ISAIAH 56:1-7

PSALM 67

ROMANS 11:13-15, 29-32

MATTHEW 15:21-28

Sermon – 8/18/02

Two of the hottest questions which preoccupied believers in Christ in the first 30 years after his resurrection were: “When will Jesus return?” and “Can the Gentiles be saved?”

We do not, even now, know what the answer is to the first question. The second question was settled definitively in the Christian Church by the end of the First Century, and three of our selections from the Scriptures this morning reveal some keys to why the debate came out the way it did.

This ancient debate is important to us today for three reasons. First, if Christian leaders had not come to believe that Gentiles (non-Jews) could be saved, very few of us would be Christians today. Second, the debate has a bearing on issues of ethnicity and inclusiveness today. And third, the debate underlines for us the supreme importance of faith as the hallmark of a Christian.

Our first reading, Isaiah 56:1-7, was written in the late 6^th Century B.C., when the people of Israel were recovering, miraculously, from one of the greatest traumas of their challenging history.

A century before, the Israelites, like other ancient nations, had political independence, a king, and a temple. In 586 B.C., the Babylonian Empire conquered the last independent Israelite kingdom (Judah), destroyed Jerusalem, burned the Temple (built by Solomon) to the ground, and led the king (and heir of David) away to exile, from which he would never return. Most ancient nations so thoroughly conquered vanished from history. By the grace and power of God, it was the Neo-Babylonians who vanished from history while the Jews returned from exile in Babylon (modern Iraq) to start to rebuild Jerusalem and the holy Temple. They did so without a king or political independence, so their identity was religious, not political.

What would be the mission, the reason-for-being, of this restored people in the Holy Land, if not to be a Kingdom? For some—represented in the Bible by Ezra and Nehemiah—the mission was to rebuild the people by rebuilding Jerusalem (and its walls), enforcing the Old Testament Law in the city, and making the people ethnically pure as well as religiously pure by ordering any Jewish men married to Gentiles (non-Jews) to divorce their wives.

There were those who dissented from this circle-the-wagons emphasis and instead spoke of Israel’s mission to the world, to make God’s “salvation known to the ends of the earth”, in the words of the later portions of the Book of Isaiah. Today’s selection from Isaiah also emphasizes evangelization of foreigners, declaring that “foreigners who join themselves to the LORD” will be accepted by God, even in the Temple itself. God says “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Those words are carved in stone on the entrance of the church where, as a lay person, I was sponsored for ordination: All Saints’, Brookline, Massachusetts.

This attitude of converting the Gentiles instead of divorcing them was also reflected in two stories which became popular in this era, 500 years before Christ: The story of Jonah (the prophet who converts his worst enemies in spite of himself and so shows God’s mercy to all people) and the story of Ruth, the pagan woman who converts to worship the LORD…and becomes the great-grandmother of King David himself.

The tug-of-war between Jews who wanted to convert the Gentiles and those who wanted to shun the Gentiles continued in Jesus’ day, when Israel had been conquered by the Roman Empire, an even more we’ll-get-in-your-face-and-remind-you-who’s-boss empire than the Persians who had encouraged the Jews to rebuild the Temple 500 years before.

St. Paul—like all the other disciples of Jesus—had been raised a faithful and believing Jew. Paul had been a Pharisee, a member of the group which was particularly meticulous about obeying all the Jewish laws and regulations—which included viewing Gentiles as “unclean” ritually and as outcasts spiritually—as “dogs” (as Gentiles were referred to) in contrast to “the Children of the Promise” (the Jews).

Paul’s dramatic encounter with the risen Christ had made him realize that his fanatical devotion to rules had led him to have a closed mind when God’s Messiah (Jesus) actually showed up, so he came to understand that faith in God, and in Jesus Christ, the fullest revelation of God, was essential to the fullness of salvation—not meticulous obedience to rules, or ethnicity.

In the passage from his Letter to the Romans which we read last week, Paul expresses his angst at the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah by the majority of his fellow Jews. He even says he wishes he himself were cut off from Christ for the sake of his fellow Jews, if it would help them to see the light!

