SERMON What Comes Out September 6, 2015 Rev. George Anastos
GOSPEL LESSON PART 1 Matthew 15:21-28 Our first lesson this morning is from the gospel of Matthew, using the Cotton Patch Version of the Bible. In this version the apostle Peter is referred to as Rock, and a parable is referred to as a comparison. Jesus called out to the crowd and said, Y all listen now and get this straight: It isn t what goes into a person s mouth but what comes out of it that debases that person. then the students went up to him and said, Did you realize that when the church members heard what you said they were pretty riled up? Jesus answered, Every plant that was not set out by my spiritual Father will be pulled up by the roots. Let them be. They are blind guides of the blind. If a blind man leads a blind man, they both fall in a ditch. Rock spoke up, Bust open the Comparison for us. Jesus said, Are y all that dumb too? Don t you understand that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the belly and then becomes dung? But what comes out of the mouth springs from the heart and that debases a person. But to eat food that hasn t been blessed doesn t debase anybody. Sermon Part I What Comes Out In my 61 years I have come to the conclusion that it is easier to look at those parts of ourselves that we can laugh at, than to look at those parts of ourselves that are so broken that we would be horrified if someone, anyone, knew those things about us. I am going to give you a personal example. And I need to tell you that this will be very hard because I carry a great deal of shame about this and I am afraid you will think less of me. I am not joking here. It was 36 years ago now, back when I was in seminary, that something happened that rocked me to my core. I was watching the news with a good friend; we were sharing a house for the summer. On the news was a report of a power outage and some subsequent looting that was happening in a black ghetto. I turned to my friend with the intention of saying something like, Those bloody black people, can t they get it together? But the words never came out. Because as I turned to my good friend to say this I was reminded by the color of his skin that he was black. And all my self-conceit and pride as a non-prejudiced person engulfed me. I was not the person I thought I was. I was less. I was blind. And I was humiliated in my private revelation. It took me quite a while to work this one out. It took me a while to face up to the things that wanted to come out of my mouth that would defile me. I ended up talking to my friend about it. He grinned and said something like, So little white boy is learning a lesson here, huh? We talked about our society, how it breeds stereotypes and images of races and groups. We talked about how we learn an Us. vs. Them mentality in our society. And we talked about how it takes WORK to break these often unconscious and inbred images. Page 1 of 4
I am raising all this because we are going to go even deeper here. And I am being quite serious when I say that what follows will not be for the theologically faint of heart. I will be challenging mainstream Christianity in a big way. I may offend some of you; I apologize in advance. So fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the ride. We will take a look at the story about Jesus and a Syrophoenician Greek woman, a non-jew. In this story Jesus leaves Israel and goes to Canaan, to the district of Tyre and Sidon, to a land of Gentiles, i.e., non-jews. And Jews did not like Gentiles. In fact, one of the most horrific insults that a Jew would level at someone, particularly a foreigner, is to call someone a dog. Dogs were unclean. They were rangy, disgusting scavengers and often diseased. A Jew of Jesus day would NEVER have a dog as a pet. Just as a person from the deep South of the United States might still quip, I was in my 20 s before I learned that damn and Yankee were actually separate words, so the same could be said for the expression Gentile dog in ancient Israel. But before we read the next passage of scripture I am going to up the ante even further. The translation of the story we will use is from a translation of the bible called The Cotton Patch Version by Clarence Jordan. Jordan was a biblical scholar who formed an interracial community in the Deep South before the days of desegregation and civil rights. He translated the bible using American images and American place names to make the story come alive to make it contextual. In this translation, Tyre and Sidon are Dalton and Calhoun (Alabama). In this translation Jesus is a white person and the Syrophoenician Greek woman is black. Finally, this is a very, very good translation. Fasten your seat belts. GOSPEL LESSON PART 2 Matthew 15:1-9 Jesus arrived in the region of Dalton and Calhoun. He entered a house and didn t want anyone to know he was there, but he couldn t be hid. Then right away a black woman from those parts came up and started pleading with him, Please, sir, help me! My daughter is badly demon possessed. And he said to her, I was sent only to white people. It isn t right to take the bread from the white children and give it to little dogs. But she said, Yes, but even so, sir, the dogs do get the scraps from their masters table. SERMON PART 2: I read a good bit of my library so I could read commentators thoughts on how Jesus treated this woman. It was startling. Some literally changed the passage to make it say something Jesus didn t. Some suggested Jesus was chiding and joking. Hahaha. Some suggested that he really didn t mean it but was just trying to teach his disciples a lesson, although they never mention just what that lesson could possibly be. Some did all sorts of things to make it say what is does not say and to hide from what it does say. But not one of rationalizations is supported by the text. Jesus insulted her. He, a Jew of his day and age, was raised with all those unconscious stereotypes, raised in his society s racism, raised with his culture s Us vs. Them mentality, raised in his society s doctrines and traditions... just like the United States right now. It is not right to take the white children s food and throw it to the dogs. Page 2 of 4
