Crumbs Are Enough (Sermon)

 “Crumbs Are Enough”

Matthew 15:21-28

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/16/20

 

²¹Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.²²Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

²³But he did not answer her at all.

And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”

²⁴He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

²⁵But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”

²⁶He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

²⁷She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

²⁸Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.  (NRSV)

 

         I don’t have a good answer for the obvious question. While first century Jews did regard Canaanite people with prejudice and contempt, I can neither explain why nor gloss over the fact that Jesus himself refers to a Canaanite woman and her ethnic kin as dogs.

Jesus’ comment is particularly baffling in light of the teaching that comes immediately prior to this encounter. A dispute with some Pharisees over hand-washing before meals led Jesus to rebuke them for paying only lip service to God. When cautioned by his disciples for angering people who had the power to make his life miserable, Jesus says that it’s not what goes into a person that defiles. What comes out of the mouth—the words, the attitudes, the bigotry, the meanness—these things corrupt because they reveal the heart. So, what’s in Jesus’ heart when he so rudely dismisses a woman crying out for help?

Over the centuries, Christians of all stripes have sprung into damage-control mode when hearing this text. According to the most common defense, Jesus didn’t really mean what it sounds like he said. He was just testing the woman. He knew how she would respond just like he knew how he would respond. So, while Jesus may appear prejudiced, the whole scene was a carefully-planned teachable moment that Jesus choreographed with spiritually-principled compassion and just a touch of good-natured teasing.

         That line of reasoning asks us to accept that God Incarnate looked at this woman and called her a dog in order to make the point that her faith was strong. And he did it to tell us that if our faith is equally strong, our children will be healthy. Our bank accounts will be full. Our nation will prevail. And everyone will get along at Thanksgiving. Anyone who expects that to be the nature of God and of the Christian faith will likely be disappointed into atheism by suppertime. That Pollyanna god exists only on the Hallmark Channel.

Through two millennia of the Christian faith, far too many disciples have also taken Jesus’ words as tacit justification to judge and disdain those who are poor, or whose ethnicity or gender is deemed inferior, or whose sexuality is deemed dangerous, or whose religion or politics are wrong. And it’s okay to treat “those people” like some neighborhood cur.

If that sounds harsh, just remember the arguments the Church made in defense of things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, race-based segregation, the Holocaust. And think about the arguments the Church continues to make in defense of humankind’s appetite for excessive wealth and our profligate use of irreplaceable resources to develop and maintain enough weaponry to destroy this planet several times over.

         And remember this, too: It’s not just as disciples of Jesus, but as the very Body of Christ himself that the Church has been doggedly mistreating people for two thousand years. But didn’t Jesus focus his ministry on those very people? On those in the deepest need? On those who are oppressed and forgotten?

Yes, the Church does lots of wonderful things, but it sometimes feels like we allow this one brief instance when Jesus acts more like a disciple than a Savior to define us and to define our mission.

         Come on, Preacher! Show us a little mercy! We’re beat down enough as it is. Here we are in the dog days of summer, and from Covid-wrought isolation, to social unrest, to bitter rhetoric in the public square that’s turning us against each other, it’s like…well, it’s like someone we love with all our hearts—someone like our own child—is sick, like she’s tormented by a demon. Where is God in all this? Where is Jesus? Where is our hope, our peace, our purpose? Help us!

         Does anyone feel that way? If so, how might you respond if I said that “it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”? How would you respond if I said that we don’t matter because Jesus came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and face it, you and I, we’re Gentiles? If I said that, would you keep coming to worship?

         The woman keeps coming. She hounds Jesus for her daughter’s sake. She knows that this Galilean Jew knows, or that he will at least remember, that she matters, her life matters, her daughter’s life matters, Canaanite lives matter.

         The woman and Jesus know that. Jesus’ disciples have to learn it. Having tried to bar the door and keep this “inferior” person away, they are now the ones on the hot seat in this story. And while Jesus’ response is inexplicably slow in coming, he nonetheless says to those who follow him that this woman and her daughter are, utterly and irrevocably, as much children of God as any Pharisee, Sadducee, priest, or ordinary Jewish person back home. Individually and systemically, Canaanites deserve to be seen, heard, welcomed, valued, respected, and protected exactly the same as anyone from Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, or Jerusalem.

