Year B
 Isaiah 35:4-7a
 Psalm 146
 James 2:1-10, 14-17
 Mark 7:24-37

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

I’m about to retire…   I’m about to make a transition…  cross a divide…  of sorts…  from one way of spending my time…   to another…  from one way of being a priest…  to another…  from one pattern of activity…  to another…  and in spite of everything I’ve done to prepare…  there will be surprises…  there will be things I didn’t think of…  or anticipate…  there will be situations which catch me off guard…  ]  from what’s been said about retirement…  from what’s been written about it…  to what it is…  ]  and yes…  there’s a book called…  Retirement Planning for Dummies…  it’s the second edition…  so it must be complete…  it must have all the answers…   to all the questions I might have asked…  if only I’d thought to buy it a couple months ago…  ]  it must be so complete…  that those of you who have already retired…  will wish you had had it when you were getting ready to retire… 

And so one other thing…   I realize I’m about to do…  is flip the narrative…  from what culture says retirement is all about…  or what people say it should be all about…   to what it actually is all about…  ]  from what I believed it would all be about…  to what it’s really all about…  ]  and whatever that will be…  it will not only change what I do on the outside…  but will change how I am on the inside…  in how I think…  and how I feel…  in how my Spirit speaks to me…   and in how I perceive and discern…  ]  the narrative I’ve accepted will flip…  from hearsay to testimony…  from conjecture to reality…  and almost like when you’ve had your cataracts removed…  from blurriness to clarity…

And as I go through this transition…  I need to remain vigilant…  I need to remain open to what I can still  learn…  to how I can still be formed…  ]  to what I can give to…   and do for others…  because if I think I’m too busy getting ready to not be too busy at all…  I may miss out on opportunities that may come my way…  on something that will flip another narrative I’ve been telling myself…  and which also turns out to not be true…

Professor Raj Nadella writes…   a few years ago…   I saw a cartoon…  in it…   there’s a CEO…  a laborer…  and a foreigner…   sitting at a table…  the CEO has a huge plate-full of cookies in front of him…   the laborer has one cookie…   and the immigrant has none…  and the CEO turns to the laborer and says…  Careful mate…  that foreigner wants your cookie!…   it’s a clear attempt to shift attention away from the CEO’s hoarding…  and to create division…  and Empire continues to do that even now…  by asking questions like…  Who’s a real American…  and who deserves its benefits…  and it creates additional division by pitting marginalized communities against each other…   so it’s that much harder to address this oppression…

The first-century historian Josephus…  describes the ongoing tension between Jews and the residents of Tyre…  these two colonized communities fought over several issues…  but primarily…  over the limited resources that were left…  after the Roman Empire siphoned off what it wanted…  and Rome deflected attention away from its selfish economic practices by convincing these oppressed communities…  that they could survive…  only by eliminating the competition from the other oppressed groups…   with whom they lived…  and this led to a mindset of scarcity among these communities…

The Syrophoenician woman…   and the deaf man…  were both people on the fringes…  like the foreigner at the table whose plate was empty…  but the woman spoke up…  out of desperation for her daughter…  and those who brought the deaf man to Jesus…  spoke up on his behalf…  ]  and there’s no record of any dialogue between Jesus and these advocates…  he simply takes the deaf man aside and heals him…

But today’s Gospel records the back and forth between Jesus and this woman…  and I wonder what we can learn from Jesus’ reluctance to grant the Syrophoenician woman’s request for a miracle…  was it fear that if the food…  in other words…  the benefits of this new Kingdom…  were to be extended to her community…  that the Jewish people would have less…  would lose out…  that it would be a zero-sum game…   in which only one…  or the other can benefit…   but not both…

And at first…  this is just how Jesus reacts…  and it may possibly have been…  at least partly…  that he was simply exhausted…  that his inner resources were depleted because of the miracles and healings he’d been performing…  ]  after all…  the text says…   that he didn’t want anyone to know he was there…  ]  but he spoke harshly to this woman…  saying…  it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs…  as though the Kingdom could somehow be depleted…

Now The Jesus Seminar folk…  were a group of biblical scholars whose goal was to establish the authenticity of what Jesus actually said and did…  and they believe that Jesus must really have said this…  because it was kind of unflattering…  and it would have been so easy to leave it out of the bible…  but if it really could be attributed to him…  well…  you wouldn’t want to lose any of his actual words…  would you…  so we’d better leave it in…  ]  and maybe…  taking the children’s food and throwing it to the dogs…  maybe that was an expression that people knew…  which referred to someone who couldn’t appreciate what was being offered to them…  that it would be wasted on them…  kind of like casting pearls before swine…

But the woman’s insightful response affirms…   that even if her community gained access to the gifts of the kingdom…  Jesus’ community would not be deprived of theirs…  ]  and remember…  in the two stories which bookend this one…   of the feeding of the 5,000 and of the 4,000…  Jesus himself flips the narrative by challenging popular notions of scarcity…  ]  so what this woman invites Jesus to do…  is challenge his own narrative about who’s in and who’s out…  ]  what she is able to accomplish…  is get him to question who he believes can be included…  and who can be healed…  and whether belonging to any particular group…  or tribe…   disqualifies you…  ]  and Jesus flips his own narrative…  and says no… 

Now we all belong to different tribes…  we all belong to different groups…  some of them are of our choosing…  like those who have similar faith journeys…  or the hobbies we share…  like exercise groups…  or gardening clubs…  or amateur astronomers…  or various kinds of support groups…  ]  but other tribes are not of our choosing…  like where our ancestors came from…  and the genotypes we’ve inherited… our inclination to develop certain kinds of diseases…  like Parkinson’s…  but our participation in any of these “so called” tribes…  ought not be divisive…

But empire knows how to create division…  because the best way to bring folks together…  is to give them a good enemy…  and promoting this kind of mindset…  only increases the difficulty we have in working together to solve our common problems… and it is an affront to the values that Jesus espoused…

And if we’re courageous enough…  we’ll be able to acknowledge that we all have some unclean spirits within us…  we are all deaf to some things we don’t want to hear…  many of us can’t speak when there’s something that really needs to be said…  and we need to recognize that we all need to be healed…  ]  there are many narratives that we need to flip…  and if…  in today’s Gospel…  Jesus is having a hard time getting it…  it’s no wonder that we sometimes do too…  but while we may be daunted by the enormity of the worlds grief…  and while we may not be obligated to complete the work we are called to do…  we must remember…  that neither are we free to abandon it…