Sermon: Shuttle Launch

By: Steve Runholt

Text: Matthew 15:21-28

Context: Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church

Date: Sunday, August 14, 2005

One of my favorite classes in seminary was called Cultural Hermeneutics. It's a formidable sounding word, hermeneutics. Basically the idea is very simple. Hermeneutics is the study of why specific words have specific meanings, and of how that meaning is conveyed.

We study hermeneutics in seminary, especially in Presbyterian seminaries, because ours is a tradition based on the Word. How does that Word come to us? How can it be that I can preach a sermon with a specific point of purpose in my mind, and you can hear something completely different in yours?

Well, here is perhaps why. When I teach Bible studies I often start with a little exercise, a hermeneutical exercise, that helps convey how much variety there is in the way we understand even the most familiar texts.

Take the two words "black" and "white". In your own mind I invite you to think of all the words you associate with "white". If you look like me demographically, as most of you do, then the list of words you think of probably sounds something like this: pure, clean, good, angel, light . Am I right?

Now do the same with "black." Bad, evil, night, dark .

But if you don't happen to be a Caucasian; if you are an African American that list is likely to be very different.

White: Power, privilege, oppression, maybe even racist .

Black: Beautiful, Africa, slave, family, culture, pride .

I asked you to do that brief exercise for two reasons. One, because it is helpful for all of us to be reminded from time to time how complex this business is of understanding words and texts. Words as simple and fundamental as "black" and "white" are loaded with cultural, social and personal associations.

That should give us pause as we peer into scripture and seek meaning and guidance and direction from a book that was written literally thousands of years ago; a book that is full of complex stories, told with words laden with meaning specific to that time. Words like "Jesus," "Messiah," "Canaanite," "woman."

The second reason I wanted to do this exercise today, and the reason that I chose "black" and "white" is that race is a central theme in today's text. And not just race but religion and ethnicity too.

I know - there are deep taboos and controversies around those subjects in our culture and some of you may be squeaming at their mere mention. Please don't worry, I don't wish to make you uncomfortable or to be deliberately provocative--though Jesus did not seem to be similarly constrained! The fact is this is not the stuff of polite dinner table conversation. And it's not meant to be. Whether we like it or not, the Bible is not the religious equivalent of Miss Manners Guide to Proper Southern Living .

It is instead a book about life in all its messy splendor. And because of that it is, at times, a book about race and gender and politics. It's about good people and bad people, and what they do in public and in private. It's a book about God becoming human, and experiencing what this whole dizzying thing called life is like, for us.

So the question we are left with today, the question given to us both by hermeneautics and, more simply, by this text is, Who is this woman's Jesus? Is her Jesus different from yours or mine? Who, and what, does she have in mind when she meets him?

"Have mercy on me Lord, son of David," she cries! It turns out that against all odds, this Canaanite woman, this pagan daughter of reviled gentiles, gets it absolutely right. Lord, son of David. Please save my daughter. Be Messiah to her.

She gets it right. It's Jesus who gets it wrong. The great Jesuit preist and peace activist, John Dear, says that Jesus was "on fire with love for every human being who ever lived," ( Jesus the Rebel, pg.xv).

Except it would seem for this woman; this innocent woman whom he treats with shocking indifference, even cruelty, calling her a dog.

Now, I don't mean to justify Christ's harsh treatment of this woman. Not for a moment. It's scandalous and we need to name it as such. So much so it's rather amazing that this scene even made it into the gospel record, it is so at odds with Jesus' normal blazing love for all humanity, particularly for outcastes. People whom the religious establishment would consign to the dung heap of society. People just like this woman.

So it is a difficult scene, and that needs to be acknowledged. But you can sort of hear the weariness in his voice, can't you? He's just had to feed 5000 families - a job he asked his disciples to do, but which he had to finish. He's come through a harsh controversy with the religious establishment over ritual cleanliness, a petty, dispiriting controversy. People have been needing him, challenging him, wanting him, pursing him essentially 24/7 since the moment he started doing things and saying things no one else ever had.

Now he's retreated to a remote region, so remote in fact that it's in gentile territory - perhaps his best hope no one would track him down.

And even there he cannot find peace or rest. Whatever Jesus this woman had in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that the Jesus she gets is tired and grumpy. Short tempered. Unkind. Human.

Most of us can probably agree on that. But the other question that must be asked is who was this woman to Jesus? This unnamed woman. Like so many women in scripture, she appears briefly. And like so many other writers in the Bible, Matthew does not take the time to name her. And she disappears from scripture immediately after she plays her brief role.

