The Beach Church Va Podcast
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, or the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity (Proper 15)
A Reading from the book of Isaiah 56:1-8 A Reading from the book of Psalms 67:1-7 A Reading from the book of Romans 11:13-24 The Holy Gospel Reading Matthew 15:21-28 A Sermon By Bishop Chris Sermon transcript: Let's pray together, shall we? Father God, we're so thankful this morning as we come to your word. We pray now that you would open our hearts and open our minds by the power of your Holy Spirit that we might know your heart, we might know who we are, and most especially that we might know your son, Jesus. It is in his name we pray, amen. Please be seated. Well, if we haven't met yet, my name is Chris. I'm the Bishop of the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic. My wife, Catherine, is here with me as well. It's my second visit to Beach Church, her first, and it's just great to be here. Thank you for the warm welcome and the kindness you've shown us. You know, there are seasons of life when faith is very easy to talk about. Your prayers are being answered. The things of life all feel settled around you. It seems as though God is very near and the path ahead seems clear. You can tell what God is up to. And then there are the other seasons, right? A medical diagnosis comes that you weren't expecting. A child goes off the deep end. A relationship breaks down that you'd had so much hope in. A prayer you've been praying for months, maybe even longer, well, it seems to go unanswered. We ask God for help and heaven seems silent. It's like the heavens are brass, as though your prayers go up and they bang off some kind of a ceiling. And it's often there that real faith emerges. Do I still trust Jesus when I don't understand what He is doing? Do I still come to Him even if He doesn't immediately give me the answers I'm hoping for? Do I want Jesus Himself or only what I hope Jesus will give to me? That's where we meet the woman in the gospel lesson today in Matthew. Her faith is tested and it is proven triumphant. And in the end, Jesus says something to her that He doesn't even say to His disciples, great is your faith. And as we're going to see, there really are two tests that are taking place in this passage. The woman is being tested. Will she continue to seek the mercy of Christ? And the disciples, they're being tested also. How far do they believe the mercy of Christ extends? And before the story's over, both of those questions, they're going to become questions for you and for me. So let's start with a little context. We wanna think about what is happening. Verse 21 tells us that Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Now, what you need to know is that this is significant because Jesus is leaving the Jewish territory. He's heading out into a Gentile land, a non-Jewish region. Before this event, almost immediately before, Jesus had been in a terrible kind of conflict, as so often happened with the Pharisees and with the scribes. They were accusing Him and He in turn turned the tables on them and accused them of elevating their traditions to have as much weight or perhaps even more weight than God's word itself. They were concerned with external purity, with the way things look, with religious observance, but Jesus told them that the problem that we have, the deeper problem, is the problem of the human heart. It's from the heart, He says, that all of the evil thoughts come and the impure words come and the defiled actions, well, that's where they come from. And now almost immediately, He encounters someone whom most people in Israel would have regarded as unclean, impure, defiled. She's a Canaanite woman. She's a Gentile, she's an outsider. Her people are enemies of the people of Israel. That's the historic and immediate context. This is what it says in verse 22. If you're following along in a Bible or an app, you don't have to, but I'm gonna walk through the text. Behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. So she's desperate, her daughter is suffering. And if you're a parent, even a grandparent, you understand something of what this is like, because there's no pain like watching your child suffer. For a parent, you'd rather take the pain yourself. You would rather carry the illness yourself. You'd rather absorb it than stand there, well, unable to do anything to help someone you love. One of our children has had illness at various times in her life. She was bedridden from age 14 to 18. And as much of a champion as Catherine was for her healing and getting her care, there wasn't a lot we could actually do. And I can tell you, I felt helpless. And I was so frustrated so many times because I couldn't fix it. The Canaanite woman is in a place like that, except her daughter is being demonized, we're told. So whether that's manifesting in illness or mental health issues or some combination of those things, we don't know. What