Recognizing Complexity is Not Enough: Further Reflections on Ferguson

Recognizing Complexity is Not Enough: Further Reflections on Ferguson

A sneak peak at my Rector's article for the Eagle: the Newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette, Indiana

As I write this, a certain degree of calm has come to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.  The Governor has told the National Guard troops that had taken up positions to withdraw, and the State Police Captain in charge of the police response said this morning that things were much, much more peaceful.  Attorney General Eric Holder was in Ferguson meeting with the family of Michael Brown, the young man whose death sparked outrage in the community, and many others. 

This week, I heard a report from NPR on the situation in Ferguson.  The reporter was interviewing people in the street.  A man, who identified himself as Bubba, told NPR’s Frank Morris:

You know what happens when you back a dog in the corner. He's going to act out, and he's going to bite you aggressively. You can't treat people like animals. Treat people how you want to be treated. That's the golden rule, I thought. So if they don't want to honor the golden rule, well, then the result is going to be the actions that you see.

[The entire report can be found HERE.]

This situation has been on my mind a great deal lately.  On Sunday, August 17^th, I preached about the circumstances of Michael Brown’s death and the necessity of a loving, grace-filled response on the part of the Church and of individual Christians.  The Gospel for that Sunday was from Matthew.  In the story, Jesus and the disciples travel to the area near the towns of Tyre and Sidon, an area north of the Galilee on the Mediterranean coast.  The circumstances are complicated, but it is important to know that for them, this is enemy territory.  While there, Jesus is approached by a “Canaanite woman” who shouts after him “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”  Jesus, however, ignores her, and his disciples want Jesus to send her away.  Jesus finally remarks that he has been sent only “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But, the woman shows a substantial amount of bravado, kneels before Jesus, and says, “Lord, help me.”  This is the critical moment in the story.  What will Jesus do (and, if he is our example, how must we respond)? 

If you know the story, you know that Jesus, well, he calls her a dog: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  It isn’t the response we expect.  It isn’t the response we might hope for.  It isn’t what we’ve come to expect from Jesus.   As I said in my sermon that Sunday, it’s a complicated story.  There are lots of hard questions that need to be answered: theological, cultural, text-critical, linguistic, historical, etc.  The troubling questions have to do with Jesus’ response.  Why does Jesus seem so disinterested in this woman and her daughter? Why do their needs seem so unimportant to him?  Why does he seem so callous?  Maybe Jesus is playing along with her, teasing her.  Some folks have suggested that the Greek word for “dog” here is a term of endearment—she’s a “little puppy”.  But this all seems wrong.  What’s going on here?

The woman is undaunted by Jesus’ response.  After all, her child’s life is at stake here.  “Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

I couldn’t help but think of the Canaanite woman when I heard the interview with Bubba.  He’s been treated like a dog, and so, like the Canaanite woman in our Gospel story, he co-opts the language and owns it.  “You want to treat me like a dog?  Then why are you surprised when I bite?”

In the story of the Canaanite woman, Jesus finally heals the woman’s daughter because of her faith.  Well, that’s too simple.  He heals the woman’s daughter because she pushed back, because she would not let him off the hook.  He heals her daughter because she demanded that she be treated as a human being and as a person worthy of respect and love.  She demanded that God’s kingdom be expanded to include her daughter and her. 

Many African-Americans in Ferguson and others besides have shown their faith.  They have pushed back; they have not let the rest of us off the hook.  They have demanded that Michael Brown receive justice, that African-Americans be treated as human beings worthy of respect and love.  In the language of faith, they have demanded that God’s Kingdom be expanded to include them. 

In my sermon, I went on to say:

I want to stand here in church this morning and I want to be a good Episcopalian.  I want to be a good pastor.  I want to be reasonable and measured.   After all, outrage, really isn’t our thing.  I want to say to you, “it’s complicated.”  Because it is.  The death of Mike Brown is complicated.  The police response in Ferguson is complicated.  The history of race and racism in this country is complicated. 

But the simple fact is that saying “it’s complicated”, especially if those of us who are white simply leave it at that, is a noxious, sinful form of white privilege. 

Recognizing complexity is not enough.  We have to respond.  As people of faith, we must be people of prayer and action.  We must pray for calm and peace, but we must also demand justice (justice, not witch hunts, but real, honest-to-goodness justice).  We must seek reconciliation. 

