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Sermon for July 2, 2023

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The Rev. Rosemary Beales gave this sermon on July 2, 2023.

Sarah laughed, they say. Sometimes I think, that’s ALL they remember about me. That and my long, long life.

I don’t laugh anymore.

You just heard the story of the worst day of my life. Did you notice that I am not even mentioned in the story? All the drama, all the horror, and finally the mercy, are there. …..But so am I.

I am used to being unseen, unheard – so I want finally to share my whole story with you—the laughter and the tears. You have to hear the whole thing to understand the part before you today.

I met Abram when I was just a girl whom everyone called “Princess.” That is, after all, what my name means. Nowadays, “Princess” makes little girls think of castles and ponies. But we were a nomadic people, so instead of castles, we lived in tents. We moved often, following the seasons, for water and pasture for our flocks.

I was still young when I married Abram, and as custom dictated, his life became my life. I traveled where he traveled and lived where he lived. I even worshiped his God.

After one of those long walking journeys, following the Euphrates River, we became comfortable in the land of Haran. Then one night Abram just had to walk to the edge of camp and stare into the vastness of the desert – what he was looking for, I’ll never know. But he came back all excited, bursting with energy and ideas. “The Holy One has spoken to me!” he said. Then came a flurry of gathering and sorting and packing, and the next thing I knew we were on the road again. We had servants, of course, to do the heavy lifting and care for the animals we drove into the desert with us. No one had to mind the children, for Abram and I had not been blessed.

And now, Abram was alight with the promise he said God had given – that he would be the father of a great family, a huge nation. “I will bless you, and you will be a blessing,” God said. But how were we to fulfill this dream? for we remained childless.

Still, off we went, traveling to . . . who knows where? Our God had told my husband simply, “Go to the place I will show you.” No guide, no map, no river to follow this time. Along the way, my husband insisted on climbing hills and meeting with the Holy. I was never privy to their conversations, but sat with our flocks in Shechem, while he came back full of new plans.

Finally, we made a home in Hebron; I remember that place well, as it was the longest we ever stayed in one place. Still, Abram kept getting these messages from God: “I will make your descendants like the stars in the sky and grains of sand in the desert.”

And the baby blankets I had stowed away for so many years went unoccupied.

Then, it was my turn to have a bright idea! I had a maidservant, Hagar, and it occurred to me that if God was not going to grant me a child, this woman might be the answer to prayer. Any child she conceived with Abram would be legally mine. The burden of my barrenness would be lifted.

The minute she conceived, though, Hagar began to look down on me. I did not need the condescension of an Egyptian girl young enough to be my daughter. I’m not proud of this, but I was so irritated by her glowing pride and her growing belly that I’m afraid I treated her unkindly. “Harassed” is the word she used as she ran away from me – taking her chances in the desert, I guess, was better than living securely under my roof, under my thumb.

Next thing I knew, she was back again, claiming that an angel had told her to return and promised her that her son – HER son – would thrive. She did indeed give birth to Ishmael, and I tried – I really tried – to accept them both. What happened to them later is a story for another day, and one I’ll always deeply regret.[1]

Years went by before, once again, the Lord enchanted Abram with his ridiculous promise: descendants without number, and this time even a mention of ME. Not from the Egyptian girl, but from ME, would these progeny proceed.  Even Abram laughed at that! But God changed our names anyway – he became Abraham – father of a nation — and I was still “Princess” but with a new pronunciation.

One day, while Abraham was lounging outside our tent, three strangers appeared out of the wilderness.  My husband welcomed them and offered hospitality – a vital custom among those who travel through stony deserts.  He offered them a resting place, a little water, a bit of bread – but then commanded his servants – and ME – to conjure up a lavish repast. While he and the strangers ate, and talked, I stood inside the tent, for I knew my place. And then, one of the strangers said the strangest thing . . .”and your wife, Sarah, will have a child.”

