There are no boundaries to God’s love, and our calling as Christ in the world is to proclaim this, and name and take down any boundaries anyone puts up, anyone, until all know the embrace of God’s love.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 20, year A
Texts: Matthew 15:(10-20) 21-28 [also read 1-9]; Isaiah 56:1, 6-8; Psalm 67
Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
There are no boundaries to God’s love, no national borders, no ethnic distinctions. All people are within God’s healing love.
That’s the joy of God’s Word. Today Isaiah tells God’s chosen people Israel that the LORD God also welcomes foreigners to the holy mountain, to the Temple, which will be a house of prayer not just for the Jewish people but for all peoples. The psalmist invokes God’s way and saving health over all nations, to the ends of the earth.
This is not the normal way of religion, something Jesus addresses with the Pharisees today. Religion is good at insider/outsider language, setting up boundaries between those who can be loved by God and those who can’t. Isaiah and the psalm are challenging words to any who believed God’s love for Israel meant God couldn’t love anyone else.
But it’s more than this. God’s boundary-free love flows throughout the Scriptures, and throughout Christ’s whole ministry.
From the beginning, outsiders were included in Christ’s mission.
In Matthew’s birth story, Magi, foreign astrologers, came to this child with rich gifts. God’s Jewish Messiah was already reaching beyond that ethnic boundary.
At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has already driven a legion of demons out of two foreigners into a herd of pigs in Gentile territory. At this point, he’s already healed the slave of a Roman centurion, a hated oppressor of the Jewish people. Today Jesus challenges the Pharisees’ human rules for religion, claims God’s love isn’t limited by Jewish law, and heals another foreigner of demonic possession.
All this leads directly to the love the Triune God shows at the cross, taking on all of human sin and evil and pain and death to draw all people – all people, Christ says – into God’s heart.
There are no boundaries to God’s love, no such things as foreigners and aliens, no unacceptable ones, none who are excluded. That’s the Good News of Christ that fills us, includes us, shapes us into Christ for the welcome of all God’s children and the healing of the world.
But listen carefully, now.
Everything these readings teach us, everything we’ve ever learned from Christ Jesus, everything the Holy Spirit has changed in my heart, every bit of Christly love that’s been given me, cringes at the racist words Jesus uses towards this woman. Using a common Jewish insult for foreigners, he says she’s not a child, she’s a dog.
This is what neo-Nazis and white supremacists paint on signs they bring to Charlottesville. Classify another human being as non-human, and they’re no longer your concern. That’s what Jesus is saying: “I came for the Jews, not for foreign dogs.”
This is extremely distressing to hear. But you’ve called me among you to listen to God’s Word and speak God’s truth, to proclaim God’s Good News, to help you understand the Scriptures and the heart of God for you and for the world. And I say to you that everything I’ve learned from Jesus himself, everything I know from Genesis to Revelation about the heart of God for this world, cries out at these words Jesus uses.
We’re tempted to try and explain them away.
Some suggest he was trying to teach the disciples that this anti-foreign prejudice was wrong. I’m a flawed, evil human being, and I can think of several ways Jesus could have done that without dehumanizing her.
Some suggest Jesus was challenging her faith, encouraging her to stand up for herself. There are a number of ways he could’ve done that without a racist epithet.
Some say Jesus was just quoting an old saying. Well, my maternal grandmother once said to me, in absolute seriousness with no irony or humor, “you can trust a Swede to cheat you every time.” I’m sure she learned that from her forebears. But I don’t believe it or repeat it, and I’m sinful.
Some suggest Jesus needed to learn his mission as Messiah was broader than the Jewish people. But Matthew’s told us, and Mark and Luke agree, that by now he’d already crossed that boundary several times, apparently without problem.
There’s no excuse that has integrity with the rest of Scripture, or makes sense in light of the cross, no excuse that’s tenable or credible. Nothing can wash over the picture of a man dismissing a woman, a person of power humiliating a vulnerable person, one human calling another human a dog. Jesus himself says today that what defiles is what comes out of the mouth, not what goes into the mouth. What excuse can override these horrible words coming from Jesus’ mouth?
