Sermons from Eastminster United Presbyterian Church in Toledo, Ohio

The reach of Jesus (Mark 7.24-37)

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Mark 7.24-37
“The reach of Jesus”
Ordinary 23B/September 9, 2018
Eastminster Presbyterian Church
Tom James
A few years ago, we were lucky enough to be able to have our kitchen remodeled. Part of the remodel was putting in new cabinets, and our contractor talked us into having the upper cabinets go all the way to the ceiling. It looks nice that way, she told us, and you get some extra storage. And those things are both true. The problem, of course, comes when you need to get things that you have put on the top shelves of those upper cabinets, right next to the ceiling. Michelle and I are both around average height—not tall enough to reach the top shelves very comfortably. So we have to find ways to extend our reach—usually by standing on a step stool or something like that.
If you’ve ever stretched to reach for something, you know it can be a little uncomfortable. Muscles and tendons, perhaps, aren’t used to be extended in that way. Maybe your back or your shoulder gets strained a little. Maybe you have to reach over something that is sharp or has a hard corner. Maybe you can’t see very well what you’re reaching for and so you aren’t exactly sure what you will get.
We may not realize it, but Jesus had to reach, too.
The gospel of Mark gives us, in many respects, a pretty realistic picture of Jesus. Here, he isn’t a barely concealed divine being, but very much human. He can get tired. He can get peopled-out, if you know what I mean, and really want some alone time. He can even be grumpy and down right rude. I don’t know about you, but I can relate to this Jesus!
Our text for this morning recounts two episodes in Jesus’ ministry, placed just after one of his controversies with the religious purists of his day. He has just finished arguing against an obsessive and servile fascination with purity rules, and we get the feeling he is interested more in developing relationships with people—perhaps with a wide variety of people, people who might in fact be outside the pale according to those who worry about who is pure and who isn’t.
Well, here Jesus gets put to test. I say that he has to reach, and that is because he finds himself straining into the darkness a little, trying to find his way out of the old obsessions and not quite sure how to get there. Both of the stories that are sandwiched together in our gospel reading occur in gentile territory. The people that Jesus comes across here are not Jews—they are not even Samaritans: they are not close cousins to the Jewish people and are not even believers in one god. They are quite foreign, and their beliefs as well as their habits and styles of life would have been repulsive in many ways to Jews, like Jesus. And do we need to remind ourselves that the woman who approaches him in the first story labors under the distinct disadvantage of being a woman in a society in which women were not only powerless but the objects of suspicion and disgust? We are still plagued today by the disease we call “misogyny” in our own society: all you have to do is look at women are treated in our media—how quickly they are criticized for their ambitions while men are celebrated for theirs. But imagine that multiplied many times over, together with a whole array of customs and laws designed to keep women away from property and from power—and you have a pretty good picture of how women were seen in Jesus’ time.
So, Jesus walks into Gentile territory. We don’t know why, exactly. I sometimes think it was just to get a break. Maybe people wouldn’t recognize him there. Maybe they would not expect him to do just one more miracle or teach any more or endure any more Q and A sessions with critics and antagonists. Maybe Jesus just wanted a few moments of anonymity. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. But you know how it goes when we get tired. Our social skills are a little dampened. We let our guard down a little. We may even forget ourselves. As I say, Jesus is tested. He’s stretched. He finds himself having to reach, and I’m not sure he likes it.
A woman comes to him. She’s a foreigner—a “Syrophoenician” woman, we are told. A pagan. Who knows what kinds of impurities she carries with her, or how many red flags Jesus’ Jewish mind detects as she approaches. What kind of purification rituals will he have to undergo, just for speaking with this woman? He has just been arguing with some purists that none of those things matter very much, but does he know what the implications of that are?
