Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (proper 15): August 14, 2005.

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8

Psalm 67

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

Matthew 15: [10-20] 21-28

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with
equity and guide the nations upon earth.
--Psalm 67:4

First Reading

Today's readings share an unmistakably universalist thrust, extending God's good news of salvation beyond insiders. For once, our reading from Paul's "Final Account," as Krister Stendahl calls the Letter to the Romans, might take the lead, since today's passage so clearly contradicts the conventional wisdom of our age-old assumptions regarding our Christian "mission to the Jews." "I ask, then, has God rejected his people?" Paul asks while in the next breath answering his own question with an emphatic "By no means!" The bottom line, for Paul, was that "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable," meaning that God's covenant with Israel is eternal. (See Krister Stendahl, Final Account: Paul's Letter to the Romans [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995], especially chap. 4.)

It's ironic that we Christians need to resort to Saul/Paul the one-time Pharisee, known for his persecution of the early church, to learn a lesson about Christian anti-Judaism that may instruct us regarding appropriate attitudes toward other faiths of our day. (See "The Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to the Jewish Community" [ELCA, 1994] for an effort to address in an act of repentance the church's complicity in the history of anti-Semitism.)

Let's start with the passage from Third Isaiah, the prophet of the return from exile, who articulates God's call to embrace "the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord," culminating in the divine declaration "my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples" (vv. 6-7). This sequel to the time of Babylonian exile and the need to keep the people free from the allures of pagan gods marks an amazing self-confidence on the part of the prophet. The calling to be "a house of prayer for all people" is indeed a mission statement that the church of our and every age would do well to hear and heed!

"Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, 'I will gather others to them besides those already gathered'" will become the promise of welcome embodied in Jesus' ministry of hospitality to strangers and sinners as recounted in today's story of his edgy encounter and dialogue with the Canaanite woman. (On the central role of hospitality in Jesus' own ministry, literally "love of the stranger" in Greek, see John Koenig, New Testament Hospitality [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985].) At first Jesus seems to ignore the woman, and then he outrightly rejects her entreaty for mercy in his uncharacteristically excluding remark "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He caps it all off with the snide dismissal "it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." Jesus seems to me to be playacting his disciples' often excluding prejudices for the purpose of teaching them a lesson in how faith is to be found in unexpected places and persons, even among those upon whom "people of faith," as we say, look down their noses.

Pastoral Reflection

Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that we ELCA Lutherans are hearing these texts on the Sunday that our churchwide assembly concludes its sessions in Orlando. What will it mean as this expression of the church concludes its meetings having made decisions regarding the inclusion/exclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons in the church? Is it significant that our reading from Isaiah 56 conspicuously jumps from verse 1 to 6, omitting what I find to be the following highly relevant text?

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, 'The Lord will surely
separate me from his people'; and do not let the eunuch say, 'I am just
a dry tree.'

Then follow these words of inclusion, which overturn the excluding verses of Torah found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (see Hanson, Isaiah 40-66, 194):

For thus says the Lord: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose
the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my
house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and
daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut
off." (vv. 3-5)

"Cut off" may well be an attempt to inject a witty wordplay into a matter of deadly seriousness. But while eunuchs are not on the "cutting edge" of the church's welcome to sexual minorities in our day, we know who are. Here the only "vision and expectations" are God's universal command to "keep my sabbaths,... choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant." The inclusion of the formerly excluded becomes a prime expression of God's initial command to the newly returned from exile, fearful of miscegenation and idolatry (see the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Ruth), to "maintain justice, and do what is right." Justice, not only pastoral sensitivity and freedom of conscience, needs to be the plumbline of the church's struggle with issues of who's in and who's out in our day as well. Marty Haugen's hymn "All Are Welcome" (Renewing Worship Songbook #R219) sings invitingly of this theme of inclusion as does Ray Makeever's "People of the Word" (Dancing at the Harvest [1997] #1).

Jesus himself will quote Isaiah while engaging in a memorable act of exclusion as he drives the money changers out of the temple with the words "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations" (Mark 11:17). His concluding accusation is borrowed from Jer 7:11, "but you have made it a den of robbers." Jesus' welcome to outsiders and sinners, of course, did not mean an embrace of the behavior of breakers of the first commandment. Yet in our day of heightened sensitivity to living in a multifaith environment amid reassertions by those of the evangelical right of the exclusivist "Christian" character of our nationhood, we disciples of Jesus need to reconsider in the light of today's texts the inclusive reach of God's grace beyond the originally "chosen." Both the "first" and the "newer" covenant's intention is to articulate God's "salvation" and "deliverance" as good news for the whole cosmos.

We may not be sure why, but Jesus' astounding declaration of inclusion to what we can assume was an idol-worshipping Canaanite woman with the words "Woman, great is your faith!" at least raises a question mark over the easy assumption of many churchgoers that salvation (which of course also means "healing") is a prerogative of only Christian (and/or Jewish) "faith."

For a discussion of the church as a "representative community" before God, God's "means, not an end," see Douglas John Hall, Professing the Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 523-24. See Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 170ff., for provocative suggestions regarding how the church might more fruitfully view its mission and role in what Stendahl insists on calling God's tikkun, or project for the "mending of the earth" (Final Account, ix, 7). JR