Under the Table and Into the Fire
Rev. Ryon L Price
United Church of Colchester
September 10, 2006
Mark 7:24-37; Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Irie and I have returned from our jaunt to the Maine coast. I am embarrassed to admit that our trip completed my transition. With the volume of fish and clams I consumed I can now no longer classify myself as a vegetarian, but am now a full-fledged "pescetarian."
As we drove down the Maine coast what we found most peculiar were the monuments erected to the men who fought for the cause of the Union. Irie and I grew up with monuments dedicated to men on the other side of that terrible war decorating our town lawns. It is almost unimaginable that this one nation under God was at one time so bitterly divided. And I thank God that those wounds continue to find healing.
Jesus is on a trip of his own in today’s Gospel story.
He has entered the region of Tyre, which was largely a gentile region – and a despised one at that. There was more than a friendly rivalry between the Jewish people and their neighbors to the north. This was not Duke–UNC or Colchester–Winooski. The hostility between the people of Tyre and the people of Israel was long, bitter and bloody. Tyre was infamous among the Jewish people for its complicity in the slave trade that saw thousands of Israelites stolen from their homeland hundreds of years earlier. The Jewish people had not fully forgiven them for that. Many still hoped for one day when the Lord’s condemnation of Tyre would one day come to pass:
I will thrust you down with those who descend into the Pit, to the people of
long ago, and I will make you live in the world below, among primeval ruins,
with those who go down to the Pit, so that you will not be inhabited or have
a place in the land in the living.
Ezekiel 26:20
There really is no mincing words here – according to Ezekiel Tyre can and will quite literally go to hell.
It is to this land of all places that Jesus has come in today’s gospel reading. We are not told why he has come or what he plans to do while he is here. Yet, I suspect, it may have been sheer weariness that brought him here. He had just suffered an intense encounter with a group of Scribes and Pharisees who had come from Jerusalem and were questioning what appeared to them to be his rather lax morals. "Why do your disciples not wash before dinner, but eat with defiled hands?" "Do you not respect the law?" "Where is your sense of decency?" I suspect that after an encounter with a group of teetotalers like this, Jesus was slipping off to Tyre for a little rest. Perhaps not unlike a pastor slipping off to Maine to have a couple of beers where nobody will recognize him?
Yet that seems to be just Jesus’ problem in the book of Mark. Scholars refer to the "Messianic Secret" because Jesus is always telling folks not to say anything about him being the Son of God. The irony of course is that it is that the secret isn’t really a secret. Everyone seems to know or suspect that Jesus is the Messiah – everyone but the religious authorities, that is.
Apparently this woman in the story is in on the secret too. Or perhaps she’s just heard whispers. Perhaps because her daughter was possessed by a demon she is desperate enough to try anything or anyone. What else is a mother to do but hope when she thinks the devil is in her child? Hearing that Jesus has come to Tyre she scurries to find him and ask that he might heal her daughter.
Here is where things get a little unsettling. This woman is a Syrophoenician; meaning that she’s not a good Jew like the ones who came from Jerusalem to hassle Jesus about his lax morals. This woman doesn’t keep kosher. She’s not clean. Her daddy wasn’t circumcised on the eighth day. She is therefore certainly no child of the living God. "Save my baby," the woman cries out. But Jesus plays the fox, "Let the children be fed first," he says, "for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs."
But this woman will not be outfoxed, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs."
I suppose mothers will go to most any length to see that their children are well. The great writer and thinker G.K. Chesterton told the story of a man who was something of a rogue who died and was cast into hell. His business associate, a deacon in the church and an upstanding citizen in the community, went to the gates of hell and in the most professional and courteous way politely asked, "Please, let my partner out of there." The devil declined. Then the condemned man’s priest came and begged, "Please, for mercy’s sake, let that man out." Again, the devil was unmoved. Finally, the condemned man’s mother arrived on the scene. Without so much as a bat of an eye she charged up, rattled the gates and surprised everyone when she did not beg to have her son back but instead yelled, "Let me in there!"
The Apostles’ Creed tells us that that is exactly what Jesus did for the sake of God’s children:
I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth and in his only
Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the
virgin Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead and buried. He descended
into hell.
This is the depth of Christ’s love for us. That he would descend even into the Pit to save us.
