` Lent 2 - 2001

Lent 2 - 2001



Todd A. Peperkorn, STM
Messiah Lutheran Church
Kenosha, Wisconsin
Lent 2 – Reminiscere (March 11, 2001)
Matthew 15:21-28
TITLE: “The Faith of the Dogs”

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.  Our text for this morning is the Gospel lesson just read from Matthew 15.  Our topic for today is persistence in prayer, and understanding why God sometimes says “no” so that he may later say “yes” to our prayers.

Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your loving- | kindnesses, for they are | from of old.  So we prayed in the Introit for the day.  Sometimes in our prayers it seems as though we have to remind God of who He is, so that He’ll do His job.  It’s like God is forgetful, and it’s our job, so to speak, to remind Him of what He’s supposed to do for us.  Remember, O Lord.  Why does the Psalmist call on God to remember, unless God had forgotten His mercies?

So it is in our lives.  There are times in life it seems as if God has forgotten you.  It seems as though we are alone and God has left us here flapping in the wind to fend for ourselves.  Ever felt that way?  I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we’ve seen so many more episodes of these shootings on television this last week.  What must the parents of the victims be thinking?  What must the parents of the shooters be thinking?  And overarching that question is perhaps the more important one: why does God let something like this happen?  We want to blame God for all the faults and problems of the world.  It brings us back to the cry of the Psalmist, Remember, O Lord.  Remember who you are.  Remember what you came into the world to do and be.  Remember, O Lord, remember that you are here to save me.

But the silence is deafening.  Sometimes the suffering continues.  Sometimes in prayer when you start to pray, things get worse!  Yikes!  It makes you want to stop praying.  But this, of course, is the devil talking to you.  God hasn’t abandoned you at all.  He is doing things in His time, in His own way and pace.  But the devil won’t let that go.  He doesn’t want you to believe that God is on your side.  He doesn’t want you to know that God will do anything for you.  The devil does not want you to hear God’s Word of forgiveness and peace and healing to you.

So we come to the faith of the Canaanite woman.  Her plight is much like yours and mine.  Jesus went over to Tyre and Sidon, the land of the Gentiles, or half-breeds that weren’t Jews but they weren’t Greeks either.  They were despised by all.   But Jesus goes there, nonetheless.  And when He is there, this Canaanite woman comes to Him and cries out, saying, Have mercy on me, Son of David, for my daughter is demon-possessed.

This brings us back to the cry of blind Bartemaeus from a couple weeks ago, doesn’t it?  Kyrie, eleison.  Lord, have mercy.  She doesn’t care that He is an Israelite.  She doesn’t know what he’s going to do.  She just knows that she’s stuck, and that her daughter has the worst thing imaginable happening to her.  Her daughter is possessed by a demon.  This is hard for our 21st century way of thinking.  I don’t know.  Perhaps things were clearer back then.  When we see a child that hasn’t been baptized, that doesn’t go to church, and has major problems, it would never occur to us that something sinister was happening.  We would simply assume that it was an attitude problem, or maybe some sort of problem with social skills or that some kind of medication was out of whack.  But in this Canaanite woman’s case, there is no question.  Her daughter does not have faith.  Her daughter is possessed by the devil.

For this woman, there was little hope outside of Jesus.  A Gentile, a woman, with a possessed daughter, it could hardly be worse.  So she goes to the only one who could possibly help her.  She goes to Jesus.  As we sang in the hymn:

And so we come, O God, today And all our woes before you lay;

For sorely tried, cast down, we stand, Perplexed by fears on every hand. (LW 428:4)

His answer, though, is hardly a ringing endorsement of her faith.  The text says that He answered her not a word.  There are few things more frustrating than being ignored.  None of us like it.  It is insulting.  It shoes a callous disregard for someone else’s feelings.  It’s one thing to get mad at someone, but it is another to ignore them.  It is as if you are saying that they aren’t worth the trouble.

