[Note: This is the homily I wrote for Sunday 9 August 2026, but didn’t give because I’d misread the lectionary calendar. I put a lot of work into it, so it was painful to have to put it aside in order to focus on the “proper” Proper. For this reason, and because I think there’s some good stuff in it, I’m posting it here on my blog.]
In the Name of the (†) Parent, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
In today’s gospel reading from Matthew,
Jesus tries to dismiss a marginalized woman
who is pleading for help
for her mentally disabled daughter.
He even compares her to a dog stealing food
from its masters’ children.
This doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know and love!
What on earth is going on here?
First, a bit of context for this story:
As Deacon Greg noted last week,
the execution of John the Baptist
must have hit Jesus pretty hard.
In the meantime, he’s mostly been hanging out
along the western shore of Sea of Galilee.
There he has carried out various miracles:
fed thousands of people from next to nothing,
walked on water,
and healed a lot of sick people in Gennesaret [Guh-nes- aret],
a nearby fishing village.
Most recently, he’s had a not-so-friendly visit
from the religious elite,
who sent a delegation from Jerusalem
to grill Jesus about Jewish dietary laws,
and Jesus has pretty much defied them.
So Jesus and his disciples leave the Galilee region
and travel northwest into the region of Tyre and Sidon,
in the Roman province of Syria.
This is a wealthy, mostly gentile region,
just outside the ancient Hebrew homelands,
where Jesus is preaching to and healing
disaffected, dispersed Jews,
whom he refers to as “the lost sheep of Israel”.
There he encounters a Canaanite woman;
we would call her “Palestinian”.
This Canaanite woman cries out
loudly and insistently to Jesus
for healing for her young daughter,
who has been “possessed” by a hostile spirit.
As someone who used to teach abnormal psychology,
I’d love to take you down a rabbit hole
about demon possession!
However: that’s not really the point here.
What is important
is that this woman’s young daughter
is in a very bad way,
and the woman is desperate to get help for her child.
I think all of us can relate to that!
So: what is front and center here
is the issue of marginality.
“Marginality” is a current jargon term
for a person feeling pushed aside or disadvantaged,
based on their identity,
that is, who they are.
Marginality is a huge issue in Jesus’s ministry.
Here’s how I see marginality
playing out in today’s gospel reading:
• On the one hand, the Canaanite woman
is multiply-marginalized within a Jewish frame:
• First, as gentile, that is, non-Jewish, person;
• Second, as a woman in a patriarchical society;
• Third, as a member of a colonized population under Roman occupation;
• And fourth, as the parent of a demon-possessed child.
• And on the other hand: Jesus and his disciples
are themselves also marginalized in this story:
They are in marginal space,
outside their personal home territory of Galilee
and their cultural/religious realm of Israel and Judaism. Furthermore, the religious elite of their home territory
is doing its best to marginalize them further,
a process that’s going to lead to crucifixion and persecution,
an extreme form marginalization!
With this context, let’s go back to the story:
I recently learned that my humanistic therapy friend,
Jef Cornelius-White,
is working on a new translation of the New Testament,
which he calls Listening with Love.
Jef thinks that the word “trust”
is generally a better translation than “faith”
for the Greek word pistis.
And our son Kenneth (who has a PhD in classics)
reminds me that the Greek pistis
is more commonly used
in a very concrete, legal/financial way
to talk about a pledge or collateral
in a legal or business deal.
But what collateral does the Canaanite woman have to offer?
Not too much you might think.
But what she lacks in capital
she makes up for with her great distress
which she shares
with sincerity, intensity and persistence.
Thus:
• She cries out, shouting to make herself heard;
• She comes to Jesus as a mother
whose child is tormented, utterly miserable,
and in danger is being totally shunned
or even killed;
• Her loudness and persistence
drive the disciples crazy,
so they beg Jesus to ger rid of her;
• And when Jesus refuses to talk to her,
This Canaanite woman comes right up to him,
bowing in complete submission,
face to the ground,
like a dog licking its master’s feet,
and implores him for help.
My friend Jef calls this:
CRYING OUT WITH TRUST IN DISTRESS
I’m going to call it:
THE KIND OF TRUST WHOSE SINCERITY IS BORN FROM PAIN.
This means that she comes to Jesus
at her lowest point, hoping against hope,
basically saying, “Help me, Lord Jesus!
You are my only hope!”
That’s the kind of trust/faith/pistis
we are talking about here.
