Goin' to the Dogs

*Read Matthew 15:21-28

While I was growing up, my family had a pet dog named Barney. He was a stray we found resting under an old abandoned tractor on the farm where we often went to buy fresh vegetables in the summer. Barney was our most favorite pet. With predominant beagle DNA in his blood, he was a gentle, fun-loving pet that could entertain us for hours in the backyard, endearing us with his fog-horn like howl and his droopy ears and sad puppy dog eyes. But Mom was very firm with her restrictions. Barney had to stay outside during the day. He could not eat table scraps, and he must be walked and washed on a regular basis. After it became evident that Barney suffered from epilepsy, a disease common to many mixed breeds, he was allowed into the house more frequently later in his life; but she was firm on the rule that he could not be fed from the table.

Such began the relationship with my purebred beagle, BJ, short for Barney Junior. She was a gift to my partner on his 35th birthday. And even though her cute puppy looks could melt the iciest heart, we stood firm with the rules. No table scraps, no begging at meals. But BJ knew just what slight degree the rules could be bent; and so before dinner was ready each evening she would take her place right at our feet when dinner was served. A good place to stretch one direction or another to grab whatever stray crumb might fall during the meal!

Then as time went by, the table rules got bent a little more. She was so much a part of us, more and more not just a domestic breed. She understood our speech and we came to understand her much fuller vocabulary of whimper, posture, body language, claw, touch, nudge, stare, ear twitch. And so at breakfast each morning, BJ eventually got a bit of toast and at the end of dinner, a choice bite of meat saved for her from my own plate. If I lingered too long before offering it, I would notice a chin delicately laid on my knee—just a reminder.

She lived heartily for six years, and then suddenly her kidneys began to fail long before she had ever come near old age. Months later, when she lost her appetite for the dog food she had always relished, the rules became irrelevant. Mealtime became an inventory of the refrigerator. Whatever she would eat, she could have: bread, steak, chicken and rice, and dog biscuits at any time of day. When she became too tired to bend and eat from her dish on the floor, then she got it from our hands. And when nothing else appealed any more, we nourished her from an IV. We were determined that she would live if we just kept on trying.

Missing her as we do, I look back now over the six years since her death and realize what happened: gradually she changed my mind about the restrictions we imposed on the way she was fed, and our "table rules" were slowly dissolved and eventually eliminated.

It was another "dog" who changed Jesus’ mind as well. As one of the earliest inhabitants of the pagan region of Tyre and Sidon, the Canaanite was known to be the worst of the lot, a long-hardened pagan, a longtime enemy. And this one, the disciples saw as a real cur: A woman—and an unescorted woman at that, a woman whose undoubtedly shady past must surely have caused the demonic possession in the family; a woman brazen enough to initiate conversation with a man.

Jesus is silent in the face of her. The disciples, however, just wanted to get rid of her, they urge, "Do what she wants, so she’ll get out of our hair." But Jesus responds, "No; I wasn’t sent for her." Then, this "dog" who is satisfied just to be under the table proceeds to change his heart. She is not beholden to the "official rules" or even to Jesus’ understanding of his own vocation, but insists that she and her daughter have a right to healing. She doggedly reminds Jesus that he is not after all servant of the "official religion" or of biblical tradition, but of an uncontrollable Spirit who blows where she will blow, touches whom she will touch, beckons whom she will beckon, heals whom she will heal.

The Jesus we meet before this incident shows partiality to his own people, distinguishes between insiders and outsiders. This Jesus is a problem, if your theology demands perfection in a savior. I too have wrestled with him: precisely because of what He taught us, I shudder at his initial responses. But you know something? In the end, this incident endears him to me more. Here is no brittle, paper-doll Messiah, but one challenged as we are: one who shares our condition and is not ashamed to correct himself. Because just then, Jesus remembers who he is. He comes back to himself in a new way. He admits, as if it were the most natural thing in the world (and of course, it is), that he had been wrong and had his mind changed.

In a sense, it is Jesus’ own awakening that takes him far beyond first-century Palestine’s "honor culture." Jesus does not save face. He is challenged by the woman on his own terms—by her living, pushy faith—to make room for outcast and alien. It’s a profound conversion for him: continue reading in this gospel, and watch how his encounters have a shifted nuance, his stories a new and pronounced bias for the poor and the outsider.

Being a faithful people is all about changing the table rules and getting changed yourself! It’s about who gets to be at the table, and who will be at the table in spite of us; and thereby about the social implications for relations between poor and non-poor, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, pedigrees. It is about a banquet for dogs.

Suddenly the persona of the God enfleshed in Jesus does not only have to do with chosen people. Not only with purebreds—Shelties and Great Danes and German Shorthaired Pointers—but with mongrels. Mutts. Half-breeds and Heinz 57s. The ones that track mud into our sanctuaries and shake pond water all over our doctrine, who hungrily snarf up any little morsel that falls and don’t know how to sit and stay.

The secret we must all discover from outsiders like the Canaanite woman is that if we hold their name up to a mirror, we come face to face with the Holy name. And those we wrote off