Dogs Need Love Too, Jesus....

In today's Gospel, Jesus' prejudice against certain other people is clear. We may love Jesus who is 100% divine. But how do we grapple with the 100% of Jesus that is human?

Transcript

Womanist biblical scholar, the Rev. Wil Gafney, also known as Will Gaffney Ph.D. is the Right Rev. Sam B. Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. She is a biblical translator and author of A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. This is four volumes and they she started releasing them, finishing them and releasing them, about the time Covid hit. I recommend them to your studies. Her biblical interpretations are provocative and never cease to deepen my understanding of Jesus.
Today’s sermon is directly inspired by her sermon based on Matthew’s version. So you will hear me kind of going back and forth between the two sermons and you will hear me going back and forth between her voice and

mine. In both Matthew and Mark, today’s Gospel is a story about the humanity of Jesus and how he was changed by a woman. As Christians, we confess that Jesus was fully divine and fully human. Not 50/50, but 100/100. Fully divine. Fully human. In both Matthew and Mark, today’s Gospel is a story about the humanity of Jesus and how he was changed by a woman. As Christians, we confess that Jesus was fully divine and fully human. Not 50/50, but 100/100. Fully divine. Fully human. And while it is hard for us to explain exactly what that means, we do see throughout the Gospels what it looks like. And while many Gospel stories show us the divinity of Jesus all 100% of it. there he is feeding 5000 people with one small cooler of food. There he is, at his mother’s chiding, changing water into wine at a wedding before he could legally drink. There he is ordering a man who could not walk to see him, to pick up his mat and walk. We know him in the garden, telling Peter to put back his sword and restoring the ear to its rightful head on the soldiers who came to arrest him. There he is coming to the disciples by walking through a storm, on top of the waves. And there he is calling, Lazarus, Come Out 4 days after Lazarus had died. We are well acquainted with the 100% of Jesus divinity.
The 100% of Jesus humanity though? That’s a whole different thing. I mean, some of it, we like: we like when he flips over the tables of the money changers. That's like watching somebody else get into trouble, right? Uh, we are both amused and have been horrified when we read about him sneaking off to teach in the temple while his mother and father frantically retrace their steps 3 days worth looking for him. We almost snicker when Jesus says to Peter, Get behind me Satan! Because doesn’t impetuous Peter just invite that kind of rebuke? But what we are less comfortable with is when Jesus allows himself to respond to a woman in need, by following his baser human instincts. His humanity. His human biases formed by the culture in which he lived and the time in history in which he walked the earth. No one gets out of here without them, yet that is exactly what this first story is about. We don’t like to think of his humanity in terms that make us uncomfortable, particularly those aspects of ourselves with which we still wrestle, like sexuality and sexual orientation. Joan Osborne’s song: What if God was one of us? And we hummed along, but let's face it, the first time you heard "just a slob like one of us", you winced, right? We don’t talk in the church about what it means that Jesus was an adult mature human male who survived puberty. Thank you very much. Did he suffer the indignity of his voice cracking when he told his mother he was about his father’s business? To be human is to be at turns itchy and scratchy and dirty and smelly. This Jesus, who is Emmanuel, God with us, in the flesh, is about much more than tidings of comfort and joy. In fact it may be much more down to earth than we may be comfortable imagining. In today’s lesson, Jesus goes to the beach. Galilee is hot. Wilda Gafney writes that while Galilee is still hot today, it is not as hot as her home state of Texas. In fact, she literally took a trip of people to the Middle East to get a break from the Texas heat. Tyre and Sidon were sea towns, but perhaps more importantly, they were outside Herod’s territory. Jesus just wanted to get away and stay off the police radar. Here he is on vacation, low key famous, perhaps infamous, and here comes a woman calling, yelling, after him and not just any woman, a Canaanite woman. This woman is literally, calling out this first century Palestinian Jewish holy man who was both religiously observant and a product of his culture, both, 
including its biases. Israel claimed God had given them Canaanite land, a notion the Canaanites did not share, and Israel occupied the land of Canaan every bit as much as Rome occupied Israel. Israelite notions about Canaanites were no more generous than Roman ideas about the Jews. This woman was a Gentile - like us - and Jesus is not shy about his opinions of Gentiles in Matthew's gospel where this story also resides. Initially, Jesus did not seem to understand his ministry to be to the Gentiles, that is, to us. In Matthew 10, he says to his disciples: Do not go any way leading to Gentiles, and do not enter any Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. All of the ministry that follows is to be to his people. Not us. Jesus has decided who will receive the Gospel and we are not on the list. In Matthew 5 he asks: If you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?” That is not a compliment. In Matthew 6:7-8 he says, “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them…”
That’s not very nice 
And in Matthew 6, starting with verse 31 he says, “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” Whatever you do, don’t pray like a Gentile. And notice that in Jesus’s language, God is their heavenly Father, [not ours. At least not yet. At least not yet] When we read these words of Jesus when he seems to be leaning into his humanity rather than his divinity…when we read these over time, one at a time, weeks apart, on Sundays, it's easy to overlook the parts of his humanity that frankly don't sit well with us. This is Jesus here. And he is saying things that today might cause his employer to send him to some anti-racism training or at least get spoken to about his mission being one of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And if this makes you uncomfortable to hear, believe me when I say it also makes me uncomfortable to proclaim. If this causes us to think that maybe Jesus was a little too human, maybe that’s because when we talk about being human, we often are talking about our less-admirable qualities. To be human is to slip up. It is to arrive late. To be human is to be selfish or lazy or not as prepared as we really should have been. To be human is to be standing in the need of God's forgiveness far more often than we like to admit or confess. AND…to be human is not actually such a bad thing—I say from experience. To be human is to be made in the image of God with something of her capacity to love, and to be human is to learn and grow and change, to open up our hearts and minds, broaden our understanding, and examine and perhaps even set aside our biases. If Jesus did not share some of this with us as well, he wouldn’t be fully human. Reverend Gaffney 
writes: “We are at our best as human beings when we listen to and learn from someone who is so different from us that everything in our culture and raising tells us she is other. This woman whose name isn’t important to the gospel—just her otherness—is in the land of her ancestors to which the Israelites and their Jewish descendants were more recent arrivals. But they see her as foreign. She cries out that she needs help for her daughter. She is a desperate mother. Her child is afflicted by something that prevents her from living fully in the image of God. Something in her is broken in some way, physically, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. And Jesus doesn’t say a mumbling word. He ignores her.” And the disciples take their cue from Jesus: and urge Jesus to get rid of her because she keeps yelling after them. They do not ask if he would or could help or why he wouldn’t. But given that our body language and our faces often give away what we really think about a person, as much as we try to hide it, right, I suspect she noticed that Jesus treated her as someone who was not part of his mission. And still. She persisted. [Good for her.] She was NOT GOING BACK to that demon. [Amen] In Matthew's version of this story, she kneels at Jesus' smelly, dusty, human feet and begs him saying Lord help me. Gafney tells us that the gospels use “lord” (capital L) as a religious title for God and therefore Jesus, but it is also the title of slave masters, which is why the Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney does not use it in her prayers. She says, “before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave... and I will not call anyone on Earth, Lord." This woman is the image of the faithful Christian petitioning her Lord, this Syro-Phoenician woman. She's abasing herself at the feet of a man from the historic enemies of her people like a slave. Her people worshipped Baal and the Phoenician god Melkart. Yet here she is at the feet of Jesus, calling him Lord. When Jesus speaks, we can almost hear him say, I would help you but… He doesn’t say that part aloud but the sentiment is there, behind what he does say which is, “It isn’t fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

