By Pastor Marcia Sietstra

Mark 7:24-37

August 31, 2003

Today I am basing my comments on next week’s lectionary reading, a story I like a lot. Today’s story shows a crabby Jesus arguing with a woman, and guess what she wins the argument! My husband thinks that’s why I like this text! But actually, this story is one of my favorites because it’s one of the most difficult stories in the Bible, and often the difficult ones are the most revealing, probably because we don’t fall into the temptation of just reading them literally and thinking we know exactly what they mean at first glance.

This woman was from the seamier side of town, a Syrophoenician, which means she was from the country north of Israel, where Lebanon is today. If you’re familiar with the Middle East today, you know that Israel and Lebanon, even today, are not friendly. They shoot missiles off at each other and exchange tank fire fairly often. And in Jesus’ day it was like that Jesus certainly knew that she was an outsider who he had ‘no responsibility’ toward. And it was a racial slur to refer to her as a dog, because that was a commonly used derogatory term.

Worse than that she had a daughter that was demon possessed, so when she approached Jesus for help, Jesus said something like, ‘Leave me alone, you Syrophoenician dog. I’m busy with my own people. Can’t you see that I have my hands full just taking care of them? I can’t bother with you and your problems.’ Whoa this is our nice, sinless Jesus? (By the way, ‘Christ’s sinlessness’ was an idea that developed in the Church over a number of years and so portraying Jesus as sinless was not an explicit concern of Mark or many other early Christian witers. ) Jesus used pretty shocking language, calling a woman a dog, but the disciples, seem to agree. ‘Good call, Jesus, let’s send her away.’

And to be honest, we can identify with Jesus & the disciples. Maybe Jesus is suffering from ‘caring fatigue’, having taken this side trip to get away from the crowds after healing and teaching and helping all kinds of people. He just wants a break! Have you ever felt like that? So many demands on your time: one person needs a ride to the doctor, an adult child or grandchild with problems has you up nights worrying, the church wants you to take on a job that needs doing, the neighbor needs your help, and on and on.

You open the newspaper or church newsletter to read about people who have no health care, or this group needs funding for daycare for the working poor, or that group needs funds to rebuild after a war’ until finally you think to yourself, ‘I can’t be worrying about people on the other side of some ocean; we have enough problems right here in our own country.’

Or maybe we get discouraged enough to think to ourselves, ‘Hey I can’t get worked up about the troubles that people are having all across this country, with fires out west and droughts down south. There’s just too much. No, there are enough troubles right here in my own town.’ And then when we really get worn down, we eventually decide, ‘Hey, I can’t try to help everyone. In fact, even in my town, I don’t know most of the people who live there. How do I know they even work like I do. Maybe what I should do is just take care of myself.’ And one day we realize that we have radically shrunk down the number of people that we care about, out of sheer defense, because we cannot face the immensity of the world’s needs.

About a month ago, I met a ‘Syrophoenician woman;’ actually she was from Guatemala. Her name is Chonita, and she cooked a Guatemalan meal for us at the home of Karen Kraus and Denny Pearson. Chonita is staying with their friends, the Nesselhoff’s, in Vermillion, who have been selling crafts from her village for several years, ever since adopting a child from the orphanage there.

Through an interpreter, Chonita told us her story after dinner, how the government troops killed her husband, even though he was not a soldier, but a farmer. How she had worked many jobs to feed her own children—she had never gone to school—I’m not sure she can read. Her children are grown and now she is working to raise money to feed the elderly in her village, because there is no social support system for them if they have no family, so they go hungry. She’s started a food pantry, and she’s raising money to build a tiny home for one woman who lives in a tin shack, so flimsy that when Dian Nesselhoff visited, and leaned against a pole, she worried it might collapse.

Chonita is here for 3 months raising money. She has been using the gifts of people in our area to buy supplies like shoes at rummage sales! Almost no one in her village owns a pair of shoes, so she is busily gathering shoes in many sizes to take home with her. That night at dinner, it was easy to pull out my checkbook and write a check for Chonita and the elderly people in her village. But there are too many people like Chonita, and I can’t write them all a check. Our tendency is to feel so overwhelmed at how many people need help, that we simply shut down and say, ‘It’s too big to solve; I’ll just take care of my own family.’

