August 14, 2005

I WILL GATHER OTHERS

(Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8; Matthew 15:21-28)

A Sermon by Gordon E. Simmons, Pastor

Reformation Lutheran Church

     We’ve had children at our church this summer.  A lot of children.  Every day.  From early in the morning until late in the afternoon.  More than 100 children every week.  We’ve had children all over the place. This has been the 19^th summer of Camp RC.

     You don’t have to be around children very long to discover that sometimes – this doesn’t happen all the time, but sometimes – they get on each other’s nerves.  They pester each other.   Sometimes they call each other names.  I think they learned this from adults, but that’s another issue.  Children sometimes notice features in one another that are a little different, and they talk about them.  Sometimes they use those differences to distinguish among themselves.  They talk about somebody as being light or dark-complected.  As having braids or a bald head.  Sometimes, if they don’t know one another’s names, they refer to each other by those features, and sometimes they can be kind of pointed.  “You mean the one with the buck teeth…or the big ears…or the limp…or the scar on his face…or the ugly mother?”  You hear it all. 

     It is one of the continuing conflicts of human life that we have to decide who fits in -- who is like us, and who isn’t.  There is a tendency in the real world, in the world we live in every day – come on, we might has well admit it – there is a tendency to be kind of leery of people who are too different from us.  We’re not always sure we want them around.  If they look too different, act too different, come from too different a place, well, you know, you’d better be careful, because you know what those kinds of people are like. 

     This is not only a problem of the 21^st century.  It’s been going on ever since the days of the Bible.  The people of the Bible had enemies, and in most of the Bible, Israelites didn’t speak too highly of their enemies.  There were Midianites and there were Babylonians.   And the Canaanites, whoa, the Canaanites, they were bad people, everybody knew it.  The Canaanites had occupied the holy land before the Israelites had arrived, and they had to be defeated.  They worshipped another god.  They were a part of a fertility cult – and I’m not even going to try to explain what that meant.  If you were an Israelite, growing up, there was one thing you learned about the Canaanites.  Stay away from them!  Don’t talk to them.  Don’t look at them.  They are evil people.  Their god is a false god.  They’re not like us.  They don’t keep our laws.  They eat unholy food, and they do things that are impure.  Stay away from the Canaanites!

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     If you don’t understand how unholy the Canaanites were thought to be, how despised their women and children were, then you will never understand the meaning of today’s Gospel lesson because this is a story about a conversation between Jesus and – horror of all horrors – a Canaanite woman!  One day Jesus was out preaching the Gospel, and a Canaanite woman came up to him, fighting her way through the crowd, and shouting – well, you know how obnoxious the Canaanites were – she was shouting at Jesus:  “Have mercy on me,” she shouted, “my daughter has been possessed by a demon.”   Now everybody knows what Jesus should have done --– Jesus should have ignored her.  Bad enough that she was a woman – Jewish men didn’t even talk to Jewish women when they were in public – but she was a Canaanite.  She wasn’t the kind of person you would want to talk to.  Certainly you wouldn’t want to touch her.  She was unclean.  You would have expected that Jesus would have ignored the woman. Sent her away.  And for a while, the way the story is told, it looks like that’s exactly what Jesus is doing.  Jesus seems to give her a rather harsh response.  Maybe Jesus was just testing the woman to see what she would say.  Maybe he was just saying things that others were saying, so that they would hear them and realize how wrong they were.  In any case, Jesus does put her off for a while.  He said, My mission wasn’t to the Canaanites, to people like you, it was to the people of Israel.”  But the woman was persistent.  She kept begging.  She kept praying for mercy.  And in the end, Jesus cannot say “no”.  He congratulates the woman – the Canaanite woman – on her faith, and he heals her daughter.

     Now this old story was told and retold to make a point. Over the years, the church has repeated this story over and over again so that people would understand what the mission of Jesus Christ is all about.  Jesus was sent for everyone.  Nobody was to be left out.  I’m telling you, if you can include the Canaanites, you can include anybody.   In the end, Jesus was saying,  “I didn’t come only for you.  I came to gather others.  I don’t care who they are or where they came from, I came for them too.”

     Hundreds of years before Jesus, the same issue had been raised.  It happened at a time when the people of Israel were living among foreigners – they had been taken captive by the Babylonians.  You know, when you have a lot of contact with people who are different, you can react in one of two ways.  You can learn that these people who are different aren’t really so different.    Or, you can take the opposite approach.  You can hate the foreigners more than ever.  Now that you know what they are like, you can dislike them more than you did before.  And that is what happened.  Some people took a very hard line.  They hated the Babylonians.  When the people of Israel got back home, some leaders insisted that all their foreign wives be divorced, a cruel thing to do to women in those days because it left them without any means of support.  But some of the Israelites took the opposite approach.  They came to see that God wanted to gather all people.  And one of those witnesses we find in the 56^th chapter of Isaiah.  Look at verses 6-8.  “And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord…these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer… for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.  Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.”  This is what the Bible teaches.  We can overcome the differences that divide us, because God intends to gather others. 

     There was a Peanuts comic strip where Lucy is up on her soapbox.  She speaks in a loud voice, with confidence.  She says, “The Declaration of Independence says that all are created equal, and that we are all given certain rights, no matter who we are.  This is wonderful,” she said, “this is a wonderful world.”  She said, “I love humanity.”  Meanwhile, Charlie Brown was nearby, listening to Lucy on her soapbox.  And he stepped up to congratulate her on her great speech.  “That was beautiful,” Charlie Brown told her.  “Oh, be quiet,” Lucy barked back.  “I don’t like you, Charlie Brown.”  Charlie Brown couldn’t believe what he was hearing.  He said to Lucy, “You don’t like me…I thought you just said that you loved humanity.”  “Oh, I love humanity,”  Lucy explained.  “It’s just people like you I can’t stand.”       Well, you see, that’s the problem.  We have all these great pronouncements about loving the world, but when it gets down to specific people, it gets harder.   There are great political statements about how all nations should get along with each other, but nations still go to war with their enemies.  Churches use flowery language to talk about how they can reach out to everyone, but when you get right down to it, not everybody is welcomed.

     We can ask the question right here in our church.  Do we really welcome everybody?  I mean, would we be welcoming if someone came in who was a Republican?  You never know.  It gets harder when you start to talk about specific people.   But whenever we find it difficult, whenever we begin to draw some lines around our people and make it harder for others to fit in, we need to remember what the Word of God says.  Jesus healed the daughter of a Canaanite woman.  And the Lord God said, “I will gather others …besides those already gathered.”

     So we want our church to be for everybody.  It doesn’t make any difference who you are or where you came from.  You can be Asian, Hispanic, White or Black.  You can be three years old or thirty years old or 103 years old.  You could have been raised in a Roman Catholic Church or a Baptist Church, you can be a life-long Lutheran or you may never have stepped into a church before; you may be single, married, divorced or separated; you may be gay or straight; you may have had addictions, phobias or even a criminal record;  – there isn’t anybody whom Jesus isn’t willing to stand beside, and if we are the Welcome Place, then there is nobody that we want to push outside either.   The Lord God says, “I will gather others.”  It is a constant reminder of just how big God’s family is.

      There may be some here this morning who have been away from church for a while.  We want you to know that you are welcome here.  It doesn’t make any difference who you are or where you’ve come from or what you’ve done.  God’s love is big enough to include you, and so is our congregation. It’s always been part of God’s plan that communities of faith be built, communities that are more and more inclusive because they are meant to reflect just how big the family of God really is.  You are welcome here.  This is the Welcome Place. There are no if’s, ands or buts.  God said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”    This is the Word of the Lord.