After years of trying my hand
at children’s sermons and chapel services for our nursery school, and still
trying to get it right, I am slowly learning that usually the ones that go best
are the ones where I use some kind of object as a lesson. Ms. Christy, our
diaconal minister is especially adept at this…although I must say I was curious
to see how she might incorporate an object lesson today to discuss “evil
intentions, murder…and fornication!” Naturally, given the nature of the
children’s sermon target audience, things can still go awry, but,
generally-speaking, object lessons help focus everyone’s attention. They give
people something concrete to concentrate on. They make topics that are usually
pretty abstract, “out there”—like faith itself (which is pretty abstract)—and
make them real and “down here,” which is doubly helpful since most adults are
paying as much attention to the children sermon as the children are. In fact,
one of my colleagues suggests that perhaps the sermons preachers deliver from
the pulpit should contain an object lesson each week.
There may be something to
that idea since Jesus, himself, is not above using an object lesson here or
there to make a point about the surprising grace of God’s kingdom. He does it,
for example, this in this morning’s gospel text when he goes from his lessons
about the Pharisees’ rules regarding ritual defilement and food purity laws to
this encounter with a desperate Canaanite woman in the region outside of his
native Galilee. Although in real time these two instances—the teaching itself and
then the teaching moment—probably spanned a few days because of travel, Matthew
puts them right next to each other to make sure Jesus’ point is concrete.
Now, to be completely honest:
it’s not altogether clear from what Matthew tells us whether Jesus initially
intends for this encounter with the Canaanite woman to serve as an object
lesson or if the opportunity just falls in his lap. Regardless, her presence
and her request for her daughter’s healing present a wonderful occasion for
Jesus to give a concrete, real-world explanation of his abstract lesson about
the rules of religion. As Kentucky author and environmentalist Wendell Berry
says, Jesus “seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here.”[1]
It is that religion in the temples and synagogues which Jesus had been
talking about. The religious leaders, such as Pharisees and scribes, had taken
issue with Jesus’ disregard for the rules and restrictions they helped maintain
and enforce, rules like the ritual washing of hands before eating and not
sharing a table with people who were deemed “unclean,” rules like the avoidance
of certain foods and how those foods were obtained. These rules and restrictions went far beyond being a
hassle to follow; they had terrible power in Jesus’ day. They helped determine who was fully a member of the righteous community and who was left outside of it. They created
strict boundaries around what was holy and therefore life-giving, and what was defiled and therefore essentially deadly.
Granted, the temple in
Jerusalem was to remain a place of purity and holiness where worshippers’ faith could be renewed through an encounter with the
divine presence, but the leaders of the religion had barnacled over a great deal of that relationship between God and human with their own numerous interpretations of the laws. As a result, they had claimed that power of determining who was in and
who was out, who was clean and who was defiled. Safe to say, that was probably most people’s impression of religion in
Jesus’ day: a habitual fascination with clean and unclean, following rules and ticking off boxes.
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| "Eating with Unwashed Hands" Jan Luyken (2008) |
All that really was, of
course, was a desire to control. Borne of human sin, focused purely on
self-preservation, a religion of rules and regulations is nothing but a longing
for power—power to ensure that we can keep ourselves in God’s good graces, keep
ourselves pure from the world and other people not like us, keep ourselves…alive.
And Jesus sees right through it. The experience with God in the Temple was
always supposed to be about relationship, not power and control. It is about
faith, not following rules. It is about life in God flowing from of the hands
of a few and out into the fields and sheep pastures, to the houses and tables
of everyone in creation.
The disciples get to see
exactly what this all means when the object lesson appears. It would be
difficult to find someone more removed from the heart of rule-obsessed religion
than a Canaanite woman in Gentile territory. She wasn’t part of the household
of Israel and she was a woman—to the religious authorities that was two big
strikes against her. Jesus then illustrates the ability of religious rules to
demean people and harm that relationship with God by letting them take their
course: first, Jesus ignores her. When she appeals to him a second time, he
reminds her that she is not in the in-crowd, that she is an “other.” Eventually
he even insults her verbally, using a common put-down of the day. In the end,
it is her strong faith in Jesus as Lord that cuts through all that religious
convention. It ultimately pays little attention to the rules and boundaries that
humans use to divide and control and demean and exclude. It just looks at Jesus
and says, “You alone can help me.”