HA! I laughed. Of course, I laughed. Wouldn’t you? Even though my reported age – 90 years old! – is a wild exaggeration, I was still too old to have a child, and I knew it. This was not the gay laughter of girlhood, but a harsh exhalation that tasted like ash.

Then, “Is anything to wonderful for the Lord?” the stranger said, and against all logic, all experience, hope began to rise in my heart again. And against all expectations, a seed began to grow within me. And – miracle of miracles, a CHILD was born to us, a son was given.

I laughed again – this time, it sounded like a lullaby – and we named our son Laughter, Yitzhak. He was the fulfillment of our hopes, the firstborn of the hundreds of thousands, the sign of God promises. We welcomed that child – oh, how we welcomed him as if we were welcoming God’s own self!

Thirteen years later, I was there when Abraham had his strange night vision. I could only hear his side of the conversation; but from what I gathered, God was demanding that Abraham take our son, our only son, Isaac, and SACRIFICE – him on a mountain. What mother would let such a thing happen?

Some say that I followed them on their three-day journey, prepared to intervene. But no. In my own way, like Abraham, I trusted that the Holy One himself would intervene. I just gave Him a little help. All I did was to simply release Abraham’s favorite ram, the very best one, whom he loved, and hope that it would find its way to that terrible altar.[2]

So I wasn’t there to witness the angel staying my husband’s hand, pointing out the white ram, freeing my beloved son. Rather, I waited in the tent, terrified, until my boy came back down the mountain. I thanked God for his mercy. But after that trauma, I never laughed again.

Generations later, one of our many promised descendants, made a similar journey up a similar mountain. You know well Jesus of Nazareth, and how his story ended – and began again.

It was he who taught you about welcome, and about sacrifice of a different sort. The self-sacrificing love at the heart of his being and of his hope for you, his Church. That love means you can welcome others without fear, knowing that you are welcoming the Holy One himself – the One who said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” –thanks be to God!

Amen.

[1] Gen 21:9-21, heard previous week.

[2] Based on midrash and my own imagination – it is not in scripture, but it seems plausible!

 

Sermon for June 11, 2023

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The Rev. Joseph H. Hensley, Jr., rector of St. George’s, gave this sermon on June 11, 2023.

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.

It was quite the day for Jesus! In this Gospel reading we just heard there is so much going on, and we even skipped some of it, because it just would have been too much to digest. Jesus and his disciples were guests in someone’s home, maybe the home of the former tax collector Matthew. And there were some other tax collectors and some people named as “sinners” for reasons that are not made clear. Then the Pharisees show up patrolling like purity police, interrogating Jesus’ disciples: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” And then Jesus heals a woman and raises a girl from the dead. I don’t know if he went back to eating dinner after all that or if just went to bed!

But even with all that is going on, Jesus is unflappable! Amid all the controversy, all the strange things that keep happening around him, Jesus knows just what to say and do. When the Pharisees want to know “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus finds just the right scripture to quote. The Pharisees thought that a respectable religious teacher would not allow himself to be tainted associating with unclean and immoral people. This would not be pleasing in the eyes of God. As calm as can be, Jesus whips out the prophet Hosea, chapter 6, verse 6: “I desire mercy not sacrifice.” That whole verse from Hosea reads “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” Jesus gently instructs the Pharisees that God is more pleased with mercy, with faithful love, than with pure offerings or pure people. And that is Jesus’ core message throughout the Gospels. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