we know is she's desperate. And so she cries out to Jesus, Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me. And then comes one of the difficult passages in a very difficult section of Scripture. Verse 23, but he did not answer her a word. She comes to the right person. She asks for mercy. She's even asking for somebody else. And Jesus is silent. And this is the first test of her faith. And there are times when the test of faith is not that God is absent, it's that he seems to be silent. You pray, you ask, you wait, and nothing seems to change. Over the years, as a pastor, I have seen people come to God. They're in the middle of a crisis that causes them to start seeking outside of themselves. An addiction has taken hold. A marriage has fallen apart. A child is in trouble. Financial hardship has arisen. The circumstances don't seem to change and the frustration just, ugh. It's usually, you know you're in that place, because you're up at 3 a.m. Or somewhere in that region of the night. And sometimes the real question becomes, do you still want Jesus if he doesn't fix the problem? If the marriage is not restored, do you still want him? If the diagnosis doesn't change, is he still enough? And if life doesn't go back to what it was or what you hope it would be, will you still trust him? In other words, do you want God? Or only what you hope God will give to you? And the remarkable thing about this woman is that Jesus' silence doesn't send her away. No, in the test of silence, she does not quit. She keeps coming. She presses closer. I think she gets louder. And perhaps some of you are living in that place today. You've prayed, you've asked, you've waited. God seems silent. Don't run away. Hold, get people around you. Grieve, ask, cry, seek the Lord. Because sometimes tested faith is simply faith that stays. Now, it's at this point in what's happening that the disciples enter into the picture. Verse 23, and his disciples came and begged him, strong word, saying, send her away, for she is crying out after us. She's making a scene. It's noisy, it's public, it's out in the open. This is not behind closed doors. People are watching. They're in Gentile territory. The disciples are already uncomfortable and now there's a scene and they want it to stop. And Jesus says in verse 24, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Mind you, Jesus is speaking to the disciples. The woman's there and she's listening in, but right now he's shifted and he's speaking to them. And I think this is where the disciples test begins. It's happening right in the middle of her test. Now, Jesus has come as Israel's Messiah. That is who he is. That is what he came to be. He's come as a fulfillment of God's promises to the people of Israel, all the way back to Abraham. And there's an order to the unfolding of salvation history to the Jews first, to Israel, and then through Israel's Messiah, blessing to the nations. We heard that in that reading from Isaiah. In Isaiah 11, it says, the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord so that even the Gentile nations will look to the Messiah, the non-Jewish people. So when this Gentile woman calls son of David, we tend to miss that. What she's doing is she's actually appealing to him based upon God's covenant with the Jews, but she's not part of Israel. She has no covenant status that she can point to. She cannot say, you owe me this because of who I am in your people. Verse 25 says, but she came and she knelt before him saying, Lord, help me. Notice the change. There's no argument. There's no explanation. There's no claim being made. She knows she has no status before the Jewish Messiah, but she does have three words. She does have three words, doesn't she? Lord, help me. And there are moments in life when the deepest prayers are often the shortest, right? Lord, help me. Lord, have mercy. Jesus, I need you. And sometimes you just groan. You know what I mean? If you haven't groaned, you probably will if you live long enough. And she kneels. Now remember, her people are watching her do this. Her neighbors are there. They don't believe in Jesus. They don't want to have anything to do with the Jewish guy who's there, this Messiah. He's their people's enemy, at least the people he's from. And her kneeling, it absolutely matters because humility, that is at the very heart of worship, right? You're either on your knees or you're on the knees of your heart. The scripture says God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. She doesn't bring her spiritual resume. She doesn't tell him she deserves his attention. She doesn't argue her worthiness. No, no, no, she just comes empty-handed. And that's how every one of us comes to God. We haven't earned his mercy. We haven't lived well enough. We haven't prayed hard enough. We come because he's merciful. He is rich in mercy. I shared this earlier, and it's one of those moments where God so got a hold of my life in the everyday. And