Sermon 6/16/13
Mark 7:24-37
How to Pack for Summer Vacation: Travelling
Abroad
This Sunday we’re continuing with our theme that Pastor
Aaron started us out on last Sunday, our series titled, “How to Pack for Summer
Vacation.” I don’t know about you, but I have a list of places that I’d
eventually like to get to see. This summer, I’ll be driving through some states
I haven’t been to yet. Ireland is on my list of places I’d just love to visit,
along with New Zealand and the Holy Land. What’s on your list? Most of us, I
suspect, imagine going places where we suspect we’ll have a good time, right?
We imagine travelling to places that we will find relaxing or exciting. We
might want to accomplish some particular task – hiking up a certain mountain,
or sailing a certain body of water, something that is challenging.
But I wonder, how often do you intentionally visit places
where you plan on feeling uncomfortable and out of place? How often do your
travels take you out of your comfort zone? I remember when I was serving in
East Syracuse – I started out living in Fayetteville, but after a year, I had
the opportunity to rent a vacant parsonage that was much bigger than my
apartment while also being much cheaper! I couldn’t pass up the good deal. But
when I shared with my congregation that I would be living in the city of
Syracuse, several folks responded with a degree of alarm. They hated having to
go into the city, and they were sure I wouldn’t like living there. East
Syracuse might be minutes from Syracuse, but some of the folks never really
crossed that line. We started then, as a congregation, volunteering at the
Syracuse Rescue Mission. I took a long time, building up from one or two
willing companions volunteering in the mailroom to getting a big group to go
serve at the soup kitchen. It took a lot, but finally some folks were willing
to go out of their comfort zones.
I’ve shared with you my introverted nature. I’m pretty
shy, and I often feel like I’m outside of my comfort zone, anytime I’m visiting
a place where I don’t know many people, or I’m a newcomer. These days many
seminaries require a cross-cultural immersion experience as part of your degree
program, and so I travelled to Ghana, in West Africa, for a few weeks after my
first year of seminary. We stayed with host families for one week of our trip,
and without the comforting present of my professors and classmates, I felt very
much out of my comfort zone, despite the incredible hospitality of my host
family. As a white American, I rarely have to experience what many people of
color experience every single day – being visibly different than almost
everyone around them. It was a new experience to know that every person who saw
me was noticing the color of my skin, and making assumptions about me because
of what I looked like and where I was from. I learned a lot from my experience,
and at the same time felt like I was just hitting the tip of the iceberg,
thinking about how people are included and excluded, who’s in and who is out,
how we define what is normal and what
doesn’t fit. How often do you travel outside your comfort zones? How often do
you cross boundaries into places where you no longer get to represent the
normal, the typical?
Jesus is
on the move in our text today too, crossing boundaries, as usual. We find that
Jesus has set out for the region of Tyre. Tyre was a region that was primarily
inhabited by Gentiles – by non-Jews. We’re told that he doesn’t want anyone to
know he’s there. But, as usual, “he could not escape notice,” and a woman comes
to him with a “little” daughter who has an unclean spirit. She comes to him
because, we read, she “immediately” heard about him when he came into town. She
falls on her knees before Jesus and begs him to heal her child. Jesus’
response? “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the
children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he says. Meaning has changed
somewhat over time, but calling a woman a dog – even, in this situation,
something like a ‘puppy-dog’, wasn’t exactly a compliment either. Jesus seems
to be saying that she doesn’t count as one of the children he’s trying to feed,
but is like a puppy begging for human food at the table. But the woman has her
own snappy comeback for Jesus – “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the
children’s crumbs.” This somehow suits what Jesus was looking for apparently,
because he says to her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your
daughter.” After this healing, Jesus takes an awkward route by way of Sidon
towards the Sea of Galilee. Here, a man who is deaf and who has a speech
impediment is brought to Jesus. Jesus heals with a command – “Ephphatha – be
opened.” Jesus tries to keep the healing quiet, but of course the news spreads
quickly. People say of him, “he has done everything well; he even makes the
deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
What to
make of this text? Why does Jesus speak the way he does to this woman? What
does it mean? When I’m confused about the meaning of passages in the Bible, it
often helps me to check the immediate context – what happens right before and
right after this passage. Knowing where the story falls in the overall scheme
of things can help point us to what the story means, instead of trying to take
a passage out of context as a stand-alone teaching. In context, we can ask: Why
is the story here? Does it illustrate a point made in an earlier scene? Is it
setting the stage for what comes next? If we look at the ‘before’ to today’s
passage, we find that Jesus was teaching the scribes and Pharisees, the disciples
and crowds, about what is clean and unclean. Jesus reminds them that it is what
is inside a person that can make them clean or unclean, not what is outside,
external, what goes in. It is not the superficial that makes us unclean or
clean, but the contents of our hearts. Jesus then reprimands the religious
leaders for holding onto human traditions so tightly that they miss the point
of the commandments of God to love.
So, it
is just after this that we see Jesus interacting with a woman who was, well, a woman, and a foreign woman, a Gentile
woman, a woman of a different race, a
woman with an unclean, demon-possessed
daughter, a woman begging on her
knees, strike after strike against her, according to ritual, custom,
tradition, practice – where is this story leading us? If Jesus had been
teaching about what really defiles a person, and how people weren’t unclean for
the superficial reasons the Pharisees insisted on, and then he went from there
directly to a region where the majority of people were foreigners, unclean
under purity laws, for no apparent reason, what can we suspect about Jesus’
intentions with the woman? Despite appearance to the contrary, it seems Jesus
must have gone to Tyre on purpose to interact with non-Jews. He must have at
least anticipated a non-Jew coming to him for healing. And though his first
words to her are at first confusing or hard to hear, what strongly held belief
against healing her could be so easily overthrown after a one sentence
exchange? I must believe, given the positioning of these two passages, that
Jesus’ trip to Tyre is an illustration, a demonstration of his point about what
– who – is clean and unclean, unaccepted and accepted in God’s terms over human
terms.
What,
then, is the point for us? What do take away? Sure, we can conclude: Jesus has
declared everyone to be clean, to belong, to be worth his time. So we aren’t
supposed to think of anyone as unclean either. But I think it is more than
that. I think Jesus calls us to be intentional about crossing boundaries, breaking
out of our own comfort zones, forging relationships that communicate more than
our words to about what we believe about who’s in God’s circle. What makes us
clean or unclean? Are we Christians missing out if the only people we spend
time with are other Christians? If we only spend time with people who share the
same believes and practices we do? In safe places? With people who are polite
and behaved and proper? With people who look just like us, live in homes like
us, work in jobs like us, watch the same TV shows, listen to the same music? Or
does keeping to our safe, clean comfort zones result in us missing out on God’s
adventure?
Over and
over, Jesus raises the hackles of the religious folk of his day because they
don’t like where he’s spending his time,
who he is spending time with. They’re
pretty sure who is clean and who is not.
But Jesus seems pretty sure too. And he’s travelling abroad. Crossing the false
boundaries we set up all over the place. Stepping out of our comfort zones, and
beckoning for us to follow. Where are you going for summer vacation? Jesus’
plans are clear. He’s boundary crossing. He’s telling us: Be opened – let your
heart be opened. He has done
everything well. So let us go and do likewise. Amen.
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