Crummy Behavior

September 6, 2009

James 2:1-8 and Mark 7:24-37

Intro to Mark 7: In the chapter before today’s reading, Jesus feeds 5000 people with five loaves and two fish, and has baskets-full left over. In the following chapter, he does it again with 4000 people. Now, between those 2 stories, has to decide whether two “dogs” deserve a few leftover crumbs that fall from the table. That those crumbs involve health care and healing for families and children only makes the question more urgent, while Congress and public opinion also debate similar issues.

Even if Jesus starts out sounding like a partisan and divisive sound bite, it comes down to the size and nature of God’s grace.

* *

The way he treated her was crummy.

For Presbyterians who like things “decently and in order,” it’s embarrassing. For anyone with a smidgeon of manners, it’s surprising.

His attitude was callous. His actions, cruel … dare I say, unchristian?

Calling a woman and her sick daughter “dogs”? Since when does he do that?

Refusing to rescue a child near death? What kind of Savior is he?

If we could take an Exacto knife to one passage of scripture and surgically remove it from our Bibles, this might be it. It’s that crummy.

* *

Maybe he was having a crummy day all around. Or chalk it up to an old time Labor Day weekend, when he didn’t want to labor. Mark tells us he wanted to be left alone, not wanting anyone to know he was there.

Then she came along, insistent and demanding, not willing to take “no” for an answer. Not letting him be.

It didn’t help that she was Syrophoenician. A foreigner and outsider – though, to be honest, Jesus was on her turf. He’d left the confines of Israel and gone to her part of the world, on the Mediterranean coast and the city of Tyre.

Trying to avoid her there was like one of us going to Minnesota and not wanting to be near any Vikings fans … even apart from that Brett Favre thing.

The spell-checker in my computer doesn’t know the word “Syrophoenician.” That’s how foreign she was.

Worse yet, Matthew’s version calls her a “Canaanite.” It doesn’t get any lower than that. The Israelites hated Canaanites on account of their pagan religion.

Deuteronomy 20 (v. 16-18) says what should happen to them when Israel enters the Promised Land:

You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and Amorites, the Canaanites and Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods.

Strong stuff. Despite that command, some Canaanites apparently survived. But the attitude against them did too.

* *

That’s not an excuse for the way Jesus acted. Our other New Testament reading flat-out rejects such behavior. James is totally intolerant of intolerance.

He lifts Jesus up as a model of equality and inclusion for all people. (I guess he forgot this one instance with the woman.) He insists that Christian faith has direct consequences for how we treat one another. Snobbery, elitism and prejudice are verboten. To remove any shred of doubt, he asks a rhetorical question: “Do you – with your acts of favoritism – really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?”

No way and no how. Prejudice and piety will never coexist. Favoritism and faith can’t stand to be in the same room together.

Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish thinker from the last century, put it like this: “No one can say ‘I love God’ and treat a person like a horse.”

Amen to that.

But Jesus does. Well, like a dog, actually. He treats that unfortunate woman in a way that would make the meanest mutt in the dog pound run for cover with its tail between its legs.

He tells her, Beg all you want at my ankles (which is where she had prostrated herself). Stare up at me with your puppy dog eyes. But don’t expect anything in return. “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

It doesn’t get any colder than that.

He’s reminding her of what she already knew: She is not one of God’s Chosen People, not one of the “children” of Israel who has a place at God’s kingdom table.

In Matthew’s version, Jesus goes even further, saying that his ministry is “only to the lost sheep of the children of Israel.” To Sheep. Not dogs.

* *

It’s rude. But it’s worth hearing. He’s reminding that woman – and us – that the God he serves is not generic.

So often nowadays, people say, “Ah, all religions are basically the same. When you get down to it, we all have the same God.”

That sounds good at first blush. But Jesus – at least in today’s Gospel – disagrees. He knows there’s a huge gulf between his God and the gods of the Canaanites and Syrophoenicians.

His God is not “one-size-fits-all,” as others imagine. His is a jealous God (who says so in so many words in the First Commandment). Not a “they-all-look-alike” God, but a big-G God, who won’t put up with any confusion or competition from all the squeaky little small-g gods of the world.

Jesus knows what tribe he belongs to. He’s of the house and lineage of David, part of the family of Abraham and Sarah, a nation set apart by this God from all other nations and all other gods. He is the Chosen One for the Chosen People.

God sent him …tothem.

* *

That bothers us, of course. When someone says each god is different it usually stirrs up religious persecution and “annihilation” to prove which god is “better.”

From the early Crusades in Europe, to the modern-day Taliban with its sickening suicide bombers … from the Spanish Inquisition to the latest example of gay-bashing in God’s name, religious intolerance has brought out the worst in people, over and over.

Human history on the whole is the history of religions fighting each other in the name of their gods, beating up each other, slaughtering innocent civilians to show that “our” god is more loving and gracious than “yours.”

