Vicar Karla Leitzman
Matthew 15: 10-20, 21-28
Almost four years ago now, I was getting ready to go to Southern California to meet with Global Refuge donors for the first time since getting hired as a major gifts officer. I was reaching out to donors to try to set up meetings to visit with them to thank them for their support and to get to know them while sharing some updates of our work of welcoming newcomers to the United States. One of the people my boss encouraged me to visit with was a former board member whose husband was a retired Lutheran Church Missouri Synod district president, which in the ELCA would be the equivalent of a local synod bishop. Unlike the ELCA, which Faith Lilac Way is part of, the LCMS does not ordain women or openly LGBTQIA+ folks to be pastors or leaders in the church. So, going into this meeting, I was nervous. I wasn’t sure what I should or should not talk about. Should I only talk about work and not talk about anything personal, even though in my experience, sharing a certain amount of personal stories is what helps to build an authentic relationship? Should I share that I was in seminary and pursuing being a pastor? Essentially, which pieces of myself should I share and which should I hold close? I absolutely had a preconceived notion of how this conversation was probably going to go and about what they believed or didn’t believe, about who they were.
I went into this lunch meeting with my mind already made up about who they were and how they were going to think about me. So I sat down at our lunch to learn that my boss had told them a little bit about me and my journey so they wanted to know all about my seminary experience, where I wanted to be a pastor. My attempts at being mysterious were thwarted. They wanted to talk about how much they liked and respected then ELCA presiding bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, a woman in the highest office of church leadership and ordained ministry. Essentially, our conversation was very different from what my mind had already decided was going to unfold. It turns out that the farther you get from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod epicenter in St. Louis Missouri, the more varied the theological interpretations become. Throughout the course of my work, I have actually met a fair number of west coast LCMS Lutherans who are more supportive of progressive Lutheran theology than ELCA Lutherans here in the Midwest, but I digress. For this couple, in particular, because the Missouri synod holds their pensions as he is a retired pastor and district president, they find themselves firmly planted in the denomination even if they might not agree with every single tenant of their faith tradition.
What this all comes down to though, is that these are some of my very favorite times when I have been wrong, when my mind has been changed. It’s honestly so fun and it’s one of my favorite ways to continually get to be surprised by God. And while, I obviously do take issue with any faith denomination that limits who can and can not be leaders in the church, that don’t value the voices of women and LGBTQIA+ leaders in the church, especially when Jesus empowered so many varied kinds of people to share his good news, I can still celebrate the things we hold in common and celebrate. And in this case, even though we have these differences, the thing that united us was our shared deep tethering ourselves to our shared Christian mandate to see Christ reflected in the face of the stranger, the foreigner. This all reminds me that I am allowed to change my mind, that I’m allowed to be wrong, that I can always re-examine my pre conceived notions of who I’ve determined someone to be in my mind.
Today, in our gospel reading from Matthew, we get an example of Jesus changing his mind, and even of Jesus being wrong, and realizing he is wrong. I’ve talked from this pulpit a good bit about how each of the four gospels gives us a different picture of who Jesus was, what his ministry was, who he came to be and what he came to do, and how those images inform our faith. Each gospel gives us a unique and distinct person in Jesus, a unique and distinct role for us to emulate in our faith journey and in our witness to Christ. Each gospel also carries complexities and vitally important context to the authors and circumstances it was originally written. And Matthew, in different ways than Mark, Luke, and John, gives us a lot of complexity.
The Jesus we get to know in Matthew is the rabbi, the teacher, the long awaited prophetic realization of the Messiah who will liberate God’s people. The Jesus we get in Matthew also, frequently holds an undercurrent of anger and starkness that, frankly, a lot of times makes Christians feel really uncomfortable. At our clergy text study this week, the resounding theme was “Oh boy I should have deviated from the lectionary this week. I don’t want to preach on this because it paints Jesus in such a bad light. This text is so uncomfortable, I don’t know what to do with it!” At face value, I thought all of those things too. Why, especially with the hecticness of Vacation Bible School this week did I not go out of my way to give myself a simpler gospel text to preach on?!
Even though a significant part of our theology as Christians is that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, it seems like a lot of the times when we are reminded of just how human Jesus was, are the passages that make us the most uncomfortable. And it just might be because those are the passages that feel just a little too familiar, that feel like a mirror is being held up for us to wrestle with the very human parts of ourselves that we try to avoid. We want to look to Jesus as the aspirational divinity, the one who came to prioritize the lowly and the marginalized, who turned the world on its head, who encourages us to do the same.
At this point in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is once again a foreigner, an outsider. It marks a transition in the focus of Jesus’ ministry and is a signal to the author of Matthew’s community that what follows will address one of their multiple concerns: “Who is Jesus’ mission and message for?” “What does that message ask of this community?” The broadest question is: “Just how wide is God’s mercy?” Where does it end or not end? This text culminates in a dramatic encounter between Jesus, his disciples, and a “foreigner,”this Canaanite woman, an encounter that intensifies these questions for Matthew’s community. The backdrop for the encounter with the Canaanite woman we meet in today’s story is deep deliberation among insiders about the complex relationship between their religious traditions and practices and “God’s will”.
Academic and historic consensus holds that Matthew’s community is predominantly Jewish, that is, it is made up of those who have been formed within the rich tradition of thought forms and practices that have shaped their understanding of God and “God’s will” for God’s people. They would have known intimately the strict rules they were to follow regarding what to eat or not to eat, how to follow precise rituals for hand washing, fasting, and many other faith practices. Now, since God has given power to Jesus, those traditions have come under scrutiny.
