Belonging

Matthew 15:10-28

There’s a common ritual of childhood, one that’s familiar to many of us, even if we didn’t precisely do it ourselves.
It’s the ritual of “No Boys Allowed.”
Or “No Girls.”

It’s a secret club, or a sign on the bedroom door, a way that we declare to ourselves and to the world that we belong in this place, or this group,
and those icky people don’t.

“No Boys Allowed,” usually passes in a few months or years or even weeks. But we do the same thing all our lives, in different ways.
That’s what Jesus is talking about in the gospel we hear today: All that back and forth about what defiles a person is in response to a complaint that Jesus and his disciples don’t belong because they don’t wash their hands before they eat.
That’s not about germs, it’s about respecting a commandment that the holy community purifies itself before eating together. And Jesus’ disciples don’t seem to care about the holiness of the Jewish table fellowship.

That might not bother you and me very much.
But changes to our own religious ritual can be disturbing. There are things we just don’t want to sing, or hear, or do in church because they poke holes in our sense of holiness.

And being able to trust the holiness of our community matters.
It supports our confidence in our faith. It helps us feel safe so that we can be more open to God and the others within our community. Trusting the holiness of our community makes it easier to trust God as we know we should.
But Jesus says that those reassuring signs of holiness aren’t really what we want them to be. It’s not what we let in that hurts our holiness. It’s what we let out. The things that really damage holy community come from the heart, not from outside, not even from our own hands.

And then a woman comes. A Canaanite woman, who worships different gods, who presumably can’t even imagine that Jesus is the Messiah, God’s Anointed One, the living breathing assurance of God’s holiness.

And this woman is a pain in the neck.
She’s too loud. She keeps insisting on attention.
Her mere presence pokes holes in the fabric of the holy community.

The disciples don’t hesitate to complain about that. And when even Jesus is blunt and rude in defending the boundaries of the holy community with his talk of dogs and throwing the food away,
she claims her own belonging anyway.
Even the dogs under the table eat the crumbs.
Whatever it looks like, however true it is that I don’t belong like you, it’s also true that I do belong.
Even those who don’t sit at the table are fed. The holy gift of healing belongs to me and to my daughter, because we belong to God, even though we don’t belong to you.

At last Jesus proclaims the greatness of her faith and her daughter is healed. She belongs.

What comes out of the mouth can destroy holiness, Jesus says. And then the Canaanite woman shows us that what comes out of the mouth can also make us pure, make us holy.
Not by repeating the ritual laws, but by claiming our belonging, in public, from the bottom of our hearts.

Have you ever felt that you don’t belong?
Have you ever thought to yourself, I don’t belong here, at Calvary?

Maybe you were new and no one else was.
Maybe things changed around you, and it made you feel excluded.
Maybe a relationship broke apart, and what used to feel like home started to feel like foreign and dangerous territory.
Maybe you’ve got the whole Nicene Creed memorized, but standing up and reciting a 1600 year old statement has never seemed to have much to do with your faith or your life.
Maybe it seemed like your pain was different from everyone else’s pain and healing, or that if people knew the ‘real you’ they wouldn’t like you, and wouldn’t understand.
Maybe you even feel some of that now.

It happens in lots of communities. It happens here. It’s happened to me.
And if it hasn’t happened to you, it has happened to someone sitting near you now.

That feeling that we don’t belong is painful, and it’s very very likely to cut us off from the healing grace of God that’s pouring out all around us.
If we believe we don’t belong we can make it true.
Or our faith can make us whole.

The hero of these miracle stories is usually the healed person, not the healer. The one who claims and accepts God’s grace, in spite of habits of pain and exclusion.

That’s what this never-named woman does.
She faces down being not good enough, not knowing enough, not being liked (and probably not liking very much those disciples who wanted to get rid of her). And she just belongs for all she’s worth.

Sometimes Jesus seeks us out when we need healing. And sometimes – even some of the times Jesus comes to us – we just have to step up and claim our own healing and wholeness.
What would it mean to you to claim your belonging?

For some of us, it might be praying out loud – in a restaurant or in a church meeting. Knowing that we don’t pray like the book, or the professionals, and pouring our faith out of our hearts, through our mouths, anyway.
For some, it might be stepping up to claim a responsibility or a gift without waiting to be asked. Believing and proclaiming that the passion in your heart for cycling, or AIDS research, or your own healing is just as important to God and the holy community as food and kids and whatever else we talk about the most.
It might be telling the story of your pain to someone else and discovering that what’s kept you lonely is actually something you share.

It’s painful to feel that we don’t belong. But sometimes all we need is to claim our belonging, from the bottom of our hearts.
And when we do belong, when we are wrapped in the comforting assurance that we are secure in this holy community, we thank God, and we remember that what comes in cannot hurt our community, however strange it feels.
It’s what comes from the bottom of our hearts that makes us holy.

The Canaanite woman reminds us that even the dogs under the table are fed. Even the people we don’t pay attention to, even the parts of our selves we think are misfit and unimportant, belong.
Belong in the holy community,
belong to the kingdom of God,
and have a claim to wholeness and healing and being fed.

And Jesus responds.
The holy community is big enough and resilient enough for the faith in all sorts of unexpected hearts.
God’s wholeness and healing are abundant enough,
but you and I must be faithful enough to claim it,
to belong to God, no matter what.


Sunday, August 14, 2011