an unnamed secondary figure, the centurion of Capernaum. What has the Canaanite woman done that Jesus should thus extol her faith? She has simply met Him and stretched out her hand to him,” and repeatedly asks his help. In so doing, she discovers the deepest riches of God’s grace and mercy. [The above 8 paragraphs adapted From “Synthesis, A Weekly Resource for Preaching”, August 2017 issue.]
I love how the psalm expresses what Jesus practiced centuries after it was written: “Oh, how good and pleasant it is, when kindred live together in unity!” I believe that desire is God’s dream for humanity, and the dream that animated Jesus in all his encounters. It’s what we pray for each Sunday as we kneel and confess our sins to God- “For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us, that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways.”