15 Pentecost B – September 6, 2015

15 Pentecost B – September 6, 2015

 

For over fifty years, Atticus Finch, the lawyer/father in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has occupied a position of “secular saint” in American culture. He is shown to us, both in the book and in Gregory Peck’s screen portrayal, as a man of rare courage, great moral integrity, and most of all, as a man untainted by the systemic racism of his community.

 

Then Harper Lee published, “Go Set a Watchman,” a different book written before “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but set in a time 20 years later. She has the same characters, but they are different than they were. In particular, the sainted Atticus is different. He is no longer so

perfect and so pure.  This later Atticus is still an educated and somewhat enlightened man for his time and place, but he is also a bigot and a racist who participates in organizations designed to keep Black people in their and dismay. This is not the man who so sat on the jail porch, unarmed, facing down the Klan to defend Jim Robinson, nor is it the man who so ably defended him in court. We do not recognize this new/old Atticus Finch.

Most of us have the same reaction to the Jesus we see in this story from Mark’s Gospel.  We do not recognize this careless bigot as the same man who eats with “tax collectors and sinners,” who healed the Roman Centurion’s daughter, who consistently reaches out to the despised, the ignored, and the left-behind.   “Who is this?” we wonder, “Who is this man who not only rejects the woman’s plea for healing, but who crudely insults her in the process? This is a Jesus we do not know.”

Over the years, Biblical scholars and preachers have tried to mitigate the unlikeable Jesus.

Some have made much of the fact that in the Greek the word used for dogs could be translated puppies or household pets, but that really doesn’t help much. Jews did not see dogs as pets, they were seen as wild scavengers, more like our attitude toward coyotes or wolves, and the word was used by Jews to refer to heretics and false teachers. And even if he did mean puppies, it’s still an insult. Others have pointed out that Jesus doesn’t say the dogs won’t eat, just that the children get to eat  first. I don’t think this helps very much. Any way you look at what Jesus said to the woman, he insulted her.

Now others say things like, “Jesus is being intentionally provocative, seeking to draw out a response of persistent faith from the woman. He debate, he is delighted to do so, since his purpose is to provoke even greater faith.”

I really doubt this notion, mainly because there is nothing to base it on other than our desire for Jesus to always look good. Just like we resist a racist Atticus Finch (and our own racist experiences we PNWerners like to pretend don’t exist), we push back against the notion of a Jesus who was somehow less than the perfect person we believe him to be.

What the woman does here is fascinating.  Instead of bristling at the insult, she turns it in her favor.  She picks up on Jesus’ reference to children and paints a different picture, one any of us with dogs as household pets will instantly recognize.  She says, “True enough, but the dogs don’t have to wait to eat until later.  They just sit under the table slip to the dogs because they love the dog or because they don’t want to eat liver. Jesus hears her and changes his mind about her request and heals her daughter. I also think he changes his mind about the nature of his mission; about the relationship of Jews and Gentiles in the new Kingdom of God.

Think about this for a minute. In Mark’s story about Jesus, this is his first recorded encounter with someone who is not Jewish, someone who is not a member of his own race and own religion. Jesus grew up in a multi- cultural context, with Greeks and Romans and others all around, but then as now, ethnic groups tend to spend most of their time together, especially in matters of religion and politics. So, this is, perhaps, the first time Jesus has had to articulate his understanding of his mission as the Messiah to someone who did not share his ethnic and cultural not have been said.  And the woman made him think.  Indeed, it appears she made him change his mind, which resulted in his changing his actions.  In a very important sense, Jesus “got converted” by his encounter with the bold, truth-telling, Syrophoenician woman.

This has been a year of heightened race awareness in the United States.  From Ferguson and “Black Lives Matter,” to Baltimore, to a traffic stop in Texas, to the horrific events at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, to pick-up trucks driving our streets with rebel flags flying off the back – we have been confronted with an issue most of us would rather not think about or talk about.  But we must.  We must not only talk about it; we must act, we must do something about it.

We thought we were past it, we thought we were like the Atticus Finch in different story, have held a mirror up to our lives and let us know that we are, as a people, more like the Atticus in “Go Set a Watchman;” most of us tone-deaf to the realities of life in America for minority persons.

And to further the point that is being misunderstood over and over in our communities, I’d like to share what I find to be a crucially important clarification about #blacklivesmatter.    Imagine for a moment that you broke your left wrist. In excruciating pain, you rush to the emergency room for treatment only to run into a doctor who insists on examining not just your mangled left wrist, but your uninjured right wrist, rib cage, femur, fibula, sacrum, humerus, phalanges, the whole bag of bones that is you. You say, “Doc, it’s just my left wrist that hurts.” And she says, “Hey, all bones matter.” patronizing and off point, then you should understand why “All lives matter” is the same. It’s not about “elevating some lives” any more than  it would be about elevating some bones. Rather, it’s about treating where it hurts.

So yes, all lives matter, but we Christians, and humans in general, most certainly need to stay focused on the Black ones right now, ok (and for that matter – the brown and native ones who are being brutalized and killed by our authorities in appalling rates as well), because it is very apparent that our judicial system doesn’t seem to know that all lives matter yet. But to be crystal clear, and run the risk of alienating myself from some of you, if you can’t see why we should all be exclaiming #Black, Brown, and Native lives matter before and above all lives matter, you are a part of the problem.

Today, and every day from the day Jesus encountered this woman to all the days before and after Jesus comes back, we are called to be like Christ in his conversation and further, his action, with the Gentile woman. We are called to listen to the voices of those who will tell us the truth about themselves, the truth about what it’s like to be a person of color in this country. We are called to listen, and then we are called take action, first changing those things about ourselves that can change and should be changed. Then we are called to speak out without fear, calling our nation to listen to the voices of those amongst us who have been ignored and silenced too long.

So where so many – actually, too many in my opinion, pastors will be preaching that God’s will for equity be done with or without us today – I want to encourage you of the truth that God has freed us in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus to be changed, nourished, and reborn into Jesus’ acting hands, feet, ears, and nature here in our Seattle area context.  Seattle, which is statistically proven to be one of the most racist parts of the country, needs followers of Jesus to stand up and speak out about what it means to follow a God and Savior who calls us to places of heartache, anger, injustice, and against the othering of many of God’s very own beloved.  We are ALL GOD’S CHILDREN WHO MATTER, but right now, the ones hurting the most are Black, Brown, Native, Syrian, Palestinian, and so very many more.  They can’t afford for us to wait for Jesus to return and make the world perfect, and it’s our job to keep up the work of Christ until Christ returns.  Not just talk about it, but to act boldly.

Amen and amen.