She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly. Matthew  15:27-28

This is one of those Gospel stories that tends to make us feel a little uncomfortable about Jesus. It doesn’t quite fit with the image a lot of people have of him – dispensing goodness and kindness and healing to all people wherever he goes, never being abrupt or losing his temper, almost like a flat, one-dimensional painting. So, let’s look at this story a little more closely, and maybe we’ll get a better understanding of what is going on.

To begin with, Jesus goes to the region of the cities Tyre and Sidon, on the Mediterranean coast, north-west of Galilee, in what is now modern-day Lebanon. This is not a Jewish area; it’s outside of the lands ruler by King Herod; the people who live there are called Canaanites, or Syro- Phonecians.

But there’s nothing to stop Jesus from traveling there, no border patrol. We don’t know why Jesus went to this area. Maybe he wanted to be anonymous for a bit. Maybe he wanted a break from all the people who had heard of the wonder-working rabbi and came to him seeking healing, and hope, and even confrontation.

The story tells us that a local, a Canaanite woman, sees Jesus and starts shouting at him from a distance, asking for Jesus to have pity on her and to     help her daughter who was possessed by a demon. This woman is not Jewish; how does she know who Jesus is, and what he can do? Even the title she uses for him, “Son of David”, is a term used for the Jewish Messiah. How does she know that?  In using the term, the Canaanite woman is proclaiming a truth about Jesus that the disciples have yet to really grasp (we’ll hear more about this next week); how did that happen? The text doesn’t give us any answers about these questions, but they are worth pondering, nevertheless.

The Canaanite woman doesn’t presume to approach Jesus directly, but she calls out, shouts at him, begging him for help for her daughter. And Jesus pays no attention to her whatsoever. But she must have been persistent, calling after him and the disciples, trying to get their attention. And who could blame her. She sees in Jesus the power to deliver her daughter and restore her to freedom and a sound mind. I think any of us would do the same.

But the disciples are bothered by the woman’s shouting, and they go to Jesus and ask him to send her away, to get rid of her so that they won’t be bothered. And how does Jesus respond?  He refuses; he says he’s sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel – meaning that he is Messiah for the Jewish people, not anyone else. On hearing this, the woman comes close and throws herself at Jesus’ feet. She calls him “Lord” and once again asks for his help.

Now things really get interesting. Jesus says to her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Calling someone a dog in the ancient Middle East was just as much of an insult then as it is now. But the woman is not put off by Jesus’ characterization of her Gentile status, and his not wanting to waste God’s blessings on someone outside the Jewish community.

Instead, she accepts the metaphor and presses on with it to make her point: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Surely God’s abundance is so great, that there will be enough for me and my daughter, even just a scrap of mercy and grace. Jesus then immediately applauds her for her faith, for her persistence, and trust that he could and would heal her daughter.

So what is going on here? How are we to make sense of this story? This is one of those times when God’s purpose and future rushes forward – even before Jesus is quite ready for it.

If we look at the broad sweep of the Hebrew Scriptures we see that one of its major themes is that God will one day draw all nations and peoples together as one human family, blessed by God regardless of ethnicity or race or geography. We heard an echo of that in the reading from Isaiah when God says that “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” This has been God’s plan all along, and the Israelites were chosen to be the stewards and custodians of God’s vision until the day came when this purpose could be fulfilled.

And this Canaanite woman – outside the official Jewish community – was an agent of bringing God’s future forward, all in a rush, and helping Jesus to be more aware of his vocation and God’s timing. Jesus is the Messiah, God’s Anointed, for all people, not just for the Jews.

And that’s often the way with really important changes and learning, isn’t it? We turn a corner and see a different perspective, realize that we have been missing important truth or parts of the picture, and at a very deep level things can never be the same again once we know – even if we don’t fully understand how this truth will unfold.

This summer we’ve had the opportunity to reflect on a time when God’s future came forward faster and sooner than many Americans thought we were ready for. The death of US Representative John Lewis has been the occasion to look back and reflect on the course and cause of civil rights in our country. From a distance of fifty-plus years it’s easy for the events of Topeka, Little Rock, Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, Washington D.C. to be words on a page, a fait accompli.