I wish, sometimes, that I could be as unflappable as Jesus. This week, a sort of strange thing happened when from my office I could hear the voice of someone speaking loudly and somewhat aggressively down the hall. He was interrogating the front office staff, and his question and tone was like the Pharisees. “Why are you doing what is not pleasing to God?” Only his actual question was about why St. George’s celebrates people who are LGBTQ+. “Doesn’t the Bible teach against that?” he wanted to know. Actually, I don’t think he wanted to know anything, he just wanted to cast judgment. And I wish that, like Jesus, I could have quoted Hosea 6:6 to him, but in the moment, a verse did not come to mind. I was too concerned with trying to be friendly and moving us away from the office door to the reception area where we talked for a few minutes. I will add that this is someone I have a relationship with, someone who has in the past had a relationship with our parish. So we were not strangers to each other. After a few minutes of him interrogating me and questioning my morals and leadership and me trying to answer his questions honestly and accurately (“No, Jesus never said anything about gay people.” “Yes, I believe it’s okay for people of the same gender to be married.”), I said to him, a little flustered by his aggressiveness, “We’re not going to agree about this,” to which he replied, with surprising gentleness, “I know.” So I invited him outside into the graveyard, and we prayed for and with each other before he went his way and I went back inside. I spent the next little while, as one does, wishing I had said this or done that. I think I did the best I could under the circumstances. I was calm. I was loving. I remembered to pray, which even we priests forget sometimes. And I tell this story, because someone might ask you why our church has a rainbow on the graveyard fence. Why are we celebrating Pride Month? Why does our church say that people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, non-binary (and the other related identities in LGBTQ “Plus”)…why do we say they are wonderfully made in the eyes of God? “Why does our congregation say you can belong here, and you can even be in positions of power and influence when some churches label you as “sinners?” Some of us may have those very questions in our own minds and hearts today. It is not wrong for someone to have those questions, if they are actually questions and not veiled condemnation. I want St. George’s to be a place where we can hang out in these cracks together with curiosity and love and prayer, because Jesus hung out in these kinds of cracked places too, these places of controversy. I share this story and these questions, because they are real, and especially because they point to some really Good News! When Jesus was questioned by the Pharisees who condemned certain people as sinners, he reminded the Pharisees, the so-called experts in religion, of the message that had been preached centuries before, that God desires and delights in mercy more than sacrifice. God delights more in our compassion than in our purity. God delights more in transforming love than in religious perfection.

The text says that Jesus ate with sinners and tax collectors, but the text doesn’t give us a lot of clues as to who these “sinners” were. Were they people who had actually done immoral things? Not always. In the religious mindset of Jesus’ time, there were all kinds of people who got labelled as sinners simply because they seemed deficient or impure or strange in some way. Maybe they were sick, like the woman who thought if she could just touch Jesus’ cloak, she might be saved. Or maybe they were disabled like the paralyzed man whom Jesus healed in the verses immediately preceding the ones we heard today. Before he heals that paralyzed man, Jesus actually tells him his sins are forgiven. Jesus challenges the belief that if people have difficult circumstances, they must have done something sinful to deserve them. Jesus says, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” I think Jesus is calling anyone whom religion labels as “sinners,” for whatever reason, rather than those whom the religion labels as “righteous” because of some outward appearances. Jesus is calling all those whom religion has said are undeserving of grace to come and get it. Come and get some of the good stuff! Now let me be clear…we are all sinners. We all fall short and miss the mark. And because God has given us the grace, we can all repent and receive forgiveness. But sometimes, some of us get labeled as being “special sinners” when really it’s because someone has decided that we need to be singled out. When someone says, “It’s because the Bible says so, period.” And Jesus is calling those people who are labeled as special sinners to be his friends and followers. And, by the way, I am happy anytime to talk more about what the Bible says and does not say, because it is an amazing, complicated, set of writings through which God can and does speak. And I believe that it is dishonoring the Word of God to use it to diminish someone’s humanity. The churches and people in the churches have too often sinned, have fallen short and missed the mark, by just saying, “The Bible says so, period.” Right now, there are some churches and people with power who I believe are sinning and missing the mark, missing the transforming love of God in this world by promoting unfounded fears and suspicions, by silencing voices, by doing harm to LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people, and their families just because “The Bible says so.”

