Come From Away

(from Mark 7:24-30)

Did you ever hear the joke about the woman who moved to P.E.I. from away when she was two years old?  She lived her whole life on the Island and died here on her 90th birthday, yet her obituary in The Guardian read, “Woman from Away Died Peacefully in Her Home.” She wasn’t born on P.E.I. so she couldn’t be classified as an “Islander.”

According to The Guardian, there was also a story about a baby boy conceived on the lower deck of the Northumberland ferry halfway across the Strait.  When the rest of the family discovered the baby was not conceived on P.E.I. soil, an argument started about whether the baby was a true Islander.  Both of his parents were Islanders, but there were the hardliners who said, “No, he was not conceived on the Island so he’s not an Islander.”  (For some it’s not just about being born on P.E.I., you must also be conceived here).  To settle this dispute, they took the matter to an older member of the family who finally determined, “In my mind, it all depends on whether the ferry was going away or coming back.”

It’s been said that sometimes people experience Islanders as cold, unwelcoming and sometimes just plain discriminatory.

I find that that hard to imagine. Both Margaret and I have felt very welcome here. But we know that island cultures are more insular than most places and we are also from an island so we may not notice it so much!

I suppose all communities create boundaries which define who is “OF” that community and those who are “NOT,” at least not in quite the same way as those born and bred there.

Our reading from Mark this morning is all about boundaries, and the people in the story bump up against them. Jesus and his disciples have crossed a boundary, the border between Galilee and the area of Tyre and Sidon.  Maybe they were taking a well-deserved break from preaching, teaching, and healing. Like taking a few days off and going to the mainland for the weekend.

Margaret and I went to Costco in Moncton last Saturday to stock up and I have to say it felt like a mini vacation! We used to live 5 mins drive from Costco in Halifax. We went there every week, now suddenly going to Costco is a vacation!

But back to our story: Tyre and Sidon was a Gentile region. Few Jews would live there, so Jesus and his disciples were in foreign territory.  This Canaanite woman hears about Jesus and comes up to him and his disciples and bows and begs him to cast the demons from her daughter. In Matthew’s version of the story, she is much noisier. She’s shouting, “have mercy on me, Lord, son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon. have mercy on me!”  Now just a heads up: these passages from Mark and Matthew are hard to read, because first Jesus ignores her.  In Matthew’s version, the disciples say to him, “send this noisy woman on her way, please. Get her out of here!”

Well, you would expect that Jesus, being Jesus, would reply, “No, no, she can stay; I want to talk to her; I want to help her; I want to heal her daughter.”  But he doesn’t! He says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” WHOAH!  Jesus lighten up! Are you having a bad day? Did you get out of the wrong side of the bed this morning?

In the Middle East, even today, calling someone a “dog” is the worst way you could insult them. If you measure Jesus in this text against the Canadian culture of inclusiveness, then is he will not come up smelling like roses in this passage!  This woman is “from away” in his eyes, even though he has come into her territory.  For Jesus, this woman is not part of the Jewish community. And his initial reaction is to not to engage with her.  As far as Jesus is concerned, at least in this text in his initial reaction, it would not be appropriate for him as a Jewish teacher to get involved in her problems.  So whichever way you look at this passage, Jesus behavior is affected by the cultural and racial boundaries associated with his Jewish identity.

There is a real irony in this story of Jesus. Remember last week I was preaching about separating the holy from the ordinary and the pure from the impure? And Jesus in the text preceding this one had been lecturing the Pharisees about what was pure or impure. He concluded that what came out of a person is what defiled them. But look what’s coming out of Jesus’ mouth in this passage! He uses the word “dog” because Jewish people considered Gentiles to be impure.  He is telling her that “the children should be fed first, and he means the children of Israel, not HER child.  Now some theologians have suggested that Jesus was just using rhetoric as a kind of object lesson for those around him to shock them and to draw out this woman’s faith.  I don’t buy that. I don’t think we can varnish this passage to improve our view of Jesus in this incident. If we do that then I think we are trying to fit Jesus into a concept of divine perfection which robs him of his humanity!

The issue at hand here is the problem of boundaries. Boundaries used to divide and separate people.  Now boundaries in themselves are not a bad thing. Sometimes they protect a culture and a way of life.  For example, I talked last week about the Jewish community. How have they been able to maintain their identity as a people for the last two thousand years? It is those boundaries, those lines of demarcation that have enabled Jews to maintain a sense of self-identity.  And those boundary markers are things like: rules about marriage and marital life, kosher practices concerning food, rules about rites of passage. These are all markers that are exclusive, but have enabled the continued survival of the Jewish people.

