This is a sermon that I preached at Circle of Mercy on August 13.  The text is Matthew 15:21-28.

Here is the audio recording if you would rather listen than read:

 What an odd story this is!  When I’m reading Matthew’s Gospel, I tend to skip over it and pay attention to the stories before and after which seem to make more sense. 

Let’s stop and look at it. It is important to note what happened right before this exchange.  Jesus has a confrontation with the Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem.  The text says “he left” that place but the verb used for “left” is too weak.  It’s used in other places in Matt such as when the magi flee Herod after honoring the baby Jesus. (2:12) Matthew persistently uses the term in conjunction with the threat of death or strong conflict. 

So when Jesus flees the Pharisees and scribes, he is not a happy camper. Perhaps he is angry, tired, or depressed. Perhaps he is just sick of people and he needs to badly get away.

Fresh off this confrontation Jesus flees for the far boarders of Israel, toward gentile territory. He and his disciples are approached by a Canaanite woman although when Matthew was written there weren’t any Canaanites. 

When this story appears in Mark which was written before Matthew, she is simply called a “Syrophoenician.”  Matthew probably changed it to Canaanite to emphasize how they were among the most hated enemies of ancient Israel.  As Jaime Clark-Soles explains in Women in the Bible: The woman is not simply “other.”  She is intensely other. And she is a loud “other” at that.[i]

“Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” This is a double whammy.  “Lord” and “Son of David” are both confessional titles in Matthew. In fact, often when Mark uses the title teacher, Matthew changes it to Lord.  This woman “gets it.”

One would expect Jesus to reach out to her immediately. After all, she seems to understand who he is even when his disciples do not.  So, what does Jesus say?  Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He doesn’t even acknowledge her existence.  Wow! This isn’t the Jesus I know.

Even his disciples find her an annoying bother.  They don’t talk to her but rather talk around her as if she isn’t even there.  “Get rid of her,” they say.

Why would Jesus be so distant and noncommunicative? Why would his disciples be so antagonistic? What is going on?

Finally, she gets a response.  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” This response is right in line with the purpose of Matthew.  Matthew’s church had only recently walked out of or been thrown out of the local synagogue and the relationship between it and the synagogue across the street was antagonistic. Much about the gospel is aimed at helping Matthew’s church define its distinct Christian identity.

Jesus has ignored her, rebuffed her and now insulted her but still she is a determined woman. She embraces the insult. “Yes, Lord, I am a dog, so treat me like one.”  Finally, Jesus responds in a way we think he should have responded all along. “Woman, great is your faith!” Her daughter is healed on the spot.

So, what was that all about? Matthew has already called her a hated Canaanite.   Jesus and his disciples don’t like her, and they want nothing to do with her.  In fact, they want her to go away. Why?  Because Jesus and his disciples are prejudiced against her. 

Robin DiAngelo author of White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for White People to talk about Racism describes prejudice as a “pre-judgement about another person based onthe social groups to which that person belongs.”[ii] Jesus is pre-judging the Canaanite woman because she isn’t Jewish. He didn’t even want to speak to her because she is other. However, she is a creative and resilient other. She takes him on, and she wins like no one else in Scripture does.

Her willingness to throw herself on the ground at his feet has some effect. She is the main character of this story, and her persistence changes his viewpoint.  In the end, her daughter is healed. It’s too bad Matthew didn’t name the woman because she deserves one, especially since she is the “star.”

It’s interesting to note that by the end of Matthew, the writing has changed. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” – not just the Jewish people – but all nations. I like to think she had something to do with this. 

So, what can we learn about her, this unnamed woman?  We can learn to stand up to prejudice in creative ways. In Christian circles, prejudice is an offensive word.   The truth is all of us can be prejudiced. White people and People of Color can be prejudiced towards each other.  The same with men and women and generational groups. The list goes on. Prejudice is typically found when a person of power looks down on someone with less power. But not always.

 Racism is something different though. DiAngelo writes, “Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not.”[iii]  Racism is in the water we drink and in the air we breathe.  We cannot get away from it however hard we try.

Webster’s dictionary defines racism in an individualistic personal way.  In 2020, Kennedy Mitchum a student who had just graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, didn’t think the definition went far enough. She wrote to the editors:

“Racism is not only prejudice against a certain race due to the color of a person’s skin, as it states in your dictionary. It is both prejudice combined with social and institutional power.  It is a system of advantage based in skin color.” She got a reply the next day. After several more exchanges, the editors agreed to make the change.[iv]

Summed up, it’s a definition that activists have been using all along: Racism is “prejudice plus power.”

Resmaa Menakem who is black wrote My Grandmother’s Hands.  In it hedescribes a situation when his wife was leaving Walmart with her purchases in a full cart.  A white employee stopped her and asked for her receipt. It took two to three minutes for the employee to match everything to the receipt. During that time she watched as 20 people -all white – left the store.  The employee stopped to check all eight of the Black customers who walked past but the white people walked right on by.[v]

Prejudice plus power.  Right then, the employee had all the power.

