Trinity Cathedral
Year A Proper 15
But the [Samaritan]
people [of the town] refused to welcome [Jesus], because He was heading for
Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do You want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went on to
another village.… (Luke 9:54-55)[1]
I’ll come back to that in a moment.
One of my favorite
pieces of contemporary slang is “clapback.” According to Urban
Dictionary, a clapback is basically a comeback or a retort, most likely pumped
with attitude and sass. The term goes back to at least
Ja Rule’s rap titled “Clapback” in 2001. It’s the rhetorical backhand that is the response you
give when you are insulted. The term is mostly used in social media settings to describe when folks
start trading insults and feuds come and go fast and furious.
Of course, there
are many ways you’d use a clapback- particularly effective is pointing out the
hypocrisies of whoever just insulted you. Or when you can point out people
abandoning their ideals for the sake of expediency. That gets pretty easy when
so much of one’s life and thoughts are online.
So, the concept
of a clapback is not a new concept at all; just a new word for what happens
when you have a beef with someone and you go about conversation.
The term has been
echoing through my head as I’ve been reading our gospel passage over the course
of the week. The gospel passage has not
one but three examples. First, Jesus
claps back at the Pharisees and instructs his followers on the spiritual
meaning of a matter of the law. Second,
Jesus claps back at his disciples who just
aren’t getting it. But then, a Canaanite woman claps back at Jesus, and this is important—she wins. She gets
what she wants.
Consider the
scene: Jesus is walking along with the
disciples, and then there is a woman who is misbehaving in a couple of
different ways. First, she’s a
Canaanite; Canaanites and the Jewish people did not get along. In fact, they had beef going back at least to
the time of Moses and Joshua, when the Hebrews forcibly conquered Canaanite
land after the Exodus and the wandering.
Second she’s a woman addressing a group of men; that’s pretty transgressive. Third, she’s yelling at them from a distance,
which is just rude. It’s not uncommon to
ignore those who are breaking so many social mores at once.
Jesus doesn’t
even address the woman until the disciples are annoyed enough to ask him to do
something about it. When he does, first
he says, essentially, “I have nothing for you.
I’m here for those of my religion, of my nation.”
But she doesn’t
go away. She doesn’t shrink back. She comes right up to Jesus and kneels at his
feet. Close enough to touch. She wasn’t invited. She wasn’t bid to do this when she asks him
again for deliverance for her daughter.
Jesus then makes
a more pointed stated. Just a minute ago, he simply said who he was here to
serve. Now he’s going to tell her who he
will exclude. He answered, “It is not fair to
take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
I
need y’all to hear me, and more importantly to hear Jesus. Jesus just called the woman kneeling at his
feet and begging on behalf of her daughter a dog. We have a derogatory term in our language for
female dogs. We need to recognize that
Jesus called this distraught mother kneeling at his feet our word for a female
dog. Let that image sink in.
Then
comes the clapback. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from
their masters’ table.”
She
says, “Fine, I’m a dog, but sometimes people treat dogs nicely.”
I’m
not sure what was in the woman’s mind at this moment. Was it shame at being brought further
down? Was it a willingness to shame
Jesus into action? was it sass or
desperation? Was it both?
I don’t
know. But it was enough to change Jesus’s
response. He is impressed with her faithfulness and heals her daughter. All while the disciples are standing
there. I wonder what was going through
their minds.
Now there are two
paths to interpreting this story at this point.
The first is to ask whether Jesus changed his mind; or repented of his
own hard-heartedness. The text is silent
on Jesus’s internal monologue; and that’s frustrating. We are so used to thinking that Jesus is
sinless that the idea that Jesus would individually express the systemic sin
all around him in the culture he inhabited leaves our theological constructs with
a problem. By that I mean that our
understanding of Christ being a sinless perfect sacrifice on the cross could be
endangered by admitting that Jesus had to repent of something evil. But, frankly, making Jesus’s sinlessness
obvious was not a concern for Matthew while he was writing, so we have this
story that does nothing to make our theology neat and tidy.
Thanks,
Matthew.
In any case, this
interpretation means that Jesus learned not to be racist, and this is the
turning point of the Gospel at which Jesus knows that the Gospel is for everyone and must be available to everyone, regardless of any human-made
divisions. Jesus’s mission will bring
into reality the dream of Isaiah’s prophecy we also read today: that God’s
house will be a house of prayer for all, and all are welcome to gather.
The second, more
traditional understanding seeks to preserve Jesus’s sinlessness, and it does so
by suggesting the episode was a test—that Jesus was going to heal the daughter
all along, but he had a point to prove. It comes to the same conclusion: that the Gospel is for everyone and must be
available to everyone, regardless of any human-made divisions.
But the
traditional interpretation immediately raises the question: Who needed to be
tested? Usually, people say the faith of the woman needed to be tested. But frankly, she seemed to have the faith bit
locked down. She’s the one bugging him relentlessly. Why further test someone who is so
obstinately seeking Jesus out because she
is already convinced that Jesus can help her.
So I am going to
go ahead and for the sake of argument assume the traditional stance. Jesus is sinless, and in this case, he is
testing someone--but he already knows he’s going to help the woman. The woman seems faithful already. I think that means we have to look at the
disciples.
There is a
popular image of the disciples as good-natured bumblers. Salt-of-the-earth fishermen. Fine people; if a little slow on the uptake
as to what Jesus was laying down for them.
But there’s a
pesky story that has never been far from my mind since I read it years
ago. Namely, that among the disciples
there were at least two who had no issue with the ideas of destroying all of
the men, women, and children of a village, all because the villagers had heard
about Jesus and didn’t want any trouble.