so it comes out a lot. When we were teaching our children to pray when they were young, you know, a natural place to do that is at the dinner table. It's simple. You can get in and out. Nobody gets hurt. And there's food on the back end, right? So my girls have a lot. We have two girls and a boy. The boy is the youngest. And my girls have a lot more words than my son. And so we were doing this for a while. And after a couple of weeks, I noticed he's not saying a word because he knows if he stays quiet long enough, one of them is going to speak up and pray. And I just had that I'm one to you look one night. And I said, girls, thank you. Thank you. Your prayers are beautiful. Let's let your brother pray tonight. And he looked at me. Oh man. And he looked down at his plate, his furrowed brow. And then he threw his hands up and he said, Lord, have mercy on me a sinner. And he grabbed his fork and he started to eat. And I was like, I don't think he gets this. But I thought, okay, that's better than nothing. So a couple of weeks go by, girls always saying your prayers. And I say to him one night, it's I mean, almost a mirror. Son, would you say the prayer? He looks at me, kind of grinds his teeth, looks at his plate. Lord, have mercy on me a sinner. And he grabs his fork and he's just chowing down. And I was going to do my fatherly duty to correct him at that point. Because clearly, he had no idea what we were doing. And by God's grace, I got one of those checks. You know how the Holy Spirit for me, the check often comes here. Sometimes it's here, but it's usually in my gut. And I have just learned to pause. So after kids were in bed, I went for a walk that night and I was just talking to the Lord about it, just grumbling like a holy father does, right? That kid doesn't know anything. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The Lord can translate that by the way. And the Holy Spirit whispered quietly to my heart, what was wrong with this prayer? And this is where we get, right? I said, well, he didn't say anything about the food. What was wrong with his prayer? Well, he clearly doesn't understand. He didn't even say thank you. What was wrong with his prayer? And then I went, oh Lord, oh, Lord have mercy on me a sinner. That prayer is always appropriate, isn't it? It's always appropriate. See, grace begins where entitlement ends. The apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2 that the Gentiles were once separated from Christ, alienated from the Commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. That was their condition. And that is our condition spiritually apart from Jesus Christ. So we don't come to God demanding anything. We come to God demanding. We are sinners seeking mercy, amen? And that's not even the weirdest part of the text. Now we get to the really strange part. Jesus says something that is so hard for our modern ears to hear. Verse 26, it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. And I got to tell you, the first time I ever read the Bible, I was 19 and I said, I think Jesus just called that lady a dog. And I got to tell you where I came from, you don't do that. And as I've learned over the years, it's better not to call girls any kind of animal names. Just don't do it. And I didn't know much about the Bible at that point. It was new to it. But as I began to learn over the years, there are things in it that we have to have interpreted because this is a different culture a long time ago. And there's something cultural happening here specific to that time, but that we actually understand pretty clearly. See, Jesus is not demeaning her. He's not a racist. He's not a misogynist. Remember, he's not only speaking to her, he's speaking to the disciples who are right there. And there are two tests going on. And so Jesus uses this household image of the kids at the father's table and the little dogs, not the scavenger mutts on the streets, but the little dogs, the household pets, but it still carries a sharp edge. Because what it does is it reflects a real boundary between races, between Israel and the Gentile world. And the woman doesn't deny the distinction. But there's another issue going on here. Remember what the disciples had just said to him, send her away. And that's probably to me the most uncomfortable line in the passage. Because a suffering woman is crying out for mercy and the disciples mainly want this disturbance to stop. Because to them, she's a problem to be managed rather than a person created in the image of God to be loved. And this is where their test comes clearly into view. How far does the mercy of God extend? Even to the outsiders, even to those who make you feel uncomfortable, even to those who aren't like us, even to those people, their people, even to the ones who have hurt us. I got to tell you, friends, there is a real danger because it is possible to be close to Jesus and still have a heart that's too small for the mercy of Jesus. And that