Test Driving Theology

Grace and peace to you from God our creator, and from Jesus, the one who hears our prayers…and answers.  Amen.

On Thursday of this week, over 500 people gathered at 134 Southview Street here in Owatonna, at the old Mayo Clinic building, to cut a ribbon…to tour…to pray for…to bless…and to dedicate the new Oak Hill Community Connections building, and the new and expanded Lighthouse shelter space.  It was good to see so many of you there!  This is a space for women and children, and now for families who need a place to stay.  It also houses a free clinic…a counseling agency…a furniture donation center…a food pantry.  And it is offices for organizations that provide care for families in need.  It was an amazing and joy-filled event.

And yesterday, the first six families moved into the space.  I’ve got to share one quick story…yesterday, Amanda Starks, the Lighthouse Executive Director, told me that she was talking with one of the new guests at the facility.  The woman was saying how amazing… and beautiful… and wonderful the space was.  The woman said, “I feel like I am someone.”  And Amanda just looked at her, smiled, and said, “Welcome home.”  

This Oak Hill project is (and this is a word I don’t just toss around lightly) …a miracle.  It is an act of God’s grace that happened, right here in Owatonna, right before our eyes.

I have been blessed to have had a front-row seat to this project…for the last…I dunno… 5 years, as it moved from a dream to a reality.  And based on what I’ve seen, I have absolutely no doubt that this project has been the work of God.  

It is the culmination of a lot of people’s dreams…of prayers…and of wonderings.  For years…no…for decades really, people have been asking questions:

• How can we bring these different organizations together?  
• How can we provide a single place… a single point of contact… for people in need?  
• How can we provide the hand up for families who need a place…a plan…a hope?
• How can we raise the money?
• How can we get it designed…and then built?

People have asked those questions over and over… persistently…for years.  They never gave up.  They kept asking.  They kept thinking…and wondering…and dreaming…over and over again.  And I believe that God heard these questions…and God’s Spirit went to work…and God provided.  

Persistence.  Coming back.  Again and again.  Until what needs to happen, happens.

Most of us know this feeling from somewhere in our own lives. The feeling of showing up, again and again, even when the results are slow or we keep hitting roadblocks. The feeling of not wanting to give up.  

Please hold onto that feeling for a minute, because I think it’s going to help us understand our gospel reading today.

I’ll be honest with you. Today’s gospel reading is one of those scripture passages that make us squirm a bit… and that’s okay. Because when we read the scriptures, we can’t skip over the hard parts.

Jesus has left Galilee and gone up into the region of Tyre and Sidon, which is Gentile territory; foreign land. And a woman comes up to him. Matthew calls her a Canaanite, which is an old word, a loaded word, the kind of word that means that this woman was an outsider…someone who shouldn’t be interacting with a Jewish rabbi like Jesus.

But her daughter is sick… life-threateningly sick.  And we all know that a parent will do anything for a sick child.  So this woman comes shouting after Jesus, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And Jesus doesn’t answer her. Not a word.

The disciples want to send her away. She’s making a scene. And then Jesus says something to the woman that stings even now, two thousand years later.  He says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” As if to say, “Sorry, I’m not here for you.”

This woman…she doesn’t leave. She drops down on her knees right in front of him and says, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus responds with the line that always catches in our throats: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he says.

If you’ve never felt uncomfortable reading scripture, this sentence should do it.  Jesus is comparing this woman… and her daughter… to dogs.  

But watch what she does next. She doesn’t argue theology. She doesn’t demand an apology. She takes Jesus’ own words and turns them back on him.

“Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

That’s it. That’s the whole argument. I don’t need the whole loaf. I need the leftovers.  I am fine with the scraps.

And Jesus turns, and looks at her and says, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And in that very moment…her daughter is healed.  A miracle.  

I love this woman. I really do. She had every reason to walk away. She’d been ignored, then rebuffed, then compared to a dog. Most of us would have left after round one. But she stayed, because she believed something better was possible, and she was not going to let go of it until she got it.  She persisted.

Here’s what’s beautiful. This story isn’t some strange exception to God’s plan. It’s actually the plan.  We can find the blueprints in our Old Testament reading from Isaiah.

Listen again to what God says through the prophet: “For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Not just for the people who look right, sound right, or who have the right paperwork. All peoples. Isaiah says the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, who love his name, who hold fast to his covenant, God will bring them to his holy mountain and give them joy in his house of prayer.

That promise was sitting there in the scriptures the whole time. This woman didn’t have to earn her way into the family. She just had to hold on until Jesus caught up with what his Father had already promised.

The theologian N.T. Wright has written about how faith in the gospels often looks like a kind of holy stubbornness, a refusal to take “no” as the final word when you believe God’s character is bigger than the “no” you’re hearing. This woman’s faith isn’t quiet. It’s persistent. It pushes. And Jesus calls it great.

Here’s where I want to be careful, because it would be easy to turn this into a “try harder, and God will finally give you what you want” sermon. That’s not it. Not at all.  That’s not the gospel.

This isn’t about wearing God down. It’s about trusting that the door is actually open, even when it doesn’t look like it yet, and having the courage to keep knocking.

I think of George Müller, the nineteenth-century pastor who ran orphanages in Bristol, England. Early on, he made a decision that shaped his whole life. He would care for thousands of orphans over the years, and he would never ask a single person for money. Not once. He would only ask God.

One particular morning, Müller’s orphanage had run completely out of food. No bread, no milk, nothing in the cupboards, and three hundred children waiting to be fed. Müller had the children sit down at the table anyway. He thanked God for the meal, out loud, before there was any meal to speak of. And then they waited.  

A few minutes later, someone knocked at the door. It was a baker from town, who said he hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, and felt like he was supposed to bake bread for the orphanage first thing that morning. He didn’t know why. He just knew he had to.  “Here.” 

Müller kept praying like that for over sixty years, never asking people, just asking God, and trusting, and showing up at the table again the next day.  Over and over.  Persistent.  Trusting.  Faithful.

That’s what this Canaanite woman shows us. Not a formula for getting what we want from God. A picture of what it looks like to trust that God’s heart is wider than we’ve been told, and to keep showing up at that wide-open table even when the world, or our own doubts, tell us we don’t belong there.

Understand this: whatever door you’ve been standing outside of, whatever prayer you’ve almost stopped praying because it feels like nobody’s listening, whatever part of you has started to believe you’re on the outside looking in, Isaiah … and this Canaanite woman… and our own experience at Oak Hill… are all telling you the same thing.

God’s house was never that small to begin with. It was always meant to be a house of prayer for all peoples. For the ones who feel like insiders and the ones who are sure they’re outsiders. For the ones with tidy faith and the ones whose faith looks more like a woman on her knees, refusing to leave until she gets an answer.

So keep knocking. Keep showing up at the table. Keep bringing the people you love before God, even when the answer seems slow, even when it feels like silence.  Be persistent. Be trusting. Be faithful.

Because the God we serve isn’t stingy with crumbs; he’s the God who, in the end, gives you the whole table.

Thanks be to God. 

Amen.