The sermon preached by Fr. Ernie on Sunday, August 20, 2023

You Mean I Love This Person Too?

By Ernest Boyer

You know, over the years I’ve become convinced that most people know the right way to treat others. I know it does not always seem that way. Still, I believe it’s true. I believe this for two reasons. The first is that, when it comes to those we really care about, most of us do try to treat them well. Oh, I know, we often go off the track. We go off the track a lot of the time in fact. As the old song goes, “You always hurt the ones you love.” We get irritated and take it out on those closest to us. We build up resentments that can become very hard to heal, but still, we do try to heal them. We make amends. We go to marriage counselors. We may even go so far as to say we’re sorry. — Yes, it happens. — The fact is, most people are really doing their best. They are making a genuine effort to treat those they care about well. Just because they often miss the mark doesn’t mean they’re not trying.

And this leads me to the second reason why I believe that most people know how to treat others well, which is that most people feel bad when they don’t. Once again there are exceptions to this. In fact, we can see these exceptions in the news. For a long time now, we’ve watched some of our leading politicians publicly exposed for lies and corruptions. Almost none show any signs of remorse. Instead they blame to others. They pretend they did nothing wrong. They deny the whole thing. This has been happening so often that I’m beginning to wonder why we keep electing people like this. These are some to the very worst among us. Why do we keep putting them in charge? I am convinced that people like this are the exceptions, though. I feel that the vast majority of us have the good grace to feel bad and admit it when we make a mistake. That’s the sign of a good person, after all. Good people feel bad when they do something wrong. Bad people do not. I think most people are good.

So, yes, I believe that most of us know what it means to treat others well. We know how to do it. The how of doing right has never been the issue. What has been the issue is the who. We have no doubt as to how to be nice to someone. What we do sometimes have doubt about is whether the person now standing in front of us is one of those we should treat in this way. For as long as human beings have been around they’ve been dividing the people they meet into two groups: either “us” or “them.” Everyone in the “us-group” we treat well. All the others we don’t.

The thing is, Jesus makes it very clear that this is something we have to change. He says this again and again and again. He says it in the sermon on the mount, where he tells us to love our enemies. He says it in the story of the Good Samaritan, where he makes it clear that we must treat strangers and foreigner the same way we treat those closest to us. He says it in Mathew 25 where he tells us that whatever we do to the least and poorest among us we do to him. Jesus leaves no doubt about this. As Loren so often reminds us, “When Jesus says love our neighbor, he does not say except for.”

That’s why today’s gospel is so jarring. It seems to show Jesus doing the very thing he constantly tells us not to do, dividing the world between “us” and “them” and treating those in the first group well and those in the second group badly. I mean, look at what it says. As Jesus is traveling a Canaanite woman come up to him and begs him to help her. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David;” she says, “my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Jesus does not answer her and his disciples tell him to send her away. Now, I have to tell you what it means that she’s a Canaanite woman. First of all, she is not a Jew. The Canaanites were the people who lived in this land before the Israelites invaded it. When Moses led his people out of Egypt and into what they called “the promised land,” the Canaanites were the people that they defeated. The Israelites treated the Canaanites the way European settlers treated the Native Americans. The came in with armies, drove them from their homes, then treated as second class citizens. The Native Americans stayed that way for hundreds of years too. I was shocked to learn recently that Native Americans were only declared to be US citizens in 1924. Until then, they were viewed as foreigners in their own land.

That was true of the Canaanites too. What is shocking, though, is that Jesus appears to buy into this prejudice. When his disciples tell him to send the woman away, he appears to agree with them. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he tells them. In other words, I have only come to help the Jews.

Hearing this, though, the woman kneels down before him and says again, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus then says something that does not sound like him at all, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he says.

“Yes, Lord,” the woman responds, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

It’s astonishing, isn’t it. Jesus has just compared her to a dog, and yet she believes in him so much that she simply will not him get away with it, and at last Jesus is moved to help her. “Woman, great is your faith!” he says, “Let it be done for you as you wish.” And with that, her daughter is healed 

Why had Jesus hesitated? Why would he hold back in helping someone in need? Was he testing her? Or was it that he too had to learn the full power of his own teaching? Frankly, it could be either one of those. That’s because our creeds teach us that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. As divine, he would never for an instant have doubted that this woman was just as fully a child of God as every other human being on earth. Not for an instant. And yet as a human, it may have been that he had something to learn too, and because he was both human and divine, it took only the briefest of words from this woman for him to learn this — to learn that this poor, frightened, scorned and marginalized woman was just as completely one of his devoted followers as anyone could be. She trusted him completely. She was as fully his as it is possible to be.

Is it disturbing to think that even Jesus had to learn that love is not just a matter of how but even more a matter of who? Perhaps that is why he did it. He wanted to show us that this is the hard part. The hard part about loving others is that it means everybody — everybody. It’s easy to love the people who love us. It’s easy to love the people we know and like. It’s easy to love the people who look like us, act like us, think like us. It’s harder to love those we don’t like, those who think or act differently from us. And yet, our job is to wish them well too, to work for their welfare and treat them fairly and with respect, because that’s what love means in this case. People of other cultures, other races, other religions, other sexual orientations, other political parties, other economic groups — everyone. Everyone.

Saying it this way, it can seem overwhelming, but it is really not so hard? We don’t have to love everyone all at once, after all. We just have to do it one person at a time. We just have to love the person in front of us. Whoever it is. Just them. We just have to look into their eyes and say, “God, I know you are in this person. Help me to honor you by honoring them in all that I do and say.” That’s it. Jesus did it with the Canaanite woman, and we can do it too. And it won’t be hard either. Because God is with us. AMEN. 

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