Years ago, I heard a poem in a sermon that I remember to this day. It goes:
He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.[1]
When I hear this poem, I picture children on the playground, drawing lines in the sand. Two of them stand smugly together, arm in arm, and carefully draw a circle around themselves with a long stick, binding themselves together in friendship and solidarity, while the third child stands alone outside of the circle, looking down at her feet, feeling rejected. Suddenly, the teacher walks over and hands her a stick, too, and together they draw an even larger circle that encompasses everyone, and then the left-out child looks up, a smile slowly spreading from ear to ear, as she becomes aware of her subtle triumph. At the same time, the mouths of the other two children drop open in bewilderment, until they shrug, drop their sticks, and all run off to play together.
Maybe it is my years as the playground outcast or my years on recess duty in the schoolyard, but I like this image, and in the poem, the sly triumph of love over exclusion gives me goose bumps every time. Maybe that is also why I love the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman from today’s Gospel. Most preachers rail against this story, upset to see Jesus turning on a begging woman, calling her a dog, and at first ignoring her innocent pleas. They don’t like to see Jesus acting that human, and they identify with the pain of the Gentile woman. But while the woman does suffer, she also wins the argument with Jesus and causes him to change his mind. I love the fact that the only time that Jesus loses a match of wits in the New Testament, is to a hated foreigner, and a woman at that. It seems that God’s elastic circle of love pushes us even to include an image of our Savior that seems out of bounds.
We all draw circles around ourselves and our loved ones, consciously or often unconsciously; we all put up barriers to keep out strange people and strange ways and strange thoughts. Look at the violence in England this week, as various ethnic communities destroy one another's homes and property. Sometimes, our circles can serve a purpose, though. For the ancient Israelites, enslaved for years in the foreign land of Egypt, exiled for years in the foreign land of Babylon, forever surrounded by peoples of different religions and by countries much larger than they, the tight circle of Law kept them from blending into and being washed away by the cultures that surrounded them. Following certain codes of dress, eating certain foods, marking their bodies through circumcision, all set the people of Israel apart from their numerous neighbors and marked them as God’s chosen people.
At the beginning of our Gospel reading, we see Jesus challenging these narrow circles that the Pharisees have drawn around themselves. Jesus realizes that the laws concerning rituals such as hand washing and temple vows could get in the way of God’s larger circle of love. With wit and even potty humor, Jesus breaks the tight circle of ritual that the Pharisees have drawn around their community and cracks open our access to the Holy Presence of God. But while Jesus can see the necessity of breaking open the hold of ritual law on his community, his vision still seems to extend only to the small circle of Israel. When the Gentile woman—the “Canaanite woman,” says Matthew (and who can be more outside the circle of the children of Israel than the idolatrous Canaanites, whose land they conquered in the days of Joshua?)—when the Canaanite woman approaches Jesus and his disciples, Jesus does not even lower himself to acknowledge her pitiful, repeated cries of “kyrie eleison,” “Lord have mercy,” and the annoyed disciples only cry out heartlessly, “Send her away!” Jesus understands himself as Israel’s messiah and cannot see the point of bothering with Gentile foreigners. God has God’s hands full taking care of the hungry, stiff-necked children that he already has, without adopting more. But the Canaanite woman has perhaps been following Jesus around for awhile and has been listening to his teachings. Perhaps she has already learned a thing or two from his clever disputes with the Pharisees and from his miraculous way of turning the world upside down. She has certainly seen his healing power and is desperate for him to use it to save her daughter. And so the Canaanite woman acknowledges him as Lord and turns his own metaphor in on him, suggesting that even crumbs of healing suffice, when they are filled with God’s abundant love. She grabs the stick and draws that second circle, enclosing the Gentiles, too, in God’s loving embrace. And Jesus, finding himself in a circle larger than the one he had imagined, recognizes his mistake.
It is tempting to make this Gospel lesson all about Jesus and say, “My, look how Jesus grew!” Or, “My, how could Jesus be so awful?!” The question for us, however, should be, “How do we, as followers of Jesus Christ, join with God constantly to enlarge the circle of divine Love that surrounds us? We Episcopalians pride ourselves on our theological tolerance and our proclamation of divine Love. Moreover, here at St. Thomas, we are a very welcoming church, so what do we have to worry about? I asked a friend of mine familiar with “best practices” for evangelism in churches to come to St. Thomas “incognito” the other week and to report back to our Vestry how we did with welcoming newcomers. I am very pleased to report that she gave us an “A+” report card. She said that we were one of the most welcoming congregations that she had ever met, and we did all of the things on the checklist that churches are supposed to do. We took her right into our circle. But wait—before we get too excited. We took her right into our circle …. but in doing so, we did not break and expand our circle. She, as a white, middle-class Louisvillian, fit right in. She followed our rules; she spoke our language; she looked just like us.
Let me tell you a more disturbing story: This week I was in the elevator at University Hospital going to visit our trauma patient in the ICU. The elevator, as usual, was crowded, filled with all kinds of people who didn’t necessarily look like me. One of them, spying my collar, asked if I was a minister. After a bit of conversation, another man asked what “faith” I belonged to. “Episcopalian,” I said proudly. My response was greeted with visible shrugs and blank stares. “Christian, from the Episcopal Church,” I added, trying to be more clear. “Never heard of ‘em,” ventured one man, doubtfully. “Is that some branch of Catholics?” offered another. Before I could explain, the crowd got off of the elevator.
Now, at first, I was amused at the ignorance of this crowd. “How could they not know who Episcopalians are?” I chuckled to myself. “How ridiculous!” I thought. “Wait until I tell the others in our circle about this!” And then later it hit me. The people in that elevator with me in our region’s public hospital were poor and suffering. They were the people who call my office asking for rent money, the ones that I tell to go away and to call Eastern Area Community Ministries, instead. If I had been in the elevator of the downtown PNC bank building, I’ll bet that most of those well-dressed people would have known about the Episcopal Church. If we, as Christians, are here to spread the Good News to the poor and the outcast, to feed the hungry, to visit the prisoners, to welcome the stranger … then why don’t the hungry, the prisoner, and the suffering know who we are? Obviously, we are not doing a very good job of fulfilling the mission that Jesus gave us in this community. How can we better open our hearts to the “Canaanite women” who cry out for mercy, desperate even for the crumbs that drop from our tables? I’m afraid that, in our case, they might have already given up shouting at our doors, having already been turned away so many times. No matter how busy we are taking care of our own, God wants us to open our circle of love, to shower healing mercy in ever wider and wider circles, like the holy oil gushing over Aaron’s head in our Psalm and pouring down on his collar and down his beard, like the life-giving water flooding down from Mount Hermon to cover the whole earth. Like Jesus, maybe we need to revise our mission priorities.
Amen.
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