Jesus’ disciples are getting impatient about this whole thing.  Send her away¸they said, for she is crying out after us.  It’s unclear whether they wanted Jesus to heal her daughter or not.  I don’t think they cared.  They just wanted to be rid of this nuisance.  Jesus, though, slams both them and her by saying that He wasn’t sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  In other words, it didn’t look like Jesus had any place for these outsiders; he had enough trouble saving God’s chosen people!

But she’s not going away.  She won’t be deterred.  She comes and worships Him and says, Lord, help me!  Notice what she didn’t say.  She didn’t say, heal my daughter.  She didn’t say, make my life perfect, like it used to be.  She simply said, Lord, help me.  That, my friends, is great faith.  Her faith was great because Jesus is great.  She knew that Jesus would give her what she needed.  Maybe that would be healing her daughter.  Maybe that would mean giving her the faith to continue to take care of her daughter.  Whatever it meant, she believed that Jesus would supply it.

But even then Jesus doesn’t give her what she clearly wants and needs.  His insults continue.  “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”  So she’s a foreigner and an outsider, and now Jesus calls her a dog!  For most of us, if God were to respond this way, we would simply give up and go home.  God clearly doesn’t want to help me.

This woman of great faith, though, knows better.  For now she has Jesus trapped in his own words.  He has called her a dog; so be it.  She will be a dog.  She then says to Him, Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.  She had Him.  She knew that she was a part of God’s household of faith.  She believed that God was slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  Even though her experience taught her otherwise, she clung to Jesus’ word of promise in the face of what appeared to be certain failure.

Finally, Jesus reveals what He wanted to reveal from the very beginning.  “O woman, he said, great is your faith!  Let it be to you as you desire.”  And her daughter was healed from that very hour.  You see, God’s ways are not our ways.  What the disciples saw, what we saw with our eyes was Jesus being cruel to this hurting and broken woman.  What Jesus saw, though, was a faith so great that it had to be revealed to the world.  So even though it looked cruel on the outside, all Jesus did was remove the dross from around the gold.  He cast everything else aside, so that all that was left was this woman’s trust that Jesus would keep His Word, no matter what.  The hymn expresses it so well:

When through fiery trials your pathway will lie,
My grace, all sufficient, will be your supply.
The flames will not hurt you; I only design

Your dross to consume and your gold to refine. (LW 411:3)

We can learn two things from this as Christians during this Lententide.  First, God will not abandon you.  It may appear as though things are as bad as they can get.  It may look like God wants to rip you to shreds and leave you bleeding on the floor.  But it’s not true.  God was with her all along.  He knows just how much you can take, and if there are trials and tribulations in your life, God will use them so that your trust in Him may grow, and so that others around you will be able to learn how to trust in God above all things.

Second, we learn from this text that our experiences is not how we gauge God’s presence in our lives.  I think that sometimes when it comes to worship, we turn the whole thing upside down.  I want worship to be exciting and wonderful.  In order for me to get something out of worship, it must make me feel better.  Now if you look at the experience of this Canaanite woman, it leaves much to be desired for worship, doesn’t it?  Her experience with Jesus was that he ignored her, insulted her, and then insulted her again.  But what she received was a greater blessing than anyone else could imagine: her daughter was healed.

That is how it is with worship for us, dear Christians.  Sometimes, worship is exciting and wonderful.  You sing a certain hymn, or something from a reading or the sermon hits you just right.  But there are the other times.  There are times when you leave more frustrated than when you came.  You can’t base God’s presence on your surface experience.  You may feel frustrated, or bored, or excited, or distracted.  But the reality is that God is in your midst.  Jesus comes to you to forgive you your sins.  He comes to comfort you with the Gospel.  He comes to feed you not with crumbs, but with His very body and blood.  That isn’t just experience, that is reality.  As our confessions say, the chief worship of God is the desire to hear the Gospel.

So join your voice to the voice of the Canaanite woman this Lent.  Cry out to God, Lord, help me!  Cry out in prayer, and He will not disappoint you.  Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for  He is good! For His mercy endures forever.  In the name of Jesus.  Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in true faith, unto life everlasting.  Amen.
[ top ]
Return to Lent II
This page was created on 02/18/2007 and last edited on: 02/18/2007
Username: Password: