"Crumbs from the Table" - Matthew 15:21-28 - August 16, 2026

Today's lesson is from Matthew 15, 21 through 28.

Hear now the word of the Lord.

And I'd like to say about this passage that it's one of those rare places in the Bible that show that Jesus learned from the people around him.

Remember when he became human flesh, he emptied himself of a lot of his godly knowledge.

And he had to learn how to speak, you know, as a child, as a baby, and all the things we do in school and about behavior.

And Jesus went on learning, and this passage shows us.

Hear now the word of the Lord.

Matthew 15, verses 21 through 28.

Matthew 15:21–28

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.

And just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David, my daughter is tormented by a demon.

But he did not answer her at all.

And his disciples came and urged him, saying, Send her away.

She keeps following her, us, shouting after us.

And Jesus answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

But she came and knelt before him, saying, Lord help me.

How often have we said, Lord help me?

Lord help me.

And he answered, It's not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.

And she said, Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table.

And then Jesus answered her, Woman, great is your faith.

Let it be done for you as you wish.

And her daughter was healed from that moment.

Well, Martha basically just gave my sermon for me.

On that note, as Jesus learned, I want you to think about for a moment your favorite teacher.

The best teacher that you ever had.

It could be a school teacher, professor, a Sunday school teacher, family member, ballet teacher, but your favorite teacher.

So now I want everybody to say that person's name out loud.

One, two, three.

Why so?

Is it Travis?

Nice.

You all have somebody.

Okay, so you've thought of your favorite teacher, and I wonder, as you think about them, what made them your favorite?

What some of their qualities were.

Now I'm gonna be honest.

I was um always good in school.

I think I've confessed this before.

I got reasonable grades, I took AP and advanced classes, but I didn't ever really try very hard in school.

Unfortunately, my children have inherited that same mindset as me.

But um I didn't really work that hard on my homework.

Sometimes I'd do it in the class before it was due while attempting to listen to that teacher.

It's probably some of my teachers' worst nightmares, someone who could do really well if I just tried, but I was okay with just being mediocre, especially in the high achievement and challenging Arlington, Virginia School District.

But that was until I took physics class.

That may surprise you as a pastor, but it was physics that really changed me.

On the first day of my junior year advanced physics class, Deborah Waldron came in wearing a superhero cape.

She stood on a table with one leg behind a full-length mirror and the other leg in front.

Hopefully, you know your reflections and know that that would make it look like she was flying.

That was how she introduced the class.

Deborah, who told us to call her that, we called her Deborah, could have easily played Peter Pan in a stage production.

That's what she looked like.

She looked kind of like a young boy, especially as she was flying away on the first day of school.

She took a tricky subject that doesn't come naturally to everybody and made it fun for us.

If you didn't figure it out from that first day experiment, she was super goofy and nerdy.

Her yearbook picture was of her holding up a sign that said, Yay, physics.

And she had a way of giving us physics experiments that helped us understand how things really worked: taking apart flashlights, making rocket ships, measuring sound waves, while also teaching us all the math and the equations and stuff we needed to pass the tests at the same time.

I continued the next year to take AP physics, which took up two periods of the day and two AP exams at the end of the year, but it was still very interesting to me at that time.

Now, that fall of my senior year in AP physics, Deborah came up to my good friend Maya and me and asked us to do an experiment for the senior, the science project that year, the science fair, that she'd always wanted to try and had just not had a chance.

It was not necessarily a physics experiment, but an experiment to find out how people learn physics.

We were simply to go to all the freshman science classes and ask each of the students to make a circuit.

Something I'm pretty sure that we learned how to do in the seventh grade.

Basically, we had to take, they had to take all the pieces, the parts of the circuit, the light bulb and the cords and the battery, and put it together until it made the light bulb light.

And then we'd time it and see how long it took.

And we were to see how many, first of all, knew how to do this by ninth grade, but also we had to compare by gender whether the boys could do it quicker or would be more likely to be able to do it than the girls.

I don't remember all of the specifics of what the results were because that would be crazy if I could still remember that.

But we did find out that boys were more likely to know how to make a circuit, and girls, even when they did know how to do it, were a lot less confident about it.

Now, of course, we're as scientists, we were not supposed to speculate as to why that happened.

We just had to report the data and hypothesize from that.

But we were sure it had something to do with how girls were taught rather than boys.

Something that we looked into as research for this project.

Boys were often called on more than girls in classes, and even then, girls were less likely to speak up in the first place.

Boys were taught to problem solve, while girls were taught to follow other people's lead.

This was several years ago now, so this may have changed in our school systems, but at the time, even in our very highly educated little bubble in Arlington, the boys and the girls were learning in different ways.

Our project that year made it to the Virginia Science Fair.

It won an award, I can't remember what, probably honorable mention.

But thinking back now, it was probably doing that project in Deborah's class, one of the first teachers I had really teach me math and science in a way that I loved, was very important for my own development as a learner.

Here was a teacher who wanted other girls and women to love science as much as her.

Sure, thinking back, I'm not sure how many of the women in my class went on to do anything with science, maybe a few, though I do know one guy who went on to build robots and apps and is a millionaire in San Francisco now.

But anyway, I think her way of dealing with teaching science helped prepare me for college and even seminary later on more than any or most classes I took.

