Be the Dog

sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18B, September 9, 2018

Isaiah 35:4-7a;  Psalm 146;  James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37

I was standing in line at Safeway. A woman with three small children was ahead of me, and their transaction was taking a long time. I thought, “How do I always manage to pick the wrong line?” I had just finished unloading every item from my full cart onto the conveyor belt when the clerk whispered to me behind her hand, “You might want to try another line. This one’s going to take a while … because it’s WIC.”

“WIC,” of course, stands for “Women, Infants, and Children.” The clerk was referring to the Department of Agriculture’s federal assistance program for vulnerable families. When you shop with a WIC disbursement, the clerk has to carefully check every item against the list of allowed items. It takes a long time to make sure that the government paperwork is completed to satisfaction. As a result, every time a WIC family buys groceries, the line of customers behind them backs up.

I had already unloaded every grocery from my cart. But even if I hadn’t, I would not have moved. Why? Because as one of the baptized, it is my duty to respect the dignity of every human being. (To be honest, it helped that I wasn’t actually in a hurry that day.) And so I made eye contact with the kids and made funny faces with them while their mother worked with the clerk. Toward the end I caught the mother’s eye; from under her hijab, she flashed a brilliant smile and mouthed, “Thank you.”

Why do I tell this story? Because it’s about one of the primary concerns of Jesus, a concern that is stated in our Baptismal Covenant: respecting the dignity of every human being.

The woman I encountered at Safeway was trying to do the best she could for her kids. I don’t know anything else about her life. What if one of her kids became very ill? What would she do then?

Two thousand years ago, she could have been the woman who approached Jesus in the region of Tyre. She could have accosted this man from another culture and another religion and begged for his assistance. Jesus was the foreigner in this situation. He may have been trying to score some time off, away from all the people who were making demands on his time and energy. But sometimes, as we clergy say to each other, the interruption is the work.

How does Jesus feel to be begged for help? Our text doesn’t say—but we do have his words. Jesus replies, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Ouch. What happened to the dignity of every human being? Did I not just say that this was one of Jesus’ primary concerns? So what gives?

The simplest answer is that we don’t know. Depending on your understanding of Jesus, people have different ideas that leave them with varying levels of discomfort. The discomfort is rooted in a theology that denies that Jesus ever sinned. So what happened here? Isn’t it sinful to insult a woman who asks you for help? Was Jesus just feeling cranky? Did he just level a racist insult at her?

Or maybe Jesus had more wherewithal than it seems. Maybe was bantering with the woman because he knew she could take it, much as John wrote about Jesus and the woman at the well. Maybe Jesus tugged her deeper into conversation by using an offensive term that Jews typically used against Syrophoenician Gentiles. (After all, we all know and frequently hear a certain offensive synonym for the word “dog.” On principle, I never use it to describe a woman, ever. But I’m aware that in certain circles, it can be used in jest.) Maybe Jesus wanted to see how she would respond. Or maybe he wanted to test his disciples’ reaction and teach them a lesson.

This reading follows on last week’s reading, in which Jesus said that it’s what comes out of a person that defiles. Maybe the gospel writer wanted to make a larger point about hypocrisy, or about deafness and new hearing and restored speech, moving gracefully from last week’s narrative through this one.

Not one of these possible explanations satisfies every scholar and every believer. So what can we do? I think this is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mysterious story that we can mine for helpful truths.

Even so, the focal point of the story is not Jesus’ shocking rebuke, but the woman’s response. See, this woman never loses sight of her own God-given dignity. When Jesus calls her a dog, she owns it. She says, “Yes, I am a dog. I am a faithful, patient dog. And I’m sitting at your feet at your God’s dinner table, because we dogs know that whatever crumbs happen to fall on the floor are ours by right. So: what crumbs are you going to give my daughter?”

Where does this woman’s dignity come from? How does she know that she is of infinite and eternal value? Who allowed her to find out?

