Learning from the Foreigner

sermon by Torin Eikler
Matthew 15:21-28

                                     (Note: this video starts about 1 minute into the sermon.)

About two-and-a-half years into my time as a volunteer, I found myself looking for an assignment to fill in the time between where I was and where I was going.  I looked at the options, but nothing much seemed to be drawing me. So, I told the BVS staff to pick a spot that needed a volunteer and send me there.  I ended up at Su Casa Catholic Worker House on the South Side of Chicago.

Su Casa was located in the Back of the Yards neighborhood where much of the gang warfare of the 1990s was taking place.  It was (and still is) the poorest place that I have ever lived, and the people who live there are almost entirely African Americans who has very low wage jobs if any at all.  I could travel in most directions for a mile or so without seeing another person with as light a complexion as mine. 

I prided myself at the time for my level of racial awareness and my ability to cross over racial barriers, but it didn’t take me long to realize that I was out of my depth.  Most everyone who lived near us knew what Su Casa was and respected the Catholic Priest who lived there and ran the place, but that is the only reason that I was able to walk openly on the streets.  I learned quickly that that protection did not extend to some areas or into the darker hours, and I got to be skilled at reading the attitude and behavior of the people who spent the days on their porches or playing in the street.  All the same, it was clear to me that I was in foreign territory, and I responded by shrinking into myself whenever I was out on an errand.

 

In our text today, Jesus finds himself in foreign territory as well.  Seeking to avoid the crowds that surrounded him everywhere he went in Israel, Jesus leaves the country for a little R&R.  Tyre and Sidon were in Phoenicia, a region in Syria which stretched north between Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea.

This was a dangerous place for a Jew to be.  The Phoenicians were of Canaanite stock, the ancestral enemies of the Jews, and the forbearers of the people we know as Palestinians today.  On top of that, Jews in Jesus' time considered all non-Jews to be unclean.  Anyone who did not keep the Jewish cleanliness laws was by definition "dirty,” and a Jew was to have nothing to do with anyone who was unclean.

I am sad to say that in my childhood I heard some of my closest friends to African-Americans as "dirty," and I said nothing to correct them.  I remember going on a date with a young woman with in High School and overhearing other students talking about it the next day.  “What is he thinking,” they said, “doesn’t he know that ‘blackness’ rubs off.”   I know now that their attitude was born of fear and ignorance.  The words got me thinking and wondering, though, because I didn’t quite know what they meant.  When I mentioned it to my mother, I learned that the town I had moved into used to have a law that read, “the sun shall not set on the back of a [black man].” 

The law is gone.  Unfortunately, the attitudes that gave it life are still as common in our time as they were in first-century, and I learned on that day, when I was drawn into that foreign world, that it is those attitudes – whether I uncover them within myself or see them in others – it is those attitudes that make me feel dirty.

It can be disconcerting to go into foreign territory.  Strange places and strange peoples can bring out the worst of our fears and bad behavior.  And strangely, it is in foreign territory that we often learn more about ourselves than anywhere else.  Richard Rohr writes that to find a new way of life, "You have to leave the world where you have everything under control.  You have to head into a world where you are poor and powerless.  And there you will be converted in spite of yourself."

Jesus was in foreign territory, and a "dirty foreigner" approached him.  The fact that she was a woman only made things harder since Jewish men were not to speak to women in public, even members of their own families, lest they risk making themselves unclean.  So, when the Canaanite woman shouted at Jesus, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.  My daughter is tormented by a demon," Jesus ignored her.  He did not even acknowledge her existence, but the disciples were not so patient.  They urged him to send her away because she wouldn’t stop.  And when Jesus finally spoke, it was with disdain: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

The woman was not deterred by his words. She went and knelt at his feet and pleaded with him, "Lord, help me."

Jesus responded in a manner that seems uncharacteristically harsh.  "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."  Despite the insult, though, the woman answered him without missing a beat.  (And I think she must have smiled as she said this….)  "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

 

The Canaanite woman was good, you have to admit.  She did to Jesus what he was so good at doing to so many of the critics who dared to engage him in oral combat.  Nowhere else in the Gospel accounts is there any report of anyone so clearly getting the best of Jesus.  This “dirty” foreigner took Jesus to task, and he knew it. What's even more surprising, though, is that Jesus not only got it, he admitted his mistake.  He did what all of us could do better when we are shown to be wrong.  He graciously acknowledged the rightness of her position, saying, “Woman, great is your faith!  Let it be done for you as you wish.” to which Matthew adds, “and her daughter was healed instantly."

