[Propertalk] Proper 18 b rcl

[Robert P Morrison]

My thoughts, now being passed on to my editorial personlity!

Bob.


I just thought of Auden's verses, set to hymn 463/464 - "He is the Way. Follow him through the land of Unlikeness; you will see rare beasts and have unique adventures."  Maybe that will be added, or sung?

THE EPISCOPAL PARISH OF ST. JAMES, LINCOLN CITY         THE FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
PROVERBS 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23                                                 PROPER 18 b RCL 
JAMES 2:1-10     		                                 6th SEPTEMBER, 2009
MARK 7:7:24-37	                                                      PSALM 125

	“Back to the Future.” It’s a fun movie. Lots of action, mostly pretty harmless, about those terribly embarrassing moments in one’s teenage years, especially when thinking about the antics of one’s parents when they were in the teens. 
	The concept is pretty good too. I imagine that more than one or two of us here wouldn’t mind jumping into a DeLorean if that was all that it took to go back in time. Just think of the possibilities. And that’s what shows and movies like that are about – offering the mind a trip back so that one can relive moments of wonder and excitement or, more importantly, I think, basically rectify mistakes.
	But, unfortunately, that’s just fantasy, as fun as it may sound. Not even a DeLorean, if one could find one readily today, can do that for you or me. We’re here, and that was there. Whatever was done HAS been done – as that marvellous “Night Prayer” from the Prayer Book for New Zealand puts it: “What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done;” There are things which no amount of worrying can do or undo. Therefore we simply place ourselves and everything that’s been part of that day’s activities into God’s hands, with an almost mystical confidence – “let it be.” 
	Still, the embarrassment returns from time to time, and can threaten to derail whatever it is in which we’re engaged at that particular moment.
	How do we cope, then?
	Some people become paralysed by the size of the task, or by what has been seen as a colossal failure in the past? Some retreat into a safe place where the individual feels he or she can avoid the gaze of the general public, thus somehow trying to escape condemnation or ridicule.
	But what if one faces up to what’s happened? What if a rejection, or an isolation, or some mistake and misunderstanding not only comes to mind, but is brought out when one meets another who was involved in an incident in the past? What then? How does one cope?This is an important question, because we’ve to deal with it often, each one of us.
	The simple answer is that, if you put things in God’s hands, if you seek God’s blessing on the good you tried to do; if you seek God’s pardon for those things which have been offensive and destructive, then every last one of us can find renewal. God’s ability to forgive, even the most dire offences, gives us a tremendous feeling of peace and hope, if only we’ll accept it. And the benefit snowballs – not only are we refreshed and reinvigorated; so are all those around us.
   Of course, if we continue to refuse to seek our brother’s and sister’s pardon, then we’ve only gone half way down the pilgrim’s path of renewal. What we need, then, is a reminder that there’s nothing for which we cannot seek re-direction. There’s NOTHING to prevent us changing course, or making a new start; there’s NOTHING to prevent us from making a fresh start with the person with whom one has shared animosity, or to whom one has shown a lack of sensitivity, and compassion, and interest.
	That’s the Good News which Jesus not only told, but He Himself demonstrated in His own life, albeit in a way that was quite unanticipated by Him!
	The two stories in this morning’s Gospel passage are quite incredible.
We’re used – or at least I am – used somewhat to glossing over the full humanity of Jesus. We start at Bethlehem. We think about the crying, the stomach aches, the hunger for Mary’s attention and Joseph’s approval. We think about the joy of discovering the depths of His relationships with Peter, and Andrew, and James and John, and all the others. We even process the emotions He experienced when He talked with those in authority, who seemed to do nothing to make life hopeful and encouraging to those who were away from the centre of power.
	But this morning we’re brought directly in front of Jesus’ narrowness of thought, His human-ness flew out of Him in His scornful confrontation with the Syrophoenician woman outside Jewish territory.
	Maybe it was because He was by Himself – this Gospel writer, unlike Matthew, for instance, takes pains to point out that Jesus didn’t have any of the disciples with Him. Jesus wasn’t even in what would normally be considered home turf. Whom did He expect to find there, but someone whose ethnic background was the butt of every cruel joke from the self-righteous, narrow-minded Jew?
	It seems that the scorn poured off Jesus’ lips as He talked to her. There didn’t appear to be an ounce of sympathy for the woman or her diseased daughter. What’s one less little girl? What’s one more anguished mother? It wasn’t JESUS’ fault that they faced their crises. It wasn’t JESUS’ fault that they belong to some outcast group. The way this Gospel writer talks to us, it’s as if Jesus’ quiet time, His personal space, had been invaded, and He was really upset. If He was away from home, he may not have expected to have been asked to do and give what His neighbours back in Galilee, or even Jerusalem, asked of Him. So Jesus didn’t offer even a tender look.
