Sermon from Sunday 16 August

 

Reading(s): Romans 11:1-2a,29-32, Matthew 15:21-28. This sermon was given by Richard Brand at St Mark.

Come Holy Spirit: what we know not, teach us; what we have not, grant us; and what we are not, make us; for your love’s sake. Amen.

The migrants' challenge is one that divides many in our country and in continental Europe. Whatever view you take, crossing the med or channel, especially with young children, leaving all that is familiar and known and home and ending up taking your chances in a fragile inflatable, must take remarkable courage or tell of extraordinary desperation. Where even do our responses and responsibilities begin? (Both geographically and morally.) Where do they end? How do we square what we say about the choices of the rich in this world with the choices of the poor? The questions and dilemmas rightly go on.

I am not making direct links but today’s readings, especially the Gospel, have some interesting things to say about inclusion and exclusion.

Our Gospel reading about the Canaanite (or in Mark’s version the Syrophoenician) woman, is amongst my favourite biblical passages. This stems from the time it finally struck me that this Gentile and woman (let the reader understand on both counts) gently challenged Jesus' views to the degree that she changed them. At first Jesus – we’re told – “did not answer her at all.” He then tells her “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” When the Gentile woman replies “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." it would seem that something changes in Jesus, a new realisation makes sense to him and he answers her “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish."

Now theologically we could spend a long time on this one but suffice it to say that there other examples of Jesus' self-understanding developing, such as early in John’s Gospel when it’s his mother who challenges him at Cana to see that the hour to begin his ministry had come.

In today’s passage the context is all important to Matthew. In my Bible version the previous section is entitled ‘Things that defile’. Having taught others about what really defiles (things stemming from the heart) Jesus himself now learns that rather than excluding Gentiles because of their supposed impurity, his calling is inclusive of all peoples. In Romans we hear this is part of Paul’s later learning, that God is ‘merciful to all’. And our Isaiah passage this morning tells of welcoming the foreigner and that “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples”.

Back in 2002 Jonathan Sacks, then Chief Rabbi, wrote a book called ‘The Dignity of Difference’. Sacks points out that the Hebrew Bible, along with the words “You shall love your neighbour as yourself." no fewer than 36 times commands us to love the stranger. He goes on to say:

We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet God.

I wonder how comfortable we are with that?

I wonder how uncomfortable we should be? We live in times where the rights of difference, on many fronts, are declared by some to be incontestable. As Christians we often struggle to enter this space but I believe Jonathan Sacks brings some hopeful words. He is addressing cultural difference but the message is wider when he writes:

The abstract language of rights fails to enter into the depths…It suggests that the particularities of a culture are mere accretions to our essential and indivisible humanity, instead of being the very substance of how most people learn what it is to be human. In particular, it understates the difficulty and necessity of making space for strangers – the very thing that has been the source of racism and exclusion in almost every society known to history. If we are to live in close proximity to difference, as in a global age we do, we will need more than a code of rights, more even that mere tolerance. We will need to understand that just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth; no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions on mankind.

I remember reading yet another report about Christianity’s failure to reach the younger generation in this country. One reason given was our failure to provide them with a coherent account of meaning and purpose in the world. Perhaps the things we talk about are too often periphery matters and we need to keep saying more about our central values of the Christian faith and our belief in what it means to be human. Perhaps we need to declare more of our belief in the value of each and every human life, created in God’s own image and through God’s grace, seeking to grow into God’s likeness. Perhaps we need to declare more therefore, about our respect for and valuing of each person, their dignity and their inherent difference. Perhaps we need to declare more of our belief in loving our neighbour as our self and the priority of loving the stranger.

Oscar Wilde quipped something along the lines of “God made us in his image, and ever since we have been repaying the compliment."

Sacks states that:

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

So what might we do? Well there is much, from scriptural learning to prayerful attention, and one simple place open to us all is conversation. Conversation in which we seek to learn from others, not just to give them our views and drive home our prejudices. Conversation with those whose social groups aren’t ours. Conversation with views written by those we don’t usually read or hear. Conversation as the disciplined act of communication and listening; of sitting with another and learning from another; of giving voice to what matters to us and growing in understanding of what shapes others. Conversation with a Canaanite or whoever is the stranger in whom we might encounter the face of God.

So be it.

Amen.