Sermons

A Call to Repair

Loving God, you teach us to build bridges. Help us to find repair. Amen.

Summer, and August in particular, tends to be a sleepy time in Washington. Congress is in recess, and even more people flee the District than usual in an election year. In the church office, things are a little slower, a time to plan for the future and do a little continuing education and volunteering. This week I’ll be taking a class on supervising staff and spending some time helping with a class at the DC jail. But when this period of respite ends, I know that Michele and I look forward to welcoming you back home as you return from summer adventures, looking refreshed and maybe with a few tan lines.

But as much as I have been feeling the summer lull, I think no one told the lectionary committee because we have been getting some of the greatest hits of the Bible the last few weeks! Two weeks ago we had the feeding of the 20,000 with just five loaves and two fish. Last week we had Peter getting out of the boat. And today we get the story of the Canaanite woman, the woman who gets the better of Jesus.

Let me say that again: the woman who gets the better of Jesus. This story, and the similar story in Mark (in that text, the woman is referred to as the Syrophoenician woman), are among the hardest texts in scripture because they show Jesus as distinctly un-Jesus-like. His words, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” create the kind of us/them dynamic that we see Jesus rejecting: Jews versus Gentiles (those who are not Jews), those who are worthy versus those who are unworthy. It is jarring, to say the least, to hear these words from Jesus. We have to ask ourselves what is going on here. Is this the same Jesus who told us to love our enemies?

Last year, I read the book with some of you, Called to Question by Joan Chittister. One of the beautiful things about that book is how Joan chronicles her own wrestlings with faith and how she answers the same questions differently from day to day. As a church that follows the lectionary, we get to wrestle with the same texts every three years and encounter them anew. So here’s how I am answering those questions today.

In following the words and teachings of Jesus, we are constantly struggling between two realities: Jesus is divine, transcendent, part of the Holy Trinity. And Jesus was an utterly human and bodily person like us. The exchange with the Canaanite woman is often held up as one of the most human exchanges Jesus has because it’s the way we still often relate to each other. It raises many questions about why Jesus, who is human but not *just* human, would speak this way.

But I wonder if that is not the point of this passage. Because in studying this passage, I’ve seen something else, something about how we are in community with others.

In my own life, I’ve been reading about how to live in a particular kind of community, the one that happens in a marriage between two people, as I prepare for my January wedding. In particular, I’ve been studying the work of Drs. John and Julie Schwartz Gottman, who have been married to each other for many decades and are psychotherapists who study marriage in a laboratory setting.

They write about something called ‘repair attempts.’ In observing couples in the lab, they watch what happens after a fight. (I want to be clear that the kind of fight I’m talking about here is an argument or hurting one another’s feelings, not physical or emotional abuse or manipulation, which is never okay.) The Gottmans noticed that after a couple has a fight, one of them will make a move. It could be as big as a heartfelt apology, or as simple as sending a meme, making a joke, or reaching for a hand. Where there has been a rift, there is now an olive branch. They write that “the success or failure of a couple’s repair attempts is one of the primary factors in whether their marriage is likely to flourish or flounder” 1. And I think we can easily see how this holds true for friendship and other family dynamics as well.

Now that I’ve pointed it out, maybe it seems pretty obvious. I’m sure you’ve all experienced this. Sometimes it takes a little bit of repair to make room for the larger reconciliation. Being able to call back to an inside joke can make that fraught conversation easier. But I confess that when I learned about repair attempts, it totally changed how I experience interpersonal conflict. Because it used to be that when I would receive a repair attempt, I would think, “I am so MAD at you! Why are you trying to make me laugh right now?!?! I just want to be MAD!” This would lead me to reject what the person had offered, making repair harder and even farther away. But now that I recognize what is going on, I think, “I am so MAD at you! But I guess I’ll send a meme back in reply to your meme because I know that’s the only way to rebuild our connection.” Pretty soon the whole reason I was so MAD fades into the background.

It’s not about burying the conflict under the rug or acting like it didn’t happen. It’s about allowing for the connection that can foster reconciliation. 1 The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, p. 27.

And so my contention today is that repair is what we are to take away from this passage. Jesus has othered the Canaanite woman, calling her a dog. And yet just a couple of sentences later, we see repair. The passage shows us that when we are in a heated conflict with someone, even a stranger, we can rebuild that relationship. When the Canaanite woman holds up a mirror to Jesus, he doesn’t like what he sees. So often, we also don’t like what we see when someone holds a mirror up to us. But he doesn’t send her away, as the disciples want him to. I’m sure Jesus could have dug in if he’d wanted to and thought of some cutting retort. Instead, he turns towards her. He rebuilds relationship. He recognizes her extraordinary faith, a faith that makes her push, and heals her daughter. It’s that repair that we are called to in our lives, in our vocations, in our families and even in our marriages.

And so, in this story, we see both the humanity and the divinity of Jesus: a human desire to separate, to be better than, to insult. And a divine desire to admit fault, to repair, to reconnect. Once again, Jesus, as he does in all the Gospel stories, shows us how to live with one another.