It made me think about how I experienced the world.

Now, back to the gospel story today, we find a woman who very much wants to be heard by Jesus.

She so desperately wants her daughter to be healed of this demon.

She'd heard about this great teacher, one who could heal and cast out demons and see people for who they were.

He was Jewish.

She was not.

She was Canaanite, a Gentile.

In the Gospel of Mark, when they tell this story, she's referred to as a Seraphonician.

While Matthew really wants to emphasize that this is a former enemy of Israel by calling her a Canaanite woman.

She went to him, to Jesus, and asked him, begged him and all his disciples is what it said, for him to heal.

The next part has always been a bit troublesome to me.

I imagine to middle many of you too.

Jesus tells her, no.

It's not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs, he says.

People try to explain that sentence away, saying that he's calling her a dog, that the translation is a little more like puppies than dog, which I'm not sure how much better that is.

But puppies are cuter, I suppose, and a little more lovable, and they actually do need to be fed, like a lot.

But not sure I'd take well to being called a puppy either.

See, this woman was a Gentile, and Jesus was under the impression at this point in his ministry that he was only there for the Jews.

The Jews were the ones who, as we talked about with the last time we talked about Matthew, who could hear this message that he was preaching and understand his language about it the best so that then they could later spread it and pass it on to other people.

But then things change.

What happens next is more amazing.

She actually responds to him.

She says, Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.

She's brave enough to speak up to Jesus.

And she makes a good point.

And she speaks out.

And Jesus actually listens.

Jesus listens, and it seems like he changes his mind.

He says, Woman, great is your faith.

Let it be done for you as you wish.

And her daughter was healed instantly.

A lot of people try to justify this incident in Jesus' ministry by saying that Jesus was just testing her faith, by saying he couldn't help her at first, just to see how she would respond.

But it's hard to imagine that Jesus would do that.

It doesn't say he was doing that.

It leaves it up to us to decide whether the woman actually changed his mind or if he had planned to do it all along.

And then we also have trouble with this story because we think of Jesus as someone without sin.

He is someone without sin.

But of course, it's also not necessarily a sin to be wrong.

It's not a sin to be mistaken.

Someone I read said this week, yet the Canaanite woman invites him to consider a better way.

And instead of holding on to his accepted way, he takes her up on this invitation.

He chooses the better way.

He allows himself to be corrected.

The sin would have been if, when shown a better way, he chose to hold on to his old way, thereby making an idol of it.

The sin would have been cooperating with those demons who tortured that girl by willfully ignoring them.

And if you think about the rest of Jesus' ministry, a ministry that was not only to Jews but to Gentiles, the Samaritans, even, that's pretty scandalous.

It appears that Jesus may have been changed by this woman.

The woman who challenged him inspired his ministry.

He listened to her and adapted.

You may even say that she taught the teacher.

So for how many of you, I wonder, was your favorite teacher someone who challenged you?

And for how many of you was your favorite teacher someone who listened to you and who was willing to adapt and learn?

I think for most of us, the most inspirational teachers are those who are willing to do both.

Someone who doesn't show favoritism.

Every teacher has that favorite student or two, and if they're us, then we especially like that.

But the best teachers are the ones who get those lackluster, uninspired students inspired.

Who feeds the ones who are hungry, who loves the ones who might be unlovable.

It's a challenge to do that these days when classes are bigger and money and assistance is tight.

But I imagine most of your teachers remember the kids who you had the most influence on, rather than the kids who were already brought bright and confident.

The kids who came to school to be fed both with meals and with knowledge.

The ones who might have bad home lives and who couldn't always finish homework, but by the end of the year didn't want to leave the class.

Those kids are the ones that teachers always remember.

It's similar in the church as well.

As most churches do, we kind of use the school calendar to decide our activities for the year.

Even if you're no longer in school or no longer have kids at home, we tend to pick up our activities in the fall with our blessing of the backpacks next week.

We're starting a new school year, our fall activities, including a lot of new ones, which you can find in your program.

A little plug for the program.

We will be picking up those new things as well.

We're hoping that people can find a way to connect to God in maybe a new way and to one another to hopefully learn something more about who God is to you and what the kingdom of God might be.

Because we're never done learning.

Even Jesus had to learn more.

He learned from a woman whose name we don't even know, only her nationality, her status as a mother and a Gentile.

We see him grow in compassion for her and remember that there's always an opportunity for us to grow as well.

To practice love and not just feel it, to show others our faith by how we act and not just what we say.

When we begin to learn from one another, we start connecting in a way that recharges us.

We get recharged from scripture, from study and fellowship.

And that connects us to one another in a way that then creates light.

See that connection to the circuit?

A light that shines bright, a light that can only come from God.

It's almost as though, as a body of Christ, we are a circuit.

Important pieces that create a current of energy and light.

We are all a part of it, no matter what.

And we are all able to create the light for others and to feel the light ourselves.

It's a circuit that we create as a church, as a community, as a body of Christ.

So let us hear those voices of those we want it usually hear.

Be open to being taught.

Care for those who need the most help.

Keep others in our prayers and in our time.

Let's get back to the basics and be connected to one another.

Amen.

Friends, let us now say together the words.