The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost Genesis 45: 1 - 15

Sunday, August 17, 2008 Romans 11: 1 – 2a, 29 - 32

The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 15: (10 – 20) 21 – 28

But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”

Matthew 15: 25

“Nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes,” quipped the esteemed statesman Benjamin Franklin. According to Franklin, we cannot be certain in this life that we will be either successful in our endeavors or wealthy or famous or even, for that matter, happy.

But the gospel according to Franklin is not the whole truth. The whole truth, at least for our evangelist Matthew, is that while we can count on death and taxes, we also can count on God to keep God’s promises.

A desperate woman approaches Jesus this morning in our reading from Matthew. Shouting, pleading and finally throwing herself at his feet, this woman begs Jesus to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon. But this woman is from Canaan and is not a Jew, not a member of the house of Israel. And we hear Jesus say to this woman from Canaan: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” This woman is not a descendant of Abraham. And God gave the blessing to the family of Abraham. She has no right to ask Jesus to help her. And Jesus makes that very clear.

Now most of us like this woman from Canaan are gentiles. We did not grow up reading Torah and going to Hebrew school. We are not Jewish by birth. And yet most of us I daresay presume that God will hear our prayers. And when Jesus reminds a gentile woman, as Jesus does in our text this morning, that she is not an heir to the promise, not entitled to a blessing, we are horrified.

Or perhaps reminded of the ground of our hope. Our hope is the certainty that God will keep God’s promise and finish what God has begun.

“In the beginning,” we read in the book of Genesis, God created a very good world and placed a woman and a man in a beautiful garden to care for the garden, “to till it and keep it.” The man and the woman had everything they could want and only one task – to love the garden. But the woman and the man had other ideas and were cast out of the garden into a world of blood, sweat and tears.

But then God called Abraham and told Abraham God would make him the father of a great nation and “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Beginning with Abraham, God was beginning a divine rescue operation, leading the whole world back to the garden. And through Abraham the people Israel are born. Israel was to be “a light to the nations,” called to show forth God’s justice and mercy and love for all the world to see. Israel was meant to be a beacon of hope in a world drowning in violence and injustice and suffering. Israel was God’s witness to the world that God had created a garden not a jungle (borrowing a metaphor from Episcopal priest Dennis Maynard) and through Israel was patiently wooing the world back to the garden.

But Israel struggled. The very existence of Israel was threatened by powerful empires – first Assyria and then Babylon and finally Rome. Israel, “the light to the nations” was about to be snuffed out, swallowed up whole by the great Roman Empire. Israel longed for a Messiah, a leader like the great king David who would free Israel from Roman oppression and allow Israel to be the holy people God called Israel to be.

What Israel got was the son of a carpenter, a young man who refused to take up arms against Rome, who acted outrageously, breaking the commandments Israel had observed for thousands of years, and who, dangerously accused the religious leaders of leading Israel astray, calling them “blind guides of the blind” in our reading this morning. Jesus was definitely not the Messiah Israel expected.

Jesus would, without question, have quietly disappeared into the mists of history, one more strange character in the life of a small and insignificant people save for one thing – the resurrection. The entire New Testament is a witness to the resurrection of Jesus and testifies to the truth that in the resurrection, God overpowered death itself. The gates of the garden have now been reopened. In the garden, Adam and Eve lived without the threat of death; in the garden, Adam and Eve exercised dominion over a world that did not slowly rot away; in the garden, Adam and Eve could be who God created them to be – the loving caretakers of a beautiful garden. In the resurrection, God keeps God’s promise that through Israel the whole world will be blessed.

God left Paul to work out the theological rationale for including gentiles in what started out as a Jewish sect. And Paul did a stellar job in his letter to the Romans. No, God had not broken God’s promise to Israel. God raised from the dead a descendant of Abraham. Israel remains as heir of the blessing. But now, in Christ, the distinction between Jew and gentile, while not dissolved, has been transcended. And so Paul can speak of Christ as the “new Adam,” human being as God created human being to be.

And because God kept God’s promise to Israel, we have confidence God will complete God’s purposes begun in Christ, re-creating God’s very good creation and us as God’s stewards.

You and I bear witness to the Resurrection, a strange and wonderful world where “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” in the words of Revelation. We testify to the truth that God is bringing into being a whole new heaven and earth, a world we caught a glimpse of in the resurrected Christ.

We live in a world that is not altogether sure how the world came into being or why rain forests are important or what we as humans should be doing. Genesis tells us we were created by God to take care of a garden, a beautiful garden, and given the image of God so that we might be good caretakers. We live in a world that at best believes we might make it to heaven when we die if we are good enough. Genesis tells us we were made to tend a garden not play a harp. We live in a world that believes that if you do not look out for yourself no one else will. Genesis tells us that God created human being as two not one, to be helpmates and partners one to another. We live in a world that is not certain about anything but death and taxes. We need to tell this world a long time ago God created a garden. And what God begins, God will finish.

Many in the world look around and wonder if there is a God. And many others who do profess faith in God expect only to “go to heaven” when they die. But as theologian N.T. Wright argues in his book Surprised by Hope, the hope of the resurrection is a new heaven and a new earth, a world of abundance and joy in which human beings will care for one another and all of God’s very good creation the way God hoped we would when God created that garden and told us to take care of it. Whenever we act out of compassion or seek to do justice or create something of beauty, we anticipate the resurrection and make a claim on God’s promise.

When you go to bed tonight, imagine for a moment you are in a garden, a beautiful garden. You are not alone; you have a help mate and a partner. You have plenty to eat, plenty to do and absolutely no limitations. This day you will sow a few seeds, pick a little fruit, make friends with a tiger and laugh at the antics of a chimpanzee. And at the end of the day you will lie down in a pasture of soft green grass and not be afraid. You will dream of another day just like this one. Imagine, in other words, in the words of Paul, the day when “God will be all in all.”