"The Joy of Being Wrong" | Nathan LeRud | September 8, 2024

Here's the way the Canadian writer Anthony Oliveira tells the story we just heard:

Once, while visiting Tyre in the north, a Gentile woman who didn't really know very much about your deal asked you to cure her daughter.

And you said, "I must tend to the children before the dogs," which was rude.

But she said, "Well, even dogs get leftovers."

And so you healed the girl, because you have to admit that was a pretty good comeback.

It's a pretty good comeback.

Jesus calls her a dog. He calls her a puppy, really, which is– I mean, at bare minimum, impolite, and possibly a little bit racist.

But she doesn't just take it. She pushes back.

In the words of the rapper Missy Elliott, she flips it and she reverses it.

The Syrophoenician woman is like the patron saint of anybody who's ever been a little bit spicy, see, any woman who dared to talk back to a man. A few of my colleagues up here know a little bit about where this woman is coming from. Because the perfect comeback is, I think, truly a kind of a miracle. Because most of the time the perfect comeback occurs to us hours or days after we need it, but every so often, the miracle happens, and the words are just there.

Even dogs get the leftovers. And bam, her daughter is healed! It's a miracle!

The woman's, what, the woman's determined faith is what makes her daughter well? That's the traditional reading: Jesus is testing her the commentators say he's not really being racist he's just testing her. And she responds to the test by affirming her faith; she earns the miracle, if you like.

Or maybe the real miracle in this story is that a woman whom the Gospel doesn't even bother to name dares to challenge the Son of God.

The text doesn't record it, but I suspect she manages to get Jesus to laugh. And maybe that's the miracle. The gospels tend to present a a pretty dour picture of this guy, all things considered. But you know, the one who hung around with tax collectors and sinners, I suspect, had a pretty reasonably well-developed sense of humor.

So she meets him on those terms, one human being to another. She confronts him, and he blesses her for it.

The miracle here, maybe, is that Jesus changes his mind. The world doesn't really usually work this way, but this time it does.

Jews do not share things in common with Syrophoenician Gentiles, but here they do.

Women don't dare talk back to men, either, in first century Jewish or Roman societies, but this woman does, and she's blessed for it.

There are Miracles all over the story if we have eyes to see them. This is how the world could be, maybe can be when God is playfully, joyfully, scandalously, blasphemously at work within it.

There's nothing– there's nothing safe about a miracle, right, they require a certain kind of risk. You have to name the thing that you want, you have to risk the vulnerability of asking, and then you run the risk that Jesus is going to do something completely unexpected.

He's going to, you know, spit into his hand and give you a wet willy, like he does a few verses later to the man with the speech impediment.

Miracles are kind of about that they're about like shooting your shot and letting God do whatever God's going to do. They're almost never these serious, solemn things drenched in Latin chant with incense burning, in my experience anyway. Miracles are more often small things, sometimes silly things. They're the antics of a clown, they're unexpected moments of joy that sneak their way into a tense situation, break open something that starts to feel like joy.

I mean find a silliness if you want to go looking for a miracle; that's one way to read these texts. Go for the joke, go for the jugular, or dare to say the inappropriate thing. Run the risk of pushing back, and see what God can do. The miracle happens when I learn to change my mind, when I discover what the Theologian James Allison calls "the joy of being wrong." The joy of being overwhelmingly, beautifully, joyfully wrong.

So I messaged the family text thread yesterday. I said, I'm working on a sermon about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. I need a story about a time I was wrong. I'm racking my brain, I can't come up with a single thing. Can anybody think of a time that I was wrong? I'm kind of struggling here.

Well when you text your family a question like that, they come back with all kinds of– some of you know my parents. My mom just texted back the roll eye emoji. She's like, oh brother. Uh, give me some examples, give me some examples. So I was given lots of material to work with.

My family is celebrating this weekend; we're celebrating the fact that my sister Lizzy gave birth to the the first member of a new generation of LeRuds. His name is Thaddeus Arcturus. [applause] Thank you, we're very excited. He's very healthy, the baby boy, born Eugene on Tuesday. To be honest, I never really wanted a baby in my family. I think that was similar for Lizzy. I mean, every baby obviously is a blessing, but every baby basically looks the same as every other baby, and we've never found them to be all that engaging.

So the story of how Lizzy and Ben decided they wanted to have a child is theirs to tell. I could tell a little bit of my side of it, which is that even after my sister called to tell me this joyful news, that she was pregnant, as excited and as astounded as I was, I was also a little bit scared. And I was a little bit sad, cause I've gotten kind of used to our little family unit of five adults, and I wasn't sure for a long time, that I was you know really ready for a poor wayfaring stranger, some pooping, crying, helpless creature to come in and start getting all of the attention. That's kind of my job. [applause]

Changes to the family structure are kind of difficult for me. That will not come as a surprise to those of you who know me, I suspect. That's true for lots of us. We hang on to stuff. And one of the things that some of us hang on to a little bit too tightly is family, it's traditions and rituals and and rules. And even when we're aware that those rules are not working as well as they used to, maybe they never worked all that well to begin with, nobody else gets to criticize my family, right, those are my people, thank you very much. I will take them, dysfunction and all.