Yet somehow, she heard. This woman heard and understood God’s love for her, and her tongue was released, and she spoke, and maybe she even opened the ears of the Messiah.

I’m open to that, by the way. If Jesus was truly human, he had days when his patience was tested. We know he sometimes lost his temper, not just in the Temple that one time, but on other occasions as well. Nothing made Jesus angrier than powerful people enabling injustice and abuse against the vulnerable. “If you trip up someone who is vulnerable,” he once said, “you may as well go and drown yourself. If you pile your own baggage on people with weak backs, if you shut the door of God’s house in people’s faces, if you hate and scorn people and teach others to do likewise, if you use the letter of the law to destroy the spirit of love, then you can go to hell!” These are things our loving, sinless savior Jesus said when he was angry.

So maybe this woman helped Jesus to see that his mission was much bigger than he’d originally thought. I mean, he had to find that out at some point, right? I don’t think he knew it in the manger. Maybe she called him up short and gave him a broader view.

Jesus mistreated this woman at first, but her reaction wasn’t to fight in anger, or flee in terror, or even freeze in uncertainty. She stayed in the game. She turned the other cheek, which is not weakness, but bravery. She walked the extra mile, which is an act of rebellion. She expressed in no uncertain terms that she had a right to exist, a right to speak her mind, and a right to have a daughter who was not possessed by a demon, thank you very much.

This woman wasn’t one of Jesus’ people. She wasn’t a follower of Abraham’s God. She was simply beloved, and she knew it. She became Jesus’ hero. And we don’t even know her name.

If even Jesus can be called up short by some anonymous nobody and learn from it, then every time I have to learn from my mistakes, I’m walking the same holy path. Maybe Jesus isn’t perfect in his sinlessness as much as in his humble humanity. Maybe Jesus shows his perfection by suffering failure and then growing from it. After all, Jesus will fail again later in the story, in a much bigger way.

I would love to know this woman. I wish I could have a beer with her. I want to know whether she had ever had a husband or other children, and what her daughter liked to play, and I want to hear the songs of resistance and revolution she sang at bedtime. No demon was going to keep hold on her little girl—nope. Mama Bear was there for her. She’d just heard of a wonder worker, the master of a smorgasbord of miracles, who was in town trying to stay incognito. Nuh-uh, she said. My ear is to the ground, and I have agents in the field. I’m coming to find you, she thought, because you do what God does, and God owes my little girl some peace!

So what about you? In the face of anxiety and suffering, how will your human dignity serve you? You see, dignity was the common thread that brought Jesus and this woman closer together.

Sometimes when we learn we’re in the wrong, it can feel painful, or like actual suffering—and then we have a choice. Do we double down on our offensive behavior, out of fear that it might mean we are fundamentally flawed? Or do we change and grow thanks to the knowledge that we are loved? Have you ever acted impatiently when someone with less power was inconveniencing you? Did you make amends? Did you dig deep for more patience the next time?

Have you ever ducked an opportunity to stand up to a bully on someone else’s behalf? Did you repent? Did you stand with someone vulnerable the next time?

An image of God's Kingdom. No, really.

Have you ever been the Syrophoenician woman, frustrated by life, held back by powerful forces, unable to get on top of it all? At such times, are you able to hang on to some idea of how loved you are? Others may label you a dog. Does a dog worry about its place in the family? No? Own your dignity, then—be the dog.

And then, once you’ve asserted your canine status, look for the other dogs. Who are the ones who only get crumbs? Go find them. Don’t just take the lowest place at the table—a table where you have every right to sit in splendor, by the way. Be the dog. Crawl under the table and join the other dogs who are waiting for the crumbs.

This is the holy place. This is where Jesus hangs out. Jesus was poured out for us in his suffering, and in so doing, he taught us how to suffer well. If you’re going to be poured out anyway—and pain and loss will come to all of us—then how can you be poured out in the service of others? In the depth of your suffering, you have infinite worth and inherent dignity. Use them! Let’s all crawl under the table and be dogs together. Amen.