September 9, 2018 – Mark 7:24-37
Mark 7:24-37
Be Opened!
Lectionary 23B – September 9, 2018 – Fall Launch Sunday!
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Jesus needs a break – he’s been working hard!
It’s been one thing after another for Jesus: healing and teaching and feeding thousands.
And to top it all off, he has recently been rejected by his own people.
It has been a tough stretch for Jesus, and so . . . he takes a vacation.
He goes west! He goes to the beach! Yes! He heads to Tyre on the Mediterranean coast.
And as far as we know, he goes alone – not even his friends are with him.
Now the beach is in non-Jewish or Gentile territory – moreover, Tyre is the region of the enemy.
And maybe he goes there purposely so that he doesn’t have to work.
Because – and this is the important point – up until this point in the story,
Jesus thinks that his mission, his work of healing and teaching and feeding and
forgiving – is solely for the Jewish people.
He thinks up till now that God is calling him just to work among his own people.
So maybe there is a real point to his going to Tyre: maybe he just needs a break from
the work God is calling him to do.
The last time he tried to get away, though, it didn’t work out so well: he didn’t go far enough!
The Jewish people found him and he ended up having to feed 5000 people!
So this time he goes way out! To Tyre! Because even Jesus needs to rest.
So he takes his tablet, sets up his wi-fi, makes sure his subscription to Netflix is up to date, and
heads to the beach so he can binge watch the new season of Orange is the New Black.
It takes him about a day to walk there.
Only: even here, even way out here, his reputation has preceded him.
Even here they’ve heard of all he’s been doing –
and so a mother with a very sick little girl seeks him out asks him to heal her daughter.
Now at this point in the story we think,
“Jesus is just so nice – even though he’s on holiday he will help the little girl out.”
But no! That is not what he does! That is not at all what he does!
What he does next shocks us! What he does next offends us!
He says No! He says his ministry is not for such “dogs” as Syrians!
The children of Israel are to be fed first and it is not fair to take bread away from the children
in order to feed the dogs!
Whoa! Jesus appears to be prejudiced! He calls the non-Jewish woman a dog!
But the woman is not to be deterred – she loves her child and she is not going to give up.
And it is just here that something amazing happens to Jesus – it is the unexpected moment that
changes everything in his life and in his ministry.
The seemingly small thing that opens a tiny door into a vast mystery.
In a move that Jesus uses many times on his own adversaries,
she takes up his own metaphor and beats him with it.
She says, “Okay, Jesus: but even dogs under the table eat the crumbs children drop for them.”
Ha! She knows that Jesus has been welcoming everyone to his table to feed them:
tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, women, children –
it’s his basic metaphor for God’s kingdom.
So why not, you know, non-Israelites, or even, say, enemies, like, oh, I don’t know – Syrians?
To which Jesus has . . . absolutely no reply.
This foreign woman is the only person in the Gospels who stops Jesus in his tracks.
She is the only person who ever gets Jesus to change his mind.
And literally he says to her,
“Because of your argument, you may go . . . your child has been made well.”
She seems to know even better than Jesus himself what the superabundance of grace that
is happening through him now means for all the peoples of the earth.
She seems to know that whatever crazy thing God is doing through Jesus,
there is enough of it for everyone.
So he says to her, “Go. I’ve got some stuff to think about.”
She goes home and finds her little girl healed.
He heads back to the beach – but his new season of Orange is the New Black goes unwatched.
He’s not binge-watching anymore – he’s thinking.
And he thinks. And he thinks some more.
And finally he thinks: “I should put this whole thing to the test.”
So he cuts his vay-cay short and goes back home to Galilee.
But – as I often say – Jesus needs a travel agent!
Mark tells us Yah: he goes home – but he doesn’t exactly go in a straight line.
On his way back to Galilee,
Jesus goes way out of his way to travel through as much Gentile territory as he can.
First he goes way up here to Sidon – waaaaaaaaayyyy out!
Then he goes all the way down here to the Decapolis, waaaaaayyyyyy over here!
Jesus really should have gone to summer school and taken a geography class instead of
going to the beach and watching Netflix all summer.
Maybe he did get a travel agent, but if he did it was the same travel agent that put the
Youth Gathering Bus Trip together –
the agent who sent us to Thunder Bay by way of Toronto.
I think Jesus wants to discover if God’s healing care and grace is operative through him
even way out here – I think he wants to know that it wasn’t just a fluke that
God healed the Syro-Phoenician’s girl.
And out here somewhere, among all these non-Jewish people, a man finds him.
A man who is deaf and who has difficulty speaking.
Jesus puts his hands on him and says something beautiful: “Be opened. Ephphatha. Be opened.”
And the man’s ears are opened, and he can hear, and his speech is rectified.
Be opened, says Jesus. Be opened.
In the story, of course, it is not just the man’s ears that are opened.
It is Jesus himself.
Jesus learns something from a woman who is very different from him –
he learns something about God and the scope and magnitude of God’s grace.
He learns that there is nowhere God doesn’t want to be at work.
Jesus himself is opened to the wonder and work of God and Jesus himself grows
in understanding just how far the reach of God’s grace extends through him.
And if we read on just a little bit, we find that Jesus discovers just how big a table God sets
for those whom God loves.
For somewhere out here, in Gentile Territory, he puts an exclamation mark on his new learning: he sits down 4000 hungry Gentiles and feeds every single one of them with
7 loaves and a few small fish.
And even from that there are some crumbs leftover – there is always more grace.
There is always enough.
Surely, Jesus thinks, that Syro-Phoenician woman was right.
Be opened.
This is not a bad thing to hear on the day our fall programming starts.
If we are the body of Christ, the physical body of Jesus on earth now,
in what way are we being called to be opened this fall, like Jesus was?
What are you being called to be open to?
In the first reading from Solomon’s Proverbs today,
is God calling you to be more open to generosity to the poor?
“Those who are generous are blessed,” we read, “for they share their bread with the poor.”
How are you going to grow, like Jesus, in faith and action this year?
Is God calling you to cook a meal for our Community Meal ministry?
Is God calling you to volunteer at Food Bank?
In the second reading, James calls followers of Jesus to simply do as Jesus does.
“If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them,
‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs,
what is the good of that?”
And in the Gospel, the Syro-Phoenician woman tells Jesus there is more than enough grace to
go around, God’s table is bigger than he could have imagined –
and he knows she is right.
And so he sets a big table for 4000 – and feeds them all.
She calls him to be opened – she calls him to grow.
To grow in faith, and to grow in action.
So be opened on this Fall Launch Sunday.
Be opened to wonder – to the wonder of where God is at work – which is everywhere.
Be opened to love – to love friend and stranger, to love those who are different,
for all are God’s children.
Be opened to generosity, to giving as you have been given to.
Be opened to compassion: for the poor, for those in need, for the lonely, for the sick.
Be opened.
How will you be opened?
How will you grow in faith and action this year?
Will you sign your name on the Community Meal sign-up sheet?
Will you talk with me or Nancy about volunteering at one of our Food Banks?
Will you offer to assist in worship? Offer to help maintain our building and grounds?
Will you come to Bible Study? And go deeper deeper deeper into the very heart of God?
The thing is, when you do, you will find Jesus there,
and there with Jesus you will find people you love – and people you will grow to love: right there, close to the heart of God, close to the heart of meaning and purpose.
Close to the heart of love.
So with the Syro-Phoenician woman, with Solomon and James – and with Jesus himself –
let us be opened this fall and together let us all say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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