Who Eats the Crumbs?

For more years than I can remember, my family and I have had a tradition each Labor Day weekend. We mark the long weekend not in the customary ways of backyard cookouts, last trips to the beach, or flipping through the channels and marveling at Jerry Lewis’ umpteenth telethon. What we do is give ourselves collective permission to wallow in the end of summer. We feel it is better just to admit that it’s more than a bit of sad that summer seems to come to a screeching halt on Labor Day. I have always believed that more than any season, summer makes the largest imprint on our memories over time. The days are longer, we linger outside past dark, stand in line for soft serve ice cream, and perhaps take to the road or air to see new places or visit family. As a kid, I thought of summer as riding my bike, playing in the creek behind our house and never remembering an exact time for bed. The popular band Greenday, who my son Will talked me into seeing with him last year when they came to the Civic Center, wrote a quintessential anthem for this time of year entitled “Wake me up when September ends.” The band sings: “summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last, wake me up when September ends.”

During the summer months I look forward to my Sundays off from the churches I serve so that I can visit other churches and worship more anonymously. These are mornings when I don’t greet people at the door, there are no sermons to preach, and I don’t even have to listen to the announcements. I’m there as a visitor, for me and no one else, and I love it. My plans have only backfired once, when I visited a small church in southern Vermont. As the service time neared, the senior warden walked to the front and announced that the priest filling in that Sunday had car problems and could not make it. After sheepishly looking around for a few long seconds, I started to raise my hand – reluctantly -- but before I could confess my ordained status, by chance a man sitting near me raised his hand and said that he was ordained and would be happy to preach. There were only ten of us in that small church.

One of the true joys of summer is getting away -- as far away as possible at times -- from work pressures, rutted routines, the heat of paved cities, and the whirlwind that leads so many families to not taking the time they should to sit down and just be together. The further away you travel, the logic goes, the more likely you can walk down a city street, stroll on a beach, hike through the woods, without being recognized by someone who knows you.

In our gospel this morning from Mark, Jesus finds himself on one of those rare occasions when he is in foreign territory. He left the region he knew most, Galilee, where he was raised, and traveled to the region of Tyre and Sidon on the coast of modern day Lebanon. We heard those same towns mentioned in the brief but destructive war this summer in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, as rockets and bombs were fired from and dropped near those same places Jesus once walked and visited. In the gospel we heard last week, Jesus was fresh off his confrontation with the Pharisees who had come all the way from Jerusalem to tell Jesus’ followers that they were not following the proper rituals in the way they were handling food. The issue was purity. Jesus basically turned the issue around on them and said it didn’t matter so much what happened on the outside, but the key was what went on and came out of the inside: the human heart. Today’s epistle from James says this in another way: “What good is it if you say you have faith but do not have works”? James 2:14. With this, Jesus got out of town.

We read that Jesus entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Jesus seemed to want what summer travel sometimes offers us: a little time away from the demands of life at home; some days near the water; no one asking for things; a break from committee meetings; or miracle making; staying on top of the parade of emails and phone messages. Just some time away. Slipping in and out without much notice. But we know that Jesus could not just make himself melt into the woodwork. People far and wide were talking, even when instructed by Jesus not to tell anyone, and word reached that house and a woman on a mission came running.

This gospel reading is so compelling because it offers so many jumping off places. We could explore what it meant for Jesus to be in a foreign land away from what he knew. I have often said that the periods of my life when I learned the most about myself were the years I traveled and lived overseas. Though we live in a country that stretches a continent and we could spend a lifetime traveling within the U.S., I think it is extremely important for Americans to travel beyond our borders from time to time so to experience other cultures and be challenged with other views, perhaps not widely held at home. Living in such a large, wealthy, and populous country, we can easily be lulled into believing our own views of ourselves, without checking them up against what others in foreign places may think.

We could explore the apparent role reversal in the encounter of Jesus and the woman -- an outsider, a non-Jew showing Jesus a thing or two about what inclusion and compassion really means. She is a person outside the faith, like the Good Samaritan, who exemplifies as much or more faith than the disciples Jesus left behind in Galilee. We see again that constant underlying theme in scripture of God using the outsider, the foreigner, the outcast to point the way towards God’s will and desire for this world and our lives. Again from James 2: Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?

For me, the word that stays with me is dog. Jesus first discounted the woman who was begging for the health of her daughter, by implicitly comparing her to a dog. The children to be fed first were the people of Israel. It is fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs. The woman, in her desperation for her daughter, was willing to eat the crumbs.

Our cuddling version of man’s best friend hardly matches up with the dogs of Jesus’ day. In Matthew 7:6 Jesus says, “Do not give what is holy to dogs.” In Psalm 59:6 one’s enemies are compared to dogs that howled and prowled about the city. Dogs in the Bible are menacing scavengers. I have led several trips to Latin America and it never fails that there always seems to be one person in the group that gets a soft spot for the many skinny, stray and mangy dogs that one often sees in the streets of developing countries. They start feeding the dogs scraps and pet them, even though the dogs are filthy. They do this to the curiosity of the locals. Stray dogs are everywhere in poverty-stricken parts of our world, often tormented by children and adults, who throw rocks at them for amusement or out of boredom.

The woman in the story could care less being compared to a dog. She wanted healing for her daughter and she would do anything, even beg a foreign miracle worker, who did not appear that interested in her that day.

The Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, the self-declared leader of those in our communion most opposed to the Episcopal Church, once infamously discounted the status of homosexuals in the church by saying that they were “below the beasts.” He could have called them dogs, for his distain and judgment was evident.

Those who some would call the dogs of this world want and deserve more than crumbs – what is left over when the meal is over. People with HIV in Africa want access to generic, less expensive AIDS fighting drugs, but large pharmaceutical companies fear the loss of patent protections and the loss of profits. Illegal immigrants want to come out of the shadows and remind us that without their hard work many of our nation’s abundant crops would rot in the fields, our office buildings would not get cleaned at night, and our houses would not get built – not for the lower prices we have grown accustomed to pay. Inner city youth want new and clean and safe schools like those in the suburbs. We can applaud the tangible progress being made in the city of Hartford as new and remodeled schools come on line this fall, as we also keep the focus on the work still needed to close the gap in the educational divide between the haves and have not’s.

I was told a long time ago by an animal lover that dog, d-o-g, is God spelled backwards; the notion being that the joy and unconditional love that dogs give their owners can reveal a bit of God’s love. The woman we meet in today’s gospel pushes that idea even further. This foreign woman shows Jesus a thing or two about compassion, inclusion and mercy. Our world, our nation, our city, our church, is filled with people desperate for healing, love, decent jobs, companionship, meaning, clean drinking water, a solid education for their kids, a roof over their heads, a hot shower and a warm bed, and access to a hospital or medicine when they get sick. Many are desperate to live in a world where the horror of September 11th will never again be repeated -- where terrorists cannot attack and kill the innocent and when politicians do not feed into our worst fears for momentary political advantage.

Jesus Christ came to a world desperate for love and hope. He also came to show us that if we really want to draw close to him, if we want get a sense of what God most wants for us, we better start noticing those who are willing to eat the crumbs and the leftovers in the face of indifference and abundance. D-O-G: God spelled backwards. Maybe there is something to it.