Sermon 139; Is 56: 3, 6-8; Rom 12:6-19(21); Mt 15:21-8 “Stay with us who love you”

Preached by Brother Luke

Holy Wisdom Church

As I thought about this passage during my personal prayer time, a prayer from the third hour kept coming to mind. So I began to think about how these two texts might be connected. Here is the prayer:

Jesus, grant us your servants fast and constant comfort when discouragement overwhelms our inmost spirit. When our souls are troubled do not withdraw from us, nor be far off when we are confused and doubtful in the midst of all the trials and tribulations of life. Rather, stand by us always, yes, come close to us, O you who are present everywhere, come close. And just as you promised to stay with your apostles, so stay with us who love you, so that ever united with you we may sing the praises of your all Holy Spirit.

The 3^rd hour is about the Holy Spirit which explains why the prayer ends as it does. But for me the phrase that connects to the Gospel passage is: “Stay with us who love you.” To love Jesus, what does that love look like?

At every Eucharist just before we approach to receive communion we hear the words of invitation: in faith and love draw near. This is precisely what the Canaanite woman in the Gospel did. In faith and love she drew near. Her appeal to Jesus is for her daughter’s sake. But then notice what happens. She is rebuked by Jesus. He tells her that he has been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. But she persists in her petition. Then Jesus goes a step further and says “it’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” What’s going on here? To modern western ears this sounds like verbal abuse.

In the Arab world, then and now, dogs are not seen as pets the way we often view them in the West. They run in packs and can be dangerous as they scavenge for food. Even those dogs that are used for hunting, herding or guarding are not house pets. Some of you may remember Susan Coulter-Miller who lived nearby for a few years and attended church here. She subsequently spent a tour of duty in the Peace Corps in Jordan. She lived with a family and worked hard to show them how to accept a dog into their family as a pet. She wrote about her experience in our Newsletter. Unfortunately, when she left Jordan, her experiment ended and the dog was out of the house. This is the cultural reality that Jesus was living in so when he referred to the Canaanite woman as a dog it was unmistakably pejorative.

St Matthew is spreading the Good News among his own Jewish community and the picture painted in this Gospel passage plays an important role in that work. Matthew’s hearers and readers were fully aware of the negative nature of the image he is presenting. It is stark and it is intended to be that way. Jesus affirms the common view that he has come only for the Jewish community and certainly not for Canaanite outsiders. But this woman persists in a way that even the hardest heart could not dismiss. “Even dogs eat the scraps that fall from the master’s table.” As with so many other Gospel stories, persistence is rewarded. Jesus recognizes her faith and grants her wish. Her daughter is cured. By so doing, Jesus has shown his community that even people they may equate with dogs can be welcomed into the community of believers. And indeed, expanding the community is the message in the Isaiah passage also.

So one valuable message delivered by this passage is the invitation to be open and to embrace all who seek to join the community of believers.  And yet, I think there is another message here as well. It is the faith in, and love for, Jesus that this woman exhibited. Her faith proved to be the critical factor for Jesus. He says to her: “you are a woman of great faith.” He uses her demonstration of faith to justify his healing of her daughter. Her faith was so strong that even Jesus’ rebuke could not budge it. This is also the faith we see in the martyrs through the centuries. Having limbs severed, eyes gouged out, being burned at the stake or beheaded, none of these atrocities shook the faith of the martyrs. They didn’t budge from their faith and love of Jesus; no matter what abuse came their way.  So her steadfast faith and unwavering love of Jesus is the additional message for us; and as with St. Matthew’s community, the openness to accept all who seek this path to salvation.  This is not only the gospel message but the epistle message as well.

Would that our faith and love of Jesus could be as strong as that of the Canaanite woman. 

Homily: Matthew 7: 1-11

As Preached by Sr, Rebecca
July 8, 2016

Holy Wisdom Church


Today’s Gospel is a continuation of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount found in chapters 5-7 of Matthew’s Gospel. These three chapters, beginning with the Beatitudes form a kind of Magna Carta in the communities of the converted Jews in the second half of the first century in Galilee and in Syria.

Matthew’s community like our own is composed of Christians dedicated to Christ on a journey of transformation.

The lived community experience of todays Gospel is the touchstone. It embraces 3 different aspects:

1. Do not focus on the splinter in your brother/sister’s eye (1-5), rather turn your attention the log in your own eye.

2. Do not throw your pearls in front of pigs (6)

3. Bring your needs to God as a trusting son and daughter. (7-11)

Now let’s Explore the 1st imperative:

‘Do not judge”. Jesus, here, is addressing rash, reckless, and foolhardy judgments. Rigid opinions and negative judgments darken the heart. The contracted, critical part of our small minds is the distorting lens that magnifies our differences and if we are really aware of our body/mind we can actually feel the disharmony within ourselves. Trying to figure out people with our short sighted minds throws a veil over our own hearts. Focusing on the errors of others also minimizes in our small minds our fallibility, our own vulnerability. A teacher once said that a habit of negative judging is an occupational disease of some serious religious people. Especially in our times of chaos all over the planet we need to use all our powers of presence to live from the heart.

We need see God revealing our own blind spots to us, those shadow areas in our life that we have failed to see. If we go after them with a sense of willfulness, anger, self-depreciation we risk obstructing our God given gifts. Jesus puts it: “if you try to pull out the weeds, you might pull out the wheat along with it. (Mt 13:29).

Rilke expresses this to a young poet: “Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.”

2. The second imperative: “Do not throw your pearls to swine”. In Hebrew there is a play on words here: pearl and treasure share the same consonants. What is this treasure we need to honor and not expose to just any person or in any situation?

This treasure is one’s intimate relationship with God.

In Ps. 119: I lay your word as a treasure upon my heart. We lay God’s Word upon our heart, and in a sacred moment our hearts open, this word sinks into the heart, and transforms it.

