16th Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 7:24-30
From there he 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.” And, when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.
Eat the Crumbs
A few years ago, there was an article about a church in Seattle called Northshore that was trying to help some of the unsheltered people living in their area. A lot of the unsheltered lived in a tent city, and the law required that this tent city be moved every 90 days. The place that the tent city was going to next backed out at the last minute, so the people at Northshore decided that they needed to help, and they applied for a permit to allow the tent city to move to the Northshore grounds. What they didn’t know was that about a month prior, the city had put a moratorium on those permits and refused to even look at their application.
So, the people at Northshore had to make a choice. They could follow the law, and they wouldn’t get into any trouble. Or they could follow their hearts, and offer the people living in the tent city a safe place to stay. So, they welcomed the tent city onto their property, even though they didn’t have a permit for it. And, as they feared, the city filed a lawsuit against them. The superior court ruled in favor of the city, and the city was awarded damages which totaled more than the entire operating budget of the church.
There is often a price to pay when we openly defy those in authority. We all learn this as we go through our lives dealing with parents and teachers, bosses at work, and sometimes even the cops. And of course, there is the ultimate authority figure of all.
Our gospel reading today describes one such encounter with that divine authority. A Syrophoenician woman is asking Jesus to help her because her daughter is possessed by un unclean spirit. This was pretty scandalous! During this time, gentiles were considered so unspiritual that even being close to one was to risk becoming unclean. This was a gentile woman in a Jewish person’s home, begging a Jewish man for help. There were rules about this kind of thing! Instead of helping her, Jesus says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs. It’s no wonder that many scholars question if this scene is historical at all, if Jesus ever said anything like this. Not only is he refusing to help her, he insults her by calling her a dog!
After hearing this, the woman says, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” She is humble in her reply, and yet she is still pushing back. She doesn’t just accept what Jesus says. Her daughter needs help, and she knows that Jesus can help her. She believes that Jesus can help her.
The story of the Syrophoenician woman reminds me of when Abraham was talking to God before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, all the way back in the book of Genesis. God was going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sin, but for some reason, God decided to tell Abraham about it first. Abraham wonders if completely destroying two entire cities is such a good idea, after all there could be some innocent people living there. And so, he asks God, “Are you going to destroy the cities, even if there are 50 innocent people there?” God tells him that if there are 50 innocent people, then the cities will not be destroyed.
“What if there are 45 innocent people?”
God says, “If there are 45 innocent people, I will not destroy the cities.”
Abraham thinks it over, then asks, “If there are only 40 innocent people, will you destroy the cities?”
“No Abraham, if I find only 40 innocent people, the cities will not be destroyed.”
“30 people?”
“No.”
“20 people?”
“No.”
“10 people?”
“If I find but 10 innocent people, the cities will not be destroyed.”
Apparently, this answer was good enough for Abraham, because he stops bargaining with God after 10. I remember one of my seminary professors saying that Abraham’s act of pushing back against God was the defining moment in Jewish history, when the Jewish people established themselves as Jews. Abraham had the gumption, the courage to talk back to God, to have a dialogue with God on a level that no one ever had before. You might say it was the moment that he became Jewish.
God wants to be in relationship with us. We could talk about the nature of God or whether or not these events actually took place. We could argue about whether or not God might have known ahead of time how Abraham or the Syrophoenician woman were going to respond. We even might wonder if these stories are allegories for the way that God tests us. But, what I do know is that these stories are about relationships.
God doesn’t expect or require blind servitude. God gave us free-will, so that we could make our own decisions, so that we could choose to love God and follow God’s laws, or to choose a different path, even if that would break God’s heart. God gives us that choice.
God gave us brains to reason with, so that we could think things through and weigh the merits of one action over another, one choice over another, so that we could think about the possible consequences of our actions…so that we could take a rule, a law, a decree, and decide if it’s right or wrong, good or bad, or somewhere in between.
So, how do we choose when there is no clear-cut answer? We have to rely on our relationships, our relationship with God and our relationships with each other. We have to make the choices that will make our relationships stronger…not just with the people that we know, our friends and family, neighbors and colleagues, the people that we go to church with and the people of our own race, nation, and tongue. We have to make the choices that will strengthen our relationship with all of humanity, the choices that will ultimately strengthen our relationship with God.
When the Syrophoenician woman said that the dogs eat the crumbs that fall off the master’s table, she wasn’t trying to interfere with what Jesus was doing, with the work that he was doing with the people of Israel. She just wanted to be a part of it. She was willing to take the smallest of crumbs, because she knew that it would be enough. The crumbs that she was asking for, the crumbs that were being swept off the table, those are God’s crumbs. And, God’s crumbs are more than we could ever need. She understood that. She didn’t want Jesus to spend less time with “the lost sheep of Israel,” to do anything that might hinder his relationship with them. But, she knew that in Jesus, there is more than enough to go around. She knew the rules, she knew that she probably shouldn’t have been in that house, but the life of her daughter was more important than compiling with a few societal norms. So, she said she would take the crumbs. And, Jesus immediately answers her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”
The people of Northshore chose to honor their relationships with God and humanity by helping the unsheltered people of Seattle. They allowed the tent city to move onto their property, even though they knew that they were going to get into trouble because of it. And, they received a judgment against them that they could never hope to pay. For the next three years, as they fought against this judgment; they didn’t know whether or not their church was going to survive. But, they did it anyway, so that they could be good neighbors to their fellow human beings.
The state supreme court eventually ruled in favor of Northshore, saying that the church had the right to exercise their religious freedom on their own property. And, new legislation went into effect to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Local government could no longer prevent a religious organization from getting a permit in this way.
The hope was that these new laws would help local governments and religious organizations resolve their conflicts over services provided to the unsheltered without resorting to litigation. The relationship is changing, and it’s changing for the better. And, it can all be traced back to that single act of compassion by the Northshore congregation.
As human beings, we have to question the things that we think are wrong. We cannot blindly follow laws because “that’s the way that it’s always been” or because “whoever’s in charge told me so.”
God gave us reason and free will, and wants to live in relationship with us. God wants to know how we feel about things. If there is something going on that you don’t agree with, reach out to God in prayer, humbly and with the faith and understanding that God loves you. Question God the way that Abraham and the Syrophoenician woman questioned God, and listen to what God has to say. God wants to live in relationship with us, because that is the nature of God. So, love God. Question God. And, live in relationship with God and with all of humanity. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
