Sermon, July 28, 2002
13 Pentecost; Proper 15, Year A
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas

Gospel: Matthew 15:21-28 Jesus heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter 

Just after September 11, a sign appeared in the front yard of a dark-skinned family. "Nuke the ragheads." A Jewish woman, now fifty, still trembles when she remembers running home from elementary school ducking from the taunts "Christ killer." A boy in Fayetteville ends up in the hospital when he’s jumped and beat up by a group of classmates who punctuate their blows with words, "Queer. Faggot." A Southern priest, now fifty, remembers the easy way the word "nigger" was part of the Mississippi vocabulary, and how he and his friends played war, shooting to death the evil "krauts" and "Japs" and (of course, the worst) "the Yankees."

And Jesus answered the Canaanite woman. "It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs."

A reporter on public radio yesterday interviewed an Irish sociologist who led a team of researchers to try to discover how early prejudice begins. They found that Irish Catholic and Protestant children picked up the patterns of their communities’ religious hatreds by age of three. Prejudice is part of our cultural heritage We pick it up from our mother’s milk and the neighborhood air we breathe. It is part of our human inheritance. And Jesus, who was fully human, is no exception.

From his earliest days, Jesus was taught that Gentile foreigners were pagan dogs. And we’re not talking about loveable house dogs. They meant the wild feral strays that scrounged the alleyways fighting for dead meat like buzzards. Already in Matthew’s gospel we’ve heard Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount, "Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6)." His listeners knew to whom he referred.

Maybe that bothers you. Because we worship Jesus as the incarnation of God, fully divine and fully human, we sometimes forget what "fully human" means. He lived with the same human limitations we do. He had to grow up and learn just like we do. And he had to outgrow some of what he learned, just like we do.

This story in Matthew’s gospel is a moment of consciousness raising. Jesus had always known that foreigners were dogs, especially women. His religion taught that; his family taught that; his neighborhood taught that; his nation’s culture taught that; his Bible taught him that. He didn’t say what he said to the Canaanite woman with enmity or cruelty. He was simply stating a fact. "It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs." Everybody knows that.

But then he heard her response. "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’ table." And he hears with divinely tuned ears words of great faith. Instantly, without hesitation, he throws away a lifetime of cultural accretion and responds with Godly compassion, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.

Tony Campolo is a popular Christian speaker from Philadelphia. He tells about having to go to Honolulu to speak. Not such a bad assignment, except for the time difference. He woke up at three o’clock in the morning, hungry. Famished. So he wandered the streets looking for something to eat, ending up as the only customer at a side street greasy spoon. He sat in the middle of the row of stools at the counter. From the back emerged a fat guy, Harry, unshaved, smoking a cigarette, wearing a filthy apron. "Wahduhyawant?"

"A cup of coffee and donut." Harry poured the coffee, then wiped his nose with his hand, picked up a donut and passed it to Tony. Not a tongs-and-wax-paper sort of place.

Right at 3:30, suddenly eight or nine prostitutes walked in. They sat on the bar stools on either side of Tony. Their language was crude and profane, and he tried to make himself small.

Then one of them announced, "Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’m going to be 39!"

"Wahduh want me to do? Sing ‘Happy Birthday’?" said the woman next to her. "Wahduaya want, a birthday cake? You’ll be 30. Big deal."

"Why do you have to be so uppity and nasty about it?"

"I’m just telling you, that’s all. Why do you have to make a big deal?"

"I don’t expect a party." And then she added, "I’ve never had a party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?"

When she said that, Tony made his decision. The prostitutes left, and he asked Harry, "Do they come in here like that every night?" Sure enough. Every night. "That woman? Tomorrow. What do you say? Let’s throw her a birthday party."

"Terrific," said Harry, and he called his wife in. "Meet this guy. He’s got a great idea. Tomorrow is Agnes’ birthday. Let’s throw a birthday party for her; here."

She grabbed Tony’s hand. "Wonderful," she said. "You wouldn’t understand this, but in spite of it all, she’s a kind woman; in her own way, a very good woman."

