Romans 11:1-32
Matthew 15:10-28
Do you ever feel as though, when you pray, God just ignores you? As though your prayers just aren’t good enough, or your problems aren’t important enough, for God to spend time listening, much less doing anything about it?
I don’t know where this idea comes from, but it’s a terrible feeling. It’s also blasphemy.
We often talk ourselves out of our pain and need by playing a comparison game. “At least I still have...” “At least I’m not...” Or we look at those who suffer more visibly and find ourselves saying “there but for the grace of God go I.” Which is also pretty unhelpful a thing to say, because God hasn’t given those who suffer any less grace than those who seem to have it all together.
We’ve got to stop this game. We have to quit measuring ourselves against each other as though there is a great competition for who can suffer better or who can avoid suffering best. If your dog dies in the middle of a week where celebrities die and thousands of children are killed, God still cares about your loss. God still knows the hurt of our neighbors and children here who struggle with poverty and hunger and addiction, just as much as God knows the hurt of those children being killed by war around the world.
Don’t imagine for a minute that God only cares about the catastrophes that make the nightly news and not about your life. Don’t imagine for a minute that God rewards your righteous work with only good health and must be punishing those doctors who contracted Ebola, either.
We try so hard to make sense out of pain. It’s only natural to try and organize the chaos inside and around us. But we can not expect that life and death and suffering and joy always make sense.
For the suicide of a comedian to make more news than the police killing a black man holding a toy gun in the toy aisle of a store, that’s the way we think, the way we operate.
For either of those things to happen in the first place, neither of them makes sense. Except for the terrible realities of depression and racism, of fear and despair. Because even though we know they are wrong, when we know they ultimately have no power, they still get to us in so many ways.
Okay, so this is a lot of tragedy. Some we can get away from and some is not so easy to escape, depending on who you are and where you’re from. The one common thread through it all is that when tragedy strikes, we can pray. Or someone can pray for us. When pain threatens to overtake us and those we love, we turn to Jesus and cry out “Lord, have mercy!” When our friends and loved ones, or even complete strangers, are suffering, we cry out this long ancient prayer on their behalf, demanding God hear us, and even when it doesn’t feel like it, God does hear us.
The Canaanite woman who showed us how to do this had the tenacity to remind Jesus of who he is, regardless of her own position. She had the courage, and maybe the desperation, to demand God pay attention to the suffering of her daughter. She did not tell Jesus to leave behind his mission to his own people, but to remember that his mercy and power was bigger than just one community. He had, after all, fed over five thousand people and collected up twelve baskets of leftovers. Any of those leftovers go to the outsiders who hadn’t made it to that particular dinner? We don’t know where they went, but twelve baskets left over, how could he deny a few crumbs to this woman?
A few crumbs, after all, was all she asked for. It was all she needed. It was enough for her daughter to be made well, because it was a few crumbs of Jesus. The son of God. God with us to the end of the age. Only a few crumbs were all that she needed, and she knew there was more than enough to go around, because she had heard of this Jesus, of the things he said and did, of the kind of man he was.
It didn’t matter that she was a foreigner. That wasn’t what she was arguing. It wasn’t a question of whether she deserved healing for her daughter, if she was good enough or worthy enough. Jesus called her a dog, and she didn’t disagree with him. She wasn’t about to make her own position a stumbling block for the healing her daughter needed. “Yes, fine, a dog,” she said. “But even the dogs get scraps sometimes.”
And that’s all she was asking. She wasn’t answered the first time she called out to Jesus, but she didn’t let that stop her from crying out. She didn’t let that stop her because she knew this Jesus was greater than the differences between them.
She knew this Jesus was powerful and merciful and honest and holy. She knew this kind of healing was in character for his mission and ministry, and she demanded it.
Do you look at the news or hear from your neighbors and coworkers and think there are better things God ought to be doing than listening to your little personal problems? Because the God we have is a relational God. Not a God who sets the world in motion and then just sits back to watch us make a mess of things. Not a God who is going to make sure we’re registered Republicans or Democrats or even tax-paying citizens before deciding to hear or ignore our prayers. The God we have is one who knows what a splinter and a stubbed toe feel like. One who knows what it’s like to see his mother suffer because of his life choices. One who knows what it’s like because he’s decided to live the life we live.
We have a God who loves us enough to become us, no matter what it will cost him. Just to walk with us again. So why would we think he doesn’t want to hear from us when we were created to be in relationship with him? As with any relationship, it takes work and struggle and frustration, just as much as joy and laughter, but that’s the sign of being in relationship. And it’s a relationship that depends most of all on who our God is.
We bring ourselves to it as fully as we are able, and God comes to us as fully as we can bear. And God is the one who starts it all, in our baptism, but even beyond that - somebody had to bring us to baptism, especially those of us baptized as infants.
God reaches out to us in every time and place regardless of who and where we are.
The Canaanite woman, the soldier who trusted Jesus could heal his servant from a distance with just a word, the kings who traveled such a long distance following a star... our God has a reach far beyond our imagination, far beyond our borders and our expectations.
And it includes us just as much as anybody. And it includes everybody just as much as it includes us.
Whatever your life, your position, your status according to yourself or according to other people, God has ordained that all people are welcome. The prophet Isaiah reminds us that God’s house is a house of prayer for all people. And Isaiah was talking to a people who had been beaten down, abducted in war, who were trying so hard to make a new home for themselves. Isaiah reminded them they were welcome before God no matter what the war had done to them, and that their neighbors, however different, were also welcome. Not because of their own worthiness, but because God is the sort of God who works that way.
Se we bring the world before God in prayer. We pray for ourselves. We pray for the big and the small and the mundane and the miraculous, trusting that God hears and answers in some way, just because of who God is.
And we pray and wrestle with God until we are left limping from the struggle of it, changed by our ongoing encounter with a living, mighty, mysterious, merciful Lord, who has mercy on us even when we haven’t the strength to demand it for ourselves.
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