So it's left to us to ask, but who was she? And who was she to Jesus? Well, first, she is an interloper. The text says Jesus withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. The plan was to have some downtime, to pray without interruption. To recharge the batteries. But sure enough this woman finds him. And it's immediately clear she is an intrusion. "Send her away," the disciples demand, "for she is crying after us."

Send her away. We're tired of traveling with a rock star. We're tired of dealing with needy people all the time. We're tired of ministry, tired of you asking us to feed 5000 families with nothing. We're tired of it all. Just send her away, would you please?

He is apparently fed up too. And so amazingly, shockingly, he tries. What makes matters worse is that she's not just an interloper. She is a Canaanite; the worst kind of Gentile. Her very body is unclean; to be in her presence is to be defiled. And as if that's not enough, she is a woman. Sub-human. Slave.

Jesus nearly succumbs to these unholy traditions. But he gets lucky. She's not just a Gentile and a woman. She is also a single mother, which is to say she is fierce as a bear. And her daughter is sick and she will not be denied.

In this moment of weary encounter Jesus responds to her not as Messiah, but as a human being. He responds to her as any Jewish male might have done. He responds to her as any of us might do to people who clamor for our time and attention when we have nothing left to give.

But the miracle here, the grace of this passage, is that she won't let him be less than he is. Normally it's Jesus who asks the provocative questions; he asks the questions that unlock the divine secrets of his mission; he asks the questions whose very answers define the expansive scope of the Kingdom of God, the realm of God's inclusive love.

But here she asks those questions. Here she advances God's own agenda. Here she, an outsider, a dog, she brings Jesus to heal and reminds him he has just stepped outside the boundaries of God's realm of inclusive love.

"I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," Jesus asserts.

O no you're not. You are Jesus. You are the Christ. You are the Messiah. And if you're going to be that, then I've got news for you. You don't get to set limits on who you love and who you don't. You don't get to set limits on who is worthy and who is not. Even you, Jesus, don't get to decide who's in and who's out.

That may be the oldest question of all time - who is in and who is out; who is chosen and who is not. You would think in our time, the 21 ^st century, that question would no longer be relevant. But I was reminded this week that it's just taken a technological turn.

Many of you probably watched the coverage of the space shuttle landing this week. Right in the middle of it a former shuttle astronaut commented on one of the great debates now raging with regard to space exploration. People are asking can't we just send robots into space? It's cheaper, it's safer. No risk at all to human life.

But there's a reason we don't send robots into space, she said. There's a reason we risk the lives of human beings and put them on that shuttle and launch them into space. And the reason is because space exploration is not just about science. It is, rather, about human experience.

You can send robots to the Olympics, she pointed out, but then it's no longer the Olympics. Space exploration and shuttle missions are about immersing yourself in something that is so challenging and transformative that you become transformed. And because other people are involved, many people across many nationalities and ethnic lines, they all feel that sense of joining in. We don't do what with machines, she said; we only do that with each other.

She's right. But in point of fact, we don't do that very often with each other. We don't normally cross lines of nationality or ethnicity or religion in the course of ordinary life. And we don't do that because it's hard to do that.

Apparently it was hard even for Jesus. Here in this passage he is perhaps most like us. Whether we admit it or not, the truth is we all have these same tendencies on display in this text. And we have them because we are human.

But it is humanity that saves him. A woman who won't let him be less than who he is takes him to task. A woman who understands the word, the concept of "Jesus" better than he does in that moment and will not let him be less than that.

Jesus stepped out of God's Kingdom, if only briefly. And it took a Canaanite woman to bring him back.

Today it's hard not to worry that the church of Jesus, the community of his followers, behaves more like the human side of Christ. We get weary with trying to save the world, we get weary with the ongoing fight against violence and for peace. We get our theology wrong, and we say no to those people who want to join our community, people whose daughters and sons are dying for want of attention from us, single moms in this country, single mom's in Niger and the Sudan.

We get weary and so we say no. This bread we eat is for us, not you.

But I'd like to think that here at WWPCC we can be more like the crew of the space shuttle. As this new academic year ramps up, I'd like to think that this will be a place where everyone is welcome across boundaries of race, nationality, and gender, across lines of class and sexual or theological orientation.

A place where we will feed the 5000 together as best we can, a place that will welcome the Canaanite woman when she comes to us, as she will in two weeks when the ladies from Room In the Inn are here.

I'd like to think that here we will understand "Jesus" in the same way this fierce single mother did put that understanding into practice. And that we, too, will be transformed in the process.

Amen