Of course, she’s not just a Syrophoenician woman: she’s one more human being coming to Jesus with a request for healing and wholeness—one more claim on his compassion, and one more opportunity for Jesus to throw open wide the arms of grace.
But he doesn’t. As I suggested a moment ago, maybe he’s tired, and doesn’t want to be stretched right now. Maybe he doesn’t have the energy for it. We’ve all been there. But the amazing thing is that this Syrophoenician woman sees something in Jesus—detects something of the implications of his gospel message—that even Jesus himself can’t quite see. Jesus tells her she is a dog. This is probably a typical ethnic slur. If God’s people are children, those who are outside the pale have to be knocked down a peg lower—they are pesky, needy animals. But I wonder if there isn’t truth to this particular slur—not a truth about Syrophoenicians or about other particular groups but about human beings in general. Aren’t we all, in some ways, pesky, needy animals?
The woman doesn’t deny being a dog—she only says that dogs are need of compassion, too. We should imagine that this was not a dog-loving culture, like ours, where there are hotels and salons for dogs—where they get their hair and nails done and are pampered with expensive treats. We have to imagine streets where dogs are running around everywhere, not especially valued by humans but, being dogs, wanted to be around them. Longing for homes but often finding themselves lost, craving companionship but sometimes rejected and abused, hungry but having to make do with little. One preacher posted a sermon about this text called “The Gospel Gone to the Dogs.” I think that’s pretty good, and if I may push the image a little farther, I suggest that the gospel is meant for dogs, and that this Syrophoenician woman, this impure, unclean pagan woman, plays the role of many other women in the gospel story—she clarifies what the gospel means. She announces it in a metaphor that is unmistakably authentic and powerful. Like the woman at the well who tells her fellow villagers that Jesus “told her all she ever did,” and like the women who ran from the empty tomb to tell Jesus’ doubtful disciples that he really had risen from the dead, this Syrophoenician woman finds a way to say what has to be said. Through her, we learn that the gospel is for us in so far as we experience ourselves as lost, or hungry, or powerless, or longing. In so far as we are dogs, outside the pale of purity and perfection, but still just as needy as ever. In other words, in so far as we are human beings.
The reach of Jesus. Even if Jesus gets tired of reaching, if you will. Still, inevitably, it reaches us. That’s the first thing, and the foundation of everything else in the Christian life. Jesus reaches us. No matter who we are. No matter how undervalued and unappreciated we might be. No matter who else may exclude us. Jesus reaches us.
But that also means that Jesus reaches far beyond us, too. Not just to us, but also to those that we, in turn, might consider outside the pale. That’s the comforting, but also challenging, truth of the gospel. Jesus’ reach reaches all. It certainly reaches us. It certainly reaches those we might want to exclude. Hopefully, we remember ourselves enough not to use ethnic or other kinds of slurs, but the clear message of the gospel is that Jesus reaches beyond the comfortable confines of his own people, and that if we are his body in the world, then we are enabled and, indeed, called to do the same.
In how many ways are we in Syrophoenician territory today? In how many ways does the world we live in bristle with the kinds of difference we find hard to relate to? Our churches were designed for comfortable similarities, where our neighbors looked like us and spoke our language, where tradition and history were things that united us rather than distinguished us from each other. Where most people shared some basic assumptions that religion is good and that church is an essential part of life. We mainstream protestants today find ourselves as strangers in a strange land, surrounded on all sides by people we don’t know how to relate to—people who seem more different from us than like us; people who don’t seem interested in what we have to offer; people who seem beyond our reach. And, yes, we’re tired of reaching.

