Pentecost 15 L23 B, Commitment to End Racism Sunday

“Confession, Repentance and Commitment to End Racism Sunday”

We have just heard two stories from Mark. One of them is — well, you can’t say it’s ordinary…it’s a miracle story, after all — but, it’s a typical Jesus-type of story. A man who is deaf is brought to Jesus. Jesus says and does some things that accompany miracle stories, and then the man can hear and speak, good as new. I understand why this story is in the Good News of Jesus according to Mark: Jesus has the power to heal.

But the other story…this one is harder for me to understand why it’s in the Gospel. There must have been plenty of other stories. Each Gospel account has some unique stories about Jesus healing and doing other amazing things. I think it’s safe to say that there are more stories than we have…even the Bible has to be edited, right? The Gospel writers chose, to a certain degree, which stories to pass along, and which ones wouldn’t make the cut.

So when it comes to the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman…why didn’t Mark take this story out? It makes Jesus look bad.

Now, the word Syrophoenician doesn’t mean a whole lot to you and me, but to the first people to hear this Gospel, that one word would have told them exactly what they needed to know about this situation…”oh, she was one of those people.” She was not Jewish, she was not part of the children of Israel, she was…something else.

Jesus is approached very humbly by this woman who is not even asking for herself, but begging Jesus to heal her child. And Jesus actually says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Jesus is speaking through the worldview of his society … it’s a society that said if you weren’t part of the in-group, you could be treated as less than human. In this case, it was a matter or religion and ethnicity. The Syrophoenician woman was on the other side of the dividing line. In the reading from James, it was rich vs. poor. But, the same kind of thing…

In Jesus’ analogy, the people of Israel are the children which means the Syrophoenician woman would be the dog. Or maybe you could argue Jesus was calling the woman’s daughter a dog (as if that makes it any better.) Now, if you’re feeling guilty because part of your brain just thought a swear word in church…you’re actually pretty close: Jesus just insulted this woman.

Why did Mark leave this in the Bible?

And then the woman challenges Jesus right back, using his metaphor against him and saying, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” In other words, she’s telling him about his own faith, teaching some theology to Jesus, and proclaiming to him that God loves her kind of folk, too, on her side of the dividing line. And Jesus agrees and heals her daughter which means admitting that what he had said earlier was wrong.

Jesus said something that was wrong — and they left it in the Bible.

Now, if that really hurts your faith in Jesus, it could be that Jesus knew all along, but said what he said for our benefit — but the point is, he said it.

Jesus was willing to be publicly wrong about something and then to learn from it.

Whether or not Jesus actually needed to learn something by admitting he was wrong, the truth is that we do, and Jesus shows us that no one is above being wrong and learning from their mistakes.

That’s important because you don’t see a lot of that these days. When a celebrity or public figure starts saying something on social media, whether that’s Facebook or Twitter or something else, and they say something that other people find offensive, one of the first things they usually do is delete the record of what they said. Maybe sometimes this is the right thing to do, but you know what happens? We don’t get the benefit of seeing our heroes being wrong and dealing with it. And learning from it.

We are entering a political season in which the mistakes of candidates from 20 to 30 years ago will be used against them. If you’re trying to get elected for something, you can’t hardly admit to ever being wrong about anything. Maybe you were misinformed, maybe your thinking was ‘evolving’, but you were never wrong.

Since I’m not running for public office this year, let me be the first to say that I have been wrong. And I hope to learn from my mistakes. I have been on the wrong side of issues like the one that divided Christians in the letter from James into rich and poor. Issues like the one that divided Jews from Gentiles in Jesus’ life.

In the United States our most basic dividing line is caused by racism.

I have been wrong in underestimating racism, and I have learned in the past year.

Last year I would have said, yes, of course there are racists — they are the bad apples, but overall our society has mostly freed itself from racism.

Last year, I would have said that people of color who rioted were hurting their cause by overreacting.

I was wrong. I have been challenged by hearing more and more media accounts of violence and discrimination against African Americans in our country, and most importantly, hearing the personal accounts of people of color telling me that racism effects their lives every single day.

A couple weeks ago, the Presiding Bishop of our denomination sat down with Bill Horne, an African American Lutheran, for a public discussion about race. Bill happens to be a Floridian, and in fact, he’s the city manager of Clearwater. Bill, who is well known, highly regarded, and widely respected, spoke about still experiencing, in 2015, the shadow of racism wherever he goes. Any time he takes off his city manager shirt, people treat him differently. And not in a good way.

I thought that racism happened out there. I was wrong. It happens in our community. We are part of it. We have to admit where we’ve been wrong.

But we also have a savior that shows us that Grace is more powerful than any dividing line. God is bigger even than our biggest mistakes. And we have a savior that leads us to hear the challenging words of the poor, of immigrants, of people of color, and to be willing to be changed by them.

There is enough Grace for us to be wrong. In fact, we won’t fully know Grace until we can admit we have been wrong. We have shown favoritism to some and not others. We have been complacent in fixing a society that is fueled by violence against people of color.

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We believe in the God of this Bible, a sacred text that isn’t afraid to talk about mistakes, and that means that we’ll have our own stories of divisions, of challenges, of being wrong, and learning from mistakes.

But it’s also a text filled with stories of healing, grace, and God’s power breaking through every division that we set up. And even when we fail, God has the power to heal the divisions in our world, too.