         It’s cliché to say, but the Church really is in decline. Maybe one reason is that contemporary disciples are and have been experiencing a dangerous contraction of faith, a regression. It’s like the Church is becoming less and less the Body of the resurrected Christ and more and more like the disciples before the terrifying experience of Friday and the transforming revelation of Sunday. And before Easter, the disciples were a self-centered bunch, weren’t they? They argued about who was first and greatest. They tried to shield Jesus from children and blind men, because they just knew, that eventually, he was going to raise a flag in one hand, a sword in the other, and lead the house of Israel in triumph, once and for all, over every principality and power. And as long as that was the goal, the disciples were never going to get enough.

         Go away, Canaanite woman, they say. There’s not enough of Jesus for us and for you.

         Into the disciples’ fearful bigotry, an outcast, a Canaanite, and a woman at that, broke the door down to say, Brush me off like a crumb if you want to, but crumbs are enough. A crumb from Jesus can restore my daughter.

         When the Church proclaims the resurrection of Jesus and still treats certain people as less-than-worthy, when we withhold the holy gifts of welcome and advocacy from people who are lonely and oppressed, we only prove that we have given up on resurrection. When people live selfishly and fearfully, crumbs are never enough. We will always hoard what we have and grasp for more.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus has been raised from dead! In the presence of the Holy Spirit, he is alive! And his resurrection empowers us for living an entirely new life than the life that even Jesus’ disciples lived while they followed him in person throughout Judea, Galilee, and into the Canaanite neighborhoods of Tyre and Sidon. If the tiniest seed and the smallest measure of yeast are enough to reveal the kingdom of God, then crumbs are all we need, and not just for being disciples, but for living as Jesus’ Body, his hands, and feet, and heart in and for the world.

Jesus sees the agony of the Father and the Son in the agony of a Canaanite mother and her daughter. His own earthly life will end violently because of his radical love for people just like them. And yet he lives and loves, fearlessly, for them, for you, for me, for all of us—because Jesus already sees it. He sees that we are all one. And his hunger, which is satisfied one crumb at a time, is for humankind to live in unity and wholeness. His hunger is for us to see ourselves in the faces, in the sufferings, in the joys, in the potential, in the breathtaking beauty of every human being and of the earth itself.

As we begin to see and to celebrate the oneness in the Creation, crumb by crumb, God, in Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is healing us and making us whole.

Holiness, Humanity, and Hope (Essay)

 Holiness, Humanity, and Hope

 

God saw everything that he had made,

and indeed, it was very good.

(Genesis 1:31a—NRSV)

 

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom.

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they will be called children of God.

(Matthew 5:3, 5, 7-9—NRSV)

 

 

         The Hebrew scriptures open with a sweeping affirmation of the Creation as a God-imaged gift—to God’s own self no less. All that is exists because at the heart of the universe there beats a creative heart defined by relationship, a loving heart that is always seeking to know and to be known. A human being’s own desire to know and to be known, to love and to be loved, is one of our most fundamentally holy (God-like) attributes. Those essential desires constitute what is most truly “good” about us because they draw us toward each other and, therefore, toward God. To seek and celebrate the goodness within us and within others is to seek and celebrate the presence of God in all that God has created and loves. For people of faith, to honor the holiness in other human beings and in the wider Creation is worship, sacrament, and service because through these practices we begin to know and love God.

         Sin is more than doing bad things or leaving good things undone. As the refusal to honor the holiness in all that God has created and has called “good,” sin weakens our humility and our willingness to follow the ways of poverty of spirit, meekness, purity of heart, and mercy. Sin intensifies human willfulness to impose arrangements beneficial to those considered privileged onto numerous others (even, it seems, if the “minority” is in the majority). Sin also tends to project the selfish fears of a dominant group onto a scapegoated population. This always creates acute suffering for the group(s) considered “minor” because they are treated as if their humanity lacks legitimacy. This becomes most devastating when the oppressed group’s suffering is regarded as having no consequence.

It seems to me that sin destroys all people and all communities because in denying the holiness and the humanity of anyone, individuals and groups grant themselves the authority to decide that something God-made lies beyond the full love and affirmation of the Maker. The fear-driven violence that inevitably ensues prevents any of us from being whole. This is what happened to George Floyd on May 25, 2020 to Amaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, to Matthew Shepard on October 6, 1998, to nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and children on December 29, 1890, and to countless others for countless reasons throughout the decades in the United States of America and throughout the eons of human life on this planet.

         These events illustrate that one form of sin that has plagued our culture for over two centuries is the sin of systemic racism: The deliberate denial of the holiness and humanity of groups of people whose skin color, ethnicity, or language has been judged as inferior by a group or by groups who hold the greater share of wealth and power in a society.

Systemic racism dehumanizes individuals and groups by:

                  -judging others according to stereotypes.