This pearl that Jesus is talking about is like the metaphor of a seed as in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. It needs the dark and the depth of the soil in order to germinate and become the mature plant that it is meant to become. The seeds that fall on the road, the rock, and the thorns all are trampled on, or wither.

The gift of God’s grace is a treasure to be honed and honored in solitude and silence.


3. The third imperative: Jesus urges us to ask, seek and knock and trust that the door of grace will be opened to us. When we don’t know how to deal with a situation, we tend to contract and go into the insular within ourselves. This makes us less available to grace. We must find a balance between self-effort and trust, openness and reliance on the grace of God.


Jesus throughout the Gospel teaches us to think of grace, God’s presence as woven into the fabric of reality. There is the reality of the daily 24/7, and there is grace, which is wider and deeper than our limited sense of self.


When we rely on ourselves to figure out how to deal with any particular problem in our lives, this leads to hopelessness and even despair. On the other hand when we leave everything up to the grace of God, then we shirk responsibility and we can go to sleep, become passive, numb.

This is a paradox: we need to question, seek understanding, but sooner or later we come to a dead end, a humbling sense of fallibility, perhaps even failure. We need to look inward, feel our desires, and engage in the struggle in dealing with them. But we also need to experience that we cannot with our small minds solve any dilemma. Sometimes we may even cry out: “Oh God, where are you in this mess?” We feel alone and empty. Then out of the blue, the grace of God breaks through. Grace, beauty and a quality of love permeates us. There is a moment of aliveness resonating within us. Chronos time merges with Kairos time as Br. Luke in his homily mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

St. Teresa of Avila says that in any given difficult situation, we need to engage all our faculties as though everything depends on us and yet we need to surrender and trust as though everything depends on God.

I like to offer a true story: Fr. William Johnson SJ taught world religions at the University of Tokyo for many years. He also started there a daily meditation group. All were welcome, Christians or not. One day a young man came in, introduced himself to Fr. Johnson asking if he could come. He said he was very depressed, that life was a daily struggle, his girlfriend had left him, he hated his job etc. and really he had no desire to live. Coming here was the last attempt to do something about his miserable life. He asked Fr. what he should do during this silent time: Fr. Johnson said: recite this phrase: “Today is a beautiful day”. It doesn’t matter if you do not believe it, nor feel it; just do it. This young man came every day. Weeks later the man comes up to Father Johnson saying: “thank you”. My external situation is the same yet “truly today is a beautiful day”. This man’s ‘small mind has descended into his heart. Nothing changed but everything has changed.

6th Sunday after Pentecost Mt 9:18-26, Romans 8:1-11, 2Kings 4 25-37

Preached by Sister Cecelia

Holy Wisdom Church

Glory be to Jesus Christ!

Can you picture how this woman who had been considered unclean for 12 yrs had managed to get through the crowds surrounding Jesus to be able to touch even the fringe on his robe? She chose totally to ignore the fear of the repercussions if anyone recognized her and realized they were now unclean and would have to perform the ritual purifying enactments. She sensed she could not go up and ask Jesus directly for a cure but had heard such tales of his healing abilities and kindness that she was filled with hope and faith that he would heal her if she merely touched the tassel of his cloak. I have always doubted that Jesus did not know who had been healed. He wanted her to know it was all right to have done what she did and he wanted others to know how much he esteemed her faith in him to be able to heal her just with a touch.

For the sake of ritual purity this woman was ostracized from society. While we don’t have the same laws now, are there individuals that we ostracize from our society? What about those with addictions of any kind? Some science and medical practitioners indicate that opioid addiction, for example, is a chronic, often relapsing disease of the brain. Although the initial decision to take drugs may be voluntary, chemical and neurological changes to the brain severely restrict a person’s self -control. The disease hinders one’s ability to resist intense impulses to take drugs-despite harmful consequences to themselves and to others. I’ve been told that most addictions are treatable and there are things we each can do to help. We can encourage people in recovery, we can support treatment opportunities. We can commit to not use hurtful or damaging words about those who face addiction. There are many other opportunities we can do to lessen the difficulties of anyone who feels ostracized.

The crowds had heard the leader of a synagogue beg Jesus to come and touch his daughter who had just died. He was truly distressed and willing to try anything to bring her back to life. Was the crowd that got up to follow Jesus only curious to see another miracle performed or were they just excited to think a healer was among them and wanting to see for themselves? In the Hebrew scriptures the power to bring back life was often by touch, by laying on the inert body and or breathing into it. There is no denying that Jairus also had the faith that is so esteemed by Jesus. Matthew does not name the synagogue leader but we learn the fathers name Jairus from the other evangelists.

Our life depends on saying yes, we are with you, Jesus, and to the gift of faith given us. If we are sincere, our yes will be evident in everything we do. Jesus has said; whoever lives the truth comes to the light so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God and through. Perhaps what can be gleaned from the Epistle this morning is that when we have the Spirit of God within us, we have all the help we need to live for God and not for selfish or worldly ends.

When we receive the Eucharist, the body and blood of Jesus we more than touch the fringe of Jesus’ garment. In faith we reenact the mystery of Jesus reaching out and touching us to give us his life. We are reminded that our bodies as well as our souls benefit by Christ touching us. When we receive Christ by faith, we begin an immediate personal relationship with God. This relationship has to be nourished by our taking time to think of God, to meditate, to read and reflect and most of all, to listen. It takes faith to keep on doing these things even when at times it can feel like we are doing nothing. The Holy Spirit works in us to help us become like Christ. Then everything we do, every action, no matter how lowly a job or how high, becomes a prayer The Spirit unites the Christian community in Christ. The Holy Spirt can be experienced by all and works through all of us.

Christ is in our midst!