I’m preaching this, and we’re putting the rainbow colors on our fence, we’re celebrating Pride, not because we want to be part of a culture war. We’re doing this because we want to be part of the covenant that God made with Noah generations ago never to destroy the earth again, and we want to be part of a world where we do not destroy one other ever! But we still have Good News to share. That’s what that rainbow out there says, that we have good news to share. The Bible also says that Jesus ate meals with and called as disciples the very people who, in his time, were told they were less than fully beloved of God. Jesus quoted the scriptures again and again which emphasized mercy and love over purity and so-called perfection. Jesus wants to know, not whether we are perfect, but whether we have revealed the love of God, the mercy of God, in our lives. Jesus turned and saw the faith of the suffering woman who believed that if she touched his cloak she would be healed and saved. Jesus turns and sees and loves all of us. All of us. Jesus sees that we too have a faith, given by God, which can already heal us, and save us, and deliver us. It does not matter how much we may “feel” that faith today, that faith has brought us here today. It’s why we are sitting here. And we are here to turn and see and help one another to nurture that faith. We are here to turn and to see and to say to one another with Jesus, “take heart, your faith has made you well,” now go…go and act on that faith, go and share that faith in ways that build one another up and which bring God’s reign of love into the cracked places of our world Go and learn, go and teach, go and live what this means: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

Avengers Endgame: Summer Pop Culture Sermon Series

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Summer Sermon Series_2022 The Rev. William S. Dickinson gave the below sermon on July 31, 2022. This sermon is part of St. George’s Summer Pop Culture Sermon Series. Unfortunately, we were not able to livestream the worship service that Sunday, so we are providing a transcript of Fr. Will’s sermon. Additionally, our Assistant Director of Music Ministries has provided a recording of the special music interlude he played to introduce the sermon.

“Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity!” Between the words spoken and the words heard, may the Spirit be present.

In all fairness, if a giant, interdimensional, purple-headed tyrant had recently arrived on your superhero-infested planet, snapped his fingers, and instantly disappeared half of all beings in the universe out of existence, you too might feel a little bit depressed.

Alright, let me back up.

If you hang around me long enough, you’ll end up hearing two things:
1) It’s hard to be a human.
and
2) God’s Grace isn’t earned, and it’s enough.

Now, neither of these things is particularly interesting, nor is either of them new wisdom, but that’s just sort of how the Gospel goes. Humans are humans, and always have been, unfortunately. In fact, it is such a ubiquitous truth that to live on this planet as an incarnate human is a difficult task that people have been complaining about having been born since…forever.

So with apologies to Gen Z, I’m afraid you all did not, in fact, invent existential dread.

One of the great aspects of Scripture is how we hear within its pages the whole of the human emotional gamut.

Outnumbering all of the very pious people saying very pious things are the writers of Scripture who are, in a word, upset. Much like us. And the weird thing is, God can do incredible, transformative things through them, too.

For every Mary, mother of Jesus who sings her assent to the trials of her life, there’s a dozen James and Johns, who are annoyed by leaving the comforts of home, or Peter, literally betraying Our Lord out of fear and grief. In half of the parables, even, Jesus shows us people who have lost their way that God uses to do great things. Remember, the prodigal son doesn’t earn back the money he squandered before his father welcomes him home with open arms.

Scripture is full of people finding it hard to be a human. And none more so than the writer of our first reading. Now unfortunately this is literally the only time we ever hear from Ecclesiastes in the entire three-year lectionary, so we’ve got to make it count.

“Vanity of vanities,” the writer says, “all is vanity!” “I hated all my toil…under the sun, seeing I must leave it to those who come after me – and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish!” In other words, “nothing matters.”

Being a human has always, always been hard, and sometimes the only thing to do about is to shout to God about how nothing seems to matter. And the great thing about God is that we don’t have to protect anything from Her. God can handle whatever we throw, and boy do we sometimes need to throw it.
Because, say it with me: “it’s hard to be a human.” But that doesn’t stop God from using us to do marvelous things.

This truth is so universally acknowledged that it even finds its way into Marvel superhero movies! That’s right, it’s Avengers day in the last week of our pop culture sermon series, and we’re talking about Thor’s grief.

Thor, God of Thunder and erstwhile wielder of the mythical hammer Mjolnir, is one of the original band of superheroes called the Avengers who are at the center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Turns out it’s handy to have a god on your side when it comes to fighting evil. (Of course, we in the church knew that already).

