The kind of church Jesus wants is one that welcomes those who are different than us — Matthew 15:21–28

Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”

Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment. Matthew 15:21–28

 

The kind of church Jesus wants is one that welcomes those who are different than us.
1. By realizing our differences
2. By realizing our similarity

Did you know that you’re WEIRD? Don’t worry, I’m WEIRD too. WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Developed. People who are part of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Developed societies make up only 12% of the world’s population. So, it’s atypical, or you might say weird, to be a part of a society like America. A group of psychologists came up with this acronym because they noticed psychology studies were almost exclusively done using American college students as test subjects. But they noticed that a lot of these studies would then say, “this is how all humans think,” even though the sample group was a WEIRD minority.

My favorite example of one of their findings in the differences in how people in WEIRD societies think versus other societies comes in how we view murder. WEIRD countries care deeply about individual’s motives. Other societies focus more on relationships, on the connectedness between people. So, in America, we have different punishments for someone who accidentally kills another person than the punishments for someone who kills another person on purpose. In some other societies that are not WEIRD, whether you kill someone as a complete accident or totally premeditated, the punishment is the same. When I first read that, I thought, “How unfair and unjust and weird is that!” And then I realized: wait, I’m the weird one. I’m the 12%.

This creates a problem for all churches, including ours. It’s clear from our readings today that the kind of church Jesus wants is a church full of people from all different kinds of societies. Whether someone was born in Jerusalem, the minority society that lived right next to the Jewish temple, or someone was born in North America, about as far from Jerusalem as you could get, Jesus wants them to come to know and believe in the true God and receive his blessings.

And we want our church to be like this. If you look on the back of our service folders, you’ll see that reason #2 our church is named Crossroads is because we want it to be a place where people from all different walks of life come, meet, gather, and then follow Jesus together.

But the problem is that we humans naturally assume that the way we live and the way we think and the way we act is how all humans live and think and act. And this is so untrue. So when people from different walks of life gather together, it’s not so simple to welcome them as we might think. If we are not very careful, we might see that they live and think and act differently than us and judge them for it.

Jesus offers us the solution in the gospel reading today. He masterfully put his disciples in a situation where they would be challenged to welcome someone who is different from them in nearly every way. And then, when they fail to welcome her, he shows them how to do so. So as we explore this reading today, we’ll ask ourselves the question: would the Canaanite woman be welcome here, at Crossroads? And we’ll see that absolutely she, and anyone who is different from us, will be, if we realize the ways we are different and the way we are similar.

1. By realizing our differences

So Jesus takes his disciples far away from their ususal stomping grounds, far outside their home culture. He takes them to the region of Tyre and Sidon, which is modern-day Lebanon. If you’ve ever traveled to a foreign country and gotten far away from the touristy destinations, you might know what Jesus and his disciples felt like. It’s a bit uncomfortable. You don’t know the right ways to act. You don’t know whether to say hi to people you pass on the street or not. You go into a restaurant and you have no idea of what any of the words are on the menu. You might have trouble understanding people. You’re constantly looking around, on alert, trying not to stand out.

And Jesus and the disciples are experiencing this, when a Canaanite woman, a local woman comes along and starts to make a scene. Crying out, even screaming, following them around, not stopping. The disciples notice Jesus isn’t acknowledging her. Maybe he’s trying to see how they will react. And they say, Send her away.

And let’s spend some time on how Jesus responds. Because at first glance, Jesus’ response seems bigoted, even misogynistic. And it totally would be, if he were responding to the woman. But he’s speaking to the disciples. He continues to test them. He almost mirrors their thought process: I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. In other words, he was mirroring what the disciples thought, that they as Jews had exclusive rights to Jesus the Savior. They had grown up thinking that because they were the society God chose to bring his Messiah, his Savior, into the world, they deserved Jesus more than this Canaanite woman. They probably heard Jesus say this and nodded along: “Yeah, it’s sad, but this woman is just too far from God to be a priority and that’s just the way it is.”

But the Canaanite woman knows better. She knows that Jesus is the Savior, notice she calls him Son of David, that’s the title of the Messiah. And so she gets up in Jesus’s grill, bows down in front of him so they have to stop and acknowledge her, and asks for Jesus’ mercy for her daughter.

And Jesus says something fascinating: It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs. And at first we say, “Woah! That’s worse than before! Does Jesus really think that the Jewish people are like God’s children, deserving to sit at his table and get all his blessings, and the rest of humanity are lesser, like dogs?” Many Bible commentators try to soften this. They say, well, Jesus isn’t talking about wild, feral dogs here; he uses the word for household pet dogs. But that really doesn’t soften anything, does it? No, what Jesus is doing here is giving the woman the chance to expose the disciples’ prejudice. He acknowledges that he came first to the Jewish people, yes, but God’s plan all along—as we heard in Isaiah 56 and Ephesians 2—was to pour out so much grace that it could not stay on one table. It would overflow for all the peoples of the world. So Jesus gives the Canaanite woman, this woman who was different from the disciples in just about every way, the floor. He gives her the chance to teach them by answering him: Yes, Lord, she said, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.

Would the Canaanite woman be welcome here? Would we react like the disciples, like people who have known Jesus and been close to him our whole lives, and so we naturally have this wariness towards people who have not been close to him? Would we be stand-off-ish, even annoyed, by someone who walks through Crossroads’ doors who is different than us?

I want to be careful that I don’t accuse anyone of being a bigot here. I am not saying that. In fact, I’ve witnessed it over and over again how excited our members are to greet people they’ve never met before, no matter what they look like. And yet, we have to realize that our natural predisposition is to be like the disciples. It’s part of the way our brains work.

