Sunday 6 September 2009, Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

‘In the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, the black man is my equal and the equal of every living man’.

In her magisterial study of Abraham Lincoln’s political genius, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes racism as ‘deeply embedded’ in mid-nineteenth century America. Lincoln voiced the egalitarian sentiments with which I began as he campaigned for a seat in the United States Senate in 1858, and he detested slavery. But he believed in white supremacy. The black man in America was not the equal of the white man in America. The black man was not capable of assimilation into American life.

Lincoln was a leader, an orator and a reformer of remarkable stature. Yet he held views that all of us find abhorrent. He was a creature of his time as well as being a creator of his time.

Much scholarly sweat has been expended on the first words spoken by Jesus to the Syrophoenician woman. It is easy to see why. A mother bows down at his feet and begs him to cast the demon out of her daughter. ‘Let the children be fed first,’ says Jesus ‘for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’. No amount of scholarly sweat can diminish the offensive nature of those words. The food of his ministry is for the children of God; it is for Jesus’s own people; it is for the Jews. It is not for the people who the Jews frequently referred to as dogs; it is not for the Gentiles.

It has been suggested that Jesus was teasing the woman, that the word he used was a diminutive term of endearment, that it was said while a smile played across his lips. Those suggestions are born of a determination that the Redeemer of the World cannot possibly have uttered anything hurtful. That determination, however well-meaning, is surely misplaced. To picture the face of Jesus is the task of the poet, not the preacher. Jesus belonged to a race which believed itself uniquely chosen by God. God had freed them from bondage, given them a homeland, and driven out other nations before them. God’s purposes were for Israel; God’s prophets called for Israel’s renewal; God’s Messiah would restore Israel’s fortunes. Jesus’s mission, in obedience to God, was to Israel. It was to the children, not to the dogs. Like Lincoln, Jesus was a creature of his time.

The encounter with the Syrophoenician woman recalls us to the transience of human values. Just as Lincoln disliked the notion of black suffrage, Jesus drew a parallel between a desperate mother’s sick child and a despised dog. Abraham Lincoln and Jesus of Nazareth in these instances exemplify that transience, and that transience requires us to re-examine the values we hold. How might we assess what is eternal, and what is not?

The Letter of James makes a unique contribution to the Christian understanding of faith, and it makes it so clearly that Martin Luther was driven to condemn it as ‘a right strawy epistle’. ‘What good is it’ writes James ‘if you say you have faith but do not have works? Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’. Protestations of belief are not enough. They have no cash value; they cannot be assessed or analyzed. The quality of faith can be judged only by the action that it generates. Perhaps the quality of values can be judged only by the action that they generate.

Lincoln’s values may fall short of the standards of twenty-first century liberal thinkers. But Goodwin notes that a black contemporary who had met all the leading abolitionists of the day never felt with any of them, as he did with Lincoln, an ‘entire freedom from popular prejudice against the coloured race’. And the crowning achievement of his political career was the emancipation of the slaves of the United States. The Syrophoenician woman responds to Jesus’s words with faithful boldness. The child is healed; the dog under the table receives its scrap. And in the next miracle that is recorded reveals that the impact of her faith has stretched beyond the region of Tyre. The audience for whom Mark is writing three decades after the crucifixion is not an audience of Jews but of Gentiles, her successors in faith.

Isaiah writes of the actions that will identify the coming of Israel’s God. The eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame will leap and the speechless will sing. Water will flow in the wilderness and streams will run in the desert. These are the actions that were prompted by faith in Jesus, who opened the eyes of the blind, unstopped the ears of the deaf, walked across the seas and fed the hungry in the desert, whose Gospel was proclaimed to the ends of the earth. These are the actions that that were prompted by Lincoln’s values, values which prompted him to break the shackles of more than three million Americans and restore them to themselves, values for which he gave his life.

So what actions do our values unleash? What actions does our faith provoke? Do we set the prisoner free or do we drain away the vital water of life? Do we make the speechless shout for joy or do we place unconscionable burdens upon their shoulders?

If the latter then no matter how clear we are today, to the generation which worships here one hundred years hence we will appear ludicrous or downright wicked; if the former then we catch in them the echo of heaven’s eternal music.