As the rector of St. John’s, I call on each of you to pray for peace and calm in Ferguson, in Lafayette, in West Lafayette, and in the streets of every city.  I call on you to demand justice—in particular, justice for Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Amadou Diallo, and more.  I call on you to remember the difficult work of living into God’s Kingdom: a kingdom where we respect the dignity of every human being, and seek to serve Christ in every person.  For some of us, this means owning up to our racial prejudice and our privilege in a society filled with racial injustice.  For some of us, it will mean educating ourselves about the history of racism in this country and especially of the way that history has been experienced by people of color.  For every one of us, it will mean asking God to fill us with grace and love. 

In love and service,

Bradley+  

"It's Complicated": a sermon on the Canaanite Woman, Michael Brown, and White Privilege

"It's Complicated": a sermon on the Canaanite Woman, Michael Brown, and White Privilege

delivered at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette, Indiana 

on Sunday, August 17th, 2014

Today we have this complicated Gospel story.  It’s complicated because it first involves Jesus arguing with a group of Pharisees and Scribes about the nature and priority of Jewish purity laws.  “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person,” Jesus tells his disciples, “but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”

Then Jesus goes on to explain that it is the words and actions that flow from our hearts, which really defile a person—it is the words and actions that flow out of our hearts, which really make us “unclean” in the sense Jesus has in mind.

Then Jesus and the disciples leave the area and travel to the area near the towns of Tyre and Sidon, an area north of the Galilee on the Mediterranean coast.  The geography is almost always important in biblical retelling of the stories.  This is enemy territory.

While there, Jesus is approached by a “Canaanite woman” who shouts after him “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”  Jesus, however, ignores her, and his disciples want Jesus to send her away.  Jesus finally remarks—is it to her or does he just make this known—that he has been sent only “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But, the woman shows a substantial amount of bravado, kneels before Jesus, and says, “Lord, help me.”  And Jesus, well, he calls her a dog.  “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But undaunted, she says, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Finally, Jesus relents—or was he just playing along the whole time?—“Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

This is such a complicated story.  There are so many hard questions that have to be asked.  First off, why does Jesus seem so disinterested in this woman and her daughter? Why do their needs seem so unimportant to him?  Why does he seem so callous?  And then, why does he change his mind?  There are so many issues—theological, cultural, text-critical, linguistic, historical—that have to be answered in order to get at a reasonable answer.  Maybe this is major shift in Jesus’ thinking—now the Messiah’s mission is for the gentiles, too.  Maybe this says something about Jesus’ humanity—Jesus really is callous and disinterested, but the woman’s faith engages his compassion and makes him change his mind.  Maybe, as someone suggested, the same Spirit that drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan has now led him to cross these rigid cultural, ethnic, and religious boundaries.  Maybe the story says something about the gender politics of Jesus’ day, helping us to see, as Paul says, that in Christ, there is “no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for [we] are all one in Christ Jesus.”  There’s perhaps the most important question of all, theologically speaking, which has to do with this woman’s faith.  What is faith?  What is it about her faith that elicits this response from Jesus?  And then there’s all the stuff about the daughter being healed in absentia, about demon possession, and all of that.  Phew!  You see, it’s all really complicated.

All of this seems hugely important, too.  But I have been stuck on one strange detail of the story.  And it really isn’t about Jesus or about the healing or about purity laws or any of that.  It isn’t about whether Jesus was callous or just playing along.  It wasn't really about Jesus calling the woman a dog or about her persistence and faith.  The thing that I’m stuck on is the fact that Matthew refers to this woman as a “Canaanite.”  This story in Matthew is the one and only time this word is used in the entire New Testament.  The story is, well again, it’s complicated…but this description of the woman is anachronistic.  The Canaanites where the people who lived in the land of Canaan, the land promised by God to Abraham when he left his home in Ur and to the Israelites when they came out of Egypt.  The books of Joshua and Judges tell the story of the Israelite invasion of the land and the destruction of many of the Canaanite cities.  They are bloody, bloody stories filled with both small-scale and large-scale violence.  Ask the youth group—that’s part of what we talked about during VBS.

But describing this woman as a Canaanite is entirely anachronistic.  Those stories—the stories of Joshua and Judges took place well over one thousand years before Jesus’ encounter with this woman.  It would be as if I told you about meeting a Soviet or a Prussian or an Ottoman Turk.  My wife—who’s from Ohio—used to go to Alabama for the summer to stay with cousins.  They would call her a Yankee and remind her that the South would rise again.  She had no idea what they were talking about.  Because of the history—a history we know from Israelite Scripture, from the stories of the initial winners of that invasion of Canaan—perhaps this would be more akin to a story of meeting a member of a Native American tribe that no longer existed.  After all, from one perspective at least, the invasion of Canaan looked like a Holy War, like genocide.

