170820-fr-daniel-dries

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A sermon preached by the Rev’d Dr Daniel Dries Pentecost 11 Christ Church St Laurence – 20 July 2017 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight: O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” According to the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, ‘Hate speech is speech which attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, or gender.’ Hate speech is terrifyingly topical and controversial in our day and age. However, hate speech was not controversial in the first century. What is defined now as hate speech would have been perfectly acceptable dialogue between people of different races, genders, ethnic origins and religious traditions in Christ’s time and place. Everything about the encounter between Christ and the Canaanite woman makes us rather uncomfortable—at least it should. But it would not have been shocking or repellent to the disciples who witnessed this encounter; it would not have been shocking to the first readers of Matthew’s Gospel either—the most Jewish Gospel. When a desperate foreigner reaches out to this Jewish teacher, no doubt as her final resort, she is initially ignored, then shunned by his disciples. When she finally makes it to the man himself, she throws herself on his mercy, only to be met with a socially acceptable, yet absolutely brutal remark, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” How reassuring that such a thing would never be said in our time and place… if only that were true. During this past week, we have witnessed more than one example of the ugly face of racism, hatred and bigotry. As we reflect on the sins and offences of the past, it is easy to put them down to history. The only problem with this defence, is that we’re supposed to learn from history. The truth is that, no matter hard we may try, we will never completely free ourselves from the restraints of our cultural and religious traditions. This is not always a bad thing. However, when our social or religious traditions seem to condone bigotry and hatred, they are not of God.  In the Old Testament Book Joshua, Yahweh commands Joshua to eliminate the Canaanites—men, women and children. This same Old Testament book goes on to claim that Joshua’s divinely inspired genocide was a complete and resounding success—that all of the Canaanites were eliminated. And yet, in Matthew Chapter 15, we learn that this may not have been the case. A desperate Canaanite woman breaks all social and religious conventions when she approaches a young Jewish rabbi. Desperately seeking healing for her sick daughter, she shows absolutely no regard for the social structures of her day. While Christ’s brutal remark to the Canaanite woman would have been socially acceptable, the fact that she approached him most certainly was not. Every so often, the Sunday Lectionary seems to scream at us, with a Gospel passage that the world desperately needs to hear at this precise moment. Today is one such occasion. Biblical commentators attempt to explain Christ’s brutal remarks, often in an attempt to soften what seems to be the most blatant example of hate speech… “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

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