is a frightening possibility. And we see that a lot in the wider church right now, especially online. And before we point a finger out there, we have to look right in here, right into our own hearts. And we have to allow the question he's asking them to come toward us. Who are you tempted to send away? A difficult neighbor, family member who has wounded you again, a person whose life you don't understand, somebody who's politically very different from you or has a different theology from you, a person whose failures are really visible and who's made a complete mess of life. Who would you rather see judged than saved? That's a probing question. It's a searching question. And the word of God always searches to the deep parts of us, right? Between soul and spirit, bone and marrow, because the Lord is trying to set us free. Where have you quietly decided? We never generally say this out loud, at least not on Sunday morning, that the mercy of God should stop. Jesus has this uncanny knack and way of exposing the human heart. And part of discipleship is letting him do it. And not running away when he does. He did it with the Pharisees, he did it with the disciples, and he does it with me and with you as well. So we come to the turning point in verse 27. The woman says, yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. And the first two words are remarkable. Yes, Lord. She doesn't fight him. She doesn't say, let me explain. She doesn't insist upon anything. She says, in effect, yes, Lord, I have no claim upon you. Yes, Lord, I cannot make demands. Yes, Lord, I come empty handed, and I know something about you. See, she knows his heart. She knows that there is more mercy in Jesus than there is misery in her situation. And there's more mercy in Jesus than there is unworthiness in her own life. And she is saying, I do not need to take the children's bread because a crumb will do just fine. Because if it falls from your table, Lord, it's enough. If it comes from your hand, it is sufficient. That is faith. Not faith in the strength of her own faith. Not faith in her ability to understand what Jesus is doing. I don't think she does. Faith in Jesus. Faith in his character. Faith in his heart. Faith in his identity. Faith in his mercy. Faith that says, I know who you are. And Jesus answers her, oh woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter is healed. Her faith was tested, and her faith was triumphant. And why? Because she kept coming to Jesus. And she humbled herself before Jesus. And she trusted in the mercy of Jesus. Now let me leave you with three simple words. Stay, everybody say stay. Stay. Kneel. Kneel. Receive. Receive. If God seems silent, stay. Don't run off. Just wait. Get people around you. Talk about the pain of the silence. Let other brothers and sisters help you bear. Don't interpret delay as another person, parent, whatever, abandoning you in your need. A system that never actually panned out. Stay. He is faithful. He is true. Don't give up. The scripture tells us that the testing of our faith produces steadfastness, which means strength. It means stability. It means grit. Not grits. Grit. And we need some gritty Christians. Mature. The apostle Peter says that tested faith is more precious than gold. So if you're in a season of silence, don't go anywhere. Stay with Jesus. And then kneel. If you've recognized any little hint or large hint of pride in you, kneel. If you've begun to think God owes you something, kneel. If you think your goodness, your success, your knowledge, your morality, your religious record are the thing you should trust in, kneel. Kneel. That is the posture of faith, and that is the posture of worship. Come with a prayer, Lord, help me. Have mercy upon me. I'm a sinner. And receive. If your heart is hardened towards someone else, please don't miss this last part. If your heart is hardened towards someone else, ask the Lord to soften it. It might mean you've gotta walk through some pain. It might mean you've gotta do some serious forgiveness work. Who are you tempted to send away? Who would you rather not have there? Who's beyond hope? Ask Jesus to give you His heart for that person. That doesn't mean there aren't boundaries that you put in place. It doesn't mean there aren't healthy things you have to do, but you need to start with His heart, not your heart, because my heart is fallible, and it's so easily swayed by pain and hurt and sorrow. But here's the thing about asking Jesus to give you His heart. He never gives us His heart just so we keep it, but so that we can give it away. You see, we receive so that we can give away. We receive, this is the kingdom economy. We receive to give away. We receive to give to others, and we become people through whom the mercy of God is meant to flow. We receive so we can give mercy to others. Now, in just a little while, we're gonna come to the Lord's table, and we're not gonna come just for the scraps. We're not crawling under the
