"How to Change Your Mind" / Rev. Dr. Richard Coble / 10.18.26

We continue on in our series in Matthew.

We've been in with Matthew the entire uh fall, entire autumn.

Uh we did um several weeks on the Sermon on the Mount, and then several weeks of parables, and now we are finishing off with Jesus' encounter with other characters throughout the gospel.

So now we are on uh what I would call a very difficult passage of Matthew.

Uh Matthew chapter 15.

Matthew 15 · chapter mention

Listen now for God's word.

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

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 Jesus did not answer her at all.

And his disciples came and urged Jesus, saying, Send her away, for she keeps shouting at us.

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

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

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

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

Jesus answered her, Woman, great is your faith.

Let it be done for you as you wish.

And her daughter was healed that moment.

Most of us know a Canaanite woman.

Maybe we've even been one from time to time.

I always, when I walk through the front door, I put my keys on the table next to the door.

And by always, I mean like half the time.

This week I went to leave.

My keys weren't where I expected them to be.

Some of you know this.

When I can't find something, I get frustrated.

I get angry.

My wife asked, Did you look in your pockets from yesterday?

To which I replied, Now why would I leave them there?

Do I look stupid to you?

You know where they were.

Most of us know a Canaanite woman.

A little while ago, I was driving on Kingston Pike in Sequoia.

I was in a bad mood.

I don't remember why, but it probably had something to do with the fact that I was driving on Kingston Pike in Sequoia.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon.

Traffic, as you know, if you've ever been there, just inches along.

It's going so slow, in fact, that uh the woman in the lane next to me, she could uh roll down her window and talk to me.

Um she said, Hey, could you let me in?

She was in the wrong lane.

Uh my window was down.

I pretended like I couldn't hear her.

I could have let her in, I didn't.

Why?

Well, I guess I kind of want her to be in as bad a mood as I was in.

Anyways, what she did was uh she screwed up, she jumped in front of me, cut me off, got in the lane.

What is a Canaanite woman?

Uh, it is someone in our lives who helps us realize we are wrong when we think we are right.

One more.

Uh, my very first sermon, I have a very vivid memory of this.

My very first sermon at my last church in Asheville was on this passage.

And what I did was I kind of hemmed and hawed.

Um, I made all types of excuses for why Jesus called this woman a dog.

Um, I recounted scholarly argument saying that, you know, it's really not that bad.

It's really more like an analogy than calling her directly a dog.

Um I said that, you know, some scholars even point out the Greek word is puppy.

It's kind of playful.

Um after the service, um, I was greeting people, you know, in the line.

Um, Carol Hovis, who some of you all met when she led an Enneagram series here, uh, she came through the line and she said to me, uh, you know, Richard, it's okay to say you thought Jesus was wrong.

Most of us know a Canaanite woman.

To be fair to Jesus, though, uh, when he refused the Canaanite woman, um, he was doing so out of faithfulness to scripture.

When the priest Ezra, many hundreds of years ago before Jesus, when the priest Ezra brought the Jewish people back from Babylonian captivity, he found that the whole land was polluted by the idols of the Gentiles.

And this is what he says.

He prays to God.

He says, And now, O God, we have forsaken your cov your commandments, which you commanded by the prophets, saying, The land that you are enduring to possess is a land unclean with the pollutions of the peoples of the land, with their abominations.

They have filled it to no end with their uncleanness.

Um, therefore, do not give your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, so that you may be strong and eat the good of the land and leave it for an inheritance to your children forever.

So that is right there in our Bible.

You can look it up.

It's Ezra chapter 9.

Ezra 9 · chapter mention

It says very explicitly, never seek their peace or prosperity.

And Jesus, he kind of takes this up, he repeats that several times throughout the Gospel of Matthew.

Matthew chapter 10, he tells his disciples, um, When you go out, do not take a road that leads to the Gentiles.

Matthew 10 · chapter mention

Do not enter a Samaritan town, but rather go only to the lost sheep of Israel.

That's chapter 10.

We're reading from chapter 15 today.

He's basically just repeating himself.

He says, I was sent only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

It's not fair to take the children's food, feed it to the dogs.

Okay.

Admittedly, yes.

What he says there sounds super harsh.

Um got to remember where he's coming from, not to excuse it, but you gotta remember Jesus came from an Israelite people who uh were trampled over and over by the empires around them and were constantly being threatened by their Gentile neighbors.

So to survive throughout centuries of warfare and enslavement and exile, um, they had to set themselves apart.

That's that's a big part of our scriptures.

They set themselves apart, they followed their own law, they worshiped their own God.

If they hadn't done all that, you have to realize, like, like all of this, like our tradition, our our old and new testaments, like faith as we know it would not exist.

It's just it's just really hard for you and me to get into the mindset of a first century galleon, occupied by Rome, threatened by their neighbors.

Um Jesus just he thought he was doing the right thing.

Um the fateful thing, when he said this thing to the Canaanite woman.

It just happens that he's wrong.

Wait, wait, uh, let me rephrase that before lightning strikes me up here.

Um, it just so happens that the faithfulness that Jesus was operating out of in that moment needed to grow, needed to evolve and change.

That's what the Canaanite woman helps Jesus see.

And honestly, um, that's not that big of a deal as we may think it is.

Does anybody remember how Luke chapter 2 ends?

Luke 2 · chapter mention

You may remember when I tell you.

Um, so Jesus is a teenager, and his parents leave him in the temple for three days, right?

And then they come back and they get them and they take them home.

Um, and then the chapter ends with these words.

It says, and I quote, Jesus went and came to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents, and Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.

Did you hear it?

