Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Texts: Isaiah 56:1, 6-8; Matthew 15:21-28

Dear Friends in Christ, God’s grace and peace be with you.  Amen

In 1789, after years of famine and tension, the women of Paris took matters into their own hands. In an act that changed the course of the French Revolution, they raided the city armory, marched to Versailles, and forced King Louis XVI to relinquish power. Their motivation was simple. They needed to feed their families and could no longer afford the cost of bread in the marketplace[i]. In the spring of 1863, Southern Bread Riots broke out across the American south. Women of the confederate state looted bakeries in Richmond and beyond, in a desperate drive for daily bread[ii]. For the last two years, women in Afghanistan have been chanting, “Bread, Work, Freedom.” Their increasingly dangerous struggle for independence and employment boils down to their need for a means to feed their families[iii].

Across the ages, women have been crying out to those in authority to simply give them a crumb from the table. Maybe they draw their inspiration from the unnamed woman Jesus meets today[iv]. We don’t know if she’s a follower of Jesus, but she seems to recognize his power. “Lord,” she calls him, “Son of David, Help me.”

Maybe she heard Jesus describe the reign of God as a place where people are abundantly fed. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour[v],” he had said. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, three measures is a LOT of flour. Whoever served that bread ended up with more than enough for a community, enough to leave crumbs all over the ground. Or perhaps the woman had heard the story of Jesus preparing a feast for thousands with only a few loaves of bread and a couple fish but leaving baskets full of leftovers[vi].

This desperate mother trusts that the reign of God is characterized by bread in abundance; healing enough to leave fragments for scavengers to glean from the picnic grounds. She needs some of those crumbs. She doesn’t care how offensive or irritating she has to be, she will not stop until her child is released from this torment.

Jesus’ reaction is hard for us to understand. This is the first woman to speak in the entire gospel of Matthew, and Jesus treats her harshly. He has come to a border on the northern end of Israel and encounters an indigenous woman from outside his community. He’s on a threshold in his ministry. Perhaps he’s fatigued and needs a break. Maybe.

Whether he’s exhausted, or too focused on what he considers his main mission, or too entrenched in a cultural disregard for foreign women, we can’t tell. Jesus initially ignores the mother, then argues against her, and finally insults her, using an ethnic, sexist term that was as ugly in his context as it is in ours[vii].

Across the years, preachers have tried to soften our discomfort with his response. “Dog” isn’t an ugly term, some say, and actually the word could be translated, “little dog,” (as if somehow women are less insulted in being called ‘little dog’ than ‘dog.’) Some say Jesus was only teasing the woman; he was merely testing her faith.

None of those explanations is consistent with the Jesus we’ve met along the way. And frankly, none of them is all that convincing.

No, I’m with the scholars who admit this is confusing. But what they do point out is that dogged faithfulness is not unique to this Canaanite mother. Like the persistently faithful of every time and every place, the woman knows that the love of God has never been scarce, that it crosses every border. She knows that our fatigue or cultural biases won’t stop God from caring for us. She knows that even as dogs snap up the crumbs that fall from the children’s table, her daughter is entitled to a remnant of the grace that abounds from the love of God.

The woman holds on to the lasting truth of the prophets: God’s salvation will come, and God’s deliverance will be revealed, not only for the lost sheep of Israel, but as Isaiah sings, for all people[viii].

She demands that Jesus remember Isaiah’s promise, too. “If, as you’ve said, there was enough yeast for 60 pounds of flour; if there were 12 baskets of leftovers from a picnic for more than 5,000, then surely, my daughter deserves at least a crumb.”

Remarkably Jesus seems to be changed by her faith. Notice, he doesn’t ask her to change. He doesn’t call on her to repent, to “go and sin no more.” Instead, he changes his response. He doesn’t just offer her a bite from the table, he welcomes her to the feast. Her daughter is instantly healed.

Today we stand on our own thresholds. Summer is bending into fall. The State Fair begins this week; school is starting. Some of us are entering new phases in life: empty nesters, new retirees, young people moving off to college for the first time, while their grandparents downsize or lose their independence, families welcoming new additions to their households. At Gloria Dei, we’re in a transition time, too.

The borders between what was and what will be, can be unsettling. It’s easy to feel threatened by the changes. We can worry that there is too much to give up, too much adjustment and loss.

But the Canaanite woman at the border would point us to the breadcrumbs in our path and would urge us to follow them. They always lead to abundant grace.

I think she would urge us to listen to the cries of the indigenous hungry in our own communities, to recognize their claim on justice and blessing, to acknowledge our responsibility to make reparations for treatment from which we have benefited.

She would push us to seek healing for our loved ones or ourselves. Perhaps she would escort us over to our prayer teams. She might help us light a candle or meet with someone who would pray with us. She would encourage us to raise our cries to a God who hears us.

Undoubtedly, she would call us to see just how lavishly generous our God continues to be. Even today, Christ spreads a table for us, not just with crumbs, but ample bread and wine, his very presence. Even here, the spirit washes over us as it will for Reese Evie, with grace and purpose and abundant love, to last a lifetime.

What women marching for bread in every generation trust is that there is food enough, love enough, grace enough for all. And they will not be denied.

Even Jesus is reminded that the healing power of God cannot be kept to only one tribe, only one nation, only one understanding, only one church. Love is always falling off the table, crossing the boundary, spilling over the edge, seeping through the cracks in the pavement, and finding another way to grow. There is enough for all.

Thanks be to God.  Amen

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_March_on_Versailles

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_March_on_Versailles

[iii] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/16/bread-work-freedom-afghan-womens-two-years-resistance

[iv] Today’s gospel reading:  Matthew 15:21-28. I wonder if the woman herself was inspired by others. See I Kings 17:6-24, 2 Kings 4:18-37.

[v] Matthew 13:33

[vi] Matthew 14:13-21

[vii] Levine, Amy-Jill, “Matthew 15:21-28, Canaanite Woman,” Women in Scripture:  A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Woman in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament, Carol Meyers, General Editor, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2000, p. 411-412.

[viii] Isaiah 56: 1, 6-8.