In & Out

This weekend we are jumping back into the lectionary for the school year. And we are right back in the midst of things.

Jesus has been busy moving and grooving in ministry and decides to take a little R&R in the land of Tyre and Sidon, which is just north of Galilee in what we now know as Lebanon. He is trying to get away from the crowds that are always pressing on him for more and more help and blessings.

Yet, while he is at a quiet dinner with his disciples, a local woman (read Canaanite and Gentile) bothers him. Her child is sick. And she pushes her way in until she is at the feet of the Teacher himself to beg for help.

And we see something that almost never happens – Jesus acts in an entirely human way. He is fully human after all. Jesus uses a derogatory slur for her and her child, calling them “dogs.”

I am not one of the theologians who is going to try and write this off or dress it up. It is messy and not pretty. This is not Jesus’s best moment on earth.

And this woman, in the way every single woman on this planet has been taught to do, calls him to task. She turns the insult on its head and gets what she needs.

At the end of the day, our passage is about who is in and who is out.

Because, as my late husband used to love to remind me, we humans love to delineate and create in groups and out groups. We love to choose who gets the blessings and curses. Who God loves and who God hates.

But, what we find, when we dig deeply into Scripture is that God’s hatred is reserved for only a handful and it is not the handful many of us would expect. It is not the ones the world casts out. Instead, they are these: those with haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that hurry to run to evil, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family. Not the usual list we hear, is it?

And the ones that God chooses, again and again? The orphan. The widow. The foreigner. The poor. The oppressed. The imprisoned. The sick. The hungry. The thirsty. The outcast. The unwanted by the world.

Even in the moment when Jesus’s human self forgets, the divine is still there to remind us who is truly in for God and who is truly out.

See you Sunday.

Blessings,

Rev. Janie