Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 10, 2006

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. (Mark 7:24-37)

[Jesus] set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, ”Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

On a September day as crisp and as beautiful as this one, I am reminded, as always, of what the poet G. K. Chesterton once said of a beautiful day:

“The world does not lack for wonder,

only for a sense of wonder.”

And in these tender hours, as Margaret mentioned, leading up to the fifth anniversary of September 11, where beauty and fragility commingle by the moment, I am also reminded of what the great writer of children’s literature E. B. White once said:

“If the world were merely beautiful, that would be easy;

if it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.

But I arise in the morning torn between a desire

to improve or save the world and a desire to enjoy or savor the world.

This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Indeed, the very same days that we arise to the sounds of the morning cardinal and hints of autumn in the air are the very same days that we hear interviews on MPR with people recalling where they were and what they felt on September 11; how it felt then, how it feels now. Has the war really been a deterrent to terrorism, or are Americans less safe now than they were five years ago? How then do we speak of beauty, of God, of savoring the day? We do, because, in spite of everything, as the psalmist tells us, it is still God’s world. “I lift my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from God, who made heaven and earth.”

Shakina shikamo. Shikamo, a Swahili word we learned in Tanzania, which is an address of reverence and respect. Since Tanzania, now sometimes between the morning news and the first cardinals on the wire on my way to church, I find myself murmuring to their creator and mine, Shakina shikamo. “Oh, Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” For just as beauty, good, and love are mysteries of life impossible to explain, so, too, is the existence of war, fear, and innocent suffering a mystery impossible to explain.

“There is in the world beauty, and there are the humiliated,” yet another great observer of the human situation Albert Camus once wrote, “And we must strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful to the one nor to the other.” It is still God’s world, in spite of everything.

No doubt, Jesus, in our story from Mark 7 for today, needed a moment to weigh, to savor the beauty of the day. Maybe Jesus needed a break from the intensity of the ministry of care on the one hand and of confrontation on the other. Maybe Jesus was longing to withdraw from the crowds for a moment of prayer. The text doesn’t tell us exactly why, only that Jesus withdrew to a region Phoenicia, to be removed from the demands of the crowds and the debates and the tussles with the religious leaders of his own culture and tradition.

For six chapters already in Mark, Jesus has been healing, teaching, casting out demons, and all the while arguing with the religious leaders, to no avail. The wisdom of compassion takes precedence over the rules of convention Jesus says so much with what he does as with what he says. For six chapters, he has been trying to get through to the religious folk, insisting that the human situation takes precedence over religious purity and social convention.

And here, in the seventh chapter, in this presumably away-from-it-all place, an outsider this time finds Jesus and asks him simply that he heal her daughter. And what does Jesus do? He tosses out the kind of religion that he has been hearing back home from the Pharisees—an ancient religious proverb about not taking the children’s bread and giving it to the dogs, that is, the children of Israel versus outsiders. And this Phoenician woman is the first, the first one in seven chapters who gets it, who understands and articulates what Jesus has been trying to say to his own people back home all along: that compassion takes precedence over ancient law and social customs. In the best of good-debate strategy, she challenges the metaphor itself. “Yes, Lord,” she says, turning the metaphor on its head, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the children’s table.”

What mother has not seen food go under the table to the dog? And show me an outsider to a religious tradition or a dominant culture who does not see more clearly the truth, hidden within a tradition, obscured for those who espouse it themselves.

This Syrophoenician woman alone in the Gospel points out—no doubt, because of her outsider and desperate status—what Jesus has been trying to say all along: that compassion is not bound by custom, nationality, race, social location, or creed. And Jesus sees, maybe even he is relieved and grateful, that she understands. And her daughter is made well.

Children and parents across the Twin Cities have been through that proverbial first day of school, some last week, some just this week. And for many, at least in our school, what precedes the first day of school is an open house.

This year, as we were walking toward our schoolhouse on our night of the open house, as we were walking toward the door we were suddenly confronted with a scene in the middle of a busy street where someone was trying to get a stray puppy out of the way of the oncoming traffic. Now, this was a beautiful, maybe five-month-old, white English springer spaniel, all frisky and wiggly-and-waggly happy, with liver-colored spots, who one can only imagine was a brand-new puppy of some little child in the neighborhood. We caught the puppy, of course. It had a collar but no tag; put him in the shade in our car, and called animal control. No one had reported a lost puppy. “If people don’t follow the rules, making sure their animals have a tag with a clear name, address, and phone number, if they don’t keep them tied up,” and on and on the rules went on the other end of the phone. These people aren’t moms, I thought to myself. It must be why they are called “animal control” rather than “animal care.” “Just give me a call when the owner calls,” I said.

So after the open house we took the puppy home and put him in our garage, until, sure enough, about an hour later animal control, bless their hearts, put the owner in touch with us. There indeed was a frantic mother on the other end of the line: “The puppy had gotten off a leash in the back yard. Thanks for catching him. Could we come get him?” Now, in my mind’s imagination, I imagined another mother who looked pretty much like me, with a daughter who looked pretty much like mine, looking for a lost puppy, pretty much like we would look retrieving ours if it was lost. And so when we pulled around to the back of the house to meet them at our garage, I was suddenly startled to be reminded that not everyone looks just like us. For this was an African-American mom with an African-American daughter, who looked quite different from us, finding themselves in a neighborhood quite different from theirs, but frantic to find their puppy, whose name turned out to be “Freckles,” pretty much as we would be, and with a heart for a puppy pretty much the same as us.

Time and again, it is startling in the Gospels just how much Jesus appears to be blind to cultural distinctions and unimpressed with religious and regional boundaries. In our story in Mark, it is a foreigner in a foreign place who challenges this entrenched metaphor that Jesus has been seeking to challenge with his own people in his own country all along. And Jesus sees not with the mind but with the heart and goes directly to the heart of the situation, and the child is healed.

The world we inhabit at any given moment, whether we are in a moment of global or local awareness, is beautiful, and it is challenging. And each and every day we never know when we get up in the morning whether this is a day to savor or to save. There is in the world beauty, and there are the humiliated. But it is still God’s world, in spite of everything. And in the ministry of this Jesus, we see the one who loved the world that God so loved with a divine love. The same Jesus who loved the banquets and the weddings, who turned the water into wine, is the same Jesus who, when faced with human desperation, makes no distinction, but goes straight to the heart of the matter with divine wisdom. And throughout the Gospels, while the critics harden and the disciples don’t get it, it is the outsider who sees. If we, the disciples of Jesus today, are to savor and to save, whose wisdom will we hear, whose reality will we see?

Amen.