It can be so easy for us to fall into the rhythms of traditions, the ways we have always done things, sometimes not knowing another reason besides “well that’s the way we have always done it.” There is nothing wrong with following these long held traditions, like the ritualistic hand washing described in today’s text. These rituals and traditions can be intrinsic to how people of faith root themselves in their communities and to those who came before them. And yet, when the tradition is tradition for the sake of tradition and negates the grounding in God’s love and mercy, we can all run the risk of missing the point, of not allowing our hearts to be open to possible changes, of potentially realizing we don’t have all the answers.
When Jesus utters these harsh words to this Canaanite woman that makes preachers today feel so uncomfortable, he is likely not just seeing a singular woman in front of him. To Matthew’s Jesus, the embodied Messiah, the central figure in the faith of his people, the Canaanites were an ancient enemy and foe, responsible for years of oppression and devastation to them as a people. Jesus likely did not see a woman asking for help for her daughter, he most likely saw years of harm and pain represented in the face of this singular woman. His focus was on liberating God’s people from oppression, not realizing that the oppressors and those associated with them might just also be worthy of grace and healing. The tension in the encounter is released with a simple statement of faith. This Canaanite woman has named Jesus as “Lord” and “Son of David,” but when she declares her utter dependence on God’s Grace, Jesus’ tradition-shaped heart breaks open. “Woman, great is your faith!” he declares. When she is able to move beyond the strict traditions to the grace and healing that Jesus brings from God, that is when Jesus stops, realizes the error of his preconceived notion, and changes his mind.
Bringing it back to my work at Global Refuge, we are actually currently navigating some tension, well a lot of tension, because of the current state of refugee resettlement. Since our founding in 1939, it has always been up to the president of the United States to issue what is called the presidential determination and this is the number of refugees that the US agrees to resettle in any given year. It also includes which countries those refugees can be resettled from. Right now, the traditional refugee admissions path is essentially only open to white South Africans, or Afrikanners. These are people who are the descendants of the Dutch, German, and French colonizers who came to South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries and established Apartheid which was responsible for untold harm and trauma to Black South Africans. Under this system, Black South Africans had to carry passes which delineated exactly where they were and were not allowed to travel to and from, what work they could and could not do, where they could and could not live.
In the aftermath of this South African system of apartheid ending, the rationale the current presidential administration is using to allow for Afrikaners to be afforded refugee admission to the United States is that they are facing racial prejudice for being white and for being the descendants of those who enacted these horrific policies, the effects of which are still experienced widely.
Because we are now the only resettlement agency contracted to provide foster care and family reunification for unaccompanied children and is dependent on funding from the federal government to continue doing that reunification, Global Refuge has been faced with an unpleasant dilemma: accept federal funding so we can continue that foster care work and then also be responsible for resettling Africaners. Or, refuse to resettle white South Africans and reject the funding but then also be barred from serving unaccompanied children. And while there is a whole lot of complexity wrapped up on this, it has enabled a few stories that really just couldn’t get more Lutheran or more filled with grace and with the changing of minds and hearts.
One family of Afrikanners was recently resettled in Fargo, North Dakota. The case manager assigned to them is a woman who was a former refugee herself from the Democratic Republic of Congo. As their case manager, she is tasked with helping them navigate housing, finding job placements, getting their children enrolled in the local school district, etc. In short, she and this family have been needing to spend an awful lot of time together. And, a genuine friendship has been formed. The children from South Africa run and leap into her arms when they see her. They have invited her into their home for dinner many times and she has returned the invitation by inviting them into her home to get to know her family. While none of this negates or undoes the harm that Black South Africans faced at the hands of the descendants of white colonizers from Europe for decades in South Africa, this story does remind us that God’s grace shows up, oftentimes in the places we least expect to find it when we have already made our minds up to how the story is going to end. In this story, we can realize that maybe just maybe, we can and should change our minds about people, just like Jesus models in today’s gospel story.
After all, the Canaanite woman is not just talking for the sake of talking, she is not just trying to talk to Jesus because she wants his autograph or because she wants to go home and brag that she met this healer from Galileah. She is appealing to Jesus, refusing to take no for an answer even after he seemingly casts her aside, for the sake of her daughter who can not speak for herself. She is speaking on behalf of one who is so vulnerable that she can not speak for herself, which is so much of what Jesus directs us to do. We also still have much to say on behalf of those who can not say it for themselves. We also must be relentless in the ways we push and push and push for the sake of the most vulnerable around us. Yes, we can hold fast to the traditions that inform how we live out our faith, we can and should root ourselves in these practices that tether us to one another and to those who came before us and to those who come after us. But, we must also keep our hearts open enough that we can be willing to admit when it’s time to try something new or when we are wrong, when we realize that our preconceived notions of who someone is or how they think might just not be what we initially thought to be true.
In our world, we navigate so many absolutes and binaries- where we are pushed to see people as one thing or another because frankly thats simpler than seeing them as complex human beings. So many people look at today’s gospel lesson and see Jesus in a way that is unfavorable to who we want him to be. We want to see our savior who has the answers, who reminds us to be kind and to pursue justice and care for all people. We look for the divine and the perfect. And yet today’s story also reminds us to look for the human. If Jesus can be capable of admitting wrongs, of changing his mind, of re-evaluating preconceived notions of who someone is or whose God’s love and mercy is for, maybe just maybe, we might not be such lost causes ourselves. And thanks be to God for that.