Now, we’re flawed human beings. Jesus may have reasons we don’t know, and, like Job, we’ll have to let that be. But we can’t find an excuse.
There is a light in this story, though. Look at this woman. Try to take your eyes off of her. She is the Good News of God shining from this text. And she shows a path to hope.
In my senior year at seminary, Mary put food on our table and a roof over our heads by doing in-home child care.
Hannah was 17 months when the year started, and this enabled me to finish seminary and Mary to stay home.
One of the necessary things we taught this little flock of kids was not to hit each other. Now, Mary and I chose not to spank our children, seeking other, non-violent, ways to discipline. But one day I lost my temper with my daughter and gave her a sharp spanking on her bottom. And this 20-month-old child looked up at me with clarity and truth and said, “Daddy, we don’t hit.”
She only knew that truth because of her parents. She called me to account for my own heart, my own teaching, and said, “this isn’t right, and you taught me that.”
That is the courage of this woman, standing up to the Son of God, holding him accountable to himself. She joins a great line of biblical people who, in fear and trembling, called God to account, demanded God be true to God’s own way. Abraham, overlooking Sodom and Gomorrah, says to God that God’s own justice and love are offended by the plan to destroy those cities. Moses in the wilderness argues with God that God’s care and love, God’s saving these people from slavery, means God can’t throw them away.
We can only say Jesus is wrong here because of Jesus himself. He may have had his reasons. But we have to say, “This is wrong, and you taught us it was wrong.”
Because if we can’t name such words as wrong just because Jesus said them, how can we face our own hidden prejudice and racism?
The harder we look for justification for something that makes our hearts sick, the more we need to face it, even here. I know you people. You care about racism and prejudice, you are a people who include all in God’s love. But even here, there are things we need to face.
We need to face that we can live many days and months without thinking about how our systems oppress people of color, aliens among us, those who speak other languages, have other faiths. That we don’t try every day to change our society that permits such things to exist, even in the heart of our judicial system and our police forces.
We need to face that we all have unbidden, unwelcome thoughts about people come to our minds, whether it’s moving to the other side of a sidewalk when approaching a person different from us, or assuming things about others by how they look, or dress, or speak. We need to stop excusing ourselves, and name that we have work to do.
We need to face that the white supremacy, neo-Nazi movements reflect a truth about our nation far deeper than just their hate and violence. We’re a country that values individualism over the common good, a country founded by slave-owners that in every generation rejects immigrants, people of different ethnicities, people of different faiths. We were founded by people looking for freedom for their religion, but not that of others. Fringe groups are only the boils and pustules breaking out on the surface. Until we hold ourselves and our politicians accountable to the ideals of our founding documents, the ideals on the Statue of Liberty’s base, we will never be rid of this deeper sickness.
Until we stop looking for excuses, we’ll never start the hard path to healing. Until we find the courage of a 20-month-old child or a foreign woman and speak up, even to God, and certainly to ourselves, we’ll never be open to the powerful, expansive, non-exclusive, all-embracing love of the Triune God for the whole of the creation.
There are no boundaries to God’s love, no national borders, no ethnic distinctions. All people are within God’s healing love.
That’s the joy of the Triune God for this creation. That’s the joy throughout the Scriptures in God’s saving love for all peoples. That’s our joy when we, too, are included in this love.
Christ has come to break down all dividing walls, all barriers and prejudices that keep people apart, to bring all people out of darkness into marvelous light. To witness to the heart of God for the whole creation.
Let us ask God for the grace to open our hearts and our eyes to see the truth, however hard it may be, and name it, and for the Spirit’s grace and strength to then take the path of Christly love that draws all people together. God give us grace to pray, as we did at the beginning of this liturgy:
“God of all peoples, your arms reach out to embrace all those who call upon you. Teach us as disciples of your Son to love the world with compassion and constancy, that your name may be known throughout the earth.”
Amen, Gracious God, make this so.
