September 8, 2024

Pentecost 16 (Lectionary 23) , Year B

Mark 7:24-37

Epiphany, Winnipeg

Help me out here. What are the things you pray for, or we pray for? (I’m not looking for details and names…). What do we pray for that just doesn’t seem to happen? Or just seems to fall on deaf ears? And what do we just keep on praying for anyway?

(And since it’s Season of Creation, I’d add that. We do it every week)

This Syrophoenician woman…Syrophonecia is a region in what we now call Lebanon, so we’ll call her a Lebanese woman. Her daughter was sick, and she’d run out of options. No doctor could help, she might have prayed and prayed, but her daughter still had this unclean Spirit, something gone wrong, something that just didn’t belong, something nobody couldn explain.

So she hears about a healer named Jesus who has come to town. Now this woman’s hometown is fifty kilometres from Jesus’ home town, so Jesus has travelled, probably on foot, fifty kilometers. He arrived in town, went to a house there, and did not want anybody to know he was there. You’ve had days like that, right? I’m tired leave me alone I just can’t handle other humans today kinds of days? He’s worn out from too many days of arguing with know-it-alls and teaching disciples who just don’t get it (welcome to a new school year!) and having everybody want something from him.

We need to let Jesus be tired and want to be alone.

But this Syrophoenician woman will have none of that. She hears that he’s in that house over there, and maybe that he doesn’t want anybody to know, but everybody knows he’s there; it’s a small town, right?

So she goes to the house, bows at Jesus’ feet, and says “My daughter’s got this unclean Spirit that’s eating away at her from the inside. Get rid of that Spirit. Get rid of it. Throw out that Spirit. Throw it out.” She asks and asks and asks and it doesn’t matter to her that Jesus doesn’t want anyone to know he’s there. She knows that all she can do is tell Jesus about her daughter. Then Jesus says what we all wish Jesus had never said: “Feed the children first; it’s not fair to throw the children’s food to dogs.”

Did he really just say that her child is like a dog? Did he say that because he’s a Jew and she’s a Gentile? Because he’s chosen and she’s not? Did he say that because he’s so tired and he’s just got a short fuse today? But that mom wouldn’t let Jesus go, you know. Her daughter was sick, and she’d run out of options. No one could help, so she goes to the place where Jesus is, she asks this question of this traveller who they said could do something, and then Jesus turns her down. But she persists and she says, “Fair enough, Sir, but even the dogs get to eat the crumbs under the table.” Something changes then, and Jesus says, “Because of that word, the demon has left your daughter. She’s OK.”

The woman from Lebanon just wouldn’t let Jesus go. And then Jesus changed his mind. Or he learned from her. He went into that house and he didn’t want anyone to know but then she came through the door, and soon the house had grown, and soon there was room for this woman who loves her daughter, and there was room for her love and her care and her pleading, and there was room for her daughter who is not a dog, and there was room for healing and for being made free…and there was room for more, and there was room for all. The house grew. Because she just wouldn’t let Jesus go.

Now here’s something to ponder about Jesus. We need to let Jesus be human. And humans need to learn things. I think we get so enthused about Jesus who heals people, or Jesus who has the questions that stump the scholars, or Jesus who just naturally has all this love for everyone around him. We hold him up like that and sort of think that he arrived as a fully-formed package, with all his teaching and his ability and personality just there from the start, packed into a newborn child and waiting to burst out into plain sight when he grows up. But Jesus had to learn things. Like anyone does. If he were a child today we might say he had to learn how to walk, and he had to learn how to hold his fork the right way and learn to read and hold a pencil and learn how to log on and remember his password, and he had to learn how to take turns and share. Just like anyone. Jesus grew, and learned things. He learned how to live in his mom and dad’s house, and how to become a youth and an adult in the town where he lived. He had to learn his ancient and rich religious tradition.

Jesus had to learn things. You know, like we all do. When we’re five or eleven or twenty-six or thirty something or 50 or 90. We learn all along the way.

This woman knows that, so she doesn’t let go. And Jesus learns something about who he is called to be. What this woman says flips a switch somewhere and maybe Jesus remembers something he’s learned about loving his neighbour as himself. A rabbi might have taught him that, he probably heard it from his mom and dad. He remembers that again, and he sees that that means that even this Gentile woman and her daughter have a place at the table and not under it. And when Jesus learns that, the house grows to include someone new. This woman and her daughter have a place at the table.

There are miracles in this story we’ve heard today. There’s this one with the daughter being healed, and there’s the other one we heard about about a man who could not hear or speak properly having his tongue untied and his ears opened wide. There’s the miracle of people caring enough to bring someone to Jesus, to anyone, for help. Just carrying people along who need to be carried along.

But maybe the really big miracle in the story is that this woman did not give up. It seemed like nobody was listening, not even Jesus. She could have turned away and walked back home to her daughter who is still not healed. But she didn’t give up. She didn’t go away. She persisted. And the house grew to include her, and her daughter.

This woman is like everyone who’s had to get someone to notice. She’s like the young woman who knew she wanted to be a pastor but everyone said women can’t do that, but she kept on insisting that they can and looking for that day, and the house grew. She’s like the young man who just wanted it to be OK for him to spend his life with the man he loves, and he kept on and so many more kept on and finally the house grew. She’s like all those women and men who have kept saying that indigenous women disappear and are murdered so much more often, and they won’t let go and now and then someone listens and the house grows. She’s like anyone who has said, “What’s happening is not right,” And has had to say it again and again and again.

And every time she says it, then we start to learn too. We have our own ways of saying “You don’t have a place at the table.” Along political lines or along social lines or racial lines or economic or religious lines, we can be the ones who say, “This food is only for us on this side and not for you.” Somewhere along the way I think we all run into a point where we want to say that the household shouldn’t include those people, or the good things we have should be for us at our table and not for those others. You know what your limits are. I think I do, and I think we all do, when we’re honest. We know where we’d like to close the door, and who we’d rather keep on the other side.

But there’s always our own persistent Syrophoenician woman, who won’t stop insisting that what Jesus offers is offered for all. And she keeps on with that good news until someone hears it, and the house gets bigger.

That’s the other real miracle of the story: the house gets bigger. It started out today with Jesus and maybe a few hosts, and soon enough there was room in the house for this woman and her prayers, and room for her daughter who so needed those prayers. So remember those things we talked about before? What do we pray for, what have we kept on praying for, what are we still waiting for as we pray…? We might keep on needing to pray for them, and working for them, for a long long time. We keep on praying because we know well enough that we cannot just fix it all.

And even when it seems like nothing changes, or we lose patience, or we think our prayers are not being heard, something else does happen: The house gets bigger. As we pray we begin to see again that there’s room in the house for our prayers. There is room for the persistent woman and her struggling daughter, there’s room for the ones who are heard and the ones who will not hear, there is room for the ones who are afraid to speak and the ones who won’t stop talking. There is room for those who cannot see and there’s room for those who refuse to see. There is room for all those places and people we pray for and there is room for this whole creation that we celebrate and call home for all the months of the year. There is room for the ones in need of healing and for the ones who lovingly carry them along. There is room for you and your prayers, for us and our prayers, and room for all for whom we pray.

The house always gets bigger. It’s right there at the heart of our story, actually, in that good news of Jesus dying and rising and stepping out into the garden: For three days Jesus was in a small room with a closed door. Then the stone was rolled away and the house grew wide open as Jesus stepped out of the tomb and into the house; the house of the whole creation, the house that has room for all.