	What’s so striking about this is that the challenge of the woman – her tired pleading, her anguished petitioning, her desperate appeal for a scrap of tenderness – the persistent challenge of this woman brought Jesus to His senses and took Him to the wood shed.
	The Good News for us is the wonderful example of a Jesus who can learn, who can be transformed, not only on the top of a mountain with Peter, and James, and John, but He can find Himself transformed educationally and experientially – and spiritually – when someone says to Him, “Wait. Think. What IS God’s love about, if it’s not to bring hope to ALL?” Jesus gets to relive that moment in which He was so insensitive. He gets a second chance. He gets to take a deep breath, to rethink about HIS relationship with God – and move on to think about that foreign woman’s relationship with God – and then He acknowledged the poverty of His thought and action. He went back and repaired what He’d left undone. He redeemed both Himself AND the woman – AND the daughter.
	What keeps running through my mind, from time to time, is the title of J.B. Phillip’s book about his translation of the New Testament. He said, “Your God is too Small.”  1
	There was Jesus , able to communicate in a foreign langauge while He was out of town. Spmehow, His reputation had poreceded Him, because the woman knew where to go for help. And she reached across two barriers. First the ethnic one, then the gender one. “Even today, in the Middle East, in conservative areas, men nd wioemn do not talk to trangers across the gender barrier. In public rabbis did not talk to female members of their own families.”  2
	But the tension can be drawn even greater. About an hundred and fifty years before Jesus, Syrophoenciains carried out an extrenely horrific persecution against the Jewsd. A story in II Maccabees 7 tels of a mother and her seven children being killed.. Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus’s first words to her descibed the Jews as children and the Su=yrophoenicians as ferociously wild, scavenging animals?
	The woman remains on her knees – in complete servitude – and talks about scavenging the scraps when the diners are finished with their meal. Jesus had just finished one of hHis many debates with people who wouldn’t accept what He offered – the love and the forgiveness of God. His mind must have been whirling at their rejection and the approach of this, this ritul and barrier-smasher.
	Jesus’ eyes must have been opened wide by her and by the way He was led to change His mind and His behaviour. He left there, after the healing, and made straight for an area in which oagans outnumbered Jews by a huge ratio. This time He knew where He was going. This time He didn’t argue. He’d learned His lesson. He healed, whoever the man was.
	And if Jesus was able to discover and demonstrate that misperceptions about God can be overcome; if Jesus was able to show how God neither knows nor makes any barriers – whether of gender, or ethnic background, or of belief – then that’s a huge sign of hope for our neighbours. Because it means that WE can learn too. We can grow also. We can be sympathetic; we can be compassionate; we can be agents of healing and hope. We can find God and the call to serve God, ANYWHERE, at ANYTIME. And just because, at some point in the past, we may have turned our backs; just because we may have ignored a cry for help; just because we may have done something incredinly hurtful – or had that done to us – this is NOT the end of the story. There’s ALWAYS another chance for us, if we’ll leave ourselves open to the possibility that God may re-form us, and bless us with the energy and ability to make a difference in the world.
	Jesus’ learning experience transformed Him, and makes it all the more poignant when we see His resolution to sacrifice Himself on the cross for everyone.
	We don’t know just what our future will be – Jesus can’t have known, fully, as he left Tyre for the Decapolis. But we’re reminded this morning that we all HAVE a future, even if its nature isn’t clear to us.
	So, whether or not we feel that there are times when we may have placed ourselves as strangers to Jesus and to God’s will, we’re invitecd to respond in gratiutude, asking for our own healing and that our our neighbours, 
	As for our past, “What has been done has been done;what has not been done has not been done;”  We may now “let it be.”. As the “Night Prayer” concludes,
	The night heralds the dawn.
	Let us look expectantly to a new day,
	new joys,
	new possibilities.

	And as our Communion hymn concludes::

	Loving puts us on our knees,
	serving as though we were slaves;
	this is the way we should live with you.

NOTES:

1 	“Your God is too Small” by J.B. Phillips. Touchstone, a Division of Simon and Schuster, New York. © 1952. Copyright restored 1998 by Vera May Phillips 
2	“Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes” by Kenneth Bailey. IVP, Downers Grove, Ill. © 2008 page 220.

--
Robert P. Morrison
The Episcopal Parish of St James,
PO Box 789
Lincoln City, Oregon, 97367

541-994-2426 (Church)


---- Ann Fontaine <annfontaine at mac.com> wrote: 
> http://paintedprayerbook.com/2008/08/15/the-feast-beneath/
> 
> Jan Richardson on the Canaanite woman.
> 
> she wrestles with Jesus and gains the blessing -- much like Jacob and  
> the angel
> 
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> 
> 
> Ann Fontaine
> Lander, Wyoming
> 
> Note: new email address
> annfontaine at me.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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