-limiting oppressed groups’ access to opportunity.

-treating minorities with demeaning paternalism.

-participating in and/or overlooking violence toward minorities.

-diminishing the weight of suffering forced upon people whose God-given, God-imaged physical attributes differ from those in power.

         No, not all who are counted among races and genders of power and privilege participate in acts of overt racism. By the same token, not all who are counted among races and genders of power and privilege participate in acts of overt peacemaking by which the systemic sin of racism is named and resisted.

         As a member of and leader in the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ, and as a child of God and, therefore, a peacemaker, I affirm that racism in all of its forms is sin and an affront to God who is being revealed in the Creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder. I also believe that it is the calling of all who follow Christ to acknowledge, honor, and celebrate the full holiness and humanity of every human being regardless of any category that may be attached to that person. Love for God necessarily includes love and respect for every human being and the desire to nurture that love and respect in one another.

To that end, at this crucial time in our shared life and history, I join with those in my own faith tradition, those in other faith traditions, and those who claim no faith tradition but cannot escape the call of love who are committing and recommitting themselves to standing in open and visible solidarity with all people of African, Latin American, Middle-Eastern, Asian, or any other heritage that has endowed them with the black, brown, or olive skin that makes them vulnerable to patronizing deference, vilifying bigotry, and life-threatening oppression in our community, our nation, and our world.

We are one human race, one humanity created and beloved by God, and only in unity do we find our hope.

May God’s peace be with all of us.

 

 

The Rev. Allen Huff

June 5, 2020

*This post also appears on my other blog: https://jabbokinthefoothills.blog/2020/06/05/holiness-humanity-and-hope-essay/

Bright Wonder (Essay)

 Bright Wonder

Allen Huff

 

         One ordinary Tuesday afternoon, as I worked in my home study, my wife, Marianne, called me. She all but sang into the phone that she’d forgotten that she’d won a coveted place in the lottery to see the synchronous firefly display at Rocky Fork, the Tennessee state park near our home in Jonesborough.

“It’s tonight! Did you remember?” she asked.

“Well, no,” I said, squirming at the interruption.

“But you can still go, can’t you?”

“Um. Well. When?”

“We have to be in Flag Pond by 7:50pm,” she said.

Flag Pond, TN.

         That night.

         Yay.

         I went full Eeyore on her. “Okay,” I said. “I guess I can go.”

         “I’m going to call Ben and Elizabeth, and see if they’ll join us. We can have as many as five people in the car!”

         Ben and Elizabeth, our adult children, live nearby, but scheduling us into their lives takes time, and we didn’t have enough of that to wear them down into a “yes.”

Good luck with that, I thought.

         The upshot of all this was that I was going to have to stop writing, eating peanuts, and (when stuck on a sentence) watching old SNL skits on YouTube in order to walk the dog and throw together some kind of snack supper for us, because there was no way Marianne was going to be home in time to help. Then, since it usually happens this way, I was going to have to hustle her out the door so we wouldn’t be late and miss the shuttle that would take us out to the state park which closes at dusk each evening.

         Call me clairvoyant, but when we got into the car, by ourselves, at 7:20, to make a 45-minute trip in 30 minutes, Marianne looked at me and said, “Speed if you have to.”

         “You should call the number on the reservation form,” I said. “Tell them we’re on the way.”

         “Good idea,” she said.

When I heard her leaving a message, I said to myself, Crap. We’re screwed. No one’s going to get that message.

         Fortunately, there was only one really slow car on the narrow, winding road to Erwin, and it turned off toward Greeneville. So I started flirting with a speeding ticket, again.

         “I’m so excited,” Marianne said. “We get to see the fireflies!”

         We can see lightning bugs from our porch any freakin’ night! I said. To myself. The things we do for love, I guess. And I did enjoy driving like a teenaged moonshiner without my wife telling me to slow down. In fact, she said, “This is fun.”

         We should be late to something you want to do more often.

         The directions told us to look for an asphalt parking lot somewhere in the 1500’s on Hwy. 352, Flag Pond, TN. When we got off of Hwy. 19W and onto 352, the numbers were in the 4200’s, and going up.

         “Why are the numbers getting bigger?” Marianne asked. “We’re supposed to find 1500. We’re going the wrong way!”

         “We can’t be going the wrong way,” I Eeyored. “352 started right back there. There has to be some kind of break. The 1500’s have to be this way.”

         “But…how?!”

         Damned if I know!

         Yanked from a calm evening at home, flying through curves at expensive-ticket speeds, certain that we’d missed the shuttle, my whole demeanor sucked oxygen from the air and light from the sky. I was a human black hole.

