Sticking Your Neck Out

Pentecost 15
Proper 16A

August 24, 2008


Believe it or not, I took time away from watching the Olympics this past week to watch a movie. I’ve read many Graham Greene novels, but I’d never seen the movie version of The Third Man.

It’s a fabulous movie, filmed on location in Vienna in the late-’40s, and features Orson Welles as Harry Lime, a thoroughly unscrupulous character: a racketeer who trades in medicine on the black market. His watered-down penicillin is causing painful deaths and Harry Lime doesn’t care.

In a striking scene on a Ferris Wheel, of all places, Harry Lime explains to a friend just how he views the world and the people in it.

“Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

Harry Lime suggests that humanity is important, perhaps, as a theoretical whole. But in his eyes, those individual lives don’t add up to that much. His friend, fortunately, is not convinced and refuses to see those people as only dots in the distance.

That view of the world comes up again in another classic movie that most of us have seen, Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick, famously says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

Rick once had fought for the good guys, but now has magnified his personal pain to blot out that big picture. He is willing to sacrifice the many because of his heartache over one person. As we know, the big picture wins out in the end, no matter how hard Rick tries not to stick his neck out. Time and again, he steps in to help the helpless individual, and remembers eventually that it’s not just one person – it’s the entire world at stake.

What we see in these films is the difference in the Macro and Micro views of the world – the wide angle, big picture and close-up pictures of life.

Harry Lime in The Third Man takes the Macro, the long-distance view for ease his mind. If you can’t see in close-up the ones you hurt, cruelty and callousness become easier to justify.

Casablanca’s Rick has tired of the big picture – but cannot help but be moved by the close-up view of human suffering.

This is all to say that your point of view is important. We can use point of view to shield ourselves from the reality of the world, or we can use it to understand ourselves and the world better.

This all comes into play in today’s story from Genesis. Pharaoh has taken the Macro view, the big picture: “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them …”

You see, this was a new king, who did not know Joseph. That means much time had passed and there was no institutional memory of why the Israelites had come to be among the Egyptians. No longer were they remembered as naturalized citizens who had been invited on a guest worker program. Now they were seen as the enemy within. The sort who would aid and abet the enemy. A minority who would out-reproduce the majority and take over themselves.

So Pharaoh first tried to work them to death and, as insurance, tried to have their babies killed in childbirth. Failing both those measures, he had all the baby boys murdered by having them thrown into the river.

From his view at the palace, all those babies were but dots in the distance. In the name of national security, he was willing to spare all of them.

But then along came baby Moses, floating among the bulrushes. The daughter of Pharaoh is taking a swim and sees him floating there … and the world changes in a moment because her perspective changes.

She has her maids bring her the basket. “When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him.” Pity. She saw him as an individual. Not as a dot in the distance.

She says, “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children.” She knows that her own father had decreed that all the Hebrew boys were to be murdered. But when it’s not a dot but a human being, not a theoretical national security threat but a tiny, beautiful child, she cannot take the big picture view. She loves him and rescues him and – in the long view of history and Scripture – she saves us all in the process.

If you’ve ever spent any time talking to me about pastoral concerns, you’ve probably heard me say something like this: “One of the great themes of the Old Testament is that wonderful things can come from the worst events. It doesn’t excuse or somehow erase disaster or tragedy, but we’ve seen over and over that God can pick us up and guarantee that there is something wonderful in our future, even when we’ve seen the worst that the world can give us.”

I sound like a broken record, I know. But I say it because it’s true. And this story from Genesis is a perfect example.

Remember that Joseph had tossed in the bottom of a pit by his brothers, but God managed to turn that story around and make Joseph a powerful man who saves his brothers and ensures the future of the Hebrew people. Now, Pharaoh has countless babies killed – ethnic cleansing by the drowning of infants. But one escapes and, wonder of wonders, leads the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.

The Joseph story goes from the close-up picture – Joseph suffering in the bottom of the pit – to the big picture, the rescue of Jacob’s family and the establishment of the Israelites in Egypt.

The Moses story goes from the close-up picture – one baby floating helpless in the reeds – to the big picture, the rescue of all the Israelites and their deliverance.

From time to time, we need to change the focus in our lives; we need to adjust our own point of view. Sometimes it’s easy to say, “Oh the poor, the poor … they already get help. What about a tax cut for me? What about some help for me?” But it’s a different thing when your brother is laid off from his job. When your friend’s insurance won’t cover her treatment. Our focus changes. Our priorities need rethinking.

