Erasing the Lines that Divide Us

Year B: Proper 18

Jesus has allowed his privileged status as a Jewish male to be severely affronted by a Gentile woman for the sake of inclusivity. So must the collective identity of Judaism suffer “indignity” (from the perspective of honor culture) by seeing its traditional social boundaries opened to welcome Gentiles. As Jesus’ command in 5:43 anticipated the feeding of the crowds on the “Jewish” side of the sea, so does this story prefigure the feeding of the masses on the “Gentile” side (8:1ff). Both the “children” and the “outsiders” have been “satisfied” (the word is the same in 6:42, 7:27, and 8:4, 8). Not only is “all food clean” (7:19); all are welcome at the table. — Ched Myers

Year B, Proper 18, September 8, 2024

First Reading: Isaiah 35:4-7a

Psalm: Psalm 146

Second Reading: James 2:1-17

Gospel: Mark 7:24-37

Sermon - Erasing the Lines that Divide Us

In last week’s sermon, we talked about how Jesus challenged conventional ideas of what is clean and what is unclean, who is in and who is out, and our tendency to place heavy burdens upon ourselves in the name of “safety.”

By the way, last week wasn’t my turn to preach, but I ended up giving a version of this sermon on Wednesday for our monthly Uplift service:

In this week’s reading, Jesus engages in “guerrilla theatre” to bring his message to life.

First, Jesus travels towards Tyre and Sidon, or you might say he goes into '“their” territory. Tyre and Sidon were historic enemies of God’s people. Sidon, named for the great-grandson of Noah, was considered under the curse of Ham (Genesis 9:34-28; cf. Genesis 10:15). Jezebel was from Sidon. In Ezekiel, Tyre was pictured as boasting over Jerusalem when the temple fell.

In other words, Tyre and Sidon might be the last place one would expect to find potential disciples of Jesus.

And that’s exactly the point.

Once Jesus reaches his destination, a gentile woman approaches him with a request for a demon to be cast out of her daughter. You can imagine what the disciples must be thinking at this point. Though they said nothing, their actions in other stories, such as John 4 with the Samaritan woman, clue us in as to what they must be thinking.

Jesus says something shocking here, but I think he is intentionally behaving according to conventional wisdom to accomplish a few different things: (1) Jesus wants to get his point across: old lines of clean and unclean are being dissolved, (2) Jesus wants to juxtapose the lack of faith of the religious leaders and the disciples with the radical faith of a gentile woman, and (3) he his inviting the woman to demonstrate her faith before his disciples.

Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” Mark 7:26–29

I think another thing we can learn from this story is that people with authentic faith don’t care about any human-imposed boundaries that attempt to keep them from the family of God. When someone has authentic faith, they will find a place at the table because the place is prepared for them by Jesus. The challenge for us is whether or not our community is ready for the kinds of people who force us to rethink who is in and who is out.

We also need to be willing, like Jesus models for his disciples, to drop our egos and allow people of other cultures, backgrounds, and traditions to challenge us and educate us.

The second encounter in Mark 7 is between Jesus and a deaf and mute man. This story is equally as shocking, so I’ll let you read it for yourself:

They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Mark 7:32–35

While Jesus did a long-distance healing in the previous story, in this story Jesus gets up close and personal. He touches the man, he spits and touches his tongue, and he looked up to heaven to show the man he was calling on God. Jesus knows his audience well; he knows how to meet us where we are at.

So the question everyone has about this passage is why Jesus spit and touched this man’s tongue. We would be repulsed by such a thing, right?

Of course, we have little problem with blood transfusions or organ transplants, and you could argue that both of those are a little more intimate than this.

But I think we need to sit with our disgust for a second because that is the same feeling the religious leaders had towards the disciples in the first half of Mark 7.

Read what Jesus said again,

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” Mark 7:14–15

His disciples didn’t understand this, so Jesus had to clarify his statement for them:

When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, “So, are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) Mark 7:17–19

What Jesus is doing here in healing the blind man with spit is saying, “You better get ready because people who eat things you find disgusting or who you might even find unclean or disgusting are about to come to the table in droves, and if you aren’t ready for that, you’ll miss out on something great.”

Or he might be saying, “You want a ritual to make yourself clean? Here’s one for you! That’s what I think about your clean/ unclean distinctions.”

In all of these stories, we need to put ourselves in the disciples’ shoes and allow ourselves to be challenged. What cultural barriers of clean and unclean have we erected that needlessly exclude others from our corner of God’s table? How can we erase these lines that divide us? Who are the Syrophoenician women in our communities?

Second Reading: Faith Without Partiality

Assemblies of Christians on Sunday should be the safest places on earth. Anyone on earth should be able to show up to a congregation of believers and feel welcome. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

In James 2, James critiqued his audience for showing partiality towards rich guests within their assemblies. James wrote, “My brothers and sisters, do not claim the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory while showing partiality. For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here in a good place, please,’ while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there,’ or, ‘Sit by my footstool,' have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?” (James 2:1–4).

Sometimes we may not even realize we are making these kinds of distinctions, but the people who experience prejudice do realize it. We need to be sensitive to how we treat others. We ought to receive everyone as Christ has received us, for the glory of God (Romans 15:7).

It can be our natural inclination to prefer people who match our level of cleanliness, style of dress, and other social expectations, but these are not the measures of who is and who isn’t a child of God.

I pray that every person who comes into our assembly feels as if they have found their way back home. I pray that they feel welcome, loved, and cherished. I say this not to correct you as James corrected his audience; instead, I write this to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing because I believe this congregation embodies these principles.

---

Thanks so much for keeping up with this blog. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or critiques, you can always comment here or reach out through my website: https://danielr.net.