It was just over a year ago a woman called Heather Heyer lost her life over a boundary marker when she was run over by a car, and nineteen people were injured. It was a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.  There was a consideration by the local government to remove the statue because of its association with the civil war and the terrible history of slavery and discrimination in the South.  When someone asked one of those marching with the white Nazi group why it was so important to keep Lee’s statue where it was, he said,  “White European culture has the right to be in America, like any other culture, and replacing the statue means the slow replacement of white heritage in the United States.” (1) You can see he believes this boundary marker is a way of protecting what he considers to be his culture. There have been similar arguments raised about the statue of Cornwallis in Halifax.

Cornwallis has been a lightning rod in the history of relations between the First Nations people and those who came to settle in Nova Scotia. And it’s complicated dealing with these issues. Do you remove statues of such controversial figures or are there ways of placing them in context?  Maybe placing a statue of a first nations person directly facing the statue of Cornwallis, challenging the discriminatory values he held. I don’t know the answer to that. In fact, they removed the Cornwallis statue in July of this year.

Social Theorists suggest that a great deal of human effort is expended in “guarding “carefully drawn boundaries.  That boundaries produce in people’s minds a so-called “moral distance;” boundaries keep “them,” “the other” at bay, and emphasize distance and difference,  and in worst-case scenarios, they hold “others” up to ridicule and debasement. (2)  I’m sure that there are cultural boundaries between communities in PEI as much as there are anywhere else. And no doubt some of those cultural boundaries have played into the decisions made by this pastoral charge.

What’s interesting about this passage from Matthew is this Canaanite woman’s reply, and how Jesus responds. You see, she is persistent. She believes in a God of justice. She will not give up on seeking help for her daughter.  “She is a mother and her child is suffering. We can imagine that she has watched as her tormented daughter has become a stranger to her.  We can picture this mother hearing her daughter’s cries and holding her during fits and cleaning up her messes.  So when Jesus replies, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” she flips the tables on him.  She says, “Yes lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”  She says, “Come on Jesus, give us a crumb for God’s sake!” She is saying to Jesus, “Actually Lord, despite what you are telling me, I’m saying… Canaanite lives matter.” (3)  And then Jesus himself has a “come to Jesus moment!”  … and he understands where she is coming from.  I like his reply in the Gospel of Matthew, “O woman, how great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”

It is said, “the truth that is offensive to you, may be the very truth that saves you!”

Now you might have a problem with this Jesus who we always see as being so perfect, being corrected and taught that Canaanite lives matter.  But you see boundaries are a human problem and a human challenge. That is the answer to this contradiction between Jesus in his perfect divinity and the imperfect humanity we see here It is the reality that Jesus cannot save us unless he’s human like us, and unless he can confront error and misjudgment in himself and overcome it. Like us, Jesus in his humanity is constrained by the boundaries in himself. The boundaries defined by his Jewish identity. But he overcomes them through his life as a man, as a Jew, and with the help of a Canaanite woman.  And he learns that in God there are no boundaries.

In 1989, I was returning to Bermuda from a Christian Education course which I had been taking at Tatamagouche.  I picked up a book there written by an author called Ken Wilber.  I was reading it on the flight home. And came across these words: “THE ULTIMATE SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is FATAL to confuse the two.”  We were flying at about 20,000 feet, and as I looked out the window, I understood what he was saying. It is the difference between the map and the terrain.  Because when you look down from that height you see no divisions, borders, or boundaries. You don’t see walls. It’s one seamless terrain.  We are the ones who create the maps. WE ARE THE ONES who define others by those lines which we draw.  But Paul says in Christ there is no east or west, no male or female, no slave nor free.  And what Paul means is that Jesus has overcome those boundaries in his humanity and he shares that humanity with us.

Jesus is the no boundary reality. 

I think all we need to do is keep reminding ourselves of that. Because sure enough, if you are like me you will keep drawing those maps, which can exclude others. We can’t help it. WE ARE ALL COME FROM AWAY.  But in Jesus, those boundaries have been dissolved because he dissolved them in his own life. And what we are called to do is live in Christ, and to place our lives inside his.

I would ask you to think about boundaries over the next week. We all have boundary markers in our lives, they define who we are but they can also become lines which exclude others. What are those lines in my life, in your life which are the ones we celebrate and which are those we need to be more careful about in our relations with others?  Island or no island, we’re all Come from Away, but we all find the place where we belong through Jesus the no-boundary reality.

(1) [https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/18/16145476/charlottesville protest white supremacy]

(2) [http://onhumanrelationswithothersentientbeings.weebly.com/the blog/understanding the social construction of boundaries]

(3) [https://www.onscripture.com/jesus woke we should be too]