The Rev. Allan Sandlin, associate rector> click here for the Scripture for the day
Doral Randolph Sandlin, my father’s younger brother and the last of Ethel Eugenia Brown Sandlin’s seven children, died this past week. He’d already lived about 20 years longer than any of us expected him to live, but his death has been hard on our whole family.
Like his brothers and sisters, he grew up during the Great Depression, raised by a remarkable mother whose husband was killed in a train wreck in 1932, leaving her with little money and all those children to care for. After high school, my uncle received an appointment to the Naval Academy and played basketball there. He flew jets during the Vietnam War and then taught aeronautical engineering at Cal Poly for many years. He was the finest whistler I’ve ever heard in person and he loved the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Well, no one’s perfect.
He had lots of natural gifts and abilities but above all Uncle Doral was someone who loved having his mind challenged and I think from time to time he even took pleasure in having his mind changed. He’d sit down at the kitchen table with his older brother, my father, the Southern Baptist theologian and preacher and ask him a question he knew Dad couldn’t resist. “Do you believe in the virgin birth?” or “What do you think about women preachers?” Now, my father always considered himself to be biblically conservative and socially moderate, but compared to his brother, he was a flaming liberal.
Their conversations would start off pleasantly enough, but they usually wound up getting overheated. Dad would get increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t convince his brother of his misguided thinking. Uncle Doral stayed cool, happy just listening and talking though I suspect he kind of got a kick out of watching his big brother get excited. Dad rarely stayed cool enough to realize that once in awhile his brother did change his mind. Uncle Doral was very good about not letting his brother know that he’d won the argument.
I have a hunch that he would have liked today’s gospel story about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. He’d have found it very interesting and he’d have saved up lots of questions for Dad’s next visit so they could discuss it.
But I was wondering, when you heard it read just now, did it startle you at all or make you a little nervous, to imagine Jesus behaving like this? Were you hoping I’d have some logical explanation for it, something that says it didn’t really happen this way or that Jesus didn’t really compare this woman and her child to dogs hungrily waiting for scraps under the table?
If Jesus had his picture on Facebook, one that his disciples posted for all the world to see, don’t you suppose it would show us Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Generosity, Mr. There’s-enough-here-for everybody-to-have-some-bread-and-we’ll-have-lots-left-over? But that’s not the Jesus we bump into today. Perhaps Jesus is tired and grumpy and needs a break after his non-stop teaching and healing and preaching among his own people in Galilee. So he crosses the boundary of his home territory and escapes for the weekend to Tyre, a place where Gentiles live, people he’s not accustomed to encountering at all.
A woman comes looking for Jesus. She’s a Gentile woman from Syrophoenicia and under normal circumstances, a Jewish man, a teacher of some renown like Jesus, wouldn’t have been caught dead in the same house with her. But she seeks him out, hoping against hope that he’ll be able to rid her precious daughter of the demon possessing her. We expect Jesus to respond to her with kindness and assurances that if she has enough faith, her daughter will be healed.
But did you hear what 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.
It’s shocking, isn’t it? Even if you’ve read and studied this passage a hundred times before, it still catches us off guard. Jesus is rude, even hostile and has clearly forgotten the “royal law” James holds up for us in the epistle reading. Remember, it’s the second part of the great commandment Jesus himself gave us: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It seems he’s momentarily just forgotten that.
Some biblical scholars, though not many, say Jesus was in control the whole time, that he was just testing her. But I doubt it. I think he simply and quite humanly changed his mind. His understanding of his mission grew, perhaps he grew some himself.
The woman doesn’t behave like we’d expect her to either—she doesn’t shrink back and say “well, thanks anyway, I’ll guess I’ll have to look elsewhere.” No. She has something to teach Jesus when she says “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She corrects Jesus and points him in the right direction.
So I was wondering…who is the Syrophoenician woman for us? Who makes us uneasy when they show up in church, asking questions, maybe even demanding to be heard? Who pushes the boundaries of our comfort level and makes us wish they’d find someplace else to call home?
“Let the children be fed first…”
“Here’s the problem with the Episcopal Church today.” Every head at the table turned to face our colleague, Norma, who has a track record for saying provocative things in our monthly Commission on Ministry meetings down at the Cathedral. She’s an African-American educator and when she speaks, we listen. We’d been talking about the decline in membership in the Episcopal Church and what the next generation of clergy leadership might look like—how they need to be both visionaries and good managers. As usual at our meetings, she’d been listening very attentively to the conversation, not saying much. And then she let us have it, right between the eyes:
“The problem with the Episcopal Church is that we don’t know how to sing ‘Just as I am.’” She elaborated. “We don’t know how to invite people to join us, to come and worship with us and work with us. At the church where I eventually became a member, I hung around coffee hour for months as a visitor, hoping someone would talk with me, someone would invite me to become a member, thinking that someone would have an idea how to do that.”