When Lizzy first brought a boy to the beach with her 20 years ago, the man who become her husband, I resisted all the way. I was awful to Ben. He became my brother-in-law, and at first I didn't know what to make of him, this football player, percussion major, macho guys guy who plays Dungeons and Dragons and did not seem to fit into our, you know, our little sensitive, tea-drinking, poetry-reading, guinea-pig-obsessed little family uniform. And it turns out I was wrong. Ben is the best thing that ever happened to the LeRud family. I mean certainly he's among the best things that ever happened to my sister, they got married 15 years ago.

But Ben is one of the best things that ever– best things that ever happened to me.

I never had a brother, but I got this miracle: I got a brother-in-law. And then to our great surprise, this cherry on top of the miracle sundae, God's little joke on my recalcitrant [ __ ] heart, which is that this brother-in-law whom I fought and tolerated, and then finally learned to love– turns out he and Lizzy brought us this new gift, this new threat to family equilibrium, this squirming, pooping, crying baby named Thaddeus Arcturus.

Thaddeus is Greek for "gift of God," theodoros in Greek. Arcturus is the North Star. So he's God's Gift, he's our North Star, and that's just another way of saying that he's a miracle, right. I told my sister half joking, half not joking, that I was very much looking forward to meeting him once he potty trained and able to discuss Jane Eyre with me, because babies don't really interest me. They kind of scare me, to be honest. I'm convinced that if I let go of their head it's just going to like fall off with a horrible thud, right, like a overripe melon all over the ground.

So I managed to fix my entire career as a priest so that I've never actually had to hold a baby when baptizing it. You can check the tapes: Shana and VJ and some of my colleagues have actually learned how to do this, how to juggle infant and chasuble and shell and miles-long christening gown, and I never, I never had to do it. I never wanted to do it. I always managed to schedule myself so I never actually had to do it.

And then on Tuesday, this baby, this gift from God, this miracle was laid into my arms for the first time. I was terrified. He was less than 24 hours old, he was 7 and a half pounds, swaddled within an inch of his life. And as soon as he landed in my arms, his little eyes kind of screwed up, and he started working his face. I could feel his diaphragm working, I knew he was going to cry, and he kind of started to fuss a little bit. Boy here we go, like, this is exactly what I was worried about. So my sister says, try making a whooshing sound; that, like, reminds him of the of the womb. Apparently that's good for calming. I'm sitting here with his baby in my hand like [makes whooshing sound] like, trying to like make him think that he's in the womb. And he kind of, it kind of worked. He started to like calm down a little bit, and he kind of like nestled into the crook of my arm, and I was a goner.

I have since been assured by people who know that that that's a sign that he is more neurologically mature than other babies, so there you go. He is– he is a better than average baby. I'm not– I'm not surprised. I still don't particularly like babies, but I better– you better believe I love this one, right, like this is– this is the joy of being wrong, right, this is the joy of having the miracle laid in your arms, and you discover you are joyfully, ecstatically, miraculously wrong about everything.

The Syrophoenician woman confronts Jesus with all of his preconceived ideas about how the world works, what matters the most, what what he thinks– he's– what he thinks he's doing in this town. He thinks he's there to minister to his own people, to teach his own flock, to take care of his own family. She goes to the heart of his mission, and she challenges his need to be right. It's as if she says, what if the mission that you think you're on is so much bigger than you could possibly imagine?

So you can read the story at least one of two ways: you can choose to believe that Jesus knew all along what was going to happen, he's just testing a woman's faith. I find that reading kind of boring, because I think it misses one of the most important things there is about Jesus, at least for me, which is that he is a human being. Maybe without sin– that's the traditional teaching, although even that formulation I got to say I find less and less convincing, because I really find myself longing for a Savior who gets me. I want a Savior who struggles and who can identify with my struggles, with my sinfulness, if you like. All the ways in which I know myself to be one who mostly gets it wrong, sometimes on a daily basis. A Savior who shows me not just through his his teaching but through his life, through his lived example, what happens when somebody calls you on your [ __ ], when somebody makes you laugh at yourself, the absurdity of your puny little ideas about how the world works – and then invites you into this joyful, exuberant play.

I think the Syrophoenician woman is the miracle in this story. Certainly she's the one who blows Jesus's world wide open.

She teaches him, she saves him.

"Even the dogs get the leftovers."

And he looks into her eyes, he laughs, she calls his bluff. And so with joy and laughter and incredible delight, he says, "Go in peace, your daughter is healed."

Cause you got to admit, that is a pretty good comeback.