Anyway!

In Avengers: Endgame, we’re at the culmination of ten years and twenty-something movies. All of the characters (fifty-plus at this point) have come together to fight against this one villain: the evil Thanos, who sees the brokenness of living beings as a kind of blight on the universe. His grand plan is to eliminate half of all sentient life to start again, to give life a chance at not overwhelming the resources of the universe. He thinks this is the only way to save the universe from destroying itself. For years and for ten movies, the Avengers and their fellow superheroes have been fighting against Thanos to stop him from executing this mad plot. They’ve all gathered together and mustered their collective strength to fight him and…with apologies for spoilers, they lose.

Thanos accomplishes his goal, and with a snap of his fingers, half of all beings, including superheroes, simply disappears.
Five years pass. Nothing has changed; the vanished are And the Avengers begin to think to themselves. What was the point? Was it all vanity after all? Did any of it matter?

Thor, the God of Thunder himself takes this failure and loss particularly hard. He isolates himself in (where else?) Scandinavia and falls into a deep depression. He sits around all day wallowing. When the other Avengers have a plan to go back in time to stop Thanos from halving humanity in the first place (it’s complicated), Thor refuses to join them.

What if he fails again? Why even bother?

Now as an aside, one disappointing way that the movie illustrates Thor’s grief and depression is by showing him gain significant weight, spawning many memes about “fat Thor.” Now this is a true reflection of some folks’ journeys in grief and it’s worth depicting, but in this case, it’s played for laughs. So I just want to acknowledge that this is dumb and lazy film-making, that it shames people for how their bodies manifest grief.

In fact, ‘fat Thor’ as a plot device is just another way of getting around how hard it is to process grief at all. Rather than actually talking about what it’s like to lose half of your friends and have to keep living, the audience is supposed to laugh instead. It’s a clumsy device, but an all too human one. What we need to learn is that Thor is broken – sad, angry, and lost to thinking that nothing matters.

He’s basically the writer of Ecclesiastes at this point. All of this superhero-ing was just vanity. Why bother trying again?

Now I think sometimes we’re taught that Thor, or Ecclesiastes, or people in our lives going through such things are just whining. That we’re just supposed to get up, keep going, power through, and those that can’t just aren’t trying hard enough. What a sad thing. Or we’re told that we have to process through our grief before we can get back to how our life was before.

But as anyone who has processed a trauma, or experienced major grief, or felt the fragility of their mortal body can tell you: it’s not an either/or.

What really happens is we accept that we’ve changed, and our lives have changed. And with the help of community, and plenty of reminders that we’re enough, we muddle through, and we decide to try again. The grief doesn’t go away. It doesn’t get fixed. But we take those first brave steps of trying again. Yes, we might fail again. But what if we don’t?

Eventually, Thor says okay, when enough of his friends convince him to try. And without giving too much away, he has an important conversation with his mother (in a different timeline – I told you it was complicated) who reminds Thor that failure, and brokenness, and pain, and joy, are all a part of being alive. That they make us who we are. That there’s nothing to fix. That it’s from within our places of brokenness that our strength comes.

And y’all, I’m as surprised as you are to say this, but that is the Gospel, smack dab in the middle of a Marvel movie. Those are the words of eternal life. That God didn’t come to fix us, that we don’t need to earn Grace, that it is from our places of need that God’s Grace empowers us to love the world. You don’t have to be fixed to help fix the world. You do not have to be good to do good. You simply need to ask for help. Thor’s mistake was thinking he alone needed to be strong. Because when he failed he had nothing left. But that’s not how Grace works. God doesn’t waste anything.

Thor isn’t healed before he tries again and saves the world. His grief isn’t gone. God doesn’t wait for us to be healed before showing us the good She can work through us. It’s in the space of our need that God works.

The writer of Ecclesiastes writes: “It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with.” “I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after the wind.”

