RCL Proper 23B
6 September 2015
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
At some point during Paula’s studies
at Vancouver School of Theology I was asked to preside and preach at Saint
Anne’s Steveston. Because Paula was
unable to come with me that Sunday, I had to take all three children with
me. For reasons I cannot now remember
there was no church school that Sunday, so the children sat in the front pew by
themselves. They sat in chronological
order: David, Anna and Owen.
Things went well at first. They were, for the briefest of moments,
poster children for the ‘Aren’t Clergy Kids Cute?’ campaign. Then the sermon began. David began tussling with Owen, while Anna,
sitting in the middle, acted as if nothing was going on.
Since I was in the midst of
delivering my sermon, I really wasn’t sure what to do. Should I interrupt my comments and thus draw
attention to the children rather than the readings or should I ignore them in
the hopes that the congregation wouldn’t notice? The boys were actually tussling in silence,
so I had that in my favour, but I knew that David and Owen realized my
dilemma. They both looked at me and then
picked up the pace of their tussle. Anna
just sat there with a look on her face that said, “Boys, harrumph.’
Just as I was losing the train of my
sermon, an elderly woman, whom I knew had grandchildren of her own, leaned
forward and gently spoke to the boys. I
don’t know what she said, but their tussle came to an end and they returned to
their previous angelic behaviour.
At the end of service I took the
time to thank this woman for her help. I
apologized for the boys’ behaviour. She
just smiled and said, ‘Oh, that’s alright.
I like children who have a bit of spunk!’
A bit of spunk is what we get in
today’s gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with a non-Jewish woman of
Syro-Phoenician birth. Jesus, full of
his sense of vocation to the Jewish people, comes face to face with a woman who
is not prepared to take ‘no’ for an answer.
She will not conform to the social and cultural mores that restrict,
even obstruct, her access to this miracle-working rabbi from Galilee.
Some interpreters of the New
Testament suggest that her persistence and her challenge to conventional ways
of behaving resemble the approach taken by a Greco-Roman philosophical movement
known as Cynicism. These ‘Cynics’, as
the followers of this movement were known, were committed to a life-long search
for virtue and for the truth. In
pursuing this search the Cynics were not prepared to put up with conventional
wisdom or behaviour or polite ways of speaking.
They asked embarrassing questions of those who were in power and they
did not care much about what ‘other people’, ‘nice people’, ‘normal people’ thought
about the Cynics themselves and their sometimes eccentric ways of behaviour.
Over the last two thousand years the
word ‘cynic’ has taken on a different connotation for us. Nowadays we call someone a cynic when he or
she looks for an ulterior motive behind a good deed. We sometimes equate cynicism with hypocrisy
when someone acts contrary to the rhetoric they use. I don’t envy Prime Minister Harper right now
in the light of the Syrian refugee crisis.
If he takes dramatic action, particularly in the midst of an election
campaign, then he surely risks an accusation of ‘cynical’ motives rather than
praise for steering a new course.
But in today’s gospel reading, we
have a wonderful example of a Cynic in the classical meaning of the word. I love this story. Jesus is doing all the right things and
gaining a growing number of followers.
People are impressed by what he is doing and some folks even invite him
and his disciples into their homes. Then
along comes this foreigner, this woman, who dares, on Jesus’ campaign trail so
to speak, to ask Jesus to heal her child, a foreign child, a girl child. He insults the woman, using words that really
stung in the context of first-century Palestine. Dogs were not nearly so well loved in those
days as they are today.
But this wonderful Cynical woman
turns the tables on Jesus. She uses his
insult as the springboard for her challenge to him to do what is surely God’s
will --- the healing of a child who has no other helper. This woman is the only person in the whole
Gospel of Mark who gets the better of Jesus in an argument. She seeks virtuous action; she seeks the
truth; she will not be thwarted by the standards of the social and cultural status
quo.
Friends, we need more Cynics in the
classical meaning of the word. We need
more people who are so committed to justice, to compassion and to generosity
that they will not be afraid to challenge the social and cultural status quo of
our own time. I dare say that it is the
vocation of all Christians in Canada today to be as persistent, as witty, as
courageous as this woman who dared to confront Jesus and to remind him that his
ministry could not be confined to the geographical boundaries of
Palestine. I wish we knew her name so
that we could celebrate a feast day for her in the liturgical calendar.
I have no illusions about how
difficult it is for an institution such as the Church to regain the spirit that
moved within us when we were only a messianic movement within the Judaism of Jesus’
day. But I pray that we can regain it
and that we can again dare to challenge ‘conventional’ wisdoms that enthrall us
and those to whom we are called to be the presence of Christ.
No doubt we will be criticized for
colouring outside the lines and for dabbling in affairs that some people think
are best left to those who are ‘in the know’.
But I hope that there is still enough life left within this
two-thousand-year-old community. What I’ve
learned from the story of a woman who lived two thousand years ago and from a
grandmother whom I met twenty years ago is this: I do love it when those who love God show
that they have a little spunk in them.
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