This sermon was preached for Sunday, August 20, 2023 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon were: Genesis 45:1-15, Matthew 15:10-28, and Psalm 133.
Back in June, at a vigil at the Enfield United Church of Christ, all the gathered folks stood to sing a hymn by Mark A. Miller that brought me to tears. It was a simple song, with a simple message - the song that the pastor, the Rev. Dr. Greg Gray, explained his church sang at every welcoming of a new member. It goes like this:
“Draw the circle, draw the circle wide…No one stands alone, we stand side by side. Draw the circle wide, draw it wider still. Let this be our song, no one stands alone, standing side by side. Draw the circle wide.”
The act of drawing a circle is powerful and sacred, and I think deeply ingrained. How many mammals instinctively form a circle around the young, the old, and the vulnerable to protect them from predators? We encircle those we care for to let them know they are loved and to keep them safe.
One way to picture the overarching narrative of the Bible is as a story of ever-widening circles. First, the circle of God’s love is drawn around just two people, then a family, then a nation, the house of Israel. Again and again, God’s people must trust in the protection of God’s encircling love in the face of hostile enemies, occupying armies, famine, flood, and plague. At the same time, through it all, prophets and outsiders continually remind God’s people that God’s vision is wider, and wider still.
The woman in our Gospel story is one of those outsiders. She doesn’t have a name but church tradition has called her Justa, so I’ll go with that. Justa is a Canaanite, not part of the house of Israel. The Canaanites were one of Israel’s ancient enemies, the indigenous people who lived in the land of Canaan before the Israelites moved in from their desert wanderings. So Justa stands firmly outside the circle. She even meets Jesus here at its border.
First, when Justa brings her pleas for help to Jesus, she encounters silence. Jesus straight up ignores her. Justa cries out even more loudly.
Next, the disciples try to turn Justa away. Jesus turns her away, too, saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But Justa comes closer anyway and kneels before him.
Then, when Jesus insults her, Justa doesn’t react with violence or even anger. She doesn’t even refute his accusation. She uses clever words right back.
Justa responds to silence with loudness, distance with closeness, and hurtful words with disarming ones. It takes humility and vulnerability but at every turn, Justa insists on love.
In doing so, Justa uses Jesus’ own teachings about non-violence and turning the other cheek to hold him accountable to God’s promise: the Messiah will be a light to all nations, that God’s salvation will reach to the ends of the earth. God’s circle is wide, wide, wide.
I have to say it’s uncomfortable and distressing to watch Jesus respond to a desperate woman with silence, rejection, and insults. And yet, I wonder if that’s part of the point. This is after all, the same Jesus who preaches about asking and seeking and knocking. Who tells parables about a persistent widow who berates an unjust judge and neighbors that make other neighbors get up in the middle of the night. Jesus encourages persistence, respects persistence. Jesus calls it faith. Could it be that Jesus, ever the teacher, knows that it is the surprising, unpredictable sayings and actions that keep us learning? The Messiah allowing himself to be rhetorically defeated in the classical Greek style by an indigenous woman - that is a story worth retelling.
Justa has faith that God can heal her daughter. She also believes she has a right to God’s love and mercy, even as a Canaanite. In the end, Jesus doesn’t require that Justa become Jewish in order for her daughter to be healed. Justa doesn’t need to step inside the protective circle of God’s love. Jesus draws the circle wider to include her.
On their Monday podcast, the New York Times interviewed the pastor of the oldest church in Lahaina, Maui in Hawaii. Waiola Church was significantly burned by the recent wildfires. When the reporter asked Waiola’s pastor, Anela Rose, what gives her hope as she looks toward rebuilding her church, Anela spoke of a pivotal moment in the church’s past. In the midst of political turmoil in the last years of the 1800s, the church’s white American pastor closed the doors of the church to the native Hawaiian congregants. But the people had church anyway, somewhere else, gathering together until the pastor was driven out.
That persistence, that strength, gives Anela hope. The people of Waiola Church belong to more than a building. They belong to God and one another. They trusted that the circle of God’s love was wider than the walls of their barred church, wider than even their pastor understood. They believed in the power of God’s promises and they knew those promises included them - their whole indigenous selves. Because of their persistence, the story of Waiola church did not end in locked doors and it will not end in ash.
 |
| Side by side photos of Waiola Church in Lahaina, Maui. Associated Press. |
I wonder if you or someone you love has ever been made to feel that you are outside of God’s care and protection. I wonder if followers of Christ ever told you to pipe down or go away. Has a religious authority ever led you to believe that you are outside of God's love and undeserving of God's mercy? Or worse, I wonder if you have ever reached for God in a moment of pain and crisis, only to be met with silence. None of those moments are the end of your story, either.
Justa’s story did not end in silence or distance or rejection because she trusted in what she knew about the wideness of God’s mercy, because she persisted and insisted on her right to it - not just hers, her daughter’s, too. She did it all for the sake of her child.
Today we gather in our memorial garden, surrounded by the ashes of all sorts of folks who had faith in God’s promises. For more than six decades now, the people of St. Mark’s have persisted through crisis and tragedy, clergy scandal and bitter conflict, flooding and closed doors. They kept gathering every Sunday not just for their sake, but for our sake, too. So that generations to come might know and trust in God’s promise of healing, wholeness, salvation.
You, too, have the right to feel encircled by God’s love. It is an act of faith to insist on that right, even from Jesus himself.
God’s circle is made real and powerful through love, and it’s expanded through love, too. Persistent, loud, insistent love.
Comments
Post a Comment