If you are angry, I hear you. If you are enraged, I understand. There are many reasons to feel anger right now.
Maybe you are angry on behalf of young women (many of them still girls) in Texas who are in excruciating, catastrophic crisis.
Maybe you are furious with people who resist, or flatly reject, the coronavirus vaccines. There are stories of frontline healthcare workers who remain uncertain whether they want the vaccine: maybe that confuses you, in addition to angering you. There are different levels of resistance to the vaccine, from understandable wariness about the FDA’s slow approval process, to fierce defiance of the whole thing as a hoax, or a liberal plot.
But then, maybe you are angry about something else. Maybe you are mad at the governor, because he is locking the state down again, or appears to be. Maybe you are fully on board with the protocols, but you are also just so deeply exhausted and strung out by the pandemic that you find yourself shaking your head and rolling your eyes when the governor decides things, because you are just so over this, so done with this!
Or maybe you are frustrated with blue-state folks who are promoting public health and safety, because they seem a little sanctimonious, holier than thou. Maybe you are angry at people on either pole in our polarized public square, angry at everyone who is talking out loud right now, just angry, angry at all the craziness and awfulness that is coming at you, and scaring you, and upending all that you thought you knew about the world, and humanity, and what things should be like.
If you are still with me, if you understand and feel some or all of this anger, or even if you are just curious about it, then I invite you to stand with me today in the region of Tyre, north-northwest of Galilee, along the coast of the Mediterranean in what is, today, southern Lebanon. Jesus is here with us, and he is clearly from out of town, away from his own dominant culture, on somebody else’s turf.
And Jesus is sounding a little angry.
Who is this Syro-Phoenician woman? Like so many women in our holy book, we do not know her name. (That alone is something we could notice, and reflect on. The risen Jesus calls women by name.) But we do know this woman is not from the usual places where Jesus and his friends live, work, and travel. “Syro-Phoenician:” this implies a decidedly non-Israelite background, and it indicates that this woman is probably more fluent in the larger Greek world than Jesus is. She may be more educated, perhaps multilingual, and she could even be wealthy. She certainly learned somewhere how to stay connected and remain effective when she engages in a verbal dual with an educated man. She is not necessarily what we might call “a person in need.” She does have a need, though, and a deep one at that: her daughter needs an exorcism.
It may be hard for us, in our place and time, to make sense of such a need. We don’t understand human problems to include demon possession. Perhaps our frameworks of mental or physical illness would be, for us, a better explanation of what her daughter is suffering. Or we could just say a young woman is in trouble: that alone is enough to go on, for us these days.) Her predicament puts her whole family at risk, and her mother is a powerful advocate.
But as I said, Jesus sounds angry. Maybe he is simply annoyed by the Syro-Phoenician woman. She’s not one of his people: maybe she believes things, or practices things, or simply wears things that he finds unfamiliar, or distasteful.
Who might be a Syro-Phoenician woman, to you and me? If I run through my list of things I’m angry about these days, I may find lots of possibilities: the person approaching me who voted for the other guy; or is defiantly unvaccinated, or looks at me with contempt. For whatever reason, this person is an Other.
Mark the Evangelist (and, for that matter, Matthew too) wants to tell us this story, even though it casts Jesus unmistakably in a bad light, at least at first. They want us to hear this story as a way to open up our imagination about who gets to be in the Jesus Movement. And they seem to know that as much as we might (truly!) say we want to welcome everyone, there are going to be plenty of people we don’t really want to walk in that front door.
Mark and Matthew are so determined to get through to us on this that they portray Jesus himself as the person in need of development! It really is important that we get this. If we are Christian, if Grace Church is our spiritual home, if we come here to encounter one another in God’s sight, and with God’s light, then we need to get this fundamental point about what it means to be a community here.
To open this up, I want to introduce you to Joan Blades and Mark Meckler. If you were in one of our Sacred Ground groups last year, you met them in a film in session one. Joan is a software entrepreneur who lives in Berkeley California, and a founder of MoveOn.org. She is, for many red-state Americans, their basic nightmare. And speaking of nightmares for a lot of Americans, Mark is a business executive and a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots; in 2021, he was interim CEO of Parler, the conservative social-media network. Joan and Mark are as far apart from each other as, well, Tyre and Galilee, as the Syro-Phoenician woman and Jesus.
Joan and Mark came together with the support of Living Room Conversations, an organization that tries to bridge the divide between U.S. Americans from red and blue states, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. One of the earliest steps in building a connection is to find common ground: what values do we share? What hopes do we both hold in our hearts? What are our common longings, our shared dreams, our deepest mutual desires?
Mark and Joan got together in Joan’s house in Berkeley, along with a few friends, friends of his and friends of hers. Here are some things Joan and Mark said about the experience, and the anxiety they felt leading up to it:
Joan says:
“Two friends with a different view each invite two friends for conversation on whatever issue they have chosen… [We] listen to each other, and see if there is any common ground.”
“What if the conversation didn’t go well? You better believe I was dusting for days beforehand for that [conversation], because I was anxious.”
“There was so much common ground, we went overtime, and we really were just starting.”
“For a conversation between right and left about climate change, it should just be about ‘conserving energy,’ because ‘climate change’ is seen as a progressive issue.”
“I just have to go on faith, faith that if I’m open and listening, some solutions will emerge. And that it’s gonna take some patience, because it’s taken us a while to get as dysfunctional as we are in the political system.”
And here’s some of what Mark said:
“I don’t even know what liberals eat! What do you prepare for liberals?”
“It’s a two and a half hour drive from my house - a completely different world … The first hour is spent just getting to know each other. What are you about? Why does this stuff even matter to you? And as you start to have those conversations, the walls tumble pretty quickly.”
“Language really matters, and Joan gets this.”
“If I say ‘states rights,’ there’s baggage that comes with that, but if I say I believe in community governance, I’m using different language that allows us to come together in dialogue.”
“We’re having a conversation really about our ability as a nation to converse.”
The Syro-Phoenician woman and Jesus have a conversation. They come together. They’re on her turf, but he has something she needs. And his followers, for twenty centuries and counting, are watching and listening. The woman engages him in mind and in spirit; she does not allow his first shot across her bow to deter her. And he then connects with her, and gives her what she asks for. And then, with power and purpose, the Jesus Movement opens up, opens wide, opens out to include Gentiles and Jews, friends and strangers, people “of every tribe and language and people and nation,” to quote our Eucharistic Prayer today.
Who might be looking at you, from across this Table, a person who startles, upsets, or annoys you? Whoever that may be, know that they are as warmly welcomed here as you are, and God is found in our ability to reach across that gap.
All of this is hard, and it will include plenty of arguments and creative conflict. Lots of people are hurting, and they cry out for justice. But God is here with us, and God’s power makes these connections possible, and with them, the rescue and restoration of the whole world, one conversation at a time.
***
Isaiah 35:4-7a
Psalm 146
James 2:1-10, 14-17
Mark 7:24-37
Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18B), September 5, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.