Called beyond our Comfort Zone
People who know me well are aware that I am always reading a book. I love fiction, murder mysteries, memoirs, romances, historical fiction, biographies. I can't imagine life without books and am often surprised to find inspiration in fiction. Authors have ways of expressing their characters and in one recent murder mystery the detectives said, “Even a lowlife drug dealer was someone's son. Everyone matters, or else no one matters. Jesus told of the shepherd who
kept searching for the one lost lamb, leaving his flock behind. For this purpose, Christ said, I was born.”
The two stories in this week’s Gospel reading may seem unrelated, but they are not thrown together haphazardly—they serve to interpret one another. So it is important to work with both stories, even though they present challenges for the preacher.
Each story begins with location. The Gentile woman was from Syrophoenicia, and the man who was deaf was near the Sea of Galilee. If we map Jesus’ route as reported by Mark, it doesn’t make much geographic sense. But perhaps it does make theological sense. To say Jesus travelled to the region of Tyre is to say he crossed the border from Jewish lands into Gentile territory—home to the historic oppressors of the Jews in the region. Here Jesus is the outsider—an
important theological distinction. If each person in the encounter was typical of
the area’s population, Jesus would have been poor and the Syrophoenician woman wealthy.
Whether the political and economic imbalances of the region played a part, we are shocked by Jesus’ harsh response to the woman’s pleas for help. In the words of Amy C. Howe, “Jesus is caught with his…compassion down”. Jesus calls the woman a dog, but the woman absorbs the insult and continues to make her case. “Even the dogs…,” she says. What must it have cost her to say this?
Her daughter is worth more.
If mission begins with encounter, then this is surely a prophetic encounter. Like Jacob wrestling with God, refusing to let go until God blesses him (Genesis 32:22–32), the woman persists. Jesus, who had been focused on his primary mission—which he understood as being to his people—expresses his assignment more clearly in Matthew’s version of this story: “I was sent only to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. Could this story be a kind of conversion moment for Jesus, where he realizes the greater truth of her response and its implications for his mission? The woman’s prophetic response refocuses Jesus on his mission and opens him to its broader implications.
Having been opened himself, Jesus is now prepared to open the ears of the deaf man. In the first century—lacking understanding of the biology of birth defects—physical disability was often viewed as a result of sin. Such people often held little or no status and were excluded from most social and religious institutions.
Whenever Jesus healed people, he healed not only the body but the relationship with the community as well, restoring that person to wholeness. In their book In Heaven There Are No Thunderstorms: Celebrating the Liturgy with Developmentally Disabled People, Gijs Okhuijsen and Cees van Opzeeland point out that “Jesus deals with a deaf-mute. He takes suffering to heart.” With this simple statement we can also turn our hearts toward those who suffer.
How well are you and I doing with turning our hearts towards those who suffer? Imagine you were present when Jane Elliot, a race educator who is a white woman, stood in front of an auditorium filled with people and said “I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society, in general, treats our black citizens – if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.” Unsurprisingly, no one moves. She pauses. “You didn't understand the
directions. If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are, in this society, stand.” More marked silence and lack of movement. She continues, “Nobody's standing here. That says very plainly that you know what's happening. You know you don't want it for you. I want to know why you're so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.”
She could have said, “if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our – homeless people, First Nations people, mentally ill people, disabled people, elderly people in residential care get in this society, please stand.”
You might be thinking that we (Comox United Church and individual members of the congregation) contribute and volunteer with Hospice, nursing homes, food pantries, NGO's who are enabling poor people around the world to better their lives, and many other groups. BUT – Jane Elliot said, “If you white folks want to be treated the way those people in our society are treated, stand.” Do any of you know for sure that you would be willing to stand? Have you ever been in a foreign place, out of your comfort zone? What does it feel like to be an outsider? I know that many people in our church family have travelled extensively. My first trip overseas was in Syracuse, Italy for three weeks in 1987 (that's on the island of Sicily). I was visiting a friend who was working there, so I had the days to myself. I have always been fairly fearless,
but found out that a young woman walking alone in that country was fair game.
