“Jesus and the Walk of Faith, Part 2. Faith and Persistence” by the Rev. Don Wahlig, August 20, 2023, Year A / Proper 15 - Genesis 45:1-15 and Psalm 133 • Isaiah 56:1, 6-8 and Psalm 67 • Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 • Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

THEME:  Be open, humble, and persistent in trusting Jesus like the Canaanite woman.

Today is Part 2 of our sermon series “Jesus and the Walk of Faith.”  When we catch up with Jesus this week, he’s busy healing the sick and the lame. His reputation for performing healing miracles has spread throughout Galilee. His miracles are still fresh in the minds of his disciples, when they get a surprise visit from a group of pharisees. The pharisees don’t seem to care much about the miracles Jesus is performing. They are more concerned about purity. Specifically, they want to know why his followers are not engaging in ritual handwashing before meals, as is customary.   

Jesus rebuts their hypocritical concern by teaching about true purity. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles, but rather what comes out of it. The words that come out of one’s mouth reveal the character of one’s heart. That is what God cares about most: a pure heart open to receiving and sharing his love. After Jesus sends the Pharisees packing, he and the disciples travel down toward the coast. They are headed into Gentile territory. Since contact with Gentiles makes a Jew unclean, we sense that Jesus is going to drive home this lesson that purity is a matter of the heart. Sure enough, before long, we find him face to face with someone any Jew would’ve gone to great lengths to avoid: a Canaanite woman. 

For Jews, this woman is the ultimate outsider. For starters, she is not with her husband. She should not even be talking with Jesus in the first place. Further, not only is she not Jewish, she is a Canaanite. You will remember that the Canaanites are the people Joshua drove out of the Promised Land. There is a long history of antagonism between the Canaanites and the Jews. And yet here she is pestering Jesus to heal her daughter who suffers from a demon. Knowing full well that his disciples are watching, Jesus first does what any Jewish male would: he gives her the cold shoulder.  But this woman will not be denied.

She has probably gone to every Canaanite priest and shrine, and prayed and sacrificed before every Canaanite idol she can find.  But nothing has worked. Then she gets word of Jesus and his miraculous healing power. She seeks him out, but the disciples shoo her away.  When Jesus tries to put her off, she persists. She is humble to the point of being submissive, and insistent that Jesus can heal her daughter, if he chooses. And he does.  

“Woman, great is your faith!”, he says, “Let it be done for you as you wish." And just like that, her daughter is healed. Jesus is teaching his disciples a lesson here. 3 lessons in fact. 

First, God’s mercy is always wider than we think it is. It’s even available to outsiders, the ones who don’t belong and don’t worship the way we do. It’s available to everyone who seeks him, including the ones that the religious insiders look down on.  God’s love knows no bounds. Our hearts should be open to receiving and sharing his love with all others, no matter how different they are. 

The second lesson is that genuine faith requires genuine humility. We have to understand at our very core that we are like the Canaanite woman. We are all in deep need of the wholeness Jesus provides. We cannot heal ourselves. The moment we begin to think otherwise, we start sliding down a slippery slope of self-sufficiency that deludes us into thinking we don’t really need Jesus at all.

Open hearts, genuine humility, and the third lesson is persistence. When we approach God in prayer and don’t get the answer we’re seeking right off the bat, it does not mean that Jesus cannot or will not make us whole. He is teaching us to persist in prayer, trusting that Jesus can make us whole. Whether it’s in this life or the next, he will do just that. In other words, our goal is to be more like the Canaanite woman than the Pharisees. In God’s eyes, it is far better to be open, humble, and persistent like her, than to be judgmental, arrogant, and self-satisfied like the Pharisees.

The bottom line is we should never assume that we are insiders who are entitled to God’s healing grace simply because we think we are part of the righteous mainstream of his people. Much better to assume we are outsiders. Scripture bears that out. The Bible is loaded with examples of outsiders who are more faithful in God’s eyes than the supposed insiders. Remember the publican praying at the back of the synagogue, convicted of his own sin? The Roman Centurion with greater faith than anyone in Israel?  How about the Samaritan woman at the well, and the good Samaritan? The list goes on and on.  All of them have two things in common. First, they are all outsiders. Second, they all have extraordinary faith.

The lesson for the disciples and for you and me is that we can learn from the faith of others. We can be inspired by their faith to deepen our own.  Few have ever understood that better than a Swedish New Testament scholar named Krister Stendahl. Krister Stendahl was a Lutheran theologian and Dean of Harvard Divinity School. In 1984, Stendahl was elected Bishop of Stockholm. One year later, he found himself at the heart of a major controversy. 

The Church of Latter-Day Saints – the Mormons – announced they were planning to build a new church in Stockholm. Lutheranism is the official state church of Sweden and so this caused a great deal of apprehension. When Stendahl addressed the issue at a press conference, he surprised many people. Instead of seeing the new church as a threat, he described it as presenting an opportunity for other Christians to deepen their faith. To help them do that, he offered 3 rules for engaging with other religions:

1) When trying to understand another religion, ask the adherents of that religion, not its enemies. 

2) Don't compare your best to their worst.  

3) Leave room for “holy envy.”

Those first two seem clear enough but that last one is a little odd. Holy envy. What is that? It’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? We need to unpack that one.  The best person I know to help us do that is Barbara Brown Taylor.  Barbara Taylor is an Episcopal Priest who teaches at Piedmont College in northern Georgia. For 20 years she taught a course called Religion 101: Religions of the World. 

Rather than only teaching out of a textbook, Barbara also took her students to experience the worship of the world’s other major religions first-hand.  Every year, they went on a series of field trips to worship at a Jewish synagogue, a Hindu temple, an Islamic Mosque, and a Buddhist monastery. She recently wrote a book about that experience. It is called Holy Envy. She writes, “Most of [my students] were Christian, so their questions had to do with how to maintain Christian identity.  For those who were fearful, the questions were about how not to put their own faith at risk.”

Her students were invariably surprised by the hospitality and kindness of their hosts, and the bond of common humanity they shared. The most surprising thing of all was how the experience of engaging with those of other religions reshaped the students’ own Christian faith.  Her students found themselves out of their comfort zone, face-to-face with unfamiliar people in unfamiliar worship spaces. They prayed together, talked together, and ate together. Slowly but surely the rigid walls of their unquestioned assumptions about other faiths, as well as their own, began to crumble. 

As they began to understand and appreciate those of other faiths, they often saw elements they could incorporate into their own faith to make it deeper and stronger.  That is what Krister Stendahl meant by holy envy.  These students experienced the lesson Jesus taught his disciples through his encounter with the Canaanite woman.  As a result, their hearts were more open, their spirits were more humble, and their faith was more persistent. 

Barbara Taylor explains that this is all God’s doing.  “For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God has a soft spot for religious strangers, both as agents of divine blessing and recipients of divine grace - to the point that God sometimes chooses one of them over people who believe they should by all rights come first.”  She goes on to say, “This is a great mystery, but it does nothing to obscure the great commandment.  In every circumstance, regardless of the outcome, the main thing Jesus has asked me to do is love God and my neighbor as religiously as I love myself.  The minute I have that handled, I will ask for my next assignment.  For now, my hands are full.”

Friends, that is our assignment, too. We, too, have our hands full.  So be on the lookout this week. When it comes to encountering those who believe and worship differently, it could very well be that God has placed them in our lives to strengthen our faith so that we might better share his love with all.  Gosh, that sounds like a vision statement I’ve read somewhere. Maybe check your bulletin?

May it be so.