But what Jesus discovered, as he was stretched into Syrophoenician territory, is that the Syrophoenician woman wasn’t simply different—she wasn’t simply a strange and alien “other.” In hearing her, in listening to her truth, Jesus found himself again. He understood anew and in a deeper way the truth that he had been preaching and living. The truth of the gospel is that we are all strangers, we are all strange, and that we find ourselves as we joined with other strangers in faith. And that means that those who are unlike us are actually our kin—they are our sisters and our brothers. They are our true community, ready to share their stories, their truth, with us, and we can’t be our true selves unless and until we cross the borders of our comfort, and recognize them as us. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

“The law of life” (Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23)

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Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23
“The law of life”
Ordinary 22B/September 2, 2018
Eastminster Presbyterian Church
Tom James
I learned a little bit of etiquette while I was growing up, but we were not an especially formal family. My parents were satisfied if I didn’t put my elbows on the table, didn’t slouch too much, and kept my mouth closed as I was chewing. My older brother did the policing on that last one. As an adult, I learned that there were some finer points that I had missed, though. I didn’t know for example, how to eat soup, dipping the soup spoon away from you rather than toward you. I’m not sure why that’s important—but Michelle is from a somewhat more refined family (here mom taught home economics and is a stickler for etiquette) and so now I know that’s how you do it.
Etiquette, of course, is all about social expectations, isn’t it? What are good manners in one society may turn out to be pretty rude in another. If you have had a chance to travel very much, perhaps you have seen that. In France, they sop up what’s left on their plates with bread—in England, that would be a no-no. In some cultures, you are expected to eat with your hands, while in others, people would be aghast if they saw someone do that.
In Jesus’ society, there were lots of rules that would appear strange to us. We wash our hands before we eat (most of us), but they had an intricate ritual of washing. And they had precise rules for washing and maintaining eating implements like bowls and cups, too. While we worry about germs, they worried about something our passage from Mark calls “defilement.” When we hear a word like “defilement,” we probably almost automatically think about something like hygiene. Again, we’re worried about dirt and germs. But what they meant by “defilement” actually had more to do with inclusion and exclusion. Jesus’ contemporaries were trying to preserve a sense of a national and ethnic identity while there were threatening influences all around. The dominant culture of the Greco-Roman world was all too easy to absorb, and the fear was that it could easily overwhelm Jewish society and effectively erase their identity and their history. This was not a trivial matter, even if the rules may seem trivial to us—it was a matter of avoiding cultural death. So, every effort was made not to do things like the Gentiles do—including eating. Jews were supposed to eat in a particularly Jewish way, and not be defiled by foreign influences.
Now, of course, this was not just about excluding the foreign element, but was also about deepening connections within the community. We are all familiar with how embattled circumstances have a way of cementing bonds, and things we share in common with our comrades in struggle become markers of community identity that we come to take pride in, like flags or like special handshakes among teammates or like team colors (like blue and maize, for example!).
But, of course, Jesus sees the limitations of this way of cementing bonds. This concern for purity, for defining ourselves in opposition to others, for avoiding foreign influences, for observing all the rituals in exacting detail, can actually distract us from what really binds us together, can’t it? Worse, it can actually be divisive. What if someone doesn’t wash their hands in just the right way? Are they then excluded? Must they be cast out of the community, or should they be punished somehow? What about when someone wants to join the community? Do they have to learn all the rituals, and do they have to get them exactly right? Can these rituals become barriers to membership—can they be a way of fencing people out? Do we protect our purity at the cost of condemning ourselves to insularity, or to becoming a monument to a past that is dead and gone? And, perhaps most importantly, what about human freedom? If the rituals must always be the same, if we can never alter or change them, or if we must always dutifully submit to them, if we must always wash and wash, or stand and salute, if we can never protest our rituals (in good protestant fashion), do they become something that actually destroys community by destroying the individuals and the constituencies that make it up? Can ritual be a way of making people conform, just for the sake of conforming?
Jesus breaks through all of this when he says, “It’s not what goes into you that defiles—it’s what comes out of you.” It sounds like a simple bit of snarky wisdom, just a little wrinkle in the rule that serves to call out the hypocrites. But, actually, it’s much more than that. Jesus turns everything around, here, because, now, if you accept what Jesus says, forming and maintaining community is not about excluding and dividing. Instead, it is about creating and inviting.