In other words, the disciples had among their ranks a few who openly
advocated for the genocide of a village of a different ethnic group because of
a perceived offense.
That’s pretty far
from a definition of ‘good, fine people.’
The disciples, given a little bit of power, were ready to go into ethnic
cleansing.
The culture they
lived in upheld these ethnic divisions. We see those divisions when the
disciples want to destroy a village; we see it when they wish this foreign
woman at Jesus’s feet would just shut up.
So, if Jesus knew
what was going on and what he would do for the woman that might mean he wanted
to teach the disciples something in this interaction.
I suggest that he
wanted them to witness the moment when his message went from being one to
Israel only and became something for everyone.
And I think it was important that the disciples saw that change as a result
of an impetuous woman’s clapback.
So, here is a
powerful man; the messiah; getting told off by a foreign woman—in front of his followers no less—and
Jesus does not try to save face by reasserting his ‘no.’ He acknowledges the
justice and compassion of the woman’s cause, and relents.
That is amazing.
Typically, when you’re surrounded by your friends and someone comes at you, you
don’t back down. Not in front of your
people.
But Jesus
did. And in the process, Jesus showed by
example that the gifts of God’s gracious reign are for everyone.
Now, we stand
outside of the text; but by being in the stream of the Christian tradition, we
may as well be standing around Jesus and the woman, too.
We’ve just
listened to Jesus respond in a racist way to a woman, and then change his tune. Our
Lord and Savior got called out for his racism, he accepted that he
responded to the woman according to a racist social structure, and he rewarded
her faith with divine healing. In so
doing, he showed the disciples what it means to repent of the evil that
surrounds them and us.
You can probably
guess where this sermon is going next.
We’ve reached a point in our national life where the KKK, neo-Nazis, and
white nationalists feel free to take to the streets. This is not news to those of us who study
hate groups. These white supremacists
have been telling us that for the past 8 years that their recruitment has
increased, sometimes exponentially. Even
if they were exaggerating, the images of Charlottesville serve to convince that
the groups may still be exaggerating, but they are not lying.
Now, we sitting
here may not claim racial superiority.
If you do, repent and return to the Lord today.
But there are a
number of us who are in a position to either aid or abet racism or challenge
it.
You see I am from
Mobile, AL. My hometown has an
infamously distinguished pedigree of institutionalized racism. And if you sitting here, and white, you
probably know what I mean when I say that , there are conversations that
white folks will only have with other white folks. Nothing but my skin color grants me entrance
to these conversations, and they are not pleasant conversations. And these conversations make me a party to
continuing a conspiracy of white supremacy that I want nothing to do with and
cannot easily avoid.
I’ll give you an example.
In 2002, I was starting my undergraduate degree, and hoping that after
military service, I might find a career in the FBI or some other law
enforcement organization. Sitting in the
office of the college recruiter, he looked at me, and began the conversation
that white men only feel comfortable having with other white men.
He said to me, “Robert, you have two things going against
you in this world; you are white, and you are a man. You should consider taking a degree in
finance instead of criminal justice; that way you will be more hirable than
those who will take a degree in criminal justice.”
In a world in which women earn at best 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, and in which the
poverty gap between whites and blacks is steadily increasing with black
unemployment double that of white unemployment, I was shocked and frozen by
what he said. For this man and many like
him, any perceived loss of power is considered a threat.[2]
In this recruiter’s office, I was being brought into a
conspiracy to maintain supremacy over others.
It was a wake-up call for me; yet while I did not challenge him then and
there, I never took a class in finance.
I’ve always wondered what he told women and African Americans he
counseled.
Perhaps you have also known those conversations. In the
course of our work, our days, and our lives, we may find ourselves in a
situation in which someone we speak to wants to know if we are a safe person to
talk to about keeping and maintaining supremacy, just as the college recruiter
did with me. It comes in
conversation: a sexist joke, an observation
about how races do certain things, a slang term for someone from a different
country. When that happens, it is
assumed we agree with the other person, or we are essentially being asked if we
are in the conspiracy of this world, to keep those divisions in place.
You know that you have a choice—an uncomfortable choice: half-hearted
agreement in the hope that the conversation shifts to something more pleasant, or
silence, or confrontation.
The Gospel passage today begs us risk confrontation. It may mean that we have to tell someone why
we cannot participate in such a conversation.
It may mean remembering aloud to the other person that our connection to
God and to all of humankind renders racial divisions meaningless at least, and
malicious at most. And that can be a
hard thing to say. My own track record
in confronting such speech is not as good as I wish it was. And yet the
imperative is there—whether we are the ones who clap back at racism, or have
our ideals thrown right back in our face when our silence equals complicity.
The good news is that we do not do this alone. We never
have. The presence of God makes all
things possible for those who face enormous odds.
I want to go back to disciples. Well after this moment with
the Canaanite woman. Well after thar
desire to destroy a village, the Holy Spirit descends upon them and empowers
them. Suddenly, they are baptizing
Gentiles and coming to grips with this inclusive work of God. Then, in the 8th chapter of the
book of Acts, Peter and John and Philip go to Samaritan villages, to preach the
Gospel and live in peace among the ones they rather have seen killed. After Jesus ascends to Heaven, the story of
the early church is the story of recovering racists trying to keep up with an
inclusive God as they get kicked in the pants by the Holy Spirit into
situations and with people they would not have chosen on their own.
That’s the work God hands to us every new day.
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