* * *
But Jesus is not quite convinced yet
And tests her with his controversial metaphor
telling her, again in Jef’s translation:
“It is not morally good to take the children’s bread
and throw it to the little dogs.”
This certainly sounds and looks like racism.
In fact, the settlers in today’s West Bank of Israel
would probably agree with this description
of today’s Palestinian descendants of the Canaanite woman;
in fact, they might even use it
to justify the acts of violence of they are even now
carrying out against the Palestinians who live there.
So what’s going on here?
What are we to make this “unchristian” treatment
of a marginalized person?
It all seems a bit rich,
especially given that Jesus and his disciples
are themselves marginalized strangers in Roman Syria.
[PAUSE]
But let’s take a deeper look…
There is something important happening here,
which will change the course of human history.
Because Jesus does engage with the Canaanite woman,
allowing her to assert herself,
on behalf of all of us fellow gentiles:
• First, notice that Jesus doesn’t call her –
and by extension, us -- “dogs”;
no, he uses a friendly diminutive:
little dogs (kynari-ios).
In the Bible, dogs are almost always described negatively: unclean, out of control, violent, greedy, lazy etc.
No, he’s not talking about the unruly, feral dogs
that run through the streets at night;
instead, he means puppies or little house dogs:
cute, friendly, nonthreatening, part of the family!
• Second, he practically hands the answer to her, saying
“It is not morally good to take the children’s bread
and throw it to the little dogs.”
Because the answer is obvious, and she replies,
“Indeed, Divine Master!
And yet the little dogs eat from the crumbs
fallen from their master’s table.”
In effect, he gives her an opportunity:
to assert that there is enough grace
for all of “God’s doggies,”
including her, her daughter… and us.
So this is the story of how Jesus made explicit
the process of opening up God’s grace
from the sheep of Israel (lost or otherwise)
to all of us “little dogs”.
And if we look carefully, we can see,
here in Matthew and in the Old Testament lesson for today
(and elsewhere in the Bible),
that this process of opening up the kingdom of God
has implicitly already been under way:
• Immediately before this story in Matthew 15,
via the argument about Jewish dietary laws;
• And in the Genesis story of the reconciliation of Joseph and his brothers.
This knitting together of people, reconciling
across lines of cultural and spiritual division and marginality,
has also been implicit from early in Jesus’ ministry,
for example in the Beatitudes.
In fact, 350 years after Jesus’ time,
Saint John Chrysostom [Cris-ah-stom]
picked up this same text
and referred to it in the Prayer of Humble Access,
which my partner Diane calls “the crumbs prayer”.
This prayer has gone a bit out of fashion
in contemporary Christianity,
but the following lines
are still burned into my heart
from years of morning prayer services at this very church:
… We are not worthy so
much as to gather up
the crumbs under your table;
but you are the same Lord
whose character is always to have mercy.
Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, [and so on…]
I think that we are all little dogs,
marginalized in different ways:
• The lonely and desperate;
• The elderly and the young;
• Immigrants, ethnic minorities and unhoused persons;
• Conservative and working class people
who feel looked down upon and judged
by cultural elites;
• Liberal and progressive people
who feel marginalized in a country
they increasingly don’t recognize.
• And all kinds of poor and middle class folks
who are struggling to make ends meet
while rich folks get ever richer.
Yes, there is plenty of marginality to go around,
especially during times of rapid social change,
and none of us likes being treated
as less worthy or important.
A feature of St. John’s Lodi being a “purple congregation”
During a period of rapid social and political change
is that all of us can feel marginalized at times.
Our congregation is dismissed
by our local evangelical siblings
as “too liberal” or “the gay church”
– when we know ourselves
to be so much more than that.
But in today’s gospel, I hear God laying out
one of key roads to deeper faith:
Crying out with Trust in Distress,
The kind of trust whose sincerity is born from pain,
Which the Canaanite mother brings
on behalf of her daughter.
Through this, we come to and are able to admit
to our deepest truth, to the thing that hurts the most,
our core pain,
and to know what that pain needs,
which is for God to see us at our lowest point,
and to offer us
at least a few “crumbs” of their love.
And to this, Jesus says:
“O woman! Such great trust of yours
in God’s help to those in distress!
Let your wish be granted.”
Such is God’s grace:
That, like the Canaanite woman,
we come for the crumbs
but are constantly surprised
by the feast of God’s love
in communion
and community.
[PAUSE]
Let this be so for us! Amen!