Norma wasn’t suggesting that we institute a Baptist-style altar call at the end of our services, softly humming “Just as I am” as the pastor stands at the front of the church urging people to come forward and make a profession of faith or join the church. She wasn’t asking for that. We already have an altar call in the Episcopal Church every Sunday morning when all are invited to receive Holy Communion.
But I think she’s right. We don’t know how to sing “Just as I am” in the Episcopal Church. We aren’t very good about the invitation piece of hospitality, asking people to come to church with us and then asking them to stay and become members. And the larger truth may be that we aren’t very good at sharing the good news of the gospel in the first place; we’re pretty lousy at telling the story of Jesus and even worse at telling our own stories.
And then we keep a fairly tight watch on the boundaries surrounding who we’ll welcome into our churches and we’re reluctant to invite people who aren’t, in fact, already members of the club.
Across the table, someone else asked the question “Are we proud of being an exclusive church?” I winced and so did everyone else as we nodded our heads in affirmation. We don’t really know how to sing “Just as I am”.
If Jesus changed his mind about the Syrophoenician woman, do you suppose we might change our minds? Or another way of asking that: Do you suppose we might radically change the way we think about hospitality? What would radical welcome look like at Holy Trinity?
For as long as I’ve been an Episcopalian, I remember seeing those signs by the side of the road that say “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” I think we’ve got one right on the corner of Sycamore and Sycamore Place. I always smile when I pass one of those signs, taking a fair amount of pride in our anthem of being a welcoming church. But I wonder how seriously we take it? Do we really welcome everyone?
I’ve heard it said that evangelism in the Episcopal Church never gets off the ground because we think that everyone who wants to be an Episcopalian already is one. You know that there’s at least a kernel of truth in that.
So can we learn something new?
When Jesus met the Syrophoenician woman, his world-view told him that his mission was just to his own people, to people who spoke the same language, had the same ethnic origin as he did. Jesus started out that day with a narrow perspective, convinced that he was already reaching those who God wanted him to reach—his own Jewish people.
But this unexpected, surprising encounter with a woman turned out to offer Jesus the gift of a lifetime. She opened his eyes and his ears to the possibility that his audience was to include everyone and he changed his mind. Jesus discovered he had some new neighbors and from this moment on, his ministry, his work, his mission will include all of them.
And so, who are our neighbors?
Maybe they are people who will see the new solar array and be curious about a church that’d do something so green.
Maybe they are families struggling to make ends meet or families with children in the Holy Trinity Pre-School.
Maybe our neighbors are first-year students at Agnes Scott or maybe they wandered upstairs from DEAM, looking for help.
Maybe our neighbor is a woman who moved to Atlanta from New York to be near her grandchildren.
Maybe our neighbors are from the deaf community and have only just learned about our wonderful interpreters here at Holy Trinity.
Maybe our neighbors are that family who chooses to drive past four or five other Episcopal churches just to get here on Sunday mornings.
And of course, our neighbors also live in Honduras and Haiti, in the fire-ravaged hills of Southern California and the war fields of Afghanistan. As the opening line in the prayer for Labor Day puts it: Almighty God, you have so linked our lives one with another that all we do affects, for good or ill, all other lives…our neighbors are indeed nearby and far away.
In the second story in this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus unstops the ears of a man who was hearing impaired. Having had his own ears opened by the unnamed Syrophoenician woman, Jesus now proceeds to do some ear-opening work himself.
And that work goes on. I wonder what Jesus is up to here at Holy Trinity?
Maybe, just maybe, he’s nudging us to do some neighbor-inviting and risk sharing our stories of God’s love. Maybe Jesus is inviting us to begin living into the inclusive, extravagant ways God is calling us to act, to become the body of Christ in the world.
I’ve not been able to stop humming “Just as I am” ever since Norma mentioned it the other day. So late yesterday afternoon when I thought I had the sermon all wrapped up, I sat down at the piano in our living room and played through this old Baptist hymn I learned so well as a child.
You probably know the first verse by heart. But if you kept singing, you’d discover in the following verses some decent theology, some words of encouragement, of invitation and challenge. Now, I suppose I could just stand up here and read those verses to you as a closing refrain to this sermon... but you know me better than that. And who knows? Maybe I was wrong about Episcopalians not knowing how to sing “Just as I am”. It’s on page 693 in your hymnal.
Just as I am, without one plea,
but that thy blood was shed for me,
and that thou bidd’st me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, though tossed about
with many a conflict, many a doubt;
fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind;
sight, riches, healing of the mind,
yea, all I need, in thee to find,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, thou wilt receive:
wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve,
because thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, thy love unknown
has broken every barrier down;
now to be thine, yea, thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, of thy great love
the breadth, length, depth and height to prove,
here for a season, then above:
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
No comments:
Post a Comment