Co-insiders in the House of God
Proper 18B
Mary has been attending the church I serve for about 30 years. She came when she was still working and has now been retired for about 10 years. She came because her son was deathly ill and she did not know what to do. Her son was 20 at the time. Of course, she sought medical attention for her son and he did experience a complete recovery. But when Mary came, the outcome was unclear. She came to our church because she knew people there and she had met the pastor at the hospital where she worked.
On the first Sunday she came, she sat in one of the pews in the back, where she still sits. A few minutes later a member of the congregation showed up and demanded she get up and find a different seat, because the one she was sitting in was apparently his.
Though the story is so stereotypical, I am not making it up. The amazing thing is that Mary moved to a different pew and came back the next Sunday. And the Sunday after that. And though she says there are still many things she doesn’t understand, she grew into roles of service and leadership. The person who had demanded she vacate “his seat” is no longer among us. He left many years later of his own volition.
Those of us who share a certain sensitivity about hospitality, perhaps especially in an age of shrinking congregations, may see similarities between this story and the reply Jesus gives the Syrophoenecian woman who pleads with Jesus for the life of her daughter. His reply had been, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.”
I may not completely romanticize Jesus but my instinctive reaction is still, “Really, Jesus?”
Isn’t it the job of the Saviour to save, and isn’t Jesus the healer of our every ill? And isn’t he the One who bore our nature and our lot? And does that bearing not require some kind of solidarity with those under the power of death?
But I have gotten hung up on this verse for too long, in part, I think, because my general homiletical approach is to deal with the parts of passages we deem challenging or difficult.
I am not suggesting the passage has no edge to it. After all, it recalls and restates God’s covenant with Israel. We may not understand why God chose Israel to be God’s people, and we may not want to be reminded that God chose Israel before God chose us. Yet the particularity of God’s election and God’s faithfulness to the covenant bodes well for those of us who are gentiles by birth.
The lectionary only gives us 14 verses but as always, context matters. Remember that Mark has two feeding stories - that of the 5000 in chapter six, and the feeding of the 4000 in chapter eight. The thing is not that Mark had a lot of material lying around which he felt compelled to fit into his Gospel, even at the risk of duplication. The point is that the children have already been fed. They were fed in chapter six and all ate and were filled (6:42). So when Mark tells the story of the Syrophoenician woman he reminds his congregation that there is no longer a barrier for Gentiles to come to the table, to become God’s covenanted people, because God remains committed to the covenant God had made with Israel. Soon Jesus feeds 4000 in gentile territory, and they too eat and are satisfied (8:8). And then there is the symbolic meaning of the numbers five (thousand) twelve (baskets), and four (thousand) and seven (baskets).
In last week’s reading Mark explained that Jesus declared all foods clean. (7:19) It should not surprise us then that Jesus moves on to declare (in his words directed to the Apostle Peter) that we should not call “anyone profane or unclean”. (Act 10:15) The theologian James Alison unfolds this beautifully in regards to the question of the inclusion of those who do not fit our sexual norms. Paraphrasing the Peter and Cornelius story using the first person plural, he writes “we’re still waiting to see… what it’s going to look like for us all to be co-insiders in the House of God, sons and daughters with equal dignity, all sharing in a priesthood whose single purity requirement is of the heart.” And when thinking about inclusion, it is worth remembering that last week Doug Lee reminded us that exclusion is not the prerogative of “conservatives.”
Even though I was raised Lutheran, the Letter of James always rang true to me. And thinking about our current political landscape it is easy to relate to these verses: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? 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? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
Isn’t what James describes exactly that which we today call “thoughts and prayers?” In today’s parlance, “thoughts and prayers” are declared intentions without meaningful commitments.
Those who read this blog and those who are part of the Ekklesia Project come from many different ecclesial traditions. We will not all give the same answer to the same question. But we know that it must be more than thoughts and prayers, it cannot be the insistence on my spot in the pew, and it must involve the recognition that what God has made clean, we must not call profane.