here<\/a>\u00a0from the Rev. C. Eric Funston). But this one, from\u00a0the Rev. Erin Phillips, a\u00a0priest in Canada, was the first I\u2019d read last week that so forcefully and prophetically connected the story to the refugee crisis. So I\u2019m honored she has allowed me to share her words here.<\/p>\n+ + +<\/p>\n
By The Rev. Erin Phillips<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking this week about how many times I\u2019ve heard this gospel reading on a Sunday morning\u2026probably around a dozen times.\u00a0 And I can think of one or two of the sermons I\u2019ve heard or preached myself.\u00a0 They are awkward sermons because it is a difficult gospel.\u00a0 Because what happens? Jesus meets a woman who begs him to help her daughter, she isn\u2019t a Jew, he calls her a dog, she says even dogs eat the scraps that fall on the floor, he says, good answer and he heals her daughter.\u00a0 On the surface of it it looks like two things happen: Jesus is a jerk and he changes his mind.<\/p>\n
So you can see why it is difficult to preach on this.\u00a0 First of all there is nothing in our other experience to say Jesus was ever a jerk. In his book, The Hermeneutic of Love, Alan Jacobs talks about how when we know and love a person then we evaluate his or her behaviour according to what we have always known him or her to do.\u00a0\u00a0 So faced with what seems to us to be out of character for Jesus we are going to have a hard time making sense of it.<\/p>\n
But the second issue is also a problem.\u00a0 Can we say that Jesus changes his mind?\u00a0 The classic response is that Jesus is fully God so how can he?\u00a0 But he is also fully human and there are places where Jesus expresses doubts and fears.\u00a0 Are we willing to say that his divinity trumps his humanity?\u00a0 We lose a great deal if we do.<\/p>\n
Part of what it means to be human is that we are changed by our encounters with other people.\u00a0 I am not the same person I was when I first met you and I hope you are not the same people you were when you met me.\u00a0 We would wonder if a person was never changed by relationships.\u00a0 Part of what it is to say that Jesus is human is to realize that he experiences all of what we experience.\u00a0 Entering into our experience means that he is changed by his encounters and relationships with people too.\u00a0 So if we are okay with that let\u2019s look at what happens in this encounter.<\/p>\n
Jesus is encountered by a woman \u2013 she has sought him out.\u00a0 She is a mother desperate for her child.\u00a0 But he doesn\u2019t see her.\u00a0 He sees a non-Jew \u2013 a Syrophoenician \u2013 and says, I\u2019m not here for dogs.\u00a0 When he calls her a dog he\u2019s not talking about dogs the way we do.\u00a0 He\u2019s not calling her a member of his family, a fur baby.\u00a0 He\u2019s calling her pest, unclean, vermin.\u00a0 And she turns it on him, pointing out those unclean pests eat from the scraps that fall from the table.\u00a0 And it is in that moment he sees her.\u00a0 She\u2019s human to him.\u00a0 And he responds as we would expect the Jesus we love to respond.\u00a0 He heals her daughter.\u00a0\u00a0 And Jesus\u2019ministry clearly extends from the Jewish nation to all nations.\u00a0 His healing ministry extends to the world.<\/p>\n
I thought about this this week as we encountered another desperate parent.\u00a0 Thousands and thousands of people have been desperately fleeing their homes for months,\u00a0the biggest crisis of displaced people since 1947.\u00a060 million people in the world have fled their homes.\u00a0 And there has been a major controversy about whether they should be called migrants or refugees.\u00a0 For the past year the headlines have mostly read \u201cmigrants.\u201d\u00a0 Migrants are drawn to a new place by opportunities. I\u2019m a migrant in that sense. \u00a0 moved to Alberta for a job and actually got financial assistance from the Canadian government under EI to do so. So are so many people who have come to Taber to work in agriculture or oil.<\/p>\n
Refugees flee a place because their lives are at risk.\u00a0 They are running from violence, starvation, death.\u00a0 It matters very\u00a0 much whether we call people migrants or refugees whether we think they are coming because they might have a better life here or if they are coming here because it is the only way they will have a life at all.<\/p>\n
The thing is that you can tell a migrant to go away with a clean conscience.\u00a0 Sorry, go find a better life in some other place.\u00a0 But when you tell a refugee to go away you are telling them to go die<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Before the war a ship left Europe loaded with Jewish refugees and we turned them away.\u00a0 So did the United States.\u00a0 Her name was the St. Louis and she was forced to take her passengers back to France where most of them died in the camps.\u00a0 We live with the shame of that refusal.\u00a0 We know that those deaths are in part our fault.\u00a0 But that\u2019s what happens when you tell refugees to go away.\u00a0 They die.<\/p>\nBut we don\u2019t like thinking about that so we call them migrants and we don\u2019t have to be honest about it.\u00a0 Or worse, we do what the British Prime Minister did and we call them swarms.\u00a0 Like insects.\u00a0 Like things we don\u2019t care about when they die.<\/p>\n
And then a photographer took a picture of one of those migrants, part of that swarm.\u00a0 A three year old boy\u2026lying on a beach\u2026his face in the water\u2026dead.\u00a0 And in that moment we saw and really saw.\u00a0 And then we looked at his weeping father as he described how his two boys had died in his arms and how he tried to save his wife and we saw.<\/p>\n
We saw not a migrant\u2026not a swarm\u2026.not a dog.\u00a0 We saw one of us, we saw a father and we saw our own children and we were horrified and ashamed.<\/p>\n
Many people have said, I can\u2019t unsee the picture.\u00a0 I hope we don\u2019t \u2018unsee\u2019the picture.\u00a0 I hope we don\u2019t return to our not-seeing of these desperate people as people.\u00a0 In one piece that I read,\u00a0 Laura Tharion,\u00a0 writing a poem of sorts of repentance for our failure to respond sooner, wrote, perhaps intentionally echoing this morning\u2019s gospel:<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t care that you are dead.<\/p>\n
We care only for the inconvenience of<\/p>\n
our own discomfort,<\/p>\n
relieved to no longer need<\/p>\n
to sacrifice the crumbs you would<\/p>\n
have quietly gathered from beneath<\/p>\n
our bloated tables,<\/p>\n
I pray we don\u2019t return to this kind of indifference.<\/p>\n
Canadians have responded generously \u2013 Aid organizations have been getting donations.\u00a0 The group in Lethbridge bringing in two refugee families have been getting great response this week.<\/p>\n
Jesus saw the mother and was moved and his ministry opened out in incredible ways\u2026ways that brought us gentiles into his circle of reconciliation and healing. And he calls on us to do the same\u2026to see the mother, to see the father, to see the suffering child and respond.\u00a0 And be part of the healing of the world.\u00a0 To provide safety and hope. Let us be part of that ministry.\u00a0 May it be so.
\nImage Credit: Freedom House\/Flickr<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This past week, I\u2019ve read so many brilliant sermons on Jesus and Syrophoenician woman, most of them online (here\u00a0from the Rev. Alissabeth Newton), (here\u00a0from the Rev. Erik Parker), and (here\u00a0from the Rev. C. Eric Funston). But this one, from\u00a0the Rev. Erin Phillips, a\u00a0priest in Canada, was the first I\u2019d read last week that so forcefully […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homily"],"yoast_head":"\n
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