Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
August 20, 2023

Inherent Worth and Value

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor

Isaiah 56:1, 6–8
Matthew 15:21–28

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This week I was sitting in one of our beautiful Chicago parks reading at a picnic table. At a nearby picnic table a couple of families ate together while their young children played around them.

At one point, the oldest girl, who was probably about seven, came over to me and asked if she could show me her flowers. I said sure. She had a handful of leaves with scalloped edges. They did look like flowers. I admired them, and she offered me one. I said thank you and accepted it. She told me I should keep it a secret and put it under my pillow. I assured her I would do so.

She looked at me a little more and then took a few steps back and said, “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” I nodded and said, “That’s true.” Then she asked, “Are you a stranger?”

I knew right away, of course, that she had been taught about “stranger danger.” I didn’t want to frighten her, but I didn’t want to make her feel more comfortable speaking to strangers in general. So, I said, “Yes, I am a stranger, because we don’t know each other.” She nodded and kept looking at me. “Are you dangerous?” she asked.

Now you can see the problem with this question right away. If I was a danger to her, I would not tell her that I was. But if I told her that I wasn’t dangerous, would that encourage her to trust other strangers? She was trying to learn how to be cautious and who to trust.

I encouraged her to go play by her family and leave me to do my reading, thereby sidestepping her question about whether or not I was dangerous. She went closer to her family, and I made eye contact with her parents, then continued to contemplate her questions: Are you a stranger? And are you dangerous?

These are questions that humans often ask, even without saying the words. We look around and try to discern whether and where we are safe. Who are the people that we can trust? Unfortunately, it is not clear cut. Sometimes we can trust strangers, and sometimes the people who are closest to us betray and hurt us.

As I thought about this, I realized that Jesus is confronted with a similar question in his encounter with the Canaanite woman. This desperate mother comes to him, and at first he completely ignores her. She is not “his people” he thinks. She is a stranger.

When his disciples are bothered by her insistent shouts, he tells his disciples that his ministry, his care, his healing, is only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. At this point he still hasn’t even addressed her, although likely she has heard him.

It’s only when she kneels before him and calls him Lord that he answers her directly. And this time he wraps his comment in an insulting metaphor, essentially calling her a dog and denying her even crumbs of what he is offering.

This is not the compassionate, loving Jesus that we know and love! It’s very uncomfortable to think of Jesus being exclusionary in this way. And some preachers and scholars try to soften his words by saying that it wasn’t as bad as it sounds: he didn’t really call her a dog; he called her a “little dog,” which is sort of like calling her a puppy.

Or, some have said that although it sounds rough to our ears, she understood that it was really loving, because in her Canaanite culture they did keep beloved pets who were fed from the table.

Some have suggested that Jesus knew all along that he would heal her daughter, but he used the encounter with her as a teaching moment for his disciples, so they would hear her plea and see Jesus appear to change, so they too would have their hearts opened toward her and others like her.

Whether or not Jesus knew in advance that he would help her, the Canaanite woman had to face down his silence first and then his insult. She persisted. She believed in herself; she believed in her inherent worth and value.

Some may be bothered that she uses the language that Jesus puts out. I have at times. She seems to agree that she and her child are like dogs. But she clearly doesn’t agree, because she takes Jesus’ words and logic and uses them against him.

She persists in seeking the healing her daughter needs and deserves. She uses her wit to resist being put down. And yet she also demonstrates respect for Jesus, calling him Lord, kneeling before him.

She demonstrates a respect for Jesus that does not imply disrespect for herself. She respects herself, too. We all need that kind of mutual respect.

This week I have had the great good fortune of participating in the Parliament of the World’s Religions. The Episcopal News Service reported that “as of Monday afternoon, more than 6,500 attendees from 95 countries, representing 212 spiritual traditions, had registered for the Parliament, with more attending online” (Bob Smietana, “Parliament of the World’s Religions Hopes to Harness Faith to Address World’s Ills,” episcopalnewsservice.org, 15 August 2023).

The Parliament of the World’s Religions was first held in Chicago in 1893, then again on the 100th anniversary, in 1993. Since then, it’s been held about every three years in different countries around the world.

A foundational goal of the Parliament is to bring together people of different faiths to build understanding and relationships between us so that we can work together for the common good.

This week as I reflected on the Canaanite woman’s belief in her own inherent worth and value, I also experienced that in a religious practice of the Sikh community.

That’s spelled S-I-K-H, and it’s properly pronounced “Sic.” I used to think it was pronounced “Seek.” But the community is called the Sikh community, and the religion is called Sikhism.

A core practice in their tradition is called the Langar. The word means “open kitchen,” and the Langar is a community meal offered to any and all people who come. (Tarunjit Singh Butalia, “Guru Ka Langar: The Sikh Ethos of Sharing Hospitality,” interfaithobserver.org, 25 August 2019).