Paul does, however, see the wondrous plan of God in the rejection of Jesus by a majority of the Jews: therefore Jesus’ followers increasingly sought new followers among the Gentile pagans, many of whom were hearing about the one true God for the first time ever. In fact, if all Jews had embraced Jesus as Lord, what we call Christianity might have been simply the latest evolution of Judaism—in which case the Gentiles might never have been evangelized. In which case, how many of us, here today, would ever have come to know the One True God?

Paul is confident also of two key things which we today ought to be mindful of. First, as he says, “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable”—i.e., the Jews still have a valid covenant with God. And second, Paul believes that the Jews will be fully included in God’s plan for salvation in God’s own time and way.

All this bears on today’s Gospel passage—one of the most difficult in some ways in the Gospels. But if we have in our minds that Big Question from the First Century—“Can the Gentiles be saved?”—this story, and its value, becomes clearer.

“Jesus went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” Neither Matthew nor Mark (who also tells this story) say why he went there; neither Gospel writer records a reason or any preaching or teaching or a single episode involving a crowd. Mark, indeed, says that Jesus went into a house and “did not want anyone to know he was there.”

Tyre and Sidon are outside of Israel, then and now; they are today in Lebanon. They were overwhelming Gentile, pagan communities. They are also seaports; maybe Jesus and his disciples were on vacation, “down the shore”, and figured that since they were miles from any Jewish area, they could take a break and not have anybody bug them for teaching, preaching, healing, feeding or anything else.

But Jesus couldn’t just go on vacation. Even in such a seemingly unpromising area for converts, even when he was doing nothing at that moment to draw people to him, even when his disciples wanted to get rid of this persistent woman, even when he repeated that his mission was to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, even when he repeated a formula which puts down the woman’s ethnic group as—gulp—“dogs”!

She still comes, begging for help for her sick daughter. What faith! She calls him “Lord, Son of David”. Her people have been fighting his people for 1,200 years—what will her friends and neighbors and relatives say when they find out she’s gone to a rabbi for help? What a risk she takes! Rejection from them—and she risks rejection from him as well.

What persistence! What a mother! She won’t be put off. She keeps asking. Her girl is sick. She goes to the One who can help. She gets down on her knees. She accepts the label as a “dog” in Jewish eyes. Anything to get her child well again!

She is Palestinian.

Think about it.

Perhaps her descendants belong to Hamas—but she is on her knees before Rabbi Jesus ben Joseph, saying “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

The dam breaks. Twelve hundred years of conflict are swept away. Jesus doesn’t say “study Torah and come back in six months”, or “obey the Sabbath” or “learn Hebrew” or anything else. She has demonstrated her faith in God, and in him, as well as her chutzpah.

“Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish! And her daughter was healed instantly.”

Imagine you are a Jewish Christian in the First Century in Syria—and you get a hot-off-the-pen copy of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and you read this story.

Can the Gentiles be saved?

It looks like the answer is YES, in capital letters. Anyone who has FAITH, whatever their ethnicity, whatever their previous faith.

Imagine you are a member of an Episcopal church in the 21^st Century in New Jersey, in a sea of various religions and people of no religion. Does a person have to have been raised as a Christian to be one? Does a person have to be a member of a certain race or ethnic group? Does a person have to be constant in the practice of their faith through their life, or can they come to deep faith and be accepted by the community of faith after a time away? Can someone move from one Christian tradition and be accepted in another?

We in St. Barnabas are walking in the footsteps of Jonah, of Ruth, of Second Isaiah, of Paul—and of that Canaanite woman. The community of faith is open to all people of faith in God. This house is a house of prayer for all peoples. And Christ sends his blessings to all who call upon him in faith. Perfect attendance not required. Membership since birth not required. Christian family heritage not required.

So let’s continue to not be like the disciples were in this story. The disciples tried to shoo someone away who didn’t fit their idea of what a follower of Jesus could be like. They were wrong. Even Jesus may have been a little surprised to find such faith in this woman.

May we find such faith in ourselves--and in others, and take delight in faith, and in God’s abundant blessings, whoever receives them.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church