Have you ever felt like an outsider? You see a group doing something and want to be a part, but you have no idea how to break in? Perhaps you were just hired to a new office, and someone tells you that the staff takes a break at 10. You wander down to the break room only to discover everyone is clustered in groups of two or three deep in conversation, so you slip back to your office to get some work done. Or maybe you saw four acquaintances having coffee together. They are laughing and clearly good friends, so you smile, wave, and then leave them to their happy world, feeling like you’re not part of the group.
Jess and I arrived at seminary a year after two friends of ours, Jeff and Melissa, had started. We actually came a year later than planned because of the arrival of our firstborn. So, it was great having these two friends there, but the problem was that our friends had a full year to build community with others. And they had.
Jeff and I knew each other from our time working at summer camp. He was eager to help integrate me into life at seminary. This was the time when Texas Hold’em poker had become popular, so one of the guys Jeff was friends with had started the Rooster Coop, which was his underground poker game that happened once a month. Jeff was hoping I could join.
The Rooster Coop had rules. You had to be in the coop to play or be invited by a member if there was an open spot. You had to wear a sport coat. Even though it was in the musty basement of one of the seminary’s apartment buildings, the game felt super exclusive. The players knew each other well, but they weren’t looking to grow the group.
So, yes, I did get an invitation to play fairly early on, thanks to Jeff, but the next game rolled around without an invitation. And the next one. I eventually made it to a couple of these evenings. They were fun, but I always felt like an outsider. Within a few weeks I came to realize that Jeff’s friends wouldn’t necessarily turn into my friends, that his community wouldn’t become mine, so I turned my attention to building relationships elsewhere.
It’s hard feeling outside of something as silly as a poker game, but feeling othered — feeling like an outsider — is a routine part of life, isn’t it? We are all very good at closing off our groups from others, and all of us struggle with welcoming others into our groups. It’s human nature, and that push and pull of exclusion and inclusion is part of the pages of our scriptures. It’s one of the things I appreciate about the Bible: it doesn’t hide our very real struggle with the ways of God, holding a mirror up to who we are while also holding forth who God is.
We see that impulse towards separation throughout the Bible. It’s there in the Exodus, where God is claiming a special relationship with the Hebrew people and requiring them to live in a way that is wholly different than the lifestyle of those around them. I’ve actually been reading Leviticus of late — I know I am strange, so just go with it — but all of those laws in Leviticus are put in place to differentiate the Hebrews from others because of this special relationship they have with Yahweh. Forgetting that God covenanted with their father Abraham to be a blessing to all the nations, they took this special relationship and turned inward. They weren’t seeking to be a light to the nations.
Fast-forwarding hundreds of years, when the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, we see this same inward turn in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. As the people come to rebuild their lives from the ashes of their exile, they recommit themselves to what they believe are the ways of God. In these books that even includes ending their marriages with people who weren’t Jewish, they were going for purity because they believed that pleased Yahweh.
That impulse shows up in our gospel text today, which is always a hard one to read because it’s one of the few places in the Bible where it appears that Jesus is a jerk. Our image of Jesus is one of love and grace — as it should be! — but he sure doesn’t come off that way here.
Jesus and his team have left their home base of ministry in Galilee, taking a two- to three-day journey northwest into Phoenicia, to the region of Tyre and Sidon. This is an uncomfortable place for these Jews. They are in foreign territory, and they are very much in the minority. They also carry with them their history and customs that have separated them from their neighbors. Keep in mind that the people living in this area are not only not Jewish but also are the descendants of those who were removed by the Jews from the Promised Land hundreds of years earlier. These are people living separate lives. They have stereotypes and assumptions about each other.
On her home turf, this Canaanite woman confronts Jesus, using words that show she understands who he is and how important he is. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David!” she pleads. Her daughter is ill, and she’s desperate for help. In other words, she believes that Jesus is the one who can enter this brokenness, be present to it, and even bring healing there. He can bring life out of death.
She pleads, and Jesus simply stands there silently. Uncomfortable, his disciples urge him to walk away from this scene. After all, she’s not a part of their group. So, he offers her and his disciples a line that seems to fit with this exclusionary strain we see in Ezra and Nehemiah. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” a quick and easy way to brush her off, right?
In other words: Not my problem. Not my mission.
She persists. Falling to her knees, she begs for his help, but he pushes back again with these harsh words, “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” How humiliating! How dehumanizing! One can imagine the smiles on the disciples’ faces as they see Jesus affirm what they hold to be true — that God is only for them.
But she pushes harder. “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Game. Set. Match.
Jesus holds her up as an example of great faith and heals her daughter.
This is a story about a foreign woman’s persistence and faith, for sure, but it is also a story about how the disciples’ own prejudice blinds them from what God is actually doing. This woman is transgressive. She’s a woman breaking social barriers for what she needs. In public, rabbis did not even speak to female members of their own families, but here is this woman approaching the rabbi Jesus with her request.