Frankly, I’m stuck on this part of the story because of this week’s events in Ferguson, Missouri.  I’ve watched the news and read the papers and read blogs and read about Mike Brown, the young, unarmed man who was killed by a police officer earlier in the week.  I’ve seen the video that apparently shows him robbing a convenient store and videos of the looting that followed.  I’ve seen the many photos of the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets and training sniper rifles on peaceful protesters.  I’ve seen the pictures of African-American women and men with their hands up and pictures of little kids holding signs that read “Don’t shoot”.  I’ve read some of the outrage from friends and colleagues, and it has made me deeply, deeply sad.

And I want to stand here in church this morning and I want to be a good Episcopalian.  I want to be a good pastor.  I want to be reasonable and measured.   After all, outrage, really isn’t our thing.  I want to say to you, “it’s complicated.”  Because it is.  The death of Mike Brown is a complicated story.  The police response in Ferguson is complicated.  The history of race and racism in this country is complicated.

But the simple fact is that saying “it’s complicated”, especially if we are white and simply leave it at that, is a noxious form of white privilege.

Pointing out that some people were looting shops in Ferguson before the police began firing tear gas is  a noxious form of white privilege.

Fixating on Mike Brown as a “thug” or on the videos from the convenient store is a noxious form of white privilege.

Talking about “black-on-black crime” while watching the situation in Ferguson unfold is a noxious form of white privilege.

It is a noxious privilege for me to sit back, from a distance, and say “it’s complicated” every time Mike Brown or Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner or Renisha McBride or Amadou Diallo gets killed by the police or by other armed vigilantes.

It is a noxious privilege for me as a parent of white children to sit back, from a distance, and say “it’s complicated” because my children have so much less to fear.

The death of Mike Brown and the statistics and the stories and the experience of African-Americans all over this country make it clear to me, it is a noxious privilege for me to stand here and say “it’s complicated”.

And I say to you sisters and brothers, if we scoff at this, if we are white, have only white children or grandchildren, and yet refuse to see how we benefit from this noxious white privilege, we must repent.  We must turn around.  We must recognize the truth because only the truth will set us free.  Only the truth can help reconcile us.  Only the truth can save us.  To my white sisters and brothers, I say that we must listen to the experiences of our African-American friends and colleagues.

And we will learn, of course, that it’s complicated.  But we will also see that it’s outrageous, unjust, demonic. We will learn that it is evil.

Sisters and brothers, we can look at today’s Gospel and see quickly that the theological, cultural, text-critical, linguistic, and historical issues are complicated.  But that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus and his disciples are inclined to ignore and dismiss the woman in this story.  And it doesn’t change the fact that

Matthew, in retelling the story, has the gall to use the ancient name of the defeated enemy, the anachronistic and loaded term “Canaanite.”  Perhaps this is a story of Jesus changing his mind or perhaps he’s joking with her.  In the tit-for-tat he’s helping his disciples see how the Kingdom’s mission is to be expanded to all the nations.  Perhaps this story is Matthew’s way of reconciling the different views of the early Church, of reconciling the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians.  Perhaps his use of the term “Canaanite” is intentional and calculated.

It’s complicated.  But something about the story, something about this woman’s circumstances is also outrageous, unjust, demonic.  It is evil.

And perhaps we should hear outrage in the woman’s voice—this person who is marginalized by her ethnicity, her religion, her gender, and by other things besides.  I don’t want to muddy the waters, but the claims of privilege extend to
male privilege, hetero-normative privilege, to Christian privilege in America.  The claims of privilege extend to the modern state of Israel where the death toll is Gaza is nearly 30 times that on the Israeli side.  Maybe we can imagine this woman holding a sign that reads “Lord, have mercy” or “Even the dogs” or “Don’t shoot” or “End the Occupation”.  Either way, she demanded to be recognized.  She demanded that her daughter be healed.  She demanded to be brought into the reach of God’s kingdom.

And here we see the bigger picture.  We see the Kingdom’s demands, sisters and brothers.  Love and justice and reconciliation.

And no doubt, it is complicated.

But in the end, it is right and just, filled with the Holy Spirit and shining with the grace of God.

Amen.