I tell you all of this because in Chonita’s worn face, which looks much older than it is, I saw the face of the woman who argued with Jesus. Like that woman, Chonita is part of an ethnic group that lives at the margins—uneducated, desperately poor, powerless. It was frightening to come here. There’s a lot of distrust of Americans because often Guatemalan migrant workers are treated very badly. She told us that her friends worried that the Nesselhoff’s would make her do all the work in their home and not let her return. So she called someone back home a few days after arriving, and was asked, ‘Are the Americans making you do all their work?’

Like the woman in the story, who is willing to suffer humiliation in order to get help for her daughter, Chonita is willing to risk much to get what she needs for her village. And what did Jesus finally say to the woman in the story when she persisted? Remember, she said to Jesus, after he called her a dog, ‘Master, even the dogs deserve the crumbs from your table.’

And Jesus, as if he has just realized something terribly important in his own mind for the very first time, says, ‘O Woman, great is your faith.’ And he heals the daughter. In effect he has said, ‘Here, this is my body, broken for all of you.’ Many scholars think this is the point at which Jesus realized that God doesn’t have favorites, and that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and kindness, no matter what race, no matter what class, no matter what condition. Mark gives us the human Jesus, still learning and growing in his awareness of what God would have us do.

Maybe Jesus understood this all along, and was just saying these hard things to test his disciples. We don’t know. But we do know that this text is a call for a radical inclusiveness to care about people at the margins, even when we are suffering from caring fatigue.

We have got to stop treating folks like dogs in this world. How often does our nation’s foreign policy do that? We refuse, as a nation, to agree to international treaties limiting pollution even as we see incontrovertible evidence of global warming. Why should other nations limit pollution if the world’s superpower won’t? Just because we can afford it, our over consumption of the world’s resources is ruining the environment. In effect, we have said, ‘The rest of the world may have the crumbs from our table. And future generations? Well, they are not our concern!’

Our foreign policy often looks at short-term gain for Americans, with little concern for the effects it has on people in other nations. The US armed the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and called them freedom fighters when they were fighting Russia, because they were fighting our ‘enemy.’ Osama Bin Ladin was recruited by the CIA and armed with stinger missiles. During the 1980’s the US supported Iraq in the 10-yr war against Iran, even though public policy advocates publicly opposed support for Saddam Hussein because his human rights record was among the worst in the world. There was no official outrage when he gassed his own people back then, because we were supporting him when it served our purposes. Some of the anger directed against Americans in the rest of the world is a reaction to what are perceived as self-serving US policies that shore up repressive regimes when it suits our purposes, even if it makes life more painful in other nations. I recommend this book, Charles Kimball’s When Religion Becomes Evil, for an easy-to-read look at this problem.

Our government speaks for us, and we as Christians have a responsibility to care about how it treats the rest of the world. You really can do so much, even as one person, by becoming involved, staying informed, looking for solutions to community problems. Look at Chonita, one illiterate, supposedly powerless little old woman, and the ripple effect her determination is having! Think what you can do!

So don’t give in to caring fatigue. Phil and I were talking about this yesterday. He said, it’s like walking the bean field when we were kids. You’d look at 80 acres of beans that had to be hoed and think, ‘This will never get done!’ We had to chop out the corn, hoe the thistles, pull the milkweeds and the cockleburs. It looks like a horrendous job when you see rows and rows of bean field. But our dads didn’t let us throw up our hands and say, ‘This is too big of a mess to even try to clean up.’ No, we’d each take 2 rows and stay at it, and concentrate on the weeds right in front of us, and when we got to the other end of the field, we’d turn around and each take 2 more, and miracle of miracles, by the end of the week we’d look back at a beautiful, clean bean field that would produce enough for all.

The world is a mess of a field, but by God’s grace, we’ve been given the task of helping to make it right. May it be so. Amen.