Sunday, August 14, 2011: Genesis 45:1-15; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:10-20, 21-28
As God's people, we are the remnants and promise of new life.
My grandmother was from a part of the world that no longer exists. As an immigrant to the U.S. between two wars, she saw people raped and murdered and towns plundered. Until she died she continued to express strong feelings about people and places—feelings that seemed only bizarre and paranoid to me, her young granddaughter. When I began to want to know more about her life, I realized that no traditional research would unearth the facts about her hometown, her birth or her baptism—the records had disappeared in a blaze of ethnic obliteration.
How was my grandmother able to live with her memories and also continue to hope and love? Hope and love she did for 84 years, with her strong political opinions, a tendency to fuss and mispronounce English words, a love of music and dancing, an inordinate fear for my father's safety and success, and an amazing capacity to create beautiful things out of bits and pieces of fabric. I spent many weekends in my room in her home, with a picture of Jesus at my bedside and a portrait of three angels above the bed. The dresser drawers were filled with remnants of fabric that she had collected. I loved to touch the pieces of cloth and imagine what she would create with them. When she died, it was the fabric that I remembered. The sight. The smell. The touch. The possibilities.
Matthew's Gospel reflects a world that was changing. Boundaries were shifting; people were afraid. Matthew's community needed to offer the gospel to a larger world and to people whom these early Christians had considered beyond the scope of their mission. Rules were changing too. Chapter 15 tells a frank story about how difficult it is to reach across deeply engrained differences. Polarization is built into us: good and bad, us and them. "Love God and love your neighbor as yourself" is a corrective to the tendency to draw closer within the lines of "our kind." Circles of affiliation give us identity, but they can be as blinding as they are solidifying. The woman of Canaan provides a model of what it is like to see beyond our immediate worldview. Here Jesus is not kind and open; he turns her down. The woman is not fazed even by her own prejudice. She confesses and proclaims. She asks for mercy, acknowledging that Jesus has no justification for dealing with her. She acknowledges who he is: Lord, Son of David. She passes a relationship checkpoint, entering into his world in the hope that he will see her in a different way. She does not give in or give up until Jesus responds and heals her.