More than one Sicilian man persistently tried to pick me up. I was a little scared
and really annoyed. I had never felt really 'different' until I went to work in Honolulu in 2010. I loved it there, but in the IT office of Queen's Hospital I was a 'visible minority'. The
people were friendly and made an effort to include me, but I didn't look like
about 80% of my co-workers who were of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Philipino
and Hawaiian heritage. I remember feeling a little uncomfortable. I worked
there for over a year and made friends and learned some about the Hawaiian
culture, but I wasn't one of them. What if I felt like that all the time?
Christian mission is relational: God wishes to heal us in ways that restore us to community with others. How do we DO that?? I really enjoy researching for service planning and writing sermons. This time I found On Being. The On Being radio show and podcast was created by Krista Tippett in 2003. It began with a controversial idea for a public radio conversation (Speaking of Faith) that would treat the religious and spiritual aspects of life as seriously as
we treat politics and economics. What does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?
Their website describes six virtues that I believe could change the world if we all practised them. They describe the following as 'Grounding Virtues' – spiritual technologies and tools for the art of living.
1) Words That Matter
We are starved for fresh language to approach each other. We need what Elizabeth Alexander calls “words that shimmer” — words with power that convey real truth, which cannot be captured in mere fact. Words have the force of action and become virtues in and of themselves. The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. Words are one of our primary ways to reach across the mystery of each other.
2) Hospitality
You don’t have to love or forgive or feel compassion to extend hospitality. But it’s more than an invitation. It is the creation of an inviting, trustworthy space — an atmosphere as much as a place. It shapes the experience to follow. It creates the intention, the spirit, and the boundaries for what is possible. New social realities are brought into being over time by a quality of relationship between
unlikely combinations of people. When in doubt, practice hospitality.
3) Humility
Humility is a companion to curiosity, surprise, and delight. Spiritual humility is not about getting small. It is about encouraging others to be big. It is not about debasing oneself but about approaching everything and everyone with a readiness to be surprised and delighted. This is the humility of the child. It is the humility in the spirituality of the scientist and the mystic — to be planted in what you know, while living expectantly for discoveries yet to come.
4) Patience
Like humility, patience is not to be mistaken for meekness. It can be the fruit of a full-on reckoning with reality — a commitment to move through the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. A spiritual view of time is a long view of time — seasonal and cyclical, resistant to the illusion of time as a bully, time as a matter of deadlines. Human transformation takes time — longer than we want it to — but it is what is necessary for social transformation.
5) Generous Listening
Listening is an everyday art and virtue, but it’s an art we have lost and must learn anew. Listening is more than being quiet while others have their say. It is about presence as much as receiving; it is about connection more than observing. Real listening is powered by curiosity. It involves vulnerability — a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The generous listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the
other and patiently summons their own best self and their own most generous words and questions.
6) Adventurous Civility
The adventure of civility for our time can’t be a mere matter of politeness or niceness. Adventurous civility honours the difficulty of what we face and the complexity of what it means to be human. It doesn’t celebrate diversity by putting it up on a pedestal and ignoring its messiness and its depths. The intimate questions that perplex and divide us will not be resolved quickly. Civility, in our world of change, is about creating new possibilities for living forward while being different and even continuing to hold profound disagreement.
I'd like to read that again – Civility is about creating new possibilities for living forward while being different and even continuing to hold profound disagreement. Today On Being describes their work with social healing as the overarching impulse in everything they make and do.
Remember the study notes on the passage in Mark I read earlier? “Jesus, who had been focused on his primary mission—which he understood as being to his people—expresses his assignment more clearly in Matthew’s version of this story: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. Could this story be a kind of conversion moment for Jesus, where he realizes the greater truth of her response and its implications for his mission? The woman’s prophetic response refocuses Jesus on his mission and opens him to its broader implications.”
Jesus' life and the stories we read about his life are meant to be an example of how to live our lives. In this passage, he changed as a result of the woman's persistence and his willingness to hear what she said to him. If we learn to practice hospitality... humility... patience... generous listening...and adventurous civility AND speak words that matter - we can make a difference in the world around us.