Jesus is testing both this woman and his disciples. Do you know who passes the test? She does. Do you know who fails? The disciples! The harsh words that Jesus speaks to her are the very thing that his disciples were raised to believe. God is only for the Jews. This is for us, not them. In her desperation, she’s not having it.
Ken Bailey, who was a scholar of the New Testament and who spent much of his life living in the Middle East, cuts to the core of this. “Jesus chooses to take the theological attitudes of his disciples and press them to their ultimate conclusion….In effect, Jesus tells the disciples, ‘You will be happy if I get rid of this woman, and limit my ministry to Israel. Very well, I will verbalize where your theology leads us.’”
And that theology leads us to an ugly place, not only theologically but also interpersonally. (It’s important here to note that what we believe about God directly influences how we treat others. If our God is only for certain people who are just like us, it’s so easy to treat others badly who are not like us.) Bailey points out, “The verbalization is authentic to their attitudes and feelings, but shocking when put into words and thrown in the face of a desperate, kneeling woman pleading for the sanity of her daughter. It is actually embarrassing to hear and see one’s deepest prejudices verbalized and demonstrated….Her response is a deadly blow to their carefully nurtured prejudices against women and Gentiles.”
Who they thought was out of bounds, Jesus says, is welcomed. In those people and places they assumed to be God-forsaken, Jesus shows up and still heals. His healing power and presence is bringing life where there was death. This work of God is so amazing that it tears down all of the walls that have divided us. In other words, there is no out of bounds to God’s love.
As I said earlier, that push and pull of exclusion and inclusion is present throughout scripture. Our psalm today is one that glories in how God chose to work through a particular people so that they could be a blessing. It asks for God’s blessing (in an echo of that well-known one from the priests in Numbers) — “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us.” But the psalm goes on to revel in how the nations will see this blessing and stream towards Israel to know this God too. All the earth will stream to this God whose love is so great that it cannot be contained by even the best of religion, by borders, by gender, or by race.
That’s actually what shows up on the final pages of the Bible itself. The end of Revelation is a picture of all the nations coming to God, who reigns in love and justice. It’s a glimpse of what heaven is like. Heaven is not the country club — the exclusive domain of those who can claim membership, who can afford the dues and look the part. Heaven is not just for people who look, speak, and act like us. It’s the glorious menagerie of all of humanity finally brought under God’s loving lordship, made new through Jesus Christ.
If it’s not clear, then let me make it so. The Bible may show the push and pull of how humans wrestle with exclusion and inclusion, but it is my conviction that the Bible lands on welcome. When we ask for the face of the Lord to shine on us, like the psalm does, we get the very face of Jesus shining on this desperate Gentile woman, so in need of help and rescue and getting it from God in Christ.
The love and mercy of God is the very thing that is bold enough to stand firm in the face of prejudice. It is going to defeat the darkness. It is the thing that hopes even when things feel hopeless.
It is that example of Jesus that we carry on through the ministry of the church in this very moment. Jesus was not afraid to go into hard places where others thought he shouldn’t go. Jesus shows up in our hardships and calls us to live out that we are a people who believe he can bring healing out of brokenness.
That continues to be the work of the church. Earlier this week I heard about how one church puts this theology into action. This is a small Presbyterian church in the upper Midwest. It has folks of all ages there. One of them is a 43-year-old man with a small family, including young children. This man hand’t been feeling well, so he went to the doctor to be checked out. This visit led to tests and scans. Eventually, he got some really hard news. He had an inoperable brain tumor. There was nothing they could do to fix it. They told him he likely had another couple of years to live.
These kinds of diagnoses and stories happen all the time, but in this case, I love what his church family did. They surrounded this man and his family. This is hard news. It is sad. Tragic, even. Yet, what did they do? They said, “We are not afraid of this, and we will walk with you.” In other words, even the hardest things in life, even those things that grieve us, they’re not out of bounds for the love of God. Christians are those who can stare in the face of the things that bring death and dare to hope for resurrection, for new life. They stare in the abyss of an inoperable brain tumor and still ask for God’s blessing, for God’s face to shine even there.
We believe that Jesus is the one who can enter this brokenness, be present to it, and even bring healing there. He can bring life out of death.
That’s always been the work of the church, but these days I think it’s important to lean into that work. We are not afraid of sorrow or pain, and we are with you. We are not afraid of the darkness, and we’re ready to hold onto hope and to shine light.
In a world that craves happiness and that does not know what to do with the hurt and tragedy, it’s the work of the church to be steadfast in loving others through the pain. It’s the work of the church to defy anything that excludes others from the love of God.
We are a people who believe that the end of this story is love winning. And so we live our days not only believing that to be true but also standing with those who others believe are God-forsaken. There are no outsiders in God’s kingdom. There is no situation that God’s love cannot reach.