What Jesus is pointing to is the power of communication—or, as we Christians sometimes calls it, communion. Words connect us. We all know how a good word can make us closer to each other, or how it can open us up to a relationship with another person that we thought we would never like. Words have amazing power. But, of course, words can also hurt, can’t they? And, in hurting, hurtful words disrupt and frustrate the process of building a community, a society in which all are included and respected and loved. It is in this sense that what comes out of us can defile—it can disrupt and destroy something that is crucial and vital: our relationships with each other. So, defilement means not contamination, but rather isolation. To defile is not to make oneself dirty but to cut off community, to hinder its growth, to undermine its generosity and its grace.
Blogger Michael Josephson tells the following story. When one of my daughters, he writes, was confronted with the fact that she had really hurt another child with a mean comment, she cried and immediately wanted to apologize. That was a good thing, but I wanted her to know an apology can’t always make things better. So I told her the story of Will, an angry nine-year-old whose father abandoned his mom two years earlier.
Will would often lash out at others with mean and hurtful words. After a particularly hostile outburst where Will told his mom, “I see why Dad left you!,” his mother, desperate and damaged, sent Will to spend the summer with his grandparents who lived on a small farm.
The first evening on the farm, Will made nasty comments to his grandmother about her cooking and the size of the house. His grandfather took him to a tool shed and told him he could not come back into the house until he pounded a two-inch nail into a 4 x 4 board. He said the nail had to be pounded all the way in and that he would have to do so every time he said a mean and hurtful thing. For a small boy, this was a major task. After about ten trips to the shed, Will began to be more cautious about his words. Eventually, he apologized to his grandmother for all the bad things he’d said.
His grandmother didn’t respond directly but asked him to bring in the board filled with nails. Then she gave him the hammer and asked him to pull out all the nails. This was even harder than pounding them in, but after a huge struggle, he did it.
His grandmother hugged him and said, “I appreciate your apology and, of course, I forgive you because I love you, but I want you to know an apology is like pulling out one of those nails. Look at the board. The holes are still there. The board will never be the same. I know your dad put a hole in you when he left and that’s unfair, but it doesn’t give you the right to put holes in other people – especially those who love you.”[1]
We defile the bonds that hold us together when we nail holes in another person. The reason it is a kind of defilement is because the connections that hold us together as human beings have a natural tendency to expand, to become more inclusive, and to be strengthened, to become more intense. We are by nature, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, social animals. We sometimes forget it, but the truth is that we can’t even survive, much less be happy, without each other. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, we are woven together in a “single garment of destiny.” Another way we might say it, borrowing a phrase from twentieth century protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is that “love is the law of life.” There are all kinds of ways that we are hateful to each other. We nail holes in each other all the time with hurtful words and actions. Sometimes, to build up our little group, we nail holes in people from other groups, sowing fear and resentment and hate. But each time we do those things, we betray ourselves, we contradict who we really are, because the most fundamental thing about human life is not hatred, nor competition, nor envy. The most fundamental thing about human life is love. It is what makes us human beings at all. It is what links us to each other and to God.
The flip side of the defilement that Jesus is calling our attention to is reverence—and, here, as with defilement, it is crucial that we use this word in the right way. There is no justification in anything that Jesus ever says and does for giving reverence to rituals and rules, though perhaps we should respect them. At the end of the day, rules and rituals are things we make to serve the needs of the community. They aren’t worth our reverence, and if we revere them we may easily destroy the purpose they serve. What we people of faith should revere, instead, is the divine in our midst—the presence of God, the power of the spirit that unites us to each other and that links all creation together in a single garment of praise. What people of faith should revere is the power to connect, to care, and to love, a power that continually takes us beyond ourselves, because it is only as we go beyond ourselves that we discover who we really are.

I propose that as a sort of theme for our ministry together here. I’m really excited to get to know you, and to come to love life at Eastminster. And I hope that will find joy in finding ourselves again out past these walls, joining the healing work of God in this community and beyond. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.


[1] http://www.proctorgallagherinstitute.com/25392/dealing-with-hurtful-words