Charles Spurgeon is quoted as saying, “If I had never joined a church till I had found one that was perfect, I should never have joined one at all.”
In a quote that is complementary to Spurgeon’s quote, Billy Graham is credited with saying, “If you find a perfect church, don’t join it: you’d spoil it.”
This is the tension that Paul lived in – between the creation of the world, between our own creation at our birth, and the New creation that comes with a life in Christ, and the creation of a new heaven and new earth that is made real by the return of Christ in all his glory. For Paul this reality of Christ’s return was so real that he anticipated the coming of Christ in everyday life.
And again, it is this anticipation that Advent tries to instill in us by setting the stage with these texts. The stage is set so that we can understand – even just a little bit – how people in Jesus’ time were anticipating the arrival of the Christ, the Messiah.
But that doesn’t mean that Christ’s activity has come to an end. Instead, toward the tail end of the Season after Pentecost, we begin to hear these passages that speak about the end of days, and what needs to happen before the return of the King. These passages of scripture teach us about how we are to live our lives even during the tumult and torture at the end of the world as we know it.
“God is the God of the living, and not of the dead.”
St. Iranaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and the life of humanity consists in beholding God.”
In the movie, Forrest Gump, some bullies are throwing rocks at Forrest as he’s talking to his friend Jenny, and so she tells Forrest to run. But there’s a problem, because Forrest wore braces to correct a problem with his spine. And so he stumbles off, trying desperately to run, even though the leg braces…
Psychology tells us that we are hard-wired to think that beautiful people are smarter than those that don’t fit into society’s norms of beauty. And that we think that tall people are more capable of leading, just by virtue of their size. And that people who smile are more trustworthy than those who frown or who keep an expressionless face.
And while psychology tells us that this is our initial, hard-wired reaction, it is good that we are thinking and rational creatures, because each of us has experienced a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a salesman with a winning smile who is intending to sell you a lemon. Our hard-wired brains lie to us initially, but it is our thoughts and our understanding that helps us to see beyond the outer facade.
There’s a story about an old man giving advice to a younger man about the battle of good and evil within him. I’m sure you’ve seen it either on social media, or had someone tell it to you at some point in your life. The story is about two wolves, and the one that wins the battle, the story says, is the one that a person feeds the most. I’d like you to take the general idea of this story, but instead of two wolves doing battle for your soul, I want you to think of two children. Because within each of us are two children that are battling for our souls.
The Gospel goes out of the way to make sure that we know that the person who came to talk to Jesus is a woman, a Gentile, and not only any Gentile, but a Syrophoenician. This is a woman of standing, in what Jesus and his disciples could call “enemy territory.”
Over the years, we have all probably used some slurs when speaking of others. But also, over the years, we have matured, and we have come to understand others better, and more importantly, we understand ourselves and our own insecurities and fears better, so that we no longer use these slurs.
Which makes Jesus using this term “dog” to describe not only the Syrophoenician woman, but all her countryfolk sound like fingernails on a chalkboard to us when we hear it. And it demands that we figure out an answer to what is happening.
As I was preparing for the service today, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a sermon that was the equivalent of Teddy Bears skipping through alpine meadows picking wildflowers and making bouquets to give to people?”
“I wonder what the Gospel for this week says…”
Hypocrites! You honor me with your lips, but your hearts are far from me!
It is important to realize that they did not reject Jesus because of who Jesus was. After all, they had seen him turn water into wine, walk on water, and feed 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. They had seen him heal people, and restore them to their lives within the community. They had watched him make the claim that he was the Messiah. And then, they tried to force him to become their king. They obviously were pretty excited about Jesus.
So what gives?