He says all this, he’s so sure that all of this God mumbo-jumbo means nothing, has no power, and yet here we are, 2300 years later and learning from him. Here he is, in the pages of Scripture, reminding us that we will have seasons of joy and of grief, and that nothing goes to waste in God’s Kingdom. Rahab was an infamous person of ill repute, and God used her to deliver the entire people of Israel. Martha was devastated at the death of her brother Lazarus, and God used her to give the disciples a safe place to rest.

The prophet Ezekiel is a victim of post-traumatic stress, and God uses him to deliver a message of liberation that gave hope to a people in exile. St. Paul was disabled, and God evangelized the world through him. We are broken, we have places of need, we have failures, and, look around, see what God is doing through us. Not because we succeeded, not because we are good, but just because. Dear Church, The only perfect person God ever used was Jesus Christ.

It is because Thor was able to share his grief that his friends could lift him up so he could try again. That’s it.

And if you hear one message of Grace today, hear this, y’all: God doesn’t need you to be fixed, or healed, and certainly not “good enough” to love you, or to use you to do profound things.

Whatever place in your life needs healing, wherever you are broken, wherever you struggle, even if you haven’t acknowledged it yet, wherever you think is the furthest place from God, that is precisely where God will heal others through you.

You do not need to be perfect to receive grace.
You do not need to be well to help others to heal.
You do not need to deserve love to love others.
You do not have to be good to do good.

Because here’s the key – when we know our need, when we know we are not perfect, when we know our need for forgiveness and grace, then a strange thing happens – we start to have forgiveness for others. We start to meet others’ needs. We start to live lives of grace.

Mary Oliver says it better than I:
“You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”

I only take issue with the world meanwhile. The world does not go on despite us sharing our struggles and our fears and our hopes.
The world goes on precisely because of it.

The world does not go on despite broken, healing people working to do good. The world can only go on because each of us broken humans decides to try.

Jesus Rerouted

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ReroutedA Sermon Preached by the Reverend Areeta Bridgemohan
at St. George’s Episcopal Church, Fredericksburg, VA
RCL Proper 18, Year B
September 5, 2021

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord our strength and redeemer. Amen.

In our Gospel story today, it seems like Jesus is trying to take a vacation again. The scripture says: “he didn’t want anyone to know that he had entered a house, but he couldn’t hide.” (NRSV)

To understand why he might have wanted a break, I’ll give you a quick recap of the highlights from the last couple of chapters: in Ch 6 he’s rejected from his hometown, his cousin gets killed by Herod, he feeds 5,000 hungry people, he calms a storm and walks on water, he does more healings and then has a public argument with the Pharisees and legal experts.

No wonder he needed a break! He sets out and goes to the region of Tyre. Tyre was mostly inhabited by Gentiles, it was a wealthy port city, and was also at odds with the Galilean Jews.

Josephus, a Roman-Jewish first century historian who was born shortly after Jesus died, listed the Tyrians among the Jews’ bitterest enemies. According to one commentary, Tyre imported its produce from Galilee, the breadbasket of the region. In times of abundance, this relationship worked well for both parties. In times of crisis or famine, Tyrians were able to purchase the harvest of the land and often made large profits, and Galileans were left with little for themselves. ,

In addition to this uncomfortable economic relationship, there was a troubled history between the Tyrians and the Jewish community. Just 130 years before Jesus was born, Tyrians had assisted King Antiochus IV, one of the great persecutors of the Jews, in the siege of Jerusalem and the terrible desecration of the Jewish temple.

This is where Jesus chose to take refuge.

Maybe he thought he would be less likely to be sought out, maybe he figured that Tyrians would rather not associate themselves with him: a poor rural Jewish general contractor. They might let him have the rest he craved. But he had no such luck. Our story tells us that when he got there, word spread and a woman approached Jesus to plead with him to heal her daughter, who was plagued by a demon.

Jesus’ response has thrown Christians into knots for centuries.