This dialogue comes at a very interesting point in Matthew s Gospel: Jesus was getting accolades from everywhere. He was healing the sick and confronting the religious and secular authorities. He was preaching to crowds of 5,000 and then feeding them with seven loaves of bread and four fish. He was on the top of his game. And then it happens. A Canaanite woman, a foreigner, a Gentile, sees him and recognizes him as the Light of the World, and pleads with him to save her daughter. And Jesus debases the woman and her daughter: Dog. Unclean. Despite how the commentators want to dance around it, the text is the text is the text. The biblical writers did not change the story to make Jesus conform to their image of him. They kept the story as it is and allow us to grapple and struggle with it. In fact, Matthew put this together in such a way that we could not miss it: Jesus had just taught that what comes out of a person is what debases, and then out of his own mouth comes a debasing comment to a woman who was desperate to heal her daughter. One of the hardest things to do is read the bible unfiltered. That is to say, we have centuries of accumulated tradition and doctrine as lenses through which we read the text. Conflict arises however when doctrine and scripture clash. I remember vividly being part of a very, um, SPIRITED discussion among some ministers. They were vociferously arguing over some new prayers that had just been published, prayers that were entirely biblically based... but not doctrinal. There were those who were nearly apoplectic in their fury (there is no other word): the prayers actually contradicted generally accepted church doctrine and tradition and were therefore, and I quote, heresy. On the other side were those clergy who said that the prayers were 100% faithful to the bible and what these prayers pointed out was that generally accepted doctrine and tradition were actually unbiblical: doctrine had to change, not the prayers. Doctrine was heretical, the other side claimed, not the bible. Oh my, it was quite lively. It is no mistake that the story of the Canaanite woman immediately follows those words that Jesus spoke regarding what debases a person. Because Jesus was caught: he was caught between what he preached about what comes out of the mouth, and what this Gentile, this woman, showed him he actually practiced. He sinned, and the Gentile woman, created in the same image of God as he, called him on it. What this story is teaching us is that it is brutally hard to grow beyond the lenses that our culture and its teachings give us. It is a slap and a blow to our self image be exposed as someone who says and even believes one thing, but actually practices something else. It is humbling to stand in the presence of our fellow creatures, and of God, and see how far we have yet to go to be someone who can maturely lay claim to the name Christian. I know that to see Jesus as someone who actually struggled and sinned like this is desperately difficult. It flies in the face of what we have been taught about him since childhood in church doctrine and tradition. How does that famous prayer about Jesus go? He who was like us in every way except that he did not sin.... And yet, such a conception is not biblical. It is not supported by what we know of Jesus as presented in sacred scripture. And Jesus himself was clear on the difference between tradition and doctrine vs. the Word of God. And Jesus was clear he made a mistake. In the passage from Matthew, when the woman points out the debasing comment that had just come out of his mouth, Jesus says something very interesting. In the original Greek of the gospel we read, ιὰ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον, ὕπαγε This is hard to translate. The New Revised Standard Version translates it as, For this saying you may go your way. Is this accurate? To the extent that English can translate this Greek, it is as good as Page 3 of 4
any other translation. The key word is λόγον, a form of logos (λογος). In Greek it can mean saying... or word or speech or reason or act. For this act you may go. For this reasoning you may go. Jesus is clearly saying that her words, her reasoning, showed up his sin and he did an about turn in how he received her. The gospel writer likely put this story side by side with Jesus teaching on tradition and doctrine deliberately: not to bewilder us, but to encourage us: if Jesus can repent, so can we. You see, even though Jesus at first saw not the woman but rather a culturally ingrained image of a foreigner, he, the teacher, was taught by her, for she was able to see not simply a Jewish man, but also a human being who incarnated God. And then his eyes are opened and he sees: not a Gentile, not a foreigner, not a dog, but rather he truly sees a fellow child of God hurting and in need. For saying this, you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter. This is powerful, everyone. How many of us would have the faith of this woman, the faith to see beyond another s hurtful and pejorative and racist label of us to the true person hidden within? For that is what this woman did here. When Jesus only saw her with the eyes of prejudice, she was still able to see him with the eyes of a fellow human being. Each of us here in this sanctuary today sees the world through lenses somehow distorted by culturally imposed stereotypes and labels. And sometimes the image presented by those lenses ain t pretty. And this is why we have this beloved community of faith. This is why we have such a searing and honest story from the life of Jesus. It is to help us understand ourselves better. It is to help us learn self-honesty and to have the courage to change direction. It is to learn that our teachers can be the very people our unconscious prejudice tells us are beneath us. It is to help us heal from where we are broken so we can participate in making creation whole. And, it must be highlighted: due to the racial unrest in our nation over the past year, we MUST pay attention to this. We cannot possibly be part of healing the fabric of our society unless we are first honest with ourselves. So we will come to communion, to that time when we share in the broken bread and spilled wine symbolic of a broken body and spilled blood. We will come to the table of communion with all our brokenness and break the bread that Jesus says is his body. We will come to the table as a community helping each other to heal and to walk the pilgrim way, however stumbling that may be at times. We come to the table. We come. Amen. Page 4 of 4