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| "Christ on the Cross between the Two Thieves" Peter Paul Rubens (1619-1620) |
Of course, you are right to
say this Canaanite woman is not an object at all. She’s a human, and that’s
part of the point. Rules of religion, used without care, can dehumanize people,
turning us all into objects that are labelled clean or unclean. But no amount
of regulation-following and ritual-completing will eve make one clean in God’s
eyes. No amount of church attendance or participation in service projects or
money donated will secure that relationship of faith that God is reaching out
to create in us. That, my friends, has been accomplished by the teacher who
dies on the cross to rid the whole world of the sin that defiles from within, the
man who suffers and becomes an outsider himself in order to make firm God’s
relationship with us even through the barrier of death.
Yes, the sermons that go best
are the ones that have some visible, tangible aspect to them often, and lo and
behold it is a foreign woman well off the beaten path who becomes the perhaps
the best example of faith in God through Jesus that the gospels offer. Thank
goodness God is still teaching this way!
Two weeks ago members of the
Epiphany high school youth group returned from a week of service projects on
the Eastern Shore. Most of these projects were undertaken among regions there that
might be compared with Jesus’ adventure into Tyre and Sidon. That is, we worked
not among the posh tourist towns or even among the many different farms that
spread out on either side of the peninsula’s main highway but rather down the
unpaved roads well off the beaten path into places ironically named Dreamland
1, Dreamland 2 and Mirina, the neglected trailer parks that house the migrant
workers who pick produce on those farms.
Some of us were given the
task of putting a new layer of paint on their rusting and leaning single-wides.
Others of us went into the trailer parks to pick up pre-school and
elementary-school-aged children and shuttle them to a local Methodist Church where
we ran something similar to Vacation Bible School. We’d pull our minivans and
rental vans into the communities and the kids would come streaming out of the dark
and empty-looking trailers, literally by the dozens, excited for a day of art
and games.
On our last day there, we had
the additional responsibility of organizing and then distributing donated school
supplies to the children, of whom there were about a hundred. The whole affair
got pretty chaotic pretty quickly, kids jumping into vans, our youth trying to
count squirmy kids to make sure everyone got the school supplies they needed. In
the midst of this, there was a language barrier, too. Unfortunately, there were
not enough book-bags for each kid to receive one, and pretty soon we noticed an
argument was brewing in the van I was driving over a particularly desirable
book-bag. Two elementary school girls started to get a little testy about who
would receive it, and, knowing how these things can go with my own two
elementary-school-age daughters, I began to worry that we’d have to come up
with some rule or regulation to decide who got it. Without any bright ideas of
how to do that, one of our youth and I just looked at the two girls and stated
the obvious, as if a plea for help: “Only one of you can have this.” Immediately,
one of the girls pointed to her friend and said, “Then I want her to have it.”
Later that evening, Matthew,
the youth, shared that’s where he had seen Christ that day. I fully agreed, and
then it got me thinking: were those migrant worker children objects of our
charity? Or were they human examples of faith and life in God? Had they been placed
in our path to offer us an opportunity to serve and practice acts of Christlike
kindness, to offer them the crumbs of donated school supplies? Or had we been brought
into their path so we could experience little outbursts of Christlike humility?
What do you find to be the
case in your lives, as you share your faith and practice your religion, as you come
to conclusions about what’s happening in Ferguson, Missouri, or Gaza? Are you
the in-crowd or the outsider?
I’m not really sure where I am
all the time in that dichotomy, but I am more and more thankful to have a God
who is still teaching all of us wandering Canaanites wherever we are with the love and compassion of his
Son…a Teacher who takes his religion out of the temples and into the fields and
trailer parks and focuses our attention on all the people of God…a gracious
Lord who cleanses even defiled religious leaders like me with crumbs that fall from
his good table.
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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