Sermon for Sunday August 17

Proper 15 

Matthew 15:21-28

Becoming Human

By Rich Gamble

I grew up in a suburb of St Louis called Ferguson Missouri. That community has been in the news quite a bit this week. It is the community where a police officer shot an unarmed young African American male. In response to that shooting there were protests, some people used the occasion of the protest to loot and damage local businesses. In response to the protests there was a highly armed militarized response by the police. Violence leading to violence leading to violence.

It is odd to hear so much about my rather obscure small suburban community. Of course, it is a very different community from the one I grew up in. St Louis had in my day, stark divisions between communities. There were black communities and white ones and everybody knew which was which. Back then Ferguson was mostly a white suburb.

Everyone in my neighborhood was white. Every child in my grade school was white. It wasn’t until I went to Ferguson Jr High that I encountered African American students and even there they would have been less than 20% of the population.

I read somewhere that we can be powerfully impacted by what was going on in the world when we were 10 years old. That 10 is when most kids start to pull in information from and about the rest of the world. I was 10 in 1968. In 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated. Following Dr. King’s death there were riots across the country. I remember sitting in my living room and looking out at the street and imagining a crowd of angry black people coming to burn down my house down. It was a recurring fear.

In my first year of Jr High I was bullied by several kids. A disproportionate share of them were African American boys. I was an easy target. I was overweight and softhearted. I didn’t understand why these kids who did not know me would target me for acts meant to humiliate me. Later I began to understand that some of those bullies were themselves possibly feeling marginalized in a school that was mostly white and wholly staffed by white teachers. By asserting their dominance over me they were trying to feel better about themselves. By 8^th grade I wasn’t as soft and the bullying ceased but the marks of being humiliated remain, like a scar on my psyche. Like a scar on the skin, though it does not hurt any more I can still feel where the wound once was.

In Seminary in St Louis, I helped organize a household of seminary students to live and work in the inner city of St. Louis and commute out to the comfortable white suburb of the seminary. That inner city neighborhood had originally been built by German immigrants. When African Americans started to take up residence in some neighborhoods, whites would flee, sometimes selling houses for the cost of a lawn mower. My neighborhood as a seminary student had been one of those neighborhoods of flight. The neighborhood was mostly African American but the membership of the German built UCC church, was still completely white. It was attended by people who used to live in the neighborhood and kept their church as a relic of the past. We seminarians worked to connect the church with its current neighbors. From the stories I heard while working there, I can say that the whites who fled their neighborhood did not do so out of a racist sense of superiority but out of a fear of people based on nothing more than the color of their skin.

Systems of Domination have been the foundation of human civilization. Such systems generate inequitable divisions of resources and privilege. Allowed to function in an unfettered manner they inevitably create inequalities so vast that they leave many destitute and a few thinking of themselves as demigods. To maintain inequitable systems, Domination utilizes fear to keep people from uniting and undoing the injustices. The more people are divided the easier they are to exploit. Domination also uses differences in people to provide justification for the unjust division of resources. Race is a tool of exploitation. The more we fear people of a different race or religion or nation the easier we are to control. Colonialists played tribes off against one another. Industrialists would strive to break strikes by Irish workers by importing Italians, by white workers by bringing in black workers, by American workers by bringing in Mexican workers. These divisions created longstanding wounds, like psychic scars.

My father was often un-apologetically racist in his views. He grew up in a white world and had little contact with African Americans but like many working class folks in white neighborhoods he feared black people. His fear was not so much of individuals but of the cumulative identity. As one who grew up in rural poverty, who had an 8^th grade education, and worked as a manual laborer there was little in his background that separated him from the experiences of much of the African American community that had left the rural South to take up residence in cities like St Louis. But my father was able to think better about himself because he was a white man in a nation ruled by white men. Though he probably never consciously thought this; like those black kids that attacked the soft white kid, he felt better about himself because there were people he saw as below him. he never thought about the scars being left on those who were not white.  

Domination depends on division, fear, and hate. It also tells us that we should enjoy feeling superior to others.