How ironic. Pitifully and painfully ironic.

* *

To the woman’s immense credit in today’s Gospel, she doesn’t tuck her tail when she hears that from Jesus. She doesn’t cower in fear either, or bark back at him for his crummy treatment of her.

Rather, with a bold, playful, almost sassy response that shows she has nothing to lose, she concedes that the God of Jesus is not, first and foremost the God of Syrophoenicians or Canaanites … or even Gentiles, like you and me.

She also concedes that God’s gifts are specifically for Israel. God practically spoils the Chosen People, she affirms, granting far more than they need. And she admits that she’s okay with that. She’s not asking for a level playing field.

But such extravagance for God’s own people enables her to ask for a few stray crumbs of mercy. With a God so loving and overflowingly generous, isn’t it likely that some of the excess might fall from the table – like the twelve baskets of leftovers – to feed others? And if so, might not those crumbs be used to heal her daughter … and the nations?

The woman invites Jesus to let his crummy behavior become crumbs of mercy for her daughter, even if it’s undeserved. God’s love is big enough not only for the lost sheep of Israel … but for the foreign “dogs” too.

Isn’t it?

Surely God won’t mind if a few morsels fall from the table to those on the bottom.

* *

Who’s to argue with that? Jesus doesn’t. Just as our prayers often change God’s heart, her pleading transforms Jesus … with a carry-over effect.

He heals her daughter, and then goes to heal people in other foreign places – starting with the man in the next scene who was deaf and unable to speak.

Jesus stops being Messiah to Israel alone, and takes his first step toward becoming the Savior of the world, so that you and I (as Gentiles) … and Canaanites and Syrophoenicians too … and outsiders of every stripe … can be grafted into the family of God and kingdom of heaven.

He lets crumbs of divine mercy fall in his wake like manna from heaven, wherever people are in need.

* *

It’s a remarkable transformation in him – quite stunning and unexpected. And it carries over to us. The change in him leads to changes in us.

Crumbs from the table – isn’t that what our Extend-the-Table offering is about, each Communion Sunday? It’s a new form of “crummy behavior” from us, helping spread crumbs of God’s love to others in the world.

Today, it’s peanut butter and jelly and other nonperishable foods going to the ‘Tosa Food Pantry. But in a larger sense, it’s always God’s grace spilling off this Table, and overflowing through us.

And why stop there? It’s not just food. What the woman and her daughter needed (and begged for from Jesus), first and foremost, was medical attention.

That remains a huge issue today, as we all know. Only now, we’re not talking one little girl with a life-threatening illness. It’s 46 million people right here in the United States, at this very moment, who lack insurance to pay for a doctor visit when they get sick. Many are women and children, with stories as heart-wrenching as anything Jesus heard.

And it’s 18-20,000 people who die needlessly each year, simply because they can’t afford routine treatment for preventable diseases. And it’s countless more who declare bankruptcy due to the crippling costs of a hospital stay.

It’s health care premiums too, rising at double-digit rates, so that businesses no longer can provide medical benefits for workers as they used to … and still want to provide, all else being equal.

Crummy, isn’t it? Crummiest of all, The New England Journal of Medicine says we don’t care! We don’t care enough as a nation to change those sad statistics. I quote: “A constant feature of health care in the United States is our national willingness to tolerate large numbers of people without health insurance.”

You know when they said that? In April … 1996. Thirteen and a half years ago. Has anything changed in that time? If not, why not?

Do we really want to be as cold-hearted about healthcare for our fellow Americans as Jesus initially was with the woman in Tyre?

I’m not saying I have the solution or right program to fix it. That’s why we elect and pay those capable, hard working, brilliant people in Washington – Democrats and Republicans alike. We trust them to come up with a clear, concise, easy-to-follow plan that works for everyone … like they always do. Right?

Until they do, we have every right to keep pestering them and demanding, playfully and persistently, as the Syrophoenician-Canaanite woman did with Jesus. It is a faithful thing to do!

Withher, we can affirm that even people on the outskirts of the system deserve something. Those who aren’t “entitled” to sit at the table, deserve the same crumbs of dignity and care we would give our pets under the table.

We need to hold elected officials accountable for that, as the Syrophoenician woman did with Jesus. We need to press for the passage of some sort of meaningful legislation for people at risk in less than another 13 1/2 years. Please join me by writing a letter or two on this subject to someone in D.C. who might do something about it at long last.

Try as he did, Jesus could not turn his back on the hungry, the sick, or others in need. How, then, can we? And how can they, who represent us?

“With acts of favoritism [or apathy toward others], do we really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?”

A woman long ago asked that kind of question to Jesus on behalf of her daughter. James asked it too, to his fellow believers. Now 46 million others are asking … us.

What kind of “crummy behavior” will we choose … the kind that does nothing, or that becomes crumbs of mercy falling from Christ’s Table, giving life to the world … And glory of God?