"Feed My Dogs!” A Sermon by the Rev. Carl F. Petering October 23, 2005 I. Introduction Susan and her husband, David, were in the middle of a divorce. She had picked up a boy friend along the way and attended a party Tom hosted. Tom wrote that he was upset by some of Susan’s behavior, especially at a hot tub party that he had recently thrown. At that party, Susan and the husband of a friend of Susan’s kissed and fondled each other while they were naked in Tom’s hot tub. He wrote a letter that began , "You will, without a doubt, make some lucky man a great wife. But unfortunately, it won’t be me." He went on to say, "If you want to catch a nice guy like me one day, you have to act like a nice girl." "And you know, nice girls don’t sleep with married men." The letter was a mixture of a “Dear John” letter and a pep talk. Another passage began, "Susan, I could really fall for you. You have some endearing qualities about you, and I think that you are a terrific person. But like I have told you before, there are some things about you that aren’t suited for me, and yes, I am speaking about your children." Susan wanted relief from her loneliness and the problems in her life. and her boyfriend’s rejection had come the week before. She wanted to commit suicide, but she did not want her sons to suffer. A week later Susan parked her car on a boat ramp near a lake. She set the handbrake and got out of the car. Her two sons, ages 3 and 14 months, were sleeping in their car seats, strapped in by seat belts. Susan believed if she killed her sons first and then committed suicide, that her sons would suffer less, urdens that overwhelmed her. She felt that her life was filled with loss and rejection, and that the responsibilities of being a single mother were overwhelming. Susan’s next decision will never be forgotten. Attempts to explain it will always fall short and continue to leave the question "why?" open to further speculation.
Susan Smith released the emergency brake and softly closed the driver’s side door. As the car drifted into the lake, the headlights were on and her two boys were fatally trapped inside. The car entered th water slowly and did not submerge immediately. Instead, it remained on the surface, bobbing peacefully, while slowly filling with water. Susan watched the car submerge into the lake. She turned away from the sinking car and began to run toward a small house. To this day, the question still asked is how could she do it? Susan Smith committed the most unthinkable act when she broke humanity’s most sacred trust, the love of a mother for her children. What do you think of this woman? Story told to highlight two things: 1) think of someone as a dog; 2) identify with Jesus’ supreme disgust that he calls the Canaanite woman by that term C.T. “It is our treatment of ‘dogs’ that show our Christ-likeness, or lack thereof.
II. Text – Canaanite woman Just as the story of Susan Smith is one of the most difficult to digest, so is Jesus’ treatment of the Canaanite woman. He had just been addressing the issue of clean and unclean, the things that defile – which was the central issue in Jewish and Gentile relations. Will he practice what he preaches in one of his rare encounters with a Gentile? And a woman at that? As it turns out, he was too unclean for the Pharisees and she was too unclean for him. This passage offers the only occasion in Matthew on which Jesus is depicted as stepping outside the borders of Israel. “Canaanite” appears only here in the NT. There were none around in Jesus’ day, but they had been the ancient enemies of Israel, the indigenous people with whom Israel battled to take possession of the promised land. By identifying the woman as a Canaanite, therefore, Matthew spotlights her for his readers as enemy, as pagan, as ethnic and religious outsider. A dog. Or, the female variety thereof, a b___________ . You know the word. She shouts at Jesus. This is only the second time in the gospel of Matthew that a woman speaks out loud. At first Jesus does not even answer. He had responded to others who had called out similarly . Was it because she was a woman? Or a Canaanite? Had Jesus been reared on the age-old hatred the Judeans had for the Canaanites, much as the Jews and Palestinians have for each other today? The Canaanite religion was a source of worshipping false idols, sacrificing children, marrying people of othe religions and other abominations. Matthew’s reference to her as a Canaanite makes her a symbol of abominable and detestable religious practices. She was “religious scum,” in Matthew’s viewpoint. If anyone was of the wrong religion, she was. If anyone wasn’t saved, this lady wasn’t. If anyone was going to hell, she was. If anyone was damned, she was. They kept walking along and she kept hollering out at them and his disciples kept encouraging him to give her what she wanted and send her away. His racial bias is reflected in his rebuffing her by saying he has been sent only to Israel. When he had previously sent out seventy disciples in pairs, and had told them specifically not to go to the Gentiles, but to go to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Whereas he had compassion on the hungry shortly before this encounter, her daughter’s illness and the woman’s anguish bounce off his heart as though hitting a wall. This behavior slaps us in the face. Is this the Jesus we’ve come to know and love? We think of compassion and inclusivity as the hallmarks of his ministry, but his prejudice is evident here. And yet it gets worse! She assumes the posture of prayer and kneels before him in an act of worship. Like the psalmist who also prays in this manner, she is at the end of her rope. He himself will echo similar words from the cross, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me!” Nowhere else in the Gospel tradition does Jesus address a sincere petitioner with harsh, insulting language. “Dogs” was as deprecating a term in his day as it is in ours. Many Christians equate being a Christian with being “nice.” Jesus is anything but nice here! But she persists. His reference to children at the table provides a crack in which she inserts her ues to invoke the Lords’ abundant mercy for the healing of her daughter. In contrast to Peter, who failed to walk on water in response to Jesus’ command and who was said to be of little faith, she is found to have great faith. She! A heathen “dog!” Interestingly, only two persons in Matthew are lauded for their “great faith,” and both were heathens! The Roman centurion and the Canaanite woman. Not his family; his disciples didn’t understand; religious leaders were offended and eventually did him in. In response to the faith of a