If we have to turn around and go home, I’m going to enjoy making her miserable the entire evening.

We passed the entrance to Rocky Fork State Park and still no 1500’s in sight. Less than a quarter mile beyond the turn-off to the park, Hwy. 352 turns right and heads up the mountain and into North Carolina while the Old Asheville Highway runs straight through downtown Flag Pond, TN. In the southwest corner of the intersection, in an asphalt parking lot, we saw a white passenger van next to one of those white canopy tents that vendors set up at festivals to sell homemade trinkets, melting brownies, and bars of goat’s milk soap.

         “That’s got to be it!” said Marianne.

         I pulled up to the tent as the van, packed full of firefly watchers, pulled away. We were relieved to see a number of other people standing around and waiting for the next shuttle. Marianne got out of the car to let the people sitting in folding chairs behind a folding table know that we were legitimate lottery winners.

         After parking the car, I stuffed my camera, tripod, and a bottle of water in my backpack and joined Marianne at the tent. The tent people knew each other and were laughing and talking loudly about people they knew, but the rest of us didn’t. I always find that insufferable, and that night found it especially so. I wandered toward a tall, wooden sign filled with rules about watching fireflies.

Seriously? Rules for watching fireflies?

         No pets.

         No bug spray.

         No flashlights or cameras without red filters.

         What’s a red filter? And how does it help take pictures of lightning bugs? I moped back to the car and put my camera and tripod away. At least my pack was lighter.

         Back at the tent, a man with a girth so colossal he looked like he had swallowed a hay bale was pulling the cord on a Honda generator.

         “You trying that again?” asked the lady who had signed us in.

         “Thought I would,” said the man.

         The generator sputtered to life and another large, colorful wooden sign lit up with electric fireflies. The man stood in front of the sign with a trying-not-to-be-too-proud grin on his face, arms spreading around his belly, and his hands in his pockets. Half of his hands, anyway. That’s all that reached after his arms spread around his belly.

         I walked up to the folding table laden with Friends of Rocky Fork bumper stickers, t-shirts, and membership applications. While appraising the offerings, I asked the woman behind the table what the rules meant by a “red filter.”

         “Oh, it’s just one of these,” she said holding up a 4-inch by 4-inch piece of red cellophane.

         “How can you take a picture through that?” I asked.

         “It’s just for your viewfinder,” she said. “To keep the artificial light at a minimum. Too much light will affect the fireflies.”

         “Oh,” I said, feeling a bit foolish.

         I took the cellophane, hustled back to the car, and retrieved my camera before the shuttle returned.

         Why didn’t I just ask about that at first?

         Winners of the firefly lottery get assigned to one of several nights of viewing, and our guides for the evening were two state park rangers, Jeff, slender as a sapling, and Carl, thick as an old oak. They were armed with Glocks, radios, electric lanterns covered with red filters, and genuine excitement at the chance to take another group into the woods until 11:00pm to watch fireflies do their mating dance.

When everyone had been shuttled into the park, Jeff called us together and told us that we’d hike about a mile into the park.

         “We’ll cross the first little footbridge,” he said, “but we’ll stop before the second, bigger bridge. That’s just so we know where everyone is. When we get there, we should still be able to see, so wander around and find a comfortable place to park yourself. About 9:45 the fireflies will start the show, and by 10:00 they should be in full display. When they start, even a quick burst from a flashlight will throw them off for a cycle or two. So please keep your lights off unless you really need them.

         “I’ll lead us, and Carl will pull up the rear. So gather up whatever you’ve brought, and let’s go!”

-----

         Rocky Fork State Park is a 2000-acre quilt of dense, Appalachian cove forest in the steep, rocky folds of the Cherokee National Forest. The main trails at the park are old logging roads. The Friends of Rocky Fork group is cutting some new, single-track trails here and there, but we stayed on the rough and rutted road next to Rocky Fork Creek, which is just big enough for fishing. 

         “I really need to come up here and fish this creek,” I said to Marianne as we walked.

It’s been years since I’ve been fly-fishing. The fish in this creek wouldn’t be very big, but regardless of size, it’s hard to look away from any brook or brown trout. All those red and yellow dots on their mossy-green backs and silver flanks create bright constellations that speak to me of the first stirrings of Creation.

         Something in me began to glimmer.

         As we walked, I asked Jeff if a firefly’s light is bioluminescence similar to what I’d seen in foxfire or, once at Folly Beach, in ocean waves.

