“The Outsiders”

“The Outsiders”


Date: August 20, 2017

GCPC, 8/20/17
Matt 15:21
–
28
The Outsiders
–
Richard Coble
Have you ever felt like you were on the outside
, looking in
? On the margins; stuck on the
sidelines as the game plays on; a pariah to the cool kids; not invited to the party; ignored at
promotion time; or
even
not getting a call back from
the interview?
Aunt Gladdis didn’t invite
m
e to the family reunion. M
y
son Bruce never calls any more.
Susan
doesn’t talk
about her day
when she get’s home.
Have you ever felt like you were on the outside?
I have. Sometimes it
feels like I have
spent
a lifetime feeling that way. No
t
invited. On
the outside. On the sidelines. It feels that way, even
when feelings don’t
match
facts. You can be
on the inside, in the boardroom, with the family, in the
clique but then something smal
l, or
something big,
can happen:
your friends forget to call, you get that diagnosi
s, you
lose someone,
you didn
’t get the job, and bam. Its
everything.
When you came in today, did you feel like you
belonged?
Do you always feel that way?
Where do you struggle to belong?
Let’s contextualize
it
just a bit.
In
just a
few professional years,
I’ve witnessed how
this
feeling
of
inside or outside has a lot to do with how
we’re
treated
, and how we treat others
.
Sometimes, oftentimes,
it is based
on how
you
look
, who you are
.
I worked as a hospital
chaplain for many years before coming to Grace Covenant. I can’t tell you how many times I
walked into a patient
’
s room, this young man, this young white man,
some might say
this
dashing
young
man
, in a
suit and tie, walking right into a hospital room, and the patient or the
family member would start off before I could begin the conversation:
‘
Oh, Doctor, thank
goodness you’re here.
Wait, no? I
’m sorry; I
thought you were the doctor. You look like a
docto
r, chaplain.’
Do people
ever
make you
feel like an insider because of how you look
?
I told
that story to my students at Wake Forest last year. One of my black students, a man in his 50s,
2
who had already spent a career in the ministry, said that when he wal
ked down the hallways of
hospita
ls, also in a suit, no one ever
called him doctor. Sometimes
he got suspicious looks, or
anxious questions.
Do people make
you feel like an
outsider
because of how you look?
We read in our
passage today about someone made to feel like she doesn’t belong.
A
woman, a
woman
,
a Canaanite,
thus
a Gentile from the region surrounding Gentile cities,
a rural
person
,
shouts at Jesus, “Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
And
Jes
us,
exhausted from
arguing
with the Pharisees a few verses back, answers, “I was sent only to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel.” “Lord, help me
,” she pleads. And Jesus, “It is not fair to take
the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” And your he
art just sinks. I can’t read that verse
without feeling it, feeling a weight in my chest. It’s just (sigh). “It is not fair to take the
children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
So, the story goes, the woman responds, not flinching at Jesus’s rebuke, movi
ng forward
in faith: “Yes. Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” And
Jesus is amazed at her persistence. “Great is your faith!” Her daughter is healed.
How does that make you feel? How do you feel when you
read this
passage? Confused?
Angry?
Numb?
Do you feel t
he feelings of the
outside? This
passage
turns our
expectations
around in the worst way
, doesn’t it
?
This
Jesus, who cured the servant of a Centurion,
also
a
Gentile, a Gentile man, only a few chapters ago; Jesus, who in the final
chapters of the Gospel
gives that
Great
C
ommission: “Make disciples of all nations”;
“all nations”;
Jesus, who spends
the
entirely
of the Gospel arguing with the religious authoriti
es of his own nation, calling them
hypocrites,
saying that they have stripp
ed their religion of its core of
justice, mercy, and faith;
This Jesus, the savior that Matthew reveals to us,
who
exemplifies a life of generosity,
faithfulness, and care, this Jes
us calls a Gentile woman a dog and refuses to heal her daughter. I

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