At the Parliament, and at a number of prior Parliaments, the global Sikh community have offered free and open Langar meals to thousands of people every day of the conference.

On Monday, the first day of the Parliament, the lines for the meal were long, and it was pouring rain. The meals were served in a large tent outside McCormick Place, so we had to walk briefly through the rain to get there. As we entered the tent in batches of thirty to fifty people, we honored Sikh tradition by removing our shoes and placing them in numbered bookshelves.

We sat in folding chairs first, in front of Sikh women who tied a simple scarf on everyone’s head, men and women alike. Then we were guided by other volunteers, who offered their hospitality and kindness with warm smiles, showing us where to sit on the floor in long lines, all facing the same direction so that we could be served.

Every aspect of the meals has a significance. We all sit together on the floor to indicate our equality with each other, “regardless of religion, caste, color, creed, age, gender, or social status.” Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia, a board trustee of the Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations of the Parliament, explains the Langar in an article about the 2018 Parliament, which happened in Toronto.

“The tradition of the Langar,” Dr. Butalia writes, “expresses the Sikh ethics of sharing, community, inclusiveness, and the oneness of humankind.” He explains that “Sikhs do not believe in charity because it [charity] assumes inequality between the giver and the receiver. Instead, the faith encourages sharing fruits of honest labor with others as equals. The Langar institution represents ‘sharing,’ not ‘charity,’ and is to be a simple meal, not a feast” (“Guru Ka Langar: The Sikh Ethos of Sharing Hospitality,” interfaithobserver.org).

The simple meal we received was a South Indian style vegetarian meal of rice and lentils, curried vegetables, naan bread, yogurt, a simple dessert, and a mango yogurt sweet drink called a mango lassi. The meal was prepared by volunteers, and we were served by volunteers who understood their service to be holy work.

We sat in long rows and were served from big pots with large ladles, and the servers kept coming around to offer us more until we were full. There were hundreds of us sitting together on the floor and eating, at the same level, the same food, at the same time.

When we were finished, I said to my friends and colleagues, “I feel like I have just eaten love.” Dr. Butalia described it this way: he said, “People open their hearts over food. As we share food with strangers, we share our hearts too with them. What better way to bring down the barriers that divide us, than sharing a simple meal with people of many or no faiths?”

Many things happened at the weeklong Parliament of World’s Religions, but the Langar meals resonated with me so powerfully.

The meals demonstrated sharing, not charity; mutual respect and honor; opening hearts; and generosity through an abundant simplicity.

And it made me think of the Canaanite woman who came to Jesus, insisting on her own inherent worth and value, expecting to be treated as such, trusting in Jesus’ ultimate capacity to see her humanity, whether he saw it right away or not.

She presented herself and her daughter in their honest vulnerability and need, approaching Jesus with mutual respect. I like to think that her open heart opened his heart, when, with her self-respecting wit, she turned his words back on him, surprising him into saying, “Woman, great is your faith!”

She had faith in him, and she had faith in herself. We can learn from her, a Canaanite women, who perhaps came from the Phoenician territory of Carthage in North Africa or perhaps from the Syrian region of Phoenicia.

And we can learn from the Sikh community, who have been serving and sharing Langar meals with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people by now, since their founder Guru Nanak offered the first Langar meal to a hungry community in fifteenth-century Punjab in South Asia.

As the Langar meal demonstrates and reiterates again and again, we are one humanity. We just need to keep learning and practicing how to act like we are.

Discernment is necessary. Every person is not trustworthy, and every stranger is not dangerous. How do we figure it out?

The girl that I met in the park this week had a conversation with her mom that I only partly overheard. “Yes, she is a stranger,” her mom said, “but that doesn’t mean that she is dangerous.” And so that youngster’s education continues. How will she know? How will she discern? How will she grow over time?

We have the same questions. Granted, many of us may have more experience now than she has. But we have the same questions: “Are you a stranger? Are you dangerous?”

“We are strangers,” I had told the young girl, “because we don’t know each other.”

What happened at the Parliament of the World’s Religions is that some of us who were strangers now know each other just a little bit more. And when I meet someone wearing the distinctive turban that is worn by someone who practices the Sikh religion, I will think of the Langar meals that made me feel like I had eaten love.

Some of our work as disciples of Christ is turning strangers into friends and being trustworthy ourselves, so that we can say to more and more people, “We are no longer strangers, and you can count on me.”

Great is the faith, the persistence, and the mutual respect — self-respect and respect for the one she encountered in Jesus — great is the faith demonstrated by the unnamed Canaanite woman.

We are one humanity, all equal in inherent worth and value, each human created in the image of our Creator God. May we learn that lesson and live into that truth. Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church