Reaching Out To All, Regardless!
a sermon based on Matthew 15:21-28
by Rev. Frank Schaefer

For the first time in its history a country church elected a woman to the board of elders.  The male elders on the board had a problem with this--simply because the elders frequently went boat fishing together while conducting the meetings.  Finally, the wives of the elders challenged them to invite the woman elder out to their next fishing trip.  So they did.  Everything went well until the woman elder felt the call of nature.  Well, we all know what fishermen do when that happens, but what was she supposed to do?  After a short prayer, she climbed out of the boat, miraculously walked upon the water just as the Lord had done, went up to the shore, and vanished behind a bush.  After a brief moment of silence, one of the elders in the boat said: "Women!!  They don't even get that part right!"

Whatever else this little joke conveys, I believe it reflects a true notion of how women of faith have not been appreciated in history by the male leadership of the church.  Our text this morning is about such an unappreciated women of faith.

It starts out just like so many other miracle stories in the Gospels, somebody needs help, and comes to Jesus. Now, ordinarily, we expect Jesus to respond, to demonstrate God’s great love for us, by healing the person or providing for their needs. Isn’t that what he usually does? But this time, he doesn’t. First, he ignores this woman, tells her he can’t help her, then he refuses to help her because of her ethnicity. Is this the Jesus we know? The One who came to show us God’s love? What’s going on here?

First of all, she was a woman, and women did not address men in public in first century Judea.  It just wasn’t done.

Second, this woman was a Canaanite.  Canaanites were pagans. They were unclean in the eyes of Jewish people.  So this Canaanite woman came to Jesus with two strikes against her.

So, perhaps it’s no wonder that Jesus ignored her. This woman was way out of bounds.  According to Jewish tradition, ignoring her would have been the correct behavior. But still, we expect more of Jesus than to conform to the expectation of his society.

“Lord, help me, please heal my daughter!” the woman pleads.

And Jesus looks down at her, kneeling before him in the dirt, and he answers, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Why is Jesus doing that? Is he testing her? Is he teaching her a lesson? Or is it that Jesus learned a lesson here?

For a long time, even raising this last question was considered preposterous.  After all, Jesus is God and God makes no mistakes, God doesn’t have to learn anything.

Well, we sometimes forget that Jesus was human too.  Yes, he had a divine nature which none of us have, but sometimes even Jesus struggled to get in touch with his divine nature.  That’s why he could be tempted too.  In Luke 2:52 we read that “Jesus grew in stature and in wisdom.”  Yes, Jesus learned too.

And that actually can help us in our own struggle.  If Jesus struggled with overcoming the limitations of his society, then there is hope for us too.  It’s almost like Jesus is responding to this woman like he was expected to and then he stops and thinks: “wait a minute . . .there is something very wrong here!”

In the end Jesus responds to her request and gives her what she wants.  He heals her daughter. And he even says to her, “Woman great is your faith!”

The important part is that Jesus was able to overcome the biases and discrimination built into his society.

And that is not an easy feat.  Overcoming the biases of one’s time/society is one of the hardest things.  Only very few people have actually accomplished that.  Of these people we say that they were ahead of their time.

Often we are not even aware of the biases we have, exactly because they are built into our society. Jesus overcomes the biases of his time and in doing so he shows us new heights of God’s love: an unconditional love!

Unconditional of our: appearance, sin, weaknesses, mistakes, ethnicity, gender, persuasions, or anything else about us.

Thank God for sending this determined Canaanite woman Jesus’ way.  Thank God for sending the Canaanite woman our way too--many a times!

God wants us to reach out in unconditional love to our neighbors, no matter who they are, what they look like.  When we gather, God wants us to do so in love, with care and compassion and in harmony and unity.

One theologian once wrote that every church should have a picture or statue of the Canaanite woman to remind the disciples of Jesus that God reaches out beyond their limitations of love and acceptance, that those we would reject are those God accepts too.

When Jesus paid attention to the Canaanite woman, he broke down all the boundaries that separate us from one another. Today he says to his church, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of ALL nations . . . ." As you leave here today, Jesus sends you out beyond the boundaries of race, economic status, age, gender or other barriers. He sends you out to high school drop-outs, illegal immigrants, mentally challenged and even to criminals. Christ sends you out to all whom our society shuts out. Amen.