Tenth Sunday after Trinity
Sunday 16th August 2020
Although we have been able to resume public worship not everyone is able to attend so the service was recorded and made available online as well as being played in church for those who chose to attend. That can be found here.
Trinity 10
Isaiah 56.1,6–8
Matthew 15.21–28
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
After the first reading from Isaiah
“do what is right”
It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? … But the trick is to know what is right and when is the right time! And that is not so simple…
Foreigners… We British are not always keen on those who choose to visit our shores, are we? All very well in their place – investing in our industry or our football teams… we may tolerate that sort of foreigner. But not sure about those who come with nothing but a desire to make a better future for themselves and their family.
And how can we make them joyful in God’s house of prayer? – they don’t even share our religion! (well, some of them do actually, but we prefer to lump them all together as foreigners and aliens, worshipping strange gods)
Not those people Lord, you cannot mean us to welcome those people!
They don’t look like us; they don’t dress like us; they don’t think like us; they don’t share our values (for which read class); they don’t eat the same food as us!
But our God isn’t interested in our sensibilities…. His justice is so much wider than our justice, our rules and regulations…
“for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
And who exactly are the outcasts? Is it them? Is it the refugee in the inflatable boat? … Or maybe, is it us?… With our too-small vision of humanity’s potential?
“I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.”
Oh help!…
After the Gospel Reading
Well OK – maybe its is all OK for genuine asylum seekers to come. We should of course try to help those who are really in need. But so many of those who come to this country are nothing more than economic migrants! We can’t be expected to take in all of them! We are a small country with limited resources!
Yes, and we are also a country that has benefitted enormously from the exploitation of other countries and their resources, both now and in the past.
My great grandparents on my father’s side were Irish – with a name like Sullivan, they couldn’t be anything else really! I’ve not got much information about them, but I think they came originally from somewhere near Cork in Southern Ireland – Sullivan is a Southern Irish name. They were probably victims of the potato famine that hit that country so disastrously in the 19th Century but for whatever reason, they came to England – initially to Liverpool and then quite quickly they gravitated to London to where the work was. They were not skilled or educated people. They took whatever work they could get. They died young, leaving their sons to survive as best they could – a couple of them ended up in children’s homes for a while and then they graduated to the British Army. My Great Grandparents were Economic Migrants pure and simple. And their descendents are now firmly ensconced in the British Middle Class.
Our Gospel reading today recounts a time when Jesus had travelled beyond his comfort zone in all sorts of ways. He was outside Israel; the territory of Tyre and Sidon was quite definitely gentile territory and always had been. He encounters there a foreign woman and one who is desperate for her child. So desperate that she turns for help to this Jewish miracle worker. And he tries to shut her up, to restrict his work to his own people – he is perhaps seeking a rest from all of that in any case… She is not ethnically or socially or culturally his equal. But her desperation will not leave him alone. She argues back and refuses to rise to the insult he tosses casually at her – she is no better than a dog (now in my household the dog has an honoured place! – but I know that isn’t always the case and certainly not in Israel in the first century!) Jesus is forced to encounter someone who doesn’t think or act or eat the way he does – and it changes him profoundly. Unexpectedly, in her he finds faith; real deep faith in God and she recognises in him divine authority. She asks him to make a difference in her child’s life. To give her a better future.
In many ways this is a shocking story, because at first, Jesus does not seem to be the total personification of love and compassion that we have come to expect! But hard sayings in the New Testament make the likelihood of authenticity greater. Why else would the early church have left it there, since it is so unsettling? This woman knows that she does not fully belong – yet even a scrap is better than nothing to one who is desperate. And her persistence wins through to show her a sign of the future.
The early Christians had to go on learning this lesson and maybe only when Paul began his monumental travels and work did they come to understand that this new way, this church, this faith was for everyone. Jew and Gentile. Male and female. Us and them.
And even today we can meet people who can offer us insights into Jesus and our own faith who are still identifiably members of another faith.
This encounter encourages us, invites us to be attentive to the people we may meet and to be prepared to have our categories about faith, about race, about nationality even challenged by their witness.
The Church is invited like Jesus to engage in unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar people. This pandemic is even forcing our hand to adopt unfamiliar technologies to reach out further! We are asked to trust that God’s kingdom really does extend far beyond our buildings and parish boundaries – maybe even beyond our borders. We are asked to engage in persistent, truthful, yet even bluntly honest conversations. It is uncomfortable – it is meant to be! But such encounters still reveal faith, persistence and ultimately the breaking in of the kingdom of heaven.
O God, you hear the cry of all who call on you. Please give us faith, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, who refused to remain an outsider. Grant that we too, may have the wit to argue and demand that all are made welcome, through Jesus Christ. Amen.