“It’s bioluminescence,” he said, “but the reaction happens because of chemical called luciferin. Fireflies’ light is the only cold light.” Jeff raised his hand toward the darkening canopy of poplar, oak, and hickory. “On the planet.”

I marveled at the thought of cold light.

-----

When we reached a small clearing, the logging road bore to the right and began to climb. A narrower trail to the left stayed close to the creek, which was getting smaller the further we followed it.

         “The bridge is just up there to the left,” said Jeff pointing toward the narrow trail. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

         Marianne and I walked toward the bridge. Several of us, including Ranger Jeff, crossed the bridge. A few fireflies were beginning to light up down close to the ground, so I prepped my tripod and locked my camera in place on top of it. Not having done this kind of photography before, I struggled with the mechanics of taking pictures of moving objects in in little to no light.

         “How’s it going,” Jeff asked when he walked past me.

         “Not so good,” I said. “I’m kind of a novice, and I’m not sure how to go about this.”

         “What kind of camera do you have?” he asked.

         “Canon 70D.”

         “I have the same camera,” said Jeff. “Do you have it on auto or manual focus?”

         “Auto.”

         “You’ll need it on manual.” As I switched the lens to manual focus, Jeff took off his pack. “I’m going to throw a bright light out there for you a-ways to give you something to focus on.”

         He shined an unfiltered flashlight beam onto a tree limb thirty or forty feet in front of me. I focused on the limb, and he turned off the light.

         “Now, just adjust your shutter speed as the light dwindles.”

         “Cool. Thank you.”

         I set the timer to a two-second delay, the shutter speed for long exposures, and began to play with what little firefly action was already happening.

My glimmer got a little brighter.

         Marianne had walked past the bridge a hundred yards or so. When she came back, real darkness was settling in, and she was giddy.

         “There’s a clearing up there, and they are really starting to flash!”

         A man named Dave, a Friends of Rocky Fork volunteer who comes all the way from Knoxville twice a week to work on trails, was there to help Jeff and Carl wrangle firefly watchers. He came to us from below the bridge and said, “Come down here! Around the corner it’s amazing!”

         I gathered my gear, turned on my red-filtered flashlight and eased back across the narrow footbridge. When I looked down the trail, I was looking into deep darkness, and for a moment, I didn’t breathe.

         The term “synchronous fireflies” had always made me imagine lightning bugs going on and off like Christmas tree lights in regular, monotonous intervals. I learned that in the mating ritual of this species of firefly, the males hover ten to twenty feet above the ground creating frenzies of brilliant yellow lights. At some point, responding to God-knows-what stimulus, they go dark. All of them. All at once. Poof. This gives the ladies down nearer the ground a chance to respond with their more subtle, coquettish glow. Then the guys get all excited again and – all at once – start flashing, Me! Me! Look at me!

Around the edges of all that, a few smaller, pale blue lights came on, and stayed on for as much as ten seconds. These were blue ghost fireflies, and their light is ghostly, indeed. On photographs, their creeping blue lights create long, eerie streaks beneath the dazzling yellows above them. As we were walking out, a single blue ghost hovered toward me and landed on my shoulder. It stopped me in my tracks. A firefly’s adult lifespan is about two weeks, but I felt like I’d been touched by something ancient and sacred. How do the smallest of physical things evoke such deep and timeless wonder?

As for the total firefly display: Imagine lying on your back in a field where neither light nor clouds dim the splendor of the night sky above you. Above you, the stars shimmer through the last of the day’s heat as it rises through the earth’s atmosphere. Now imagine that every so often those stars cease to shine. They go dark for a few seconds, and when they appear again, you see entirely new constellations flickering above you. Now imagine this happening over and over, and if you have never seen a synchronous firefly display, you’ll have some idea of the experience we were having that evening at Rocky Fork State Park.

         Having found my vantage point, I leveled my tripod, wrapped a red filter around my camera’s viewfinder, secured it with a rubber band, and draped my bandana over the little orange light that shines on the front of the camera during the two-second delay. I set the shutter speed at thirty seconds, aimed my camera blindly toward the hypnotizing flurry of lights.

When there was nothing to see but fireflies, I noticed the depth of the darkness in that remote mountain hollow. With all other visual distractions dissolved, I smelled the rich aromas of leaves rotting beneath the trees and hard earth cooling underfoot. I heard the rhythmic pulse of crickets, and the gurgle of cold, clear water washing over smooth gray stones. In that numinous, purifying moment, all things converged into a single, otherworldly celebration. And the numbing darkness I had brought with me sloughed off, giving way to bright wonder.