HOW INCLUSIVE IS GOD?
A sermon by Rev. Jack E. Skiles

August 17, 2008

Isaiah 56:1, 4-8; Matthew 15:21-28; Romans 11:1-2, 29-32

I stepped outside a few nights ago to perform the mundane task of carrying out to the curb our garbage and recyclables.  The moon was spectacularly bright behind a broken field of cumulus clouds.  The planet Jupiter was just off to the left of the moon.  I heard overhead a growing sound and I looked up into the evening twilight to see a small group of birds flying as one to the east.  Before I could turn away the small group turned into a massive one as hundreds of birds were winging their way toward their evening roost.  Birds of a feather are already flocking together. 

The light is already beginning to seriously diminish here in the northern hemisphere and the brain chemistry in any number of birds is causing their songs and behaviors to change from mating rituals to getting ready to leave rituals.  Many birds migrate, but still they group as robins to wing their way south together.  The groups of birds of varying kinds do not intermingle in their travels.  Discrimination, being able to discriminate has great benefits that help different animals and mammals survive and thrive.  Discrimination is natural and most often beneficial. 

But, sometimes, it can be so very cruel and insensitive to a changing environment.  In  Chicago, the world's second busiest airport, O'Hare Field, has been in an area of northwest Chicago the past sixty years that has been directly part of a major migratory pattern for birds for the last million or so years.  In sixty years the birds have not caught on to the ever increasing danger of flying through that area and huge numbers of birds just following their instincts are killed there every spring and fall season.

You and I, who are animals ourselves, have been gifted to not only have natural instincts, but also the gift to be self aware, the ability to make choices far beyond mere repetitions. It is a tension that we exist within, patterned instinctual behaviors verses well thought through choices, intentionally made decisions.

Our world of people reflects centuries long groupings like birds of a feather flocking together.  For many of us in this sanctuary our ancestral groupings have worked very very well for us.  We are very well provided for economically.  We are surviving most comfortably and we have available to us and use huge amounts of resources.  Our ancestral relatives have made many discriminating choices, they grouped together with similar people, often of the same skin pigmentation and with similar belief systems that have rather successfully gifted us with the advantages we have today.  The ability to discriminate has many positive attributes as well as many less than positive manifestations many of which we are acutely aware of in our society and world.

Discriminations that once most probably were beneficial in determining survival of our clan, our people, such as skin color, gender identifications, sexual preferences have long since ceased to have those positives and are in fact, as we all know, used today to blatantly harm others.  We are asked in today's world to make conscious choices about instinctual discriminations that unnecessarily harm the world of people, plants, animals and the climate.

The faith of our fathers and mothers has had to grow in this regard. All three Scripture lessons this morning, provided by the Revised Common Lectionary focus our attention on the growth of inclusivity within our belief systems from time of the Jewish Babylonian captivity in Isaiah, to the painful struggle of the man we know as the Apostle Paul in the Book of Romans, to that most compelling story of Jesus calling a woman a “dog,” as she was a Canaanite and a woman, before embracing her faithfulness at the story's end.

Turn with me to the 56th Chapter of Isaiah. This section of Isaiah is a major culmination of faith within ancient Jewish thought that had some of the greatest impact on Jesus and the earliest followers of Jesus, like the Apostle Paul. This section of Isaiah is referred to in the professional literature as III Isaiah. Isaiah had multiple authors and was written over the period of a century or more and it was all molded into one unit over time. This particular section that we are allowing ourselves to meditate upon this morning was penned while the Jews were in captivity in Babylon around 586 BCE, some 2,500 years ago.

Isaiah is a prophet who speaks directly the mind of God. Verse one says, “This is what the Lord says: Maintain justice and do what is right for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed. Blessed is the one who does this, the one who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath without desecrating it, and keeps one's hand from doing any evil. Let no foreigner who has bound themselves to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.' And let not any eunuch complain, ‘I am only a dry tree.'”

There is within the Hebrew Scriptures rabid and narrow racism and preferences stating that God only loves and chooses Jews. And then there are statements such as this one this morning, 2,500 years ago, where one of Israel's greatest religious minds says that, directly from God, not only are foreigners welcome and embraced fully and completely by God, but so are those of a sexual minority, the eunuchs.

Religions, the rituals of faith, have long encouraged the faithful to draw circles that exclude as way of stating who is included. How do we know who belongs if we do not discriminate? Religious groups for all of history have struggled. Surely, religions have argued, surely the Divine has chosen us. III Isaiah is amongst the first Jewish voices to call people's attention to that growing understanding that God chooses to gather everyone and that the mark of faith is not race, or land ownership, or clerical collar, or gender, or sexual orientation, but those who hold fast to God's covenant and who bring justice, God's divine compassion and mercy and kindness to reality in their everyday living situations. God desires faithfulness to God's covenants, God's promises. God surely does not discriminate against any part of God's creation, but loves us all equally. We are called to so emulate such divine love.

