Sermon

Two lessons from the Syro-Phoenician woman

Scripture Text:

Matthew 15:21-28

Sermon:

Jesus and his disciples look a lot like bullies in the gospel passage we read today.  So, the story of the Syro-Phoenican woman is a story some Christians just avoid.  Some folks read it and say that Jesus didn’t really mean it, but that he was testing his disciples.  Other say that Jesus was being human – he was prejudiced just like we all are.  I’m not sure what I think but I do hear two strong messages in this passage about what it means to follow Jesus.  The first message I hear is Jesus showing us how important it is to welcome outsiders, to show hospitality to everyone, including people who seem foreign to us – both as The Church of St. Benedict and as individual people.  The second teaching I hear is that we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for what we need, that Jesus is responsive to being asked, and even harassed, for what we need. Those are two sides of the same coin of hospitality:  offering God’s hospitality to others and accepting God’s hospitality for ourselves.

First, I’d like to talk about sharing God’s hospitality to outsiders.  There are some very potent ways outsiders are made unwelcome in the world we live in, but I have a personal and very recent story to share with you, in part because it has to do with our patron saint, St. Benedict.  And because it’s less about remarkable hospitality and more about constant, everyday hospitality.

I went to a writing workshop for pastors in July.  It’s hosted by St. John’s University in Minnesota, a Benedictine college and monastery on a beautiful lake, surrounded by woods and farmland.  St. John’s is Benedictine, and so, hospitality is very important to them because it was important to St. Benedict (as we often talk about in this church!).  It’s a big place, and we pastors weren’t the only guests there that weekend, but we couldn’t stop talking about how welcomed we felt.  Here’s one example: every morning, a group of us got up early to go to morning prayer at the Abbey church.  When you arrived for morning prayer, which the monks do every day, there was always one monk assigned to be a sort of monk usher.  He never spoke a word.  But he smiled and invited you to come sit with a warm sweep of his hand.  There was a special place for guests to sit, not set apart or at a distance, and not right in the midst of all the monks, but still, we could see, hear, and feel close to everything that was happening. During our first morning, the monk usher saw that we couldn’t figure out what book to use and he quietly came by a few times to show us what page everyone was on.  He had this quiet but powerful feeling of openness about him – he wanted us to feel welcome.

St. Benedict, as some of you may have heard me say before, wrote in his Rule, “Welcome each guest as Christ.”  I was amazed to be treated this way at St. John’s – to feel that these monks – wearing habits, mostly men who were older than me, who might not even feel women should be ordained – treated me with such warmth and gentle love.  Our difference didn’t matter.  It’s not easy to be that hospitable, especially when you receive as many guests as St. John’s or any monastery does.  It would be easy for the monks to be like the disciples in the gospel story – to get tired of new people. They have a university to run, and here are always new people who never know where anything is, who don’t know how to behave, or always ask the same questions over and over.  And yet, there are several guesthouses that are part of the university; it’s just part of what they do.  And the Rule they follow teaches them to welcome every single one as though it was Christ who had come among them.

But Benedictine monks are human – and they have a great sense of humor. There’s a joke that once when a monk saw another visitor coming down the road to his monastery he said, “Oh Christ, not you again!”   But Jesus taught his disciples over and over again and in this story of the foreign woman, that part of what his ministry was about was welcoming and healing people who were different. May we not be afraid to do the same.

The other lesson of the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman is not being afraid to ask for what we need.

The Syro-Phoenician woman Jesus meets on the road has no right to ask him to heal her daughter.  She’s not a Jew.  She hasn’t said she’ll follow him or change her life.  A a woman alone in her society, she shouldn’t be approaching a strange group of men at all.  She doesn’t even ask nicely or politely: she shouts.  And when she does, it’s as though we’re in a middle school – the disciples mutter to Jesus, “Tell her to get lost.”  He ignores her.  She doesn’t give up.

How hard would that be for you to do?  To hold your ground when a big group of people who are stronger than you don’t want to talk to you?  Of course, the Syro-Phoenician woman had the strong motivation as a mother to do something for her child, but she’s not the only outsider or foreigner in the gospels to go after Jesus for healing or teaching and not give up.  Nicodemus who finds Jesus in the middle of the night, a Roman centurion, the women with the flow of blood who touches Jesus’ robe, a blind man who cries out from the side of the road.  And Jesus answers all of them.  Jesus never refuses to heal anyone.  Jesus never asks anyone to go figure it out on their own or to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Speaking of bootstraps: recently, Adam and I saw the movie “Cowboys and Aliens.”  At the end, just like always, the cowboy hero leaves everyone behind and rides off into the sunset alone.  He doesn’t seem to need anything or be attached to anybody.  People say that owning a home is the American Dream, but I think the American Dream is actually the idea that we can be totally self-sufficient.  That we can have everything and don’t need anyone else’s help.  But that’s not how Christ asks us to live.  That’s not the world God imagined we would live in.

Don’t be a cowboy riding off into the sunset, all by your lonesome.  God wants us to find healing and God wants us to be connected. Don’t be afraid to ask God for what you need, even if you feel like you don’t deserve it.  Jesus Christ is love and your Lord: don’t be afraid to ask him – even to shout at him! – for the healing you need.

Because the other thing Jesus teaches us about healing, or getting what we need, or knowing God better, or being forgiven, is that it actually makes a difference to ask for it.  Not just to sit back and think, well, “Jesus knows where to find me.”  Part of the Christian life, part of being in relationship with God and other human beings, is asking.  Is communicating.  Is saying “Have mercy on me” or “Lord, help me,” or reacting with anger and sass when you feel God hasn’t given you what you need. God is a great mystery and I don’t pretend to understand how or why someone people seem to get more of what they need than others, but sometimes we need to be brave enough to ask.

Jesus taught that the two greatest commandments were to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.  Both loving your neighbor and loving yourself.  Love yourself enough to ask God for what you need.  Love your neighbor, and look for the face of Christ in them.  Accept God’s hospitality.  And offer God’s hospitality to others.

Amen.

Uploaded on August 14, 2011 in by RevHeidi

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