But delving back into the stories and the television footage from the time has reminded me of the heartache, unjustified bloodshed, and persistence that helped to set in motion civil rights for African-Americans. John Lewis, Martin Luther King, C. T. Vivian (who also died this summer), Andrew Young, and so many others helped us to see the deepest and truest meaning of the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

And, of course, it was not only American values that the civil rights leaders were upholding, but Biblical values as well – the same vision of all people as part of God’s one human family that is referenced in Isaiah; a Beloved Community of all God’s people, where God’s desire is (as the prophet Amos declares) “[to] let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
And this is the reason that so many clergy, lay people, and religious community members heeded Dr. King’s call to join the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Our own David St. George, then Rector of All Saints’. answered that call and went to Selma to support the march. This vision of God’s purpose and God’s future was rushing towards them and towards our country and our churches and faith communities.

But as so often happens, we make a change, we pass a law, we declare something to be true and then we think it’s over and done – only to realize later that there is a great deal more effort, work, and prayer that needs to happen. That is certainly the case with the progress of civil rights in our country and the backlash from some quarters against them.

We know that laws alone don’t change attitudes and open hearts, as vital as legal changes are. Changing hearts and minds is the work of prayer, and attention, and countless conversations with others who are both like us and unlike us, the work of listening to God and sharing what we know to be God’s truth.

We can be like the Canaanite woman in this morning’s Gospel. We can be persistent, we can publicly recognize and announce God’s vision of all people being made in God’s image, with dignity and worth, brothers and sisters sharing in the abundant blessings of God’s creation, a Beloved Community.

We can be conduits of God’s future and the fullness of God’s kingdom in our midst. May we be blessed in our prayer, our action, and our proclamation.

Let us pray.
O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. ~ BCP, p. 815

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 16, 2020

In God’s creation of the world and providing humankind with all the elements we need for life God exercises providence – loving care. From a human point of view, we would say that this loving care includes foresight, as well; planning into the future. Remembering God’s providence reminds us of our dependence upon God; everything that we have is a gift that has been wisely and generously given to us by our loving Lord.

The Book of Common Prayer defines a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of God’s inner and spiritual grace.” They convey the generous and gracious love of God to us (inner and spiritual) by tangible means (outward and visible).

The Church has two primary sacraments – baptism and Eucharist. The outward sign of baptism is water and the sign of the Cross made with chrism (blessed oil); the inner grace is new life in Christ. In Eucharist the outward sign is the bread and wine, and the inner grace is participation in God and being at one with fellow believers.

Five other sacramental rites are available in the Episcopal Church and are all vehicles of God’s grace, but are not rites that every Christian will necessarily be part of: Confirmation, Marriage, Reconciliation (private confession), Ordination, and Anointing at the Time of Death (“last rites”).

The word sacrament has to do with making something holy. The outward, tangible part of a sacrament reminds us that God uses the good creation he has made to be an avenue of divine grace and blessing for us.

To lament is to express grief, sorrow, or pain in an open and heartfelt way. It is not something our modern American culture tolerates very well; we always hear that we should be strong and carry on without complaint. There certainly is a time and place for that. But lamentation has deep Biblical and Christian roots. The Psalms are full of lamentation – both as individuals and as a people, a communal statement of anguish. Perhaps the most well-known and profound example of lament is Psalm 22 which begins: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus utters that Psalm verse when he is dying on the Cross.

Lamentation is a way of being honest before God and before one another. It says that something is not right, out of joint, broken and painful – whether that is in our personal lives, in public life, in the tragedies of disaster. Lamentation lays bare our hearts and allows room for the healing light and presence of God to come within us and among us. To lament is a very faithful way to pray.

A covenant is relationship between two parties, with rights and responsibilities on both sides – with the emphasis on the relationship. There are a number of different covenants in the Bible, and they have all been initiated by God. The best known is the relationship between God and the Hebrew slaves after they had been freed from slavery in Egypt. In the desert, on Mount Sinai, God promised that he would be their Lord if they would be his people. The commandments that God gave to the people through Moses were to be markers and patterns of life that would show they were living according to God’s ways (what we call the Ten Commandments).

Covenants are about loyalty and faithfulness, which is why the Prayer Book refers to “the covenant of marriage.” At the Last supper Jesus also referred to the bread and wine as the sign of the new covenant that God was making in the Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The disciples and all others who would follow were being invited into a new and life-giving relationship with God.~ VGM+

Sabbath is the practice of regularly refraining from work and resting. It is about trusting that the world will go on, the sun rising and setting, without any help from us. Our trust is in God. God made the universe and gave it life, and God’s care for creation far exceeds any of our efforts to make things happen. In the Ten Commandments, given to Moses after the Hebrew slaves were freed from bondage in Egypt, God tell the people to “remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.” In the first story of creation in Genesis (the first book of the Bible) we hear that God made all things in six “days” (large periods of time), and on the seventh day, God rested. And so we are called to rest, as well.