She and her daughter are dogs in his proverb and in his mouth. Ancient Israelites and Jews in the first century and rabbinic period despised dogs. They were unclean scavengers that ate dead flesh. So yes, Jesus has for all intents and purposes called this woman a female dog. And what she does next is an expert move in the world of persuasive communication: and she leans into his proverb to turn it back on him. She said, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their lord’s table. Now her use of the word lord, is a challenge. What kind of Lord will he be? Loving God or slavemaster? And in that moment, something happened to and in Jesus that sometimes, a word of truth can do to us today. He is given pause. Something clicks or maybe something unclicks and opens. He seems to reach through his own humanity to find his divinity. He starts looking and sounding like the Jesus we know and love. He praises her faith - faith in him is Lord? Faith that as a man who had his own mother, he would do the right thing? Faith that whatever it was she had heard about the man called the Son of David was true? Faith that there was more to him than the first impression suggested?—He healed her daughter in that very moment.

Gafney reminds us that: She left that place restored to wholeness, and Jesus left that place walking towards a whole new understanding of his ministry. The closing words of Matthew’s gospel, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” teach us that Jesus has made room at the table for everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, because, I believe, of this woman. That's how significant she is. In spite of the open welcoming arms of Jesus, everyone hasn’t always been welcome at the table, not in the United States, not in the Church. While we don’t like to talk about it, the attempted eradication of Native Americans was largely successful. Not to mention the Middle Passage, during which two million Africans died before they reached these shores in chains and another 10-15 million died on forced marches between the dock and auction block. And this week, in Georgia, we were once again reminded of how we as Americans value brute force and violence and rights above listening to children; children who are pleading with us to do something to stop them from dying from gun violence in the very places we send them to learn about peace and cooperation. And if we have learned anything at all from our genocidal history it is this: you have to confront it. Tell the stories, learn from them, lament them. In the language of the church, confess, and repent and be reconciled. Silence about our sins breeds the corruption that lies about, or denies, who we are and what we have done. And we must tell the truth no matter how ugly that truth might be. For it is in truth telling, that we, like Jesus, might reach through our own humanity to find a spark of God’s divinity in US. [Amen] In the second story in today’s Gospel, Jesus uses the word meaning Be Opened. Because together, these two stories show Jesus’ mind being opened. And in this, perhaps our minds about the way we think of Jesus are opened as well. One of the truths we have to tell is that the Bible is many things, including a slaveholding document from a slave holding era in history. The truth is that Jesus never condemned slavery, used the language of slavery as though it was normal, and in some cases, healed or raised folk who then went back to being slaves. Yet, this same Jesus also shows us that to be human, is to wrestle with ancestral legacies of bias. To say or think or act upon the unloving impulse, whose roots we cannot always identify, can we? The Syro-Phoenician woman and her daughter are not the only ones who emerged from this encounter changed. Jesus goes forward to proclaim a gospel in which all are welcome to the table because this woman taught him that Syro-Phoenician lives matter.