David Steinmetz, one of my seminary professors, told us in his Church History lecture course about a Presbyterian who had come to Duke to do her divinity degree and really suffered for that choice later when she came before the Presbytery to have her fitness for ministry examined. First there was the problem of her being a woman. And why did she not go to Princeton, the Presbytery wanted to know? Or Westminster? But, Duke of all places, a Methodist school? The grilling went on insufferably like this for several hours and the young woman grew more and more aggravated by what she thought was an unfair trial. At last the final question was to be asked – the question which would serve as the litmus test for whether or not this person was indeed a true Calvinist Presbyterian or a Methodist wolf in Presbyterian wool. "Would you be willing to be damned to hell for the sake of the Gospel?" the inquisitors asked. "Yes, I would be damned for the sake of the Gospel," the would-be minister responded. "And I would even go one step further," she said. "I would even be willing to have you and the entire Presbytery damned to hell also…but only for the sake of the Gospel of course."
That woman trapped her inquisitors in their words much like Martin Luther says the Syrophenician woman trapped Jesus in his. "You want me to be a dog? Then I will be a dog. For my daughter to be well I will be a cat or a dog whatever you want me to be, and I will go through whatever you want me to go through." Her love was unqualified, and unconditional, and totally self-effacing. And it absolutely broke Jesus’ heart because it reflected God’s own self-effacing love for his children. The fact that this woman would willingly become a dog for the sake of her child mirrors, in all its startling beauty, the fact that God – for the sake of his own children – became a man. And because of that her daughter was healed.
In the summer of 2001, I was a "tour liason" in New York City. Tour liason was a neat little euphemism my employers dreamed up to explain why I was directing large groups of people up the World Trade Center or over to Yankee Stadium without an official New York City Tour Guide License. "No, officer, I am not guiding this group of people. I am directing them. I am not a tour guide; I am a tour liason." All the work for half the pay.
At any rate it was a wonderful summer for this boy from Lubbock, Texas to take in the sights, sounds and seediness of the Big Apple without having fully taken on all the responsibilities of adulthood. Near the end of my stay I eerily reflected in my journal, "I can always come back to New York, but I will never come back to right now. There is no way I could have known at the time how true that would be. We can all of us always go to New York, but we can never go back to June, July or August 2001.
As we enter these next forty or so hours together we prepare to enter into a holy time of remembrance of those whose lives were lost five years ago – those who cannot go back to New York at all. We remember where we were and how we felt when we heard the news. We were scared. We were mournful. We were angry. Our thirst for vengeance resembled Ezekiel’s curse against Tyre: "I will thrust you down with those who descend into the Pit."
These were and are our feelings and part of the natural grieving process is allowing ourselves to feel them so that we can move on. Yet, whatever hatred and enmity we might feel, we must not presume that God feels just as we do.
What made Harry Emerson Fosdick famous in the first part of the last century was in part the fervency of his preaching which rallied young men from all across the nation to take up arms to fight in the First World War. Fosdick later arrived at a more nuanced theology of war. At the end of his life Fosdick wrote in his book The Living of These Days that when he imagined Christ in the warring world he did not see Christ arrayed in the panoply of battle, but on his judgment seat, high above the fury, sitting in condemnation of us all – aggressor, defender and neutral all alike – who by our communal guilt have somehow all contributed to a way of life that is so estranged from the way of life Jesus taught us to live.
I too imagine Christ seated on the judgment seat looking with horror upon the demon-possessed nations. Yet I also see the image of the Syrophenician woman standing beside him. Her child is in her arms. She comforts Jesus. Ministers to him. She reminds him of his own love – even for the demon possessed.
Perhaps that is why I am not so bothered by the monuments erected in the South in honor of the "Boys Who Wore the Grey." My how glad I am that they lost, lest in the tragedy of history Irie and I would never have been allowed to meet and fall in love and marry as one fully human woman and one fully human man. Yet I understand the monuments, and I am glad that they stand because the boys who wore the gray too had mothers who loved them and lives that mattered to Jesus Christ.
When I think of September 11, 2001, I think of its heroes. I think especially of New York City’s firefighters who raced into the smoke and flames. Their mission was clear and unencumbered by geography or religion or ideology. Their mission was to save lives and valiantly they sacrificed their own lives to do so. I think that is the truth about Jesus Christ we must live with most deeply today. The truth that Jesus has come to save lives regardless of geography or ideology. The truth that his heart breaks for the thousands of mothers who lost children on September 11th and for the many more tens of thousands of mothers who have lost children since. Good or bad, Christian or Islamic, Jew or Gentile, black or white. They matter to Jesus. And so however we might respond to 9-11, in order to be faithful to the true Jesus, we must resist the temptation to strip him of that universal compassion because in the end he is the one who has raced into the fire. He is the one who became a dog. He is the one who for our sakes even went into hell.
And on the third day he rose again.
And because of that, so shall we.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