Our faith calls us to world view that is the very opposite of domination. In today’s scripture Jesus has his mind changed by someone. This is a unique occurrence in the Gospels. Jesus doesn’t change his mind for his friends or family, not for the religious elite, or for the political leaders. He doesn’t change his mind even when failure to do so will lead to his death. But here, in today’s scripture he changes his mind. Jesus who grew up in patriarchal Jewish society changes his mind after being taught a lesson by a foreign woman.

We have a history in the Christian Church of making Jesus into a superman, someone superior in his very being to any other human. I find that to be less compelling that thinking of Jesus as very much a human, with all the frailties of humans, but as one who was able to make good choices along the way. He starts off today’s scripture as a guy who needs a break. His ministry is very taxing. He needs to get away but everywhere he goes he runs into crowds of people looking for wisdom or healing or something. So he goes out of the country. He goes to somewhere, where he won’t be known. But wouldn’t you know it, even in the land of foreigners his reputation precedes him. A foreigner, a woman no less, has the gall to ask a favor, her daughter is ill and no one can help her. The woman believes Jesus can heal her daughter and she asks him to do so. We want to show Jesus to be superior, we want to say that the bigotry against foreigners is not found in Jesus. We want to say that the chauvinism of male superiority is not in any way found in his thinking. But from somewhere Jesus, tells this woman to take her sick daughters case to some other healer. Jesus will have none of it. He is on vacation.

Jesus goes so far as to say that his powers of healing are reserved for the people of Israel. It’s not right to throw the food meant for the children to the dogs, he says. Get that, the woman and her sick daughter are the dogs here. Imagine an African American mother carrying her extremely sick child to the hospital and being told that the hospital is just for white people and not for dogs like her child. Some of us would fly off in a rage against the injustice and the inhumanity of such a statement. But this woman is used to life on the lower rungs of Domination’s ladder. Anger will not save her child. Instead she uses her wit. Folk tales of oppressed people often have heroes who use their wit in worlds ruled by powerful though stupid oppressors. In the African American community there were many stories about Briar Rabbit who outsmarts the fox who would otherwise have him for dinner. The woman uses Jesus’ insult as a metaphor for her own ends. Even the dogs are allowed the food that falls from the children’s plate. She says.

Now this is where I give Jesus credit. It is not that he was somehow born with superior insight by virtue of being a superior being, it is that he has the capacity to learn and grow and become more human, to set aside the prejudices his upbringing had handed him and see the measure of his humanity to be found in the very grace of God. Jesus sees in the ability of this woman to use his own metaphor to argue against his actions, as the kind of skill he himself uses against those who defend domination’s logic. He understands that in his treatment of this foreign woman he had manifested the very way of thinking and acting that he spent his life opposing. The woman teaches him to see his faith as being bigger than just for the Jewish people. It is a very important lesson that she has taught him in this swift interplay of words. And he relents. He does the thing he said he would not do. He heals the woman’s daughter.

We have all been raised in a system of domination. The scars of fear and humiliation are a part of our psyche. But our faith proclaims that the measure of our humanity is not to be found in the practices of the past but in the very nature of God. We are called to live into our humanity. To see a truly human experience not as one that comes naturally to us but as one we must grow into as we reach beyond ourselves to the image of a God of self-giving love.

Jesus changed his mind and his actions and in so doing became more human. This happened as he allowed a woman, a non-believer and a foreigner to teach him about being a better man of faith. It is not Jesus’ superior birthright we see as the mark of true humanity but his willingness to put aside his prejudices for the sake of another.

Our faith calls us to cross the boundaries that separate us from one another, to overcome the barriers, to break the ancient cycle of violence, to tear down the walls, to reach beyond our fears and hurts and seek out our humanity in the struggles of those we are taught to fear.

The scars that the world has inflicted upon us can be reminders of our call to remake ourselves and the world. The death of an unarmed young black man at the hands of a white police officer can be an everyday occurrence in an unjust world or it can be a call to take a close look at and change the violence inherit in the system to which we’ve accommodated ourselves. We have a choice. In that choice lies our true humanity. Amen.