In Paul's letter to the Romans, Chapter 15, we have Paul struggling to write and we have us struggling to read and comprehend the dense, confusing arguments that Paul is attempting to give voice to this morning. Bear with me here, Paul is writing to the Romans this letter that we have, thirty years before the Gospel of Matthew is written down for the first time. Paul comes first and this was Paul's last letter that we have. He was writing to the five or six small house churches in Rome trying to get them ready for his visit around the year 56 or 57 CE.

Paul believed one thing more than anything else. He believed, he knew, he was sure that God had moved in such a primal manner in Jesus that it changed Paul's whole orientation in life. Paul believed that God was still working that strongly in the life and resurrection of Jesus that it would and will change everyone's life who believes in Jesus. “Get ready,”  Paul would suggest, “get ready because God is not done moving. God is still speaking, moving still and God is coming again. Be ready!”

Paul struggles in Chapter 15 in Romans and goes back and forth around this issue of whether or not the Jews were God's chosen elect and whether or not they are still God's chosen or whether or not through faith in Jesus a new elect has been crowned.

We have been gifted to have this book [the Bible] of people giving witness to what they believe to be most true. This book contains gems of wisdom and rocks of ignorance and the streams of living attempts to make a true path toward God. In reality there are many paths that are dead ends in this book and we are called to be live disciples who must humbly discern and learn and struggle not to make the same mistakes that others have and to still hear the call of God to gather all to God's holy places.

This book is filled with support of slavery and has been used to rob millions of lives from having freedom and dignity. This book is filled with misogyny and hatred of women and has been used to abuse. This book contains the varied story of human beings who have sought to understand the Divine lure to be better people, people who reflect the divine and Jesus is that part of that story that has connected with me and I trust with most of you and we, you and I, are humble significant aspects of the rest of the story of God being fully known through Jesus.

Paul is struggling in Romans 15 to say that God choose the Jews and God is choosing them still and that Jesus, a Jew, is now calling from within Judaism to go beyond traditional Judaism to gather all people together as one. Let's try to ponder this whole concept beyond Paul's 1 st century awareness and let's attempt to think and believe theologically.

We are called in 2008 CE to move beyond regional and local oddities of belief that we alone are God's chosen people. That was stated in the negative; let me state it in the positive. Everyone is chosen by God and we experience God's call uniquely and in the midst of our personal oddities.

I am a pinkish, straight American male but I don't believe that God is just like my personal oddities. Nor do I believe that God is a darker skinned Chinese lesbian. What I do believe is that all are contained fully in God. All. Everyone and everything is fully contained in God and that God is calling God's creation to covenants, promises of responsibility, of ethical moral behaviors and to error on the side of justice, compassion and mercy as God is doing to us.

Jesus in this morning's lesson from Gospel of Matthew does some religiously and theologically stretching behavior both personally and corporately. Jesus is approached by a Canaanite woman who comes begging Jesus to heal her daughter who has an evil spirit.

This is a tough story because Jesus turns on this woman in a very ugly way that is indicative of men at our locker room worst. He calls her a dog. While that is bad enough, in the Greek it is more than a dog. The Greek does not support Jesus referring to her as a nice pet either. He uses a term that is both sexually and animalistically crude in referring to this woman from the dregs of society as a female dog in heat. Jesus is not being meek and mild in this encounter.

It is appropriate to take every racial, sexual, gender, economic stereotype currently active in today's world and toss it into our struggle with this story from Jesus this morning. The woman is an outsider with no rights asking, if not demanding, help from a person at the top of the food chain who normally at a social level eats people like this for dinner as an appetizer. Do you know what I mean? I'm sure we understand each other.

Jesus says, after calling her names, the food I have to give, the bread is not for the dogs, the scum of the earth people like you. And she responds, even the dogs in your society get to eat the crumbs from beneath your tables. Jesus smiles at her and says, “Your faith is making your daughter whole.”

This story is an embarrassment for people who are convinced they are already chosen. The story is not embarrassing because Jesus refers to this woman as a “bitch in heat” but because this woman actually wins the argument with Jesus and the grace of God is fully given to this woman, who isn't even Jewish and who does not even convert. She goes her way and her daughter is healed.

Like Isaiah, like Paul, Jesus is demonstrating that God's grace and love and commitment goes beyond culture, beyond nation states, beyond gender and sexual orientation. God loves everyone, values everyone, and calls us all to love as God loves. We people who have a tendency to know ourselves as special, as chosen, as one step above the rest seriously have to struggle to understand that God does not view us as above anybody and in fact expects us to stoop down from our psychological exaltedness and lift up everyone to the same fair, compassionate justice-filled plane of existence.

It is the Word of God for the People of God.