I
am here an extra time this year
because Trinity is in a time of
transition.
Transition
means change
and change comes hard to Church people.
It
starts early.
At
my first congregation we started a children’s service.
Small
children took turns carrying the processional cross.
But
it was too heavy for them and they could barely keep it upright.
So
I got them a lighter wooden processional cross they could manage.
There
was an immediate outcry among the children.
I
quote: “They’ve taken away our cross.”
I
do love the Church.
I
love Church people.
My
favorite Church people are Episcopalians.
calcifying into a stodgy nay-saying
resistance to anything new
that makes our faith
boring and worse still
puts a sour
face on the gospel.
Speaking
of the gospel, we might learn something
about flexibility and openness
from today’s lesson in
the Gospel of Matthew.
When
we read a novel for a literature class,
the
professor will usually ask
“who is the main
character?”
There
is a rule of thumb for figuring that out.
It is the one who changes most.
The
main character is not a stable prop in someone else’s drama.
The
main character learns things, grows.
King Lear is called
“King Lear” because the old king
eventually sees his own injustice
and he repents.
Shakespeare
didn’t name his play after faithful Cordelia
who is good and virtuous throughout.
He
named it “King Lear” after the character who moves,
changes, makes spiritual progress – and is therefore
interesting.
So,
who is Matthew’s book primarily about?
If
it’s about Jesus, then instead of taking everything he
ever said as the final word for all
time,
we might look to see if Jesus ever
changes his mind.
His
first teaching was the Sermon on the Mount.
Not
much grace in that sermon.
Here’s
what Jesus says about the law.
“”Not one letter or stroke shall pass
away from the law . . .
Whoever breaks . . . the least of
these commandments . . .
will be called the least
in the kingdom of heaven.”
He
thinks the Pharisees are soft on sin.
He
wants to make the law more rigorous.
His
main point is that doing the right thing isn’t enough.
Dotting every i and crossing every t is not enough.
You
have to get your heart right.
Now fast forward to today’s lesson to see
where that leads.
The
disciples have just violated a law about hand washing.
The
Pharisees cry “Shame. Not one stroke or letter . . .” they say.
“Whoever
breaks one of the least
of these commandments . . .” they say.
But
now Jesus says, “It’s no big deal.” His position has shifted.
He
explains, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles,
but what comes out it.”
The
heart is what matters. Not legal technicalities.
Jesus
began to wonder what some of the law
has to do with the heart.
Maybe
if your heart was right,
it didn’t matter if you kept the law
perfectly,
so long of course as you were Jewish
and kept the law pretty
well.
So
Jesus, being a bright guy, knew when it was time
to get out of Dodge, so he took a little vacation from his
mission
in the non-Jewish country of Tyre
and Sidon.
He
had strictly ordered his disciples
not to even tell non-Jews about the
gospel.
They
were the wrong race, wrong customs, “not our sort dear.”
So
he was in Tyre and Sidon on a vacation, not a mission.
But
along came this non-Jewish woman begging him
to heal her daughter.
Jesus
ignored her. She persisted.
The
disciples said, “One of the goyim is bothering us.
Send her away.”
So
Jesus told her he served Jews only.
In
desperation, she threw herself down in front of him.
He
called her a dog and ordered her out of the way.
But
she said, “Even dogs eat the crumbs from their master’s table.”
That
rocked him.
She
had called him her master.
It
was at once beautiful and a violation of the taboo
separating Jew and Gentile.
It
was so wrong under the law, so right in the heart.
Jesus
repented.
He
had just recently said to his own disciples
-- right
race, right gender, right religion –
“O ye of little faith.”
Now
he says to this foreign pagan
-- wrong race, wrong gender, wrong
religion --
“Woman, great is your faith.//
Let it be done for you
as you wish.”
Jesus
is stumbling toward a new kind of religion
This
nameless woman had converted him.
And
we had better be glad she did,
because without her there would have
been no gentile mission
and we would still be sacrificing
goats to Jupiter.
Matthew’s
book still has a long way to go.
Eventually,
It ends like this:
Jesus says to his disciples,
“Go therefore and make disciples of
all nations . . ..”
“Nations”
means the non-Jews.
When
Jesus first sent his disciples out to spread the gospel,
he said, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles
and
enter no town of Samaria,
but rather
go to the lost sheep of . . . Israel.”
But
after meeting this gentile woman,
he began to change his tune.
In
the end, he sent his disciples to baptize all nations.
So
what might we learn from this story?
The
first thing we see is Jesus modeling an open mind
and an open heart.
His
faith was a living, growing thing.
It
changed. It moved. It morphed.
He wasn’t so stuck in what he said yesterday
he couldn’t move on to a new truth
tomorrow.
Jesus
changed. So how about us?
It’s
good to check our faith from time to time
to see if it has any buds on it, any
green shoots.
If
not, we might want to fertilize it a bit
with a new prayer practice, a new
book,
a retreat or some act of
mercy.
Maybe
we need to meet someone outside our comfort zone
-- some modern equivalent of a Canaanite woman
with a sick
child
– someone to shake up our stultifying certainties.
The
second thing we notice in this story
is its ethical trajectory.
Right
from the beginning,
the distinctive thing about Jesus
was his gospel of
inclusion.
Right
from the beginning,
he sat at table with sinners and
social outcasts.
But
at first he was calling them into an even smaller circle
of stricter rules than the Pharisees
had drawn.
Then
he extended the circle by disregarding
laws that kept people outside
even if their hearts
were faithful.
Then
he took in lawless gentiles if they had great faith,
and finally sent his disciples out
to gentiles
who didn’t even have
faith yet.
It
is an expanding ethic of inclusion, an
ethic of embrace.
St.
Paul kept extending that trajectory of inclusion.
“In
Christ there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female,
neither Jew nor gentile,” he wrote.
We
have our trajectory set in the life of Jesus.
Who
might be outside our circle of caring or acceptance?
Who
might be the Canaanite woman for us?
If
we keep an eye out for the people we are tempted
to avoid, they may show us the
growing edge of our faith.
Not
all change is good. But some change is.
And
the good change is as uncomfortable as the bad.
When
our Church changes, it unsettles us.
But
I’ll let you in on something: That’s on purpose.
It’s
because we need a little unsettling now and then.