In Judaism the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and extends until sundown on Saturday. Christians originally celebrated the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day, the day of Resurrection, on Sunday. Those two practices merged over time, as Gentiles (non-Jews) became followers of Jesus.

Sabbath, for Christians, is primarily Sunday and is to be a day dedicated to God in worship, rest, family time, even unplugging from the rest of the world. But any day or period of time can be taken as time to practice an intentional Sabbath for renewal, refreshment – physical, emotional, and spiritual. ~ VGM+

 ~ VGM+The word peace appears nearly three hundred and fifty times in the Bible. It is far more than the absence of war or strife. Nor is merely a polite “go along to get along” attitude. Peace is a state of wholeness and balance that comes from being in a right relationship with God and with neighbor – and within oneself. The ancient Hebrew word for peace was “shalom”, meaning wholeness, completeness, soundness, health, safety, prosperity, and serenity for an individual and for the community. It is still used as a greeting in modern Judaism. Peace is a positive state; the way God wants us to be. It is a value that is expressed in one of the blessings in our services: “The Peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” ~ VGM+

Words of Faith
Words matter – what they mean, how we use them, the feelings they convey, the way they shape our experience of life. For centuries Christians have had a “vocabulary of faith” which was a collection of words and ideas that was generally understood by society at large and by believers in particular.

Over time that changed. Some words became very secularized; for example, in sports we hear about players making sacrifices for their team, but originally “sacrifice” meant “to make holy.” And then some Christian groups have taken faith words and defined them in ways that most Episcopalians would have trouble resonating with.

Add to all of that the perceived split between “public life” and “private faith” – and we have lost confidence in our ability to know and use the vocabulary of our Christian lives. That can make it difficult for us to think and reason clearly about our faith, and to express to others what it is we believe and why we behave as we do.

As we have been living through this time of health crisis, we know that whatever is on the other side of this will be different than what we started with. We will be different, and we will face some new challenges and realities.

It will be good for us to remember and renew and become confident once again in the words of our faith and our expression of the Christian life as we understand it in our Episcopal and Anglican tradition. To help us with this I’ll be sharing a word on most days, with a short definition or explanation of what it means, Christianly-speaking. I hope you find this encourages you to think about the words you say, the words you pray, and the way God is shaping, forming, and equipping you to do God’s work in the world.
Blessings, Vicki+

Grace
Grace means gift – God’s gift to us of love and blessing that we neither earn nor deserve. God offers us grace before we are even aware that we are in need of it; and God already loves us fully, before we even do anything to respond to him.
We often think of someone being graceful or moving with a quality of grace, like a dancer. That image conveys a sense of fluidity, ease, motion, even beauty. When we are on the receiving end of God’s grace we gain that sense of moving through life with greater ease and dignity because we know that we are loved to our very depths.

Jesus said: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:7

This is the season of The Schedule. It’s the time to make sure the family Google calendar syncs up with the new fall routine, after the glorious disruptions of summer and vacations. And if you have children in your household you know (or may remember) the particular September scramble of fitting in after-school activities, sports, homework, social events, with work, household chores, and volunteer efforts. Sometimes it feels like you need a computer program to figure out who needs to be where, with what, or whom, when. And heaven help you if a small detail changes and you have to rearrange everything! Even if you don’t have children at home, the early fall always arrives with the drive to get organized, make sure your commitments are in your calendar in ink, so you know what you are doing, and begin the new program year. It can feel like multiple requirements are pressing in on you all at the same time – at least until you can get your schedule somewhat tamed.

And into the midst of all of this September scramble comes Jesus, with his challenging and difficult words this morning. The carefully stacked blocks of our schedules and commitments may just get knocked over, like pulling out the last block which collapses the tower in a game of Jenga when we hear what Jesus has to say; and we may not like it at all!

He addresses the large crowd who were travelling with him, people who had seen his miracles and healing and wondrous works, who had heard him speak with authority about God’s purposes and had followed along to see what else was going to happen. Maybe there would be an even more spectacular miracle; maybe Jesus would even more brazenly denounce the Roman governing system and hand the running of the country back to Jewish rulers; maybe there would always be food enough for all of them. Curiosity and desire can draw people on for a long time.

