“Even the Dogs…..” James 2:1-10,14-17 Mark 7:24-37 preached at Keswick-Ravenshoe Pastoral Charge September 6, 2015

This week our world was rocked by a heartbreaking image of a three-year old boy washed ashore on the beach in Turkey – a small boy still completely recognisable, in his red t-shirt and brown shoes.  Isn’t it something that one image like this can galvanise nations into action, even though the refugee crisis has been building and building for several years. I remember another photograph which galvanised, and which in my mind began the trek to the end of the war – a child of 9 named Pham Thi Kim Phuc, running down a road burning from napalm, screaming in agony. There were far more horrific photos taken, but that was the one which finally permeated the consciousness of the west to the horrors of what ordinary people in Viet Nam lived with. There have been many comments n Facebook about how awful it is to publish such a photo – “we don’t need to see this” commented some “we know it is awful”. “I couldn’t look” commented others. And then there were a few like me who said “Yes, you really DO need to see this, you DO need to look. It is too easy for us to remain cocooned, and not recognise the desperation of daily life which the men, women and children of such countries live with. We DON’T know what it is like, unless we ourselves have seen it.”

My Professor of Homiletics (preaching) in seminary insisted that preachers always had to have the text of the Scripture at hand, and whatever other reading material we could find in the other. You could, he said, find good sermon material even in the sports section. We have to do two things with our scriptures – we have to put them into their own context – and then we have to put them into our own context, and see if there are fresh insights which the text brings to today.

So today we have a text in which a woman has come a long way to ask Jesus to save her precious daughter. We don’t know if she is an immigrant, or a migrant who has come for help. We can assume – that the distance was great. All we know is that she does not share Jesus’ ethnic background nor his religion. She is ‘other’. She asks him to save her child, and Jesus replies “it would be unfair to take the food meant for the children, and throw it to the dogs”. Now, to us this means next to nothing. We’ve grown up hearing it and it was just one of those sayings of Jesus. So here is the context – Jesus calls this woman a Gentile dog. He literally says that what he offers is only for the chosen people, no one else – and he uses a racial slur to drive home the point.

Part of the difficulty with this passage is that we have built up this picture of who we think Jesus was; we want him to be the simple, easy answer to all our problems and to all of society’s problems. When faced with the complexities of personal and institutional racism in our country and around the world, it is easier to have Jesus transcending everything, instead of looking at him right in his culture and context. Jesus was a man, and very much a person of his own culture and context – he was one of a people who believed they alone were chosen by God – and to the Jews of that time, people of other ethnicities and religions were considered unclean.

So when he is confronted with the Gentile pagan, he tells her that his message and ministry are only for the people of Israel. He isn’t interested in ministry to someone who is not of his racial background. It wouldn’t be fair to take the banquet prepared for his people – the children, the humans – and give it to Gentiles – the dogs, the less than human.

And she has the distinction of being the only person in the recorded texts who not only got the better of Jesus but also taught him something. She says even the dogs get to eat the crumbs left by others. Even those considered the least are deserving, she says. Even we who are largely invisible are human beings and equally deserving, she says. 

The Jews themselves were refugees – escapees from slavery in Egypt, who fled their captors and went to a new country for a better life. Jesus’ parents fled with him back into Egypt – not migrants but once again refugees, and illegals at that. Yet here is Jesus putting aside someone not of his own race or faith, as ‘not worthy of the crumbs’.  She asked for healing, for some touch to make her life just a bit better by the saving of her child. So there is Jesus’ context. I wonder if that woman was in fact a migrant, a refugee, an illegal.

Today’s context. Migrants, immigrants, refugees – and the crumbs from under our tables.

Migrants, immigrants and refugees are not the same thing. Each word has a different meaning.
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According to UNESCO a migrant is someone who travels freely to another country for reasons of personal convenience and without intervention of an external compelling factor.
They travel freely, of their own accord, to make a better life for themselves. Once they decide to migrate, or to emigrate, they become immigrants to the country of their destination. Interesting that most news articles seem to think that all those poor people in boats just want a change of scenery. Some media would have us believe they are coming to sponge off our country, getting health and benefits, taking all our jobs. So we see an attitude that the poor want to get away from where they are for foodbanks and a life of being lazy.

But what about the word Refugee? We aren’t hearing that word quite so much in the press, when we should be. Refugees are compelled to leave their homes, because they feel there is no other choice. But who would risk drowning just in case, unless the conditions at home are so horrendous that to remain is certain death. Refugees have no choice. They live with the fear of persecution (or worse) because of their religion, race, nationality, or political opinion. They live with the daily threat of death from bombing, shooting, or starvation. They have no choice but to escape for their lives. They leave looking for some crumbs of hope, some tiny sign from under the tables of the very comfortable. They ask for so little – a place of healing and food.

Those are the people of Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Armenia, people forced into being on the move seeking some healing, some respite, some few crumbs, and the saving of their children.

God loves the rich and poor. Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.
Those who are generous are blessed. Do not crush the afflicted at the gate,
for God pleads their cause.

Following the publication of the photo of Kim Phuc, in 1972, the reality of the war was brought home hard. Children were being denied even the crumbs from under the table; children being denied healing and hope. When the war ended in April 1975, the exodus began and hundreds  of people fled – too late for many – and yet between 1975 and 1978 close to two million refugees were accepted by other countries. Some had left sooner, those who could pay their way out. And while it should not be, it is the children and their plight which most touches our hearts in a ­­way nothing else can. The picture of one little boy – a beautiful child of Creation – denied not only healing and hope but even his life, even the chance to find out what else there is, outside the table. And we begin to examine ourselves and our faith, and wonder if we have been holding it just for ourselves, instead of truly putting it into action. I say we, for I am as guilty as the next.

James says to us today “What good is it, my sisters and brothers, if you say you have faith but do not have works?  If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

“It is not fair” he said, “to take the food for the children of Israel and feed it to the dogs.” Jesus, amazingly, was incredibly wrong. At least he realised it. Hr was forced to examine his prejudices and biases, and make change. So are we.

This is why we need to read the bible with our newspapers in the other hand – or our ipads or phones or radios, however you hear the news. But what can we do?  Faith communities… can play a significant role in making the human issues of forced migration and displacement central, challenging misleading language, highlighting unjust or victimising policies, and opening up space for alternative perspectives and conversations. We can work to sponsor families, find homes and work for them. We can. Yes it isn’t easy. But we can.

In particular, we need to remind ourselves that we too are the product of people movements – some forced, some voluntary, some hopeful, some fearful. Irish immigrants were refugees, from poverty and starvation. Jews, refugees from persecution and death. Bosnians from persecution, death and starvation. Vietnamese from war, famine, and political upheaval.

The images and the people we are seeing are desperate refugees. We, like Jesus, need to learn. The commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves doesn’t mean only the people we think fit the pattern we set. Our neighbours are clamouring at the gates to get in.  Our job is to open our arms and welcome the stranger. 

Essentially we are Jesus. We are the ones now being told that even the dogs get the crumbs from under the table. There are people crying out in pain, looking for a simple hand of hope, and a chance for healing. If we truly are followers of the Way, then we are called to reach, as far as we can, in any way we can, to our neighbours who we are called to love. Our neighbours are on the shore. How do we respond?

1.      Teaching Jesus a sermon by Rev. Fran Ota

2.      Sermon on the Refugee Crisis, by Rev. Ruth Dudley, Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia