The "Other" is also the Same

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
September 6, 2009; 14 Pentecost; Proper 18, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 7:24-37) – Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go-- the demon has left your daughter." So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak."
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You all remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a great American novel, set in 1839. Huck Finn is a boy who has run away from an abusive father and from the civilizing efforts of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. While camping out, Huck meets Miss Watson's slave, Jim. Jim is running away too, from Miss Watson's intention to sell him into the harsh servitude downriver. Huck believes what he has been taught, that it is wrong for Jim to escape. Jim is the property of Miss Watson.

Author Mark Twain uses the journey of this unlikely pair as a foil for his own satire social commentary and satire about the foolishness and wickedness of human beings.

When their raft is swamped by a passing steamship, Huck finds refuge with an established family and becomes friends with a boy his age, Buck Grangerford. The Grangerfords are in a thirty-year blood feud with the Shepherdsons, both good, church-going clans who bring their guns to church as they listen to the preacher's sermon on brotherly love. When Buck's sister elopes with one of the Grangerfords, there is a gunfight, and all of the Shepherdson males are killed. Huck narrowly escapes to rejoin Jim on the raft.

In one of their adventures, a grifter who poses as the lost descendant of Louis XVI and the rightful heir to the throne of France, "captures" Jim and turns him in, copping his interest in the reward money. Huck is outraged. But his conscience tells him that Jim is Miss Watson's property, and for Huck to continue to help Jim escape, would be tantamount to stealing. By now, though, Jim has become a real person, a friend to Huck. Huck lets friendship overcome his moral teaching and resolves to help Jim's escape, willing to face what he believes will be eternal consequences for a thief, saying to himself, "All right then, I'll go to hell."

In a complicated twist of plot, Tom Sawyer arrives and assists in the escape, but gets shot in the leg. Rather than making his way to freedom, Jim stops to help Tom, and for the first time in his life, makes a demand of a white person. He tells Huck to go get a doctor. Huck explains this complete reversal of his world-view the only way he can, "I knowed he was white on the inside... so it was all right now." Eventually, everything does turn out all right.

There are so many stories – novels, plays, movies, operas, T.V. shows, even animations – about one person discovering a common human bond with someone they believed to be "other" – different, unrelated, even sometimes the enemy. In those stories, something happens to allow them to recognize that the other is also the same. Out of that recognition comes relationship, reconciliation, even love.

From Mark's Gospel today, we heard one of those stories, about a Gentile woman, a Syrophoenician, who begged Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter. "He said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.'" In Jesus' neighborhood, Gentiles were called "dogs." He had heard that language from childhood. It was Biblical language for those who were unclean. Outsiders. Those "Others." We all grow up with some form of cultural conditioning. It is part of our humanity, and the church has always insisted that Jesus was fully human.

"Let the children be fed first," he told the Syrophoenecian woman. Jesus understood his calling to be for the renewal of his people Israel. Maybe that is why he did not want to be known as he journeyed into the region of Tyre. He traveled anonymously; this wasn't his territory. No, he was sent to the lost sheep of Israel.

But this woman crossed his boundary, and would not take "no" for an answer. "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." The church says that Jesus is fully human; the church also says that Jesus is fully divine. This woman's answer is divine. It speaks of love. Love for her child. It is a word of humble humanity, and God's ears are always tuned to the needs of humble humanity. Instantly Jesus sheds his human cultural conditioning, and sees this woman as a fellow child of God. Instantly, he heals her daughter.

From that moment onward in Mark's Gospel, Jesus changed his mission. He treated the Gentiles with the same compassion as his own people. From that moment onward, Jesus performed the same miracles of healing and feeding among the Gentiles as he did among the Jews. We read today that he went out of his way, past the Jewish region west of Galilee, into the Decapolis on the far side of the lake and on the other side of the River Jordan. The Decapolis was a Greek region, populated mostly by non-Jewish Hellenists. That is where Jesus touched and healed a man who was deaf and mute. In the next story in Mark's Gospel, Jesus feeds a multitude of 4,000 in this same location. It was the same miracle of feeding that Mark reported two chapters earlier about Jesus' feeding of the multitudes in his home of Israel.

We who are Christian cheapen our faith and betray Jesus' generous spirit when we treat those from other faiths and nations any differently than we treat our own kin. We are to love our neighbor as ourselves, and the answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" is the story of the Good Samaritan. A Samaritan was an outsider, a heretic, an enemy. That's another one of those stories about recognizing a relationship between those who were thought to be "Other."

I think our relationship to the "Other" is universally expansive.

We have a group in our church called the Friends of Animals. They celebrate the relationship we share with others in the animal kingdom. They promote an ancient tradition. The biblical kosher laws witness to the life that is in our brothers the animals, and how that life belongs to God and deserves human respect. So many of Jesus' illustrations are observations from the animal world – the birds of the air, the sheep and the goats, the net full of fish – all told by one born among the animals in the manger. The animals are our neighbors.

We have another group in our church called the Gaia Guild. They celebrate our relationship with the whole natural order. They also promote an ancient tradition. The earth is God's and all that is in it. (Ps. 24:10; 1 Cor. 10:26) God speaks, and the stars and the planets, the earth and sky and sea, and everything that is comes into being. The earth is alive, and God's entrusts her stewardship to us. We are God's gardeners, called to love and care for the health of the planet and all of its life. The biblical story begins and ends in a garden. All earthly life is our neighbor.

In our lifetime the ancient story of other-connectedness has even transcended human boundaries. You remember the movie E.T. A little boy befriends a stranded Extra-Terrestrial and saves him from the army of scientists. The little boy, Elliott, and alien E.T. find themselves bonded by a love that glows in their hearts.

Scientists tell us that the atoms and molecules that have bound together to create the earth and all that is in it, including us, human beings, come from the remains of great collisions and explosions of stars billions of years ago. We are literally stardust.

As God breathes our life into being, we are in an intimate relationship with the entire cosmos. What God has joined together, we should not separate. All humanity is our neighbor: Jew and Gentile, slave and free, Grangerford and Shepherdson, rich and poor, and every other division of race, religion, nationality, tribe, teaching, power, wealth, or condition of life – we are all one within God's eternal embrace. The "Other" is also the same.

We are even in an intimate relationship with the animate and the inanimate worlds, from the microscopic plankton that feeds the whales to the mysterious invisible dark matter that balances the universe. We are all in this together, and God calls us to honor respectfully all that God has made.

The old stories tell us to open our eyes and our hearts so that we can recognize our selves in the "Other." Those stories are simply narrative versions of Jesus' summary of all wisdom: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as your self." The "Other" is our neighbor. The boundary of "neighbor" is universal.
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