He he increased in wisdom.

Uh, he learned, he changed, he grew.

We don't really need to get into this, but if you ever want to have a conversation one-on-one, we could talk about all the times God also changes and grows throughout the Bible.

It happens quite a lot, actually.

Um, but you and me, you and me, like, we have this picture of like what perfection should look like.

Perfection in our minds is somebody who's who's always right, never wrong, uh, never has to admit a mistake, somebody who likes to argue instead of listening.

And trust me, there's a whole bunch of that in the Bible, too.

Um but I think that's what makes this encounter between Jesus and this Canaanite woman uh just so refreshing.

What if when Jesus realized he was wrong and he realized she was right, what if he was showing us a whole new way of what it means to be divine?

A whole new way of what it means to be perfect?

What if to be faithful, sometimes we have to admit, even when we are trying our very best, we have to admit, hey, we'll know everything.

And we can actually learn something from somebody else's experience.

What if, in order to be like Jesus, we have to grow?

You know, like he did.

This isn't to say that we can't be passionate about the things we are passionate about.

You know, Westminster Presbyterian Church has this long history of standing up for justice and inclusion.

Uh, there's a long line of preachers before me who stood up here and said uncomfortable things because they believed that what they were saying was right and uh and they felt called by the Holy Spirit to do so.

This doesn't change any of that.

I remember such an uncomfortable time back in um summer of 2020.

I wasn't here, I was in Asheville at the time.

A lot of you all were here, though.

Um I bet any of you all remember that time?

I bet you do.

Uh George Floyd's murder was uh at the hands at a Minneapolis police officer.

It was it was all you could see.

It was all over the news.

And uh there were protests in all major cities.

Um, some of them were peaceful, others of them were violent.

Um, they spread across the country.

The country was already kind of on the brink, because remember, that also happened to be COVID.

So everywhere you went, protesters were clashing with police, uh, police were crashing with protesters.

Uh Black Lives Matter was chanted from uh the street and from the pulpit alike.

Everybody thought that you know their side was right and the other folks were wrong.

Uh I recently read in a book by theologian Tom Long that George Floyd, I didn't know this, George Floyd was originally from Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is just like a town away from where I was born.

And um, and the folks from Fayetteville, I mean, they sure knew that George Floyd was from there.

And there were huge protests in Fayetteville that summer.

Um, some of them turned violent, you know, um, fires, broken windows, uh, looting.

There was kind of a showdown, like it all kind of came to a head on June 1st of 2020.

Uh 200 protesters marched down the street of what's known as uh Bronco Square, which is right by the HBCU um Fayetteville State.

200 protesters.

And as they were marching, they met up with uh 60 heavily armed police officers, uh mostly white.

And the police ordered them to stop, and the protesters stopped.

And we've all seen this before, right?

Like, you know, um two brick walls about to ram into each other, right?

But then uh the strangest thing happened.

Um, all of a sudden, in unison, all 60 of those officers uh laid down their weapons and kneeled right in front of the protesters as a sign of solidarity to the 200 folks who had come out.

A police representative later wrote as a sign of understanding the pain that is in our community, the Fayetteville Police Department took a knee to show that we stand for justice for everyone.

The protesters on the other side of the street didn't know that was coming.

They were just kind of like gobsmacked to start.

But then uh one by one, they did the same.

They also took a knee in front of the police.

And one press protester uh later wrote on social media: he said, men and women alike started crying and then came toward the police officers to shake their hands.

So it turns out what had happened was um one of the police officers liked to play a game of pickup basketball with one of the protesters, like before any of it happened.

And um, and they had had a talk.

And then that police officer he went to his sergeant and he said to his sergeant, like, you know, really, all these folks are looking for is just a little sign of empathy.

And the sergeant, she said, Well, um, well, why don't we take the first step then?

I guess we all know a Canaanite woman, right?

Remember, uh, 2000 years before any of that happened, um, the Son of God, our Savior Jesus Christ, uh showed us that what it means to be perfect, what it means to be divine, uh, includes putting down everything you know is right in order to make a little space, in order to see the person in front of you standing right across from you as also a child of God.

I don't do this often, um, but I'm gonna end this sermon with three points.

Um, three points I'm taking away from our reading through Matthew over several weeks.

Uh, point number one is this um in the book of Matthew, we see that we are called to follow our traditions with faithfulness.

Jesus says, I came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it in his Sermon on the Mountain.

Then he took, you know, three whole chapters to expand upon the Jewish traditions of his ancestors, traditions of mercy and love, justice and peace.

That's number one.

Uh number two, point number two is uh we are called to follow these traditions of justice and love and mercy and peace with all of our hearts.

At times we are called to stand up in uncomfortable places and speak truth even to power.

We are called to rally and to march and to vote and to try our best to live into the kingdom of heaven.

Just like Jesus did in the face of the Pharisees and the Roman authorities and a bunch of other people throughout the whole gospel.

That's point number two.

And point number three, point number three is an and, not a but, it's an and.

And at the same time, Jesus shows us that as we practice our faithfulness, we must also leave room to recognize the humanity of those standing from across the street from us, too.

Um we must recognize that faithfulness is not the same thing as closed-mindedness, and there's always room for the spirit to change us, to move us in a new direction.

Friends, uh, in this world that we live in, where, I mean, just turn on the news this weekend.

In this world where it seems like folks are choosing violence instead of peace, uh, walls instead of bridges, rage instead of dialogue, this, this way, friends, this way of Jesus Christ, um, this is how we are called to live differently.

Um, this is how we are called to follow our Savior.

Um, our Savior who changed his mind, and in doing so saved the whole world.

Amen.