Gentile woman who demands inclusion in God’s grace, Jesus appears to expand his understanding of his own mission and ministry. Prior to this event, he feeds a Jewish crowd of 4,000. After this, he feeds a Gentile crowd of 5,000 – not counting women and children! It looks like a profound conversion for him. As there was an abundance of bread left over after the two feeding miracles, were Jesus’ eyes opened to see that God was even more abundant than he had imagined? Was it the woman’s reference to “crumbs” that helped him to see there was enough of him left over for the Gentiles after he had “fed” the Jews? The divine provision for Israel can be extended to gentiles, and …Israel will still have no lack. So lavish are God’s blessings and the abundance of God’s table that even after the children are fed, enough bread remains for all. Is this the greatness of her faith? She knows who Jesus is and holds him to it; she will not settle for anything less than a measure of God’s grace. She insists that Jesus be Jesus, and through her insistence she frees him to be fully who he is. Her faith insisted on the fulfillment of the gospe l promise that the sun and the rain are given to all, and that God is impartial with his blessings. Matthew asks that we, like Jesus himself, listen to her and be transformed through a faith like hers: persistent, vigorous, and confident in God’s faithfulness to his own promises. From here on in this gospel, Jesus’ encounters have a shifted nuance. His stories take on a new and pronounced bias for the poor and the outsider. There is an insight threading its way through the rest of Matthew that can be traced back to the argument of a Canaanite “dog.” For instance, when he fed the four thousand Gentiles a little later, he is said to have had compassion on the crowd. Whereas the disciples had wanted to send the Canaanite woman away, Jesus specifically does not want to send the Gentile crowd away hungry. Again, at the end of the book, this nationalistic Jew who thought he had been sent just to his own people, sends his disciples into all the world to make disciples of every creature. Quite a turnaround. Could it be that we come face-to-face in this story with the very real humanity of Jesus Both in terms of it being an incident in which he is caught with his “compassion down;” and it being an occasion when he learned something from one of his accusers? The book of Hebrews says he was perfected through his suffering, suggesting a maturing into perfection, not being perfect from the beginning. Is this incident part of his suffering, when he had to redefine his mission and become more inclusive in his distribution of grace? He had spoken in the sermon on the mount of God giving sun and rain to the just and the unjust and had told his disciples they should be impartial in this way as God is. And then he rejects this foreigner and wants to ignore her; he calls her a name, and he tells her he has nothing to do with her kind. Is this evidence of his “growing selfhood,” i.e., he did not know everything in advance, as he himself said, “Of times and seasons, only the Father knows.” Her insight opens his eyes. This is the only story in the gospels in which someone appears to change Jesus’ mind about anything! And it is a woman, who shouldn’t be talking to him in public at all according to the mores of the time! To say to her “great is your faith” is as if to say, “You know what I’m about more than I do!”
Wow! Jesus wasn’t always perfect! Is that a shock to you? Can we still believe in such a Jesus, a Jesus who is not perfect, a Jesus who is put to shame by a foreign woman to whom he has behaved inhumanly? What do we do when Jesus’ words and actions don’t measure up to what we would expec t our Savior to say or do? We could excuse him by blaming the rigors of his ministry. Or we could claim he was testing her faith, knowing in advance how she would respond. Or we could excuse him for being dominated by a cultural context that prohibited him from dealing with her. Or we could blame the writer, maybe Matthew didn’t get this down right. Faithfulness to scripture demands a refusal to reduce difficult sayings or stories to easily understood messages. We want a sanitized, shrink-wrapped Jesus sealed in cellophane. We want the domesticated Jesus of “Away In a Manger” – the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes. No crying he makes! For crying out loud! Did he not cry when he was a baby? Did he not go through the terrible two’s as a toddler? Did he not rebel against his parents by hanging back in Jerusalem to discuss with the scholars? Did he not ask for the cup to be taken from him if at all possible? Did he not bleed real drops of blood on the cross? Did he not say, “Don’t call me good? There is only one who is good?” Peter called him the Christ, and did he not say, “Don’t spread that around!” Jesus remains more and other than any artist can paint. The four gospels each presents a different picture. This text highlights an aspect of Jesus that would be easy to overlook. And one which would be easy to avoid preaching on. By the same token, it may serve to enlarge our picture of who Jesus was and what it means to say he was Son of God. This is the only Jesus whom I can trust. Only in this Jesus do I recognize the human face of God. I see Jesus’ full engagement with my own human reality as I struggle to find the good news of the gospel . I get tired, have prejudices, get short tempered, call people names, and refuse to help people at times. Only in this Jesus can I see a Lord who is tempted in every way that I am, yet without sinning. In this encounter, I see a “dog” call forth the Christ in Jesus, and he becomes a brother and a friend, The same power that transformed Jesus transformed the disciples and the early church. It’s transforming Africa and South America, where new Christians are praying for the old, tired Christians in the United States. That same power is available to me. It is available to you. And that’s Good News!
III. Susan Smith was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. She placed an online personal ad seeking pen pals who are "not judgmental" and want to write to a convicted murderer who considers herself "sensitive, caring, and kind-hearted." She said she loves "rainbows, Mickey Mouse, the beach, the mountains, and waterfalls." She adds, "I have grown and matured a lot since my incarceration, but I will always hurt for the pain I've caused so many, especially my children." Anyone want to write to her? “It is our treatment of the dogs that show our Christ-likeness, or lack thereof!” “When you did it for the least of these, you did it for me,” the Christ said. |