There are two miracles here. The first one is obvious and by itself no small thing.  Jesus healed that little girl, but clearly it would not have happened except for this mother's great love.  In one of his study books, James Moore calls this "love with an attitude."  He says the woman was bold and courageous because she lived by an attitude of love.  She would not be put off.  She would not be discouraged.  She would not give up.  She was willing to risk humiliation in order to free her daughter from her suffering.  “Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things. Love never ends." Long before the apostle Paul penned these words, this Canaanite woman lived them.

The second miracle in this story of healing is, in many ways, even more significant.  Jesus' immediate response to the Canaanite woman was tribal - "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." – which is not surprising.  We are all members of a family and a tribe first.  Who you are related to counts for something in this world.  Families take care of their own.  Blood is thicker than water and everything else.  

How many wars have been fought, how many millions have died in our world because of that attitude?  In 1994, 800,000 persons from the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda were murdered by members of the Hutu tribe, who were then in power.  "Ethnic cleansing" we now call this - bad blood between neighbors that begins with simple disagreements about religion and who owns what territory, and ends in a bloodbath. Witness Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, and Palestine, to name just a few of the places where ethnic tensions have erupted in violence again and again.  One wonders where God is in these places, why it seems that God cannot be heard or is not known in these bleeding hearts.

Jesus said to the Canaanite woman, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." And the voice of God spoke into the mess that Jesus was making through the Canaanite woman when she replied, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table."

What do you suppose Jesus learned in that foreign place that he could not have learned in his home territory?

Last week I made the journey from Morgantown to Goshen, IN and back on the train.  For those of you who haven’t done much train travel, you should know that if when you sit to eat in the dining car your table is filled up with others who are also in the mood for some food.  It is, of course, uncomfortable to sit there eating in silence.  So, conversation with strangers is the order of the day.

At breakfast, I was seated with a pleasant enough retiree from Missouri who had spent his life building houses and was returning from a quick remodel of his daughter’s apartment in New York.  As we chatted about our lives and world events, he made a sudden shift to the situation in the Middle East – the conflict between Israel and Palestine, to be specific.  What began as a lament for the loss of life over the years quickly became a low-key rant about the failings of Muslims in general and the evil blood-thirstiness of the Palestinians in particular.  He ended his tirade with, “Those dirty sand-devils will never stop fighting until they have everything and everyone else is dead,” and looked to me for support in his statement.  I sputtered out something about the history involved and excused myself from the table wishing that I could, somehow, get that man to step into a new place so that he would be free to replace his ignorance and anger with compassion and empathy … maybe even love.

 

[In 2002], a 13-member delegation of The United Methodist Church conducted a fact-finding tour of the Middle East. These 13 American Christians in foreign territory were taken aback by what they saw and heard. It was a very different perspective than that provided by the American news media.  During the visit the delegation spent the night of July 27 in farmers' homes in a Palestinian village. Les Solomon, of Alexandria, Virginia, noted that despite his extensive travels to other parts of the world, "I have never experienced the levels of repression on a people that I experienced during the visit. Its basic intent is to break the will of the Palestinian people by breaking their spirit."[1]

Working in other parts of the world, Esther Armstrong and Dale Stitt of Portland, Oregon, have an ecumenical ministry called Journey Into Freedom that, among other things, sponsors what they call "Trips of Perspective." Esther wrote in their newsletter of a "wonderfully disturbing" trip to Haiti where they met some of the poorest of the poor. They heard stories of starving people so hungry they are forced to eat emaciated dogs and donkeys, and of schoolchildren in Port-au-Prince swallowing stones to assuage hunger pangs due to poverty. Why do they go? Esther says, "We go on our Trips of Perspective not to fix the problems, to have answers, or even to make a difference. We go to be present, to stand in solidarity with the people of Haiti, to confront our real powerlessness in the face of dire need, and to be transformed."

What have you learned in a foreign territory that you could not have learned anywhere else?


Whenever we journey into scripture, we are traveling to a foreign land.  You know that, and we have talked about how different the society and culture were in the time of Jesus many times before.  So, I won’t burden you with more of that today.  Let me just share that on this particular trip I learned that God’s mercy is open – that God’s grace is a blessing that pours out on all – even those that I think of as unworthy.  It pours out, washes away the myths that possess us, and pushes us to grow and change. 

That’s not a new thought for me, but it’s good to be reminded of that from time to time … as I sit in judgment on men who talk about the worthlessness of Palestinians or frown at those who want to white-wash this country.  It’s good to be reminded that no matter who we are, no matter where we come from, no matter what we have done or said, God’s love is strong enough to hold us all – strong enough to hold us … and wise enough to uncover our desire our truer nature.

 It’s good to know that there is One there, ready to welcome us in, bless us, and respond to our hearts deepest longings with the words, “let it be done for you.”

 
AMEN.

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[1] from United Methodist News Service as printed in Newscope, August 9, 2002