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| No place for partiality |
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By Pastor Phil Haslanger (Please feel free to email a response or question) Sept. 6, 2009 James 2: 1-17; Mark 7: 24-30 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen Tomorrow night, a number of folks from the Memorial community will gather at Luke House just off of Willy Street on the near east side of Madison They will work with food that others here have prepared over the weekend, they will bring some of their own. They will set the tables and then start bringing plates of sloppy joes and corn out to the guests who will be seated around tables of eight. Some of the folks from Memorial will be sitting at the table with those who have been waiting in line for this meal. They will pass the salad from one to another and later they will choose a couple of cookies off of a plate. It would not be true to say that all distinctions of race and class, of privilege and poverty will fall away around that table. But Paul Ashe, who runs the Community Meal Program at Luke House, has worked hard over the years to minimize the sense of distinction and partiality that James was writing about in his letter today. I think it’s hard for us not to make distinctions. I know it’s hard for me. We make quick judgments when we see people. I think that’s natural. We look for safety with those who seem familiar, our antenna for danger goes up when we see something unfamiliar. The issue really is what we do next. I remember a few years ago when I was using a scene from the Wisconsin musical “Guys on Ice” in one of my sermons. Some of you who have been around here a while may remember when Jim Veloff and I did that here. At another church, I did the scene with my son, Michael, who was then a theater student in college. Mike arrived at church after the service had begun. It was fall, but he came into the entryway of the church wearing a winter parka, carrying a bucket with fishing supplies. He has a good sense of theater, but he didn’t exactly look like your typical Sunday morning worshipper. So a vigilant usher stopped him, asked what he was doing there. The usher was friendly enough, but he was clearly suspicious. And once Mike explained his mission, the usher must have figured that I was crazy enough to have a son like this, so he let him linger in back until the scene began – but I suspect he kept an eye on Mike in the meantime. You see, this business of not drawing distinctions, of avoiding partiality, is not easy. Jesus seemed to have trouble with that in today’s Gospel reading. It’s useful to look at what Jesus had been up to in the days before this woman approached him. Mark tells the story of Jesus feeding people on a hillside in Galilee, then trying to get some quiet time on a mountain. But a storm came on the Sea of Galilee and his disciples were scared out of their wits until they saw Jesus walking across the water towards them. They docked at a city just up the sea a ways, only to have folks there rush up to him with those in need of healing. And then the Pharisees and scribes showed up there from Jerusalem to see if they could trip him up over things like his followers eating without washing their hands. You can understand that by the time Jesus got to this house in Tyre, far to the north, along the Mediterranean, far away from the places where people knew him, away from the normal Jewish villages, he was looking for some down time. Mark writes of Jesus: “He did not want anyone to know he was there, yet he could not escape notice.” He was in the land of the Phoenicians, controlled by the Syrians. This was not a place with many Jewish people. Maybe that’s why Jesus thought he could find some quiet time there. These were not the people he had been gathering together on his mission. Yet this woman – this desperate woman who did not fit in with Jesus’ crowd at all -- pushed her way into the house where he was staying to plea for healing for her emotionally disturbed daughter, who, in the parlance of the time, was possessed by a demon. She was not Jewish. She was a woman. She did not fit it at all. Jesus does not act the way we expect Jesus to act. He essentially tells her to get lost. Even worse than that, he insults her ethnicity, comparing “the children” – the Israelites – perhaps those who farmed inland to provide food for the Phoenicians – to those of her ethnicity, whom he dismissed as dogs. There is ethnic tension here, and maybe economic tension as well as the Phoenicians got first dibs on the food raised by the Israelite farmers. But there is no doubt that Jesus is showing partiality, making distinctions among people. Yet the woman does not give up, and her comeback seems to remind Jesus that he really ought to practice what he has been preaching – that there is space around God’s table for everyone. So what does that mean to us? What if the people we ate with at Luke House also joined us around this table here on Sunday mornings? What if the people we fed and played with and stayed overnight with the past week at the Interfaith Hospitality Network joined us around this table? I think we would welcome them, because we are a very friendly congregation. But I think we would also be uneasy about it. How do we adapt what we are used to when newcomers enter our place? Do we handle it with grace or do we let our anxiety get in the way? There are no simple answers to this. We do a good job as a congregation of acting as James suggested we should. We do more for our brothers and sisters who need shelter, who need food than simply send them on their way with a prayer. We gather food, tend to families, lobby for better health care and against budget cuts that are devastating those with special needs. We pay attention to injustices put upon low-wage immigrant workers. It’s that next step that is hard -- the personal relationships we might develop with those in need. Some of our folks are exploring the possibilities of working with the parish nurse on Allied Drive to make some person-to-person contacts. The conversations around the tables at Luke House get us beyond our normal categories of relationships. So do the encounters with folks in the Interfaith Hospitality Network. Let me offer one more idea. It is indirect, but it might help us open our hearts to the needs of those in our community. It comes from Paul Ashe in the context of Luke House. Some folks from here go there to serve the food and eat with the other diners, but others prepare the food at home and don’t have the opportunity to share around the table. Others support our Luke House ministry financially. I’d invite those of you who can’t be there to consider this. On the first Monday of the month, select something from our Luke House menu – sloppy joes, corn, salad, bread, cookies – and incorporate it into your evening meal. As you eat that meal, take time to join your hearts with all those gathered around the tables at Luke House , those you know from here and those you don’t know. Keep widening the circles of our love. It’s what we do here this morning as we gather around this table. We remember another meal that transformed the way people have related to another across the centuries. We share bread and cup and a bit of our lives, just as Jesus showed us. For us, it’s a sign of what can be throughout our world. |