Jesus does not recommend only one point of view, micro or macro. He says, blessed are the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, and blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Not just one here, another there, but the many.

But Jesus knows that if that were his only message, it would be so easy for us to wave a hand at the world and say, “Ah, the hungry. Ah, the meek. Ah, the little children. I feel for them, but what can you do?”

So he challenges us to shift our point of view. Love your neighbor as yourself, he says – and then makes sure through the parable of the Good Samaritan that we are to love our neighbor as an individual, no matter who he or she happens to be. Don’t hide behind that long-distance lens – get up close and personal because you can make a difference in the world.

You’re going to hear me preach sometime about the Millennium Development Goals – the MDGs that you may have heard others in the church talk about. They’re goals set by the United Nations and endorsed by our Church. You may be like me – my eyes start to glaze over when you say UN and world this and acronym that. But I’ve started to change my mind because I’ve shifted my point of view.

One goal is universal education for children everywhere. Great, how much bigger can you get? But I’ve talked to folks from our Diocese, right here in Alabama, who have gone down to Haiti – not to change the world, but to build desks for a school. And they left behind the tools and the know-how so that parents there could make more desks. Are desks that important? I’ve seen pictures of those children, who used to bring chairs from home every day when the walked to school because the school couldn’t afford desks.

Another goal is child health – reducing by 2/3 the mortality rate for children under 5. Great, another goal so big that I say, why even try? But I met some folks at our Diocesan Convention who told me that for $10 I could buy a mosquito net. The most simple thing in the world but something that would practically guarantee that I’ve saved a child’s life by keeping malarial mosquitoes out and the healthy baby in.

A healthy baby. That baby might be the next great Olympian. That baby might be the next Moses. That baby might be the next – who knows? And all because someone changed his focus, from the big and impossible to the small and doable. From the mass of dots in the distance to the living human being up close. From being a big-picture, theoretical Christian to one who is willing to stick his neck out for his neighbor, no matter who that neighbor might be.

Our Words, Our Hurts

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 15a
August 17, 2008

Matthew 15:21-28

I love this passage from the Gospel of Matthew. I used to read it to my dog, who I’m sure always loved it. She and I were convinced that this is a Scriptural basis for feeding dogs scraps from the table, no matter what veterinarians may say.

That being said, this is a difficult reading – it is a story that I’ve always struggled with, and I invited you to struggle along with me this morning.

Jesus is walking with his friends up north, out of his normal range, visiting an area that has another faith tradition and always has resisted the call of God. Jesus even uses Tyre and Sidon as an example of hard-heartedness. But there he is, and he runs up on this Canaanite woman out in the middle of the day – someone he by tradition ought to ignore. Yet he stops and talks with her.

Here, the story is full of promise – we expect a kind word from Jesus. But no matter how we read this story, we can’t get around the fact that, at least on the face of it, Jesus decides to insult the Canaanite woman.

She asks for help for her sick daughter. But he says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” In other words, Jesus has been sent to the chosen people – not to Gentiles. But he doesn’t say Gentiles, he says “dogs.”

There are a couple of different ways of looking at this, two main approaches. The first is, that Jesus didn’t mean it – he was testing her, drawing her out Socratically. He intends to heal her all along. The second is that Jesus did mean what he said – his ministry was only to the Israelites. He didn’t intend to heal her, but she convinces him through clever argument.

Either way: His language is not respectful. But the question remains: Was it offensive? Again, there are several theories, several ways of approaching this question.

First, perhaps it was not offensive – this sort of energetic, caustic back and forth is said by some to have been common in the cultures of that area in that time. Think back to the Old Testament stories of Abraham bargaining with God and of Jonah arguing with God. Think of the confrontations of Jesus with some of the religious leaders of his time – he was not afraid of offending them, saying things like, “Woe to you … Woe to you,!” He was not afraid tell it like it is to his opponents.

But here, even though the words seem harsh and offensive to our modern ears, perhaps they were delivered with a smile – maybe Jesus was letting her know that while he understood the historic antipathy of Jew and Gentile, he was about to show its undoing. Unfortunately, the spare language of the Gospels don’t tell us for sure.

So we have to consider that perhaps this was an offensive exchange – that Jesus was simply stating the facts: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In this interpretation, Jesus does not mean to heal her but is moved by her plea. “Lord, help me,” she says, and he ultimately is moved by her plea. If you think about it, why Jesus would be all the way up in Tyre and Sidon, if he did not intend to teach and heal among the Gentiles? The fact is, we just don’t know, and while this is a hard interpretation, it is one that has to be considered.