He replies: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (NRSV)

This is the only time Jesus says no to someone who comes to him for healing, and on top of his refusal, he insults her too. It sounds harsh to us, but it might have been even harsher to contemporary ears. Dogs were not sweet lovable pets that are part of the family, but more on par with rats, scavengers who lived on garbage.

This is not the kind, compassionate, inclusive Jesus. It is a Jesus who unsettles us, and not in that “be-more-loving” kind of way, but in the cringey way that reflects back to us some of our prejudices and blind spots.

Christians have tried to explain his answer in a variety of ways. Some say that his response is not that bad – after all the Greek word he uses for dog is “kynarion”, which means a little dog, a puppy, which is less insulting. Others observe that he doesn’t outright refuse her request, he prioritizes his mission to the Jews – which was a source of great debate in the early Christian church, Mark’s audience. Yet others have made sense of his response by saying that Jesus was testing her faith.

Some ancient Christian traditions hold that she was wealthy, which adds another interesting layer of disparity between them.

Today I’m going with: Jesus had his prejudices, and I wonder whether there was a small part of him that felt that withholding healing redressed some of the economic and social inequality between the Tyrians and Galileans. Maybe he did think of his mission as first for the Jews and then the Gentiles, and he might have been less compassionate with her because her wealth, status and otherness made it hard for him to be touched by her suffering.

I prefer to read the story this way because without that the healing that she affects upon him and the grace and openness that he shows are diminished.

In this story, Jesus models what it’s like to be wrong, that most human of qualities.

As I was reflecting on this story, I wondered how this encounter might have played out today.

In an article on the evolution of the concept of “cancel culture”, the author describes how the meaning of the term has drifted further and further away from its original intention as an instrument for traditionally marginalized communities to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of privilege.

She says that it is often now used as shorthand to describe an aggressive style of communication on social media which treats public debate as a battlefield.

She quotes journalist Zeeshan Aleem who says: “It’s … a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. … What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.”

And I would add that it eliminates the possibility of just plain being wrong. Ambiguity and self-interrogation are both important parts of being able to admit wrongness. Being wrong is hard even in the safest and most loving of environments. Being wrong when it feels like there’s not much grace is so much harder.

A core part of our journeys as Christians is metanoia, or conversion. Our baptismal covenant wisely includes 6 questions as part of the examination of the candidates – 3 of them are called the ‘renunciations’, three opportunities to renounce the influence of evil over us. The next three are the ‘affirmations’, three opportunities to affirm our desire to turn towards Christ.

Conversion can’t happen if we’re always right.

The renunciation of evil and the commitment to follow Christ represent the journey of a lifetime of conversion. A conversion that is taking place every day of our lives, in every relationship.

The Syrophoenician woman creates the space for Jesus to have a change of heart by persisting. She challenges him to exercise the values that he’s been practicing in his ministry – the reality of God’s love and grace for everyone, this time even Gentiles. She invites Jesus to expand the fellowship of his table and opens the possibilities of the breadth of his kingdom. She invites him to go beyond a binary, beyond either/or towards both/and.

The story tells us that he returned from the region of Tyre and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of the Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. This is like saying he went from Fredericksburg to Richmond by way of D.C. (the traffic on the 95 would have extended his time with us here on earth). It seems like the Syrophoenician woman inspired him to go further into non-Jewish territory.

She is the second non-Jewish person that he heals and the third follows right after her, after which he feeds 4,000 people still in Gentile territory.

This story reminds us that the disappointment and hurt that we cause each other can all still be used by God for the good of the kingdom. Even our prejudices can’t keep God’s grace out.

To close, I want to share the words that Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber shares at house brunches to welcome newcomers to the church. In her greeting, she tells them:

“At some point, I will disappoint you or the church will let you down. Please decide on this side of that happening if, after it happens, you will still stick around. Because if you leave, you will miss the way that God’s grace comes in and fills in the cracks of our brokenness. And it’s too beautiful to miss.
Don’t miss it.”

May our Christian journey follow in Jesus’ footsteps and may it be a wonderful adventure of stumbling, making mistakes healing and growth. Amen.