But instead of encouraging the crowd, Jesus turns to them and says, “If you want to come with me and be part of what I’m doing, here’s what needs to happen: you can’t put your family first; you need to know that there’s a strong possibility this is going to end with a torturous death; you can’t be weighed down by an overabundance of possessions. You need to count the cost of all of this before we go any further together.” Wow. Take a minute and let all that sink in.

And then the objections come: isn’t Christianity supposed to be family-friendly? didn’t Jesus die so that we don’t have to suffer? What’s wrong with owning lots of things? These are all really good questions, and we could spend an hour pondering and discussing each one. For now, I’ll just say that Jesus is making it very clear that anyone who wants to follow him, to be his disciple, needs to be aware of the realities and costs involved.

I recently heard about a church in another part of the country, in a downtown area that had a big banner on its front lawn that read: “Come on in. It’s easy.” That may seem like a good marketing strategy – a low bar to get folks to cross the threshold. And in many ways, it’s what the socially-accepted expectation of church was – at least in America, in the decades after World War II: “Come through the doors, you’ll meet people like yourself, you can be comfortable, not too much is going to be required of you.” Now, of course, that’s an over-generalization, but the point here is that the message on that 2019 church’s banner is not true. It’s not true of Christian faith, of following Jesus, of worshiping God; it never has been true.

The very first commandment that God gave Moses after the Hebrew people were freed from their slavery and they were being gathered and shaped as a people, the very first command was “Hear the commandments of God to his people: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me.” This command to worship and serve God alone was of course about turning away from the various Egyptian deities, or the Canaanite gods they would later encounter. But it was always understood to include any person or idea or value that we might want to put in God’s place as an idol; whether we are intending to do that or not. And Jesus, as God Incarnate, is bidding his followers to make sure they understand and are prepared for this challenge. It’s anything but easy.

The New Testament scholar Tom Wright uses this image in commenting on this passage: ‘… think of the leader of a great expedition, forging a way through a high and dangerous mountain pass to bring urgent medical aid to villagers cut off from the rest of the world. ‘If you want to come any further,’ the leader says, ‘you’ll have to leave your packs behind. From here on the path is too steep to carry all that stuff. You probably won’t find it again. And you’d better send your last postcard home; this is a dangerous route and it’s very likely some of us won’t make it back.’ That’s truth, that’s real; there’s a lot at stake in following Jesus.

And if we think that setting out the costs of discipleship in a clear way is a lousy recruitment tool, that it merely drives people away, I would ask us to think again. I would offer the example of a number mythic stories that have been written by faithful practicing Christians as an expression of their understanding of God and the world and being disciples, books that are beloved and have huge followings: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Harry Potter.

In each of these books, while there are one or two central characters, there is always a larger core group of people and beings (because not all the characters are human). Each member of the group has their own very different gifts, abilities, personalities, graces, physical features, and attributes. And they are all drawn together, not by their fondness for each other, but to take on a dangerous and important mission that that they could not ever have imagined on their own: those who are loyal to Aslan, the Fellowship of the Ring, Dumbledore’s Army and the Order of the Phoenix.

Certainly, each of these series of books – which have spoken so profoundly to so many - is full of stirring, heroic scenes and battles between good and evil. And they seem very exciting and attractive… from a distance; kind of like the feeling of watching a video of runners crossing the finish line at the New York City Marathon and thinking that would be a really cool thing to do – until you start the actual training. But the crux of these stories, the turning point, the truth-with-a-capital-T in each book has to do with the protagonists making a hard choice, giving something up, coming to a costly awareness or decision – whether it is mercy or repentance or sacrifice. It is because Tolkien, and Lewis, and JK Rowling write the Truth – even without mentioning God – that their work endures and continually finds new audiences. The Truth they portray is hard and beautiful and good.

Jesus’s words are hard; they are challenging. They call us to examine our lives, our schedules, our commitments. Did we think faith was going to be easy? Do we try to fit God in as an after-thought, a “nice-to-have”? As the Prayer Book puts it in Eucharistic Prayer C, do we look to church “for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal”? Solace and pardon can be good places to start, but we can’t stay there – not if we are going to go the whole way with Jesus.

So, at the start of this new season, let’s take the time – each one of us - to ask God how we might count the cost of our faith, the cost of what God is asking us to do and to be, so that we can be more fit and ready to serve our Lord with truth, mercy, beauty, and goodness.

Let us pray.
Grant, Lord God, to all who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, that, as we have put away the old life of sin, so we may be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and live in righteousness and true holiness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. ~ BCP, p. 252
 
Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 8, 2019