At our small group Bible study last Wednesday, we had a couple medical professionals, David and Liz, who opened my eyes to this. There’s something in the medical field called implicit bias. And it is this truth that doctors and nurses and CNAs can automatically pre-judge their patients depending on their background. And it’s a huge issue that is proven in statistics. People who are a different ethnicity than the medical people serving them are statistically likely to get worse care and have worse outcomes. The most striking one to me is that Black women are five times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. How can medical professionals fight against it? David shared that they work against it by first of all realizing that they are doing it. It’s not that all doctors are racist, certainly not. But they do have to realize that they subconscious have this implicit bias in favor of people who are more like them. And what follows from the realization is that they actively fight against it. They must actively realize they have this subconscious bias to do their absolute best to correct it consciously.

Friends, to be the kind of church that Jesus wants we must to do the same. We have to recognize that we’re the insiders, so to speak. We’re the ones of the society who are already dedicated to this church. And because we are sinful, we can be like the disciples in that we naturally want to lift ourselves up as holy, pious people who are so close to God, we’re seated at the table. This means we naturally subconsciously also lower others down to below our status.

So, realize that when someone walks through our doors that you have never seen before, especially if their appearance hints that they may be from a different walk of life than you, you must go over and above to consciously correct that bias. You must go over and above to make them comfortable. You must go over and above to show them 100% of your normal friendliness, to smile wide, to take the initiative to introduce yourself first, tell them out loud that you’re so glad they’re here. You must show them, clearly and warmly, that they are welcome.

2. By realizing our similarity

Because after all, it’s the woman, the “new person in church,” who outdid the disciples here. She realized how she was similar to the disciples. She was different from them culturally in just about every way, but what was similar between her and them was the abundance of God’s mercy. She realized what the disciples had not yet grasped, that she was equally able to receive Jesus’ blessings as they were. She realized that even if she wasn’t Jewish, even if she wasn’t a part of the first people to hear about the blessings Jesus came to bring, that God’s blessings were so abundant that they couldn’t possibly fit just on the Jewish table. The overflowed to her and to all people. She realized that even if she received just a crumb, just a tiny bit of Jesus’ blessings, that would be more than enough.

And look carefully at how Jesus responds. After he’s given her the chance to correct him, he agrees with her in his final analysis of this interaction. Then Jesus said to her. Notice he doesn’t praise her for her differences. He doesn’t praise her for the fact that she’s a woman and yet having the guts to be persistent in a heavily patriarchal society. He doesn’t praise her for the fact that she was in the out-group and she was bold to speak into the in-group. He praises her for her faith. He praises her for her faith in God’s ability to save.

Faith is the great equalizer of all of humanity because it does not let anyone stand above anyone else. Remember that when you see our world torn apart by people thinking that certain people groups are superior to others. Remember that when you are tempted to have pride that you are so close to God when others aren’t. We all have this implicit bias against people who aren’t like us, and the only way we can get rid of that is by realizing that nothing can put humans on equal terms except for faith.

You might think, really? Nothing else in the whole world? Yes. Because: what is faith? Faith is what happens when a person believes that nothing within themselves can bring them closer to God. Nothing, not where you were born, not how you grew up, not whether you’re a WEIRD society or not, not how many times you’ve been to church, no matter how often you open your Bible at home, no matter how many evil acts you’ve done or good deeds you’ve accomplished, you and I and every person ever born can do nothing to get close to God. We were all, even Jewish people, born far away from God, like foreigners and aliens. And when we realize this, we look to Jesus. Because he alone has accomplished what we could not. Paul wrote in our second reading: He has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations…He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

Paul is saying that when Jesus died on the cross, he took away every idea that you need to follow God’s law well enough to get closer to him. No! Jesus paid for all the times you broke God’s law so that there is no more distance between you and God. You sit at his table and enjoy all his blessings. This gives you peace. This gives me peace. This can give every person who walks through Crossroads’ doors peace. Because through him we all have access to the Father by one Spirit.

So it’s not just realizing our implicit bias that will help us welcome every single person who ever comes to Crossroads. It’s also realizing our similarity. When we realize that we have no right to be close to God, but we have faith that Jesus has given us that access totally and completely, we see how everyone is like us. Every person who comes to Crossroads is a person that Jesus loved so much he died for them. No matter what they look like, no matter their walk of life, no matter their outward appearance, God loves them so much. And so we naturally love them, in our hearts and with our actions, so much too.

One final implication. It’s a common thought in our WEIRD society—remember, we prize individualism—that our faith in God is strictly a personal thing. And so many people have come to the conclusion that you do not have to go to church to have a relationship with God. And while technically it is possible for God to save someone who never goes to church, that is not how he wants churches to be. Because to think we can maintain a relationship with God on our own betrays an attitude like what the disciples had until Jesus corrected their arrogance: I’m close to God, I don’t have anything to learn from anyone else. But yes, we do!

Just this last Wednesday night I was reminded of this. We were talking about Romans 8 at small group Bible study, and since I’m a pastor, I’ve probably read that dozens of times. I’ve studied it in detail, in fact at seminary we spent like three separate days on it. It’s the one that says for we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. But someone was there has a different religious background than me, and he notice something in that section that I had never realized before, which it gave much such a greater appreciation for not only the verses that I thought I knew inside and out, but also a new insight into faith in God. And God poured out his blessings to both of us because we were together. That’s the kind of church Jesus wants.