Menakem’s wife told the manager who was white about it and he was aghast and immediately called over the employee.  She was surprised, apologetic and a bit mortified and insisted she wasn’t deliberately doing that.  She may not have been targeting Black customers on purpose but she was doing it unconsciously.  

Often racism is something we don’t even know we are doing.

Years ago, I was walking down the alley close to where I live and I passed a black man.  I saw him coming and I clenched inside involuntarily.  I had been taught by society that black men are dangerous and that I might get hurt by them. These thoughts – however wrong – are embedded deep inside.

I imagine you have heard some of these statistics before but it’s a good reminder:

• According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black women die 3 times moreoften giving birth.Black Americans are also almost twice as likely as white Americans to lack health insurance, making it difficult to receive proper care. Disparities are seen across a number of chronic diseases, as well as in the current pandemic.
• A report found that Black girls often receive more severe penalties for the same behavior as white peers. They are nearly 6 times more likely to get out-of-school suspension.
•  White and Black people are equally likely to use drugs but the system is 6 times more likely to incarcerate Black people.[vi]

Nibs Stroupe, a white retired pastor of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, GA calls himself a “recovering racist.”  When I pass an unknown Black person now, I often check in with myself and feel what my body is doing.  Am I clenching up inside? Am I breathing more deeply? Do I feel scared? If I do, I then tell myself to “stop” and it works.  I too am a recovering racist.  

There’s another “ism” that doesn’t get talked much about.  “Ableism.”  

According to Accessling.org – “Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. At its heart, ableism is rooted in the assumption that disabled people require ‘fixing’ and defines people by their disability. Like racism and sexism, ableism classifies entire groups of people as ‘less than,’ and includes harmful stereotypes, misconceptions, and generalizations of people with disabilities.”

The 2020 documentary “Crip Camp: A disability revolution” produced by Michelle and Barack Obama outlines “ableism” in subtle ways

This was a camp in the 50’s,60’s and 70’s called Camp Jened.  Crip is short for “crippled” and one of the film makers Jim Lebrecht– who has spina bifida and went to the camp- said they chose the title because they wanted folks to know the documentary wasn’t your average documentary.  The old footage was filmed by People’s Video Theatre and had a quirky sense about it. It was combined with new footage to make the documentary.

It starts out with the camp director digging holes in the ground and saying, “I thought it would be funny if they tripped.”  In another scene in front of other campers, a teenager says, “I got run over by a bus.”  Campers answer, “congratulations!” There was a point when Lebrecht shoots video of himself with a camera strapped to his wheelchair.

Interspersed with the old footage, the characters appear as adults talking about the camp and their other experiences. Lebrecht said he had bladder issues and needed to wear diapers and then later a bag. It would leak and it was embarrassing. But at the camp everyone had something going on with their bodies and it was no big deal.

The documentary deftly shifts to 1973, when Congress had passed a law-giving people with disabilities limited protection – that if an organization got money from the federal government, they could not discriminate against someone based on disability. But President Jimmy Carter’s administration delayed approving new regulations needed before the law could take effect. Ableism.

Judy Heumann, was a counselor at the camp who used a wheelchair and was a Jewish disability rights advocate who died just recently. She helped lead a sit-in beginning on April 5^th 1977 at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco because the law still hadn’t taken effect. It lasted 26 days and scores of people with disabilities including some from Camp Jened participated. One newspaper reporter described the sit-in as “protesters in wheelchairs, the lame, the palsied and the blind.”

As an example of how creative and resourceful people with disabilities can be, the phone lines and water were shut off, but they were able to communicate outside the window using sign language.

They also found unexpected allies. The city’s mayor, George Moscone, sent over mattresses and tried to arrange portable showers for the protesters. Members of other organizations, including the Black Panther Party and the Gray Panthers, brought supplies and cooked meals.

Finally, Heumann and a small delegation traveled to Washington, D.C., to gain attention, hauled around town in the back of a truck because wheelchair accessible vehicles were not yet available – ableism again.

On the 23rd day of the San Francisco sit-in, the regulations were very quietly signed in Washington. Heumann told one gathering, “The Congress, the press, the American public have seen that we have stamina, strength and intelligence.” 

Jesus had to be convinced by the Canaanite woman that he came to the world for all of us and not just the Jewish people. She was creative and had an exorbitant amount of courage.  After all she had the guts to question Jesus.

Judy Heumann, Jim Lebrecht, and Kennedy Mitchum help us understand what the gospel story means in real life.  Like the Canaanite woman they wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. They refused to cave into insults. They wouldn’t be ignored or rebuffed but kept working for justice.

 This is what brings the Reign of God to our world.  It’s what it means to be a new kind of church. Let’s get to work.  

Circle of Mercy, 08/13/2023

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[i] Jaine Clark-Soles, Women in the Bible: Interpretation (Westminister John Knox Press, 2020), p.18

[ii] Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism (Boston, Beacon Press, 2018), p. 19

[iii] Ibid, p.22

[iv] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/dictionary-racism-definition-update-trnd/index.html

[v] Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies (Las Vegas, Central Recovery Press, 2017) p. x

[vi] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/06/18/12-charts-racial-disparities-persist-across-wealth-health-and-beyond/3201129001/