And then, there is the possibility that even if Jesus meant to heal her all along, that he used this language to emphasize his point in dramatic fashion.

It happens elsewhere in the Gospels. In the next chapter in Matthew, he uses some pretty horrible language to one of his disciples. He turns to Peter and says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.” [16:23] Clearly, you had to have a thick skin to be one of the 12 disciples. The Good Shepherd was always good, but he wasn’t always gentle with those closest to him.

No question, Peter’s feelings must have been hurt when Jesus calls him Satan – but this came at a moment when Peter was trying to talk Jesus out of going to Jerusalem and being killed, something that Jesus had to do; something that Jesus had to do for our salvation. So, perhaps it’s a case of strong language for a strong message.

The good news is that Peter got over it. And the Canaanite woman clearly got over it. She went nose-to-nose with Jesus and gets what she came for: the healing of her daughter.

She comes away with something she doesn’t ask for: She comes away with salvation for herself, I am sure. Jesus recognizes and commends her faith.

And we all came away with something else – this was the opening of Jesus’ ministry to the Gentiles. That is the point of this story, the reason this healing – out of the many, many healings – the reason that the story of this healing is told again in Matthew’s Gospel. The Canaanite woman opens the door and all of humanity is invited through.

Now I wonder about this unnamed Gentile woman. She leaves this encounter with Jesus and goes home to see her daughter, who now healed. I’m sure she is joyous, ecstatic. Does she become a follower of Christ? I imagine so. Does she resent the language Jesus used? I doubt it.

Like Peter, there was so much at stake that a momentary rebuke – perhaps one used as a rhetorical device – a potentially hurtful word is probably forgotten or, perhaps even, understood for what it was.

But let me say this – these are dangerous devices, these hard words used by Jesus. They’re sort of like mini-miracles – words that would be poison in our mouths become soothing balm from his.

And because the church has been run by mortals since the death of Jesus, there has been plenty opportunity for us to get it wrong, to use words that hurt, to confront others awkwardly, to make our case in self-righteous and hurtful ways.

You look over our history and you see so many times the church got it wrong – persecuting Jews, persecuting other Christians who happened to differ on doctrine, backing unjust wars, covering up abuse. Such a long, sad litany.

You probably know someone who has been hurt by the church or by someone acting in the name of the church. You may have been hurt by the church. I’ve known people who have been divorced and then run off by their congregations – either through official policy or by longstanding hurtful custom. I’ve known people who have been ostracized because they’re somehow too conservative or too liberal. I’ve known people who have been let down by pastors, and I know my name surely will be involved in such stories.

But of course, there is good news. The church is so much bigger than its problems. Jesus Christ is so much more powerful than any human institution. That is why we’re here. Sometimes we’re here because, like the Canaanite woman, our faith in our church defies all logic. But we have faith and we come back, hoping to meet Jesus.

This is why we have corporate confession – why we get on our knees in this weekly service to ask forgiveness for things done and left undone. This is why we have individual confession with a priest or deacon, we call it the sacramental rite of reconciliation – there we admit to our weaknesses and failings so that we may be filled with the Holy Spirit and touched by the forgiveness promised by Christ through His church.

We need confession because sometimes we are the stumbling blocks to our brothers and sisters. Sometimes we let others be stumbling blocks to us. We let the weaknesses of our humanness get between us and Christ.

This is why we have the sacrament of unction – our healing service in which we ask for healing – perhaps physical, but many times for the emotional pain and hurts that have inflicted upon us by others. And perhaps, just perhaps, for the pain of knowing that we have caused pain to others.

And of course, this is why we have the Eucharist – it’s why we gather every week to share in the body and blood of Christ because the only name given for healing and for salvation is Jesus Christ our Lord.

We are going to be hurt in this life, sometimes at the hands of those who claim to speak for Jesus. And we always run the risk of hurting others.

But that’s never the end of the story. It wasn’t the end of the story for the Canaanite woman, who had so much faith that she just barreled through what she could have seen as hurtful, who kept after Jesus for healing because she knew it was his to give.

So pain and hurt do not make the end of our story. When the next words from our hearts are, “Lord, help me,” we already are rewriting that story. It becomes a story that ends with the words of Christ, “My child, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.”

Amen.