BREADCRUMBS

Sermon at St John The Baptist Felixstowe 

11th Sunday after Trinity 

20th August 2023

Text:  ²⁷ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’  (from Matthew 15v21-28)

God give you peace my sisters and brothers.

In her trilogy of books Raynor Win, with her husband Moth, tells the story of them being made homeless just as Moth is diagnosed with an aggressive form of CBD which seems to destine him for an early grave. She writes about their time backpacking around the United Kingdom as a last chance at living a life before Moth dies and she is faced with life on ‘The Welfare’. They have no home and the open road is their only haven. I will not add any more to the story here but only reflect on her comment about the multiple rejections they received from strangers on realising that Moth and she were not holiday hikers but, to put it baldly, homeless tramps. Homeless in their homeland Raynor finds some responses a challenge and comments;

‘As a people can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid?’

It seems, she ponders, that people up and down our land have an incredible capacity for generosity but also have a capacity for limiting our generosity and only give to ‘the Deserving Poor’.

Those who help at Pushchair Pitstop and in the Parish Pantry are 🔝 faced with interesting questions from those who do not use our services. These question often begin with, ‘Do they really need it’. Too easily we slip into conditional charity, a guarded generosity, that presumes the needy are greedy and all those in straitened circumstances are feckless and on the take.

And so we come to today’s gospel reading about the Canaanite Woman seeking help for her demon possessed daughter. They, as were Raynor and Moth, are homeless in their homeland. The Canaanites were the Aboriginal people of of Israel. Displaced by a more powerful people and moved to the edges of society they were literally left with crumbs and treated as dogs by those who thought the land belonged to them – forgetting that the Land of Promise only ever belongs to the Lord God Almighty. (Leviticus 25v23).

Jesus takes the plight of this homeless homelander and uses her as a parable of how we are to welcome others, refusing to allow our judgement of another’s need, to give birth to hostile prejudice.

But Jesus is canny in the way he calls us out.  In the verses which come before today’s readings Jesus challenges the Pharisees about their pickiness when it comes to clean and unclean foods;

¹⁷Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? ¹⁸But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. ¹⁹For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. ²⁰These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.  (Matthew 15.17-20)

…and then immediately goes on to be ‘picky’ about to whom He offers healing when the Canaanite Woman comes crying out for help.

This passage is all about challenge and being challenged.

Jesus challenges the Pharisees – obsessed with the minutiae of religious ritual, holding it to be more important than righteous living.

Jesus is challenged himself  – by the begging for scraps of compassion from a mother caring for her daughter.

Matthew challenges his readers – we know his first listeners were part of the group known as Judaizers; Christians who wanted to make observing the whole of the Jewish Law a compulsory part of the more generous faith revealed on the Cross.

This story is a challenge for people of all nations. As we read Sunday by Sunday through the Book of Romans we are reminded that we too were once homeless so should leave nor room for pride or for prejudice;

Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy (Romans 11v30)

This story is a challenge for every single Christian tempted to become Drawbridge Daughters and Sons of God. Keeping God’s grace to themselves alone and shutting the gates of heaven behind them. Happy to receive generosity from the hand of the living God but tentative in opening their own.

Of course this challenge is not about food for the Pantry and baby clothes for Pitstop – after all the Canaanite Woman wasn’t asking for breadcrumbs was she?

This challenge is about realising that there is nothing we have that we did not first receive.

This challenge is about realising that whenever we say ‘no’ to the sick, the naked, and the foreigner, to the hungry, the thirsty, or the prisoner, we are saying ‘no’ to God. [Matthew will tell us more about this when we come to Chapter 25 of his Gospel.]

This challenge is about learning that ‘mine’ is not a word that belongs in the vocabulary of any follower of the Way of the Lord.

As C.S. Lewis reminds us in the upside-down language of ‘The Screwtape  Letters’.

Screwtape is speaking:

And all the time the joke is that the word ‘Mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father [Below] or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong – certainly not to them, whatever happens.

We close today with words from the Book of Common Prayer;

WE brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.  (1 Timothy 6v7)

And

ALL things come of thee, and of thine own do we give thee.  (1 Chronicles 29v14)

May each of us this week allow ourselves to be challenged by a love that has no boundaries, no conditions, and no exceptions in the hope that we, unworthy though we are, may be found to be recipients of that self-same love and become fountains of love, generosity and welcome ourselves.

This blog ‘Breadcrumbs’ is copyright © Andrew Dotchin 2023.  It may be reproduced free of charge on condition that the source is acknowledged.

Matthew 15.[10-20]21-28 – The Canaanite Woman’s Faith

[Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, ‘Listen and understand: ¹¹it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’ ¹²Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offence when they heard what you said?’ ¹³He answered, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.¹⁴Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.’ ¹⁵But Peter said to him, ‘Explain this parable to us.’¹⁶Then he said, ‘Are you also still without understanding? ¹⁷Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?¹⁸But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. ¹⁹For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. ²⁰These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.’] Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. ²² Just 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.’ ²³ But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ ²⁴ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ ²⁵ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ ²⁶ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ ²⁷ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ ²⁸ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.