"I’ll come early and decorate," said Tony. "I’ll bring a cake."

"Oh no!" said Harry. "The cake’s my thing."

Tony mumbled under his breath. "Oh, Jesus."

Two-thirty the next morning. Tony brought crepe paper, a big sign – "Happy Birthday Agnes" – and they really spruced the place up. The word was out. By 3:15 every prostitute in Honolulu was in the place. Tony looked around and thought, "Wall to wall prostitutes, ...and me!"

At 3:30 on the dot, Agnes and her friend walked in. Everybody was ready as she walked through the door. "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AGNES!" and they started singing, "Happy Birthday to you..."

Tony said, "I have never seen a person so stunned in my life. Her mouth fell open. She swayed back, and her knees buckled like she was about to fall. Her friend caught her, and sat her down on a stool." They were still singing as Harry brought in the cake. When Agnes saw the cake, she lost it. Tears flowed down her cheeks. Her chin trembled.

Harry was sort of nonplused. "Blow out the candles, Agnes." She tried, but she couldn’t. So he did. "Cut the cake, Agnes."

"Harry, is it okay if we don’t cut the cake? I mean, if it’s okay? I’d like to keep the cake just a little while, you know? It’s okay, isn’t it? I live just two doors down. Let me take the cake, and I promise, I’ll come back. I’ll come right back."

"Sure."

And she picked up the cake like it was the Holy Grail and walked out. The door closed, and there was a dead silence. It was awkward. No one knew what to do, so Tony said, "What do you say we pray?" As strange as that sounded, it seemed like the natural thing to do.

So Tony prayed for Agnes. That God would heal the wounds that had been inflicted on her by dirty, filthy men. That God would deliver her from what men had done to her since she was a little girl. That God would purify her and make her whole again, and give her back her dignity and her life, and save her from sin. When he finished, Harry said, "Hey, you didn’t tell me you were a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to?"

And in one of those moments when the Spirit puts the words in our mouth, he said, "I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning."

"No, you don’t," said Harry. "There is no church like that. If there was a church like that, I’d join a church like that."

That is the kind of church that Jesus came to create. And if you dispute that, read your Bible. Read Matthew’s gospel. After Jesus healed the daughter of the pagan Canaanite woman, immediately he went to another place outside Israel, to another part of the foreign pagan lands surrounding his home. And there, he healed everyone who came, and he repeated for the outsiders the miracle of feeding that he had performed among his own. In Israel, there had been twelve baskets left over, symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel. In this foreign place, there were seven baskets remaining, the mystical number of their foreign religion. (Matt. 15:29f)

And in the next conversation he has with the Jewish authorities, his own people, he identifies himself with the "sign of Jonah" (16:4), the reluctant Jewish evangelist who God had to pull out of a whale to coax him to go preach to the foreigners of Tarshish. And never again did Jesus distinguish between insiders and outsiders as he mediated the abundant extravagance of God’s grace to all people. When he told about the laborers in the vineyard, he gave the same full wage to those who came at the eleventh hour as he gave to those who had worked from the early morning (Matt. 20). And when he spoke of judgement (Matt. 25), Jesus said nothing about beliefs, belonging to the right group, or correct worship. He said the cutting issue would be about feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison." And when he died, the curtain of the Temple was torn in two, opening the holy of holies to the whole wide world.

Each of us has some unhealthy boundaries that we have inherited and some that we’ve erected. Some prejudices we have picked up from our environment; some we’ve created out of hurt, fear and ignorance. And what we have done to others, we’ve probably done to ourselves. Most of us have shamed and repressed the parts of our own lives and personalities that look like Canaanite dogs and prostitutes to us.

Let there be faith. Trust in the boundless good that is God, within you and outside of you. Listen and look for the good that is beyond your comfortable boundaries. Look at the dogs again. They are children of God. Surprise them with your blessing. You live in a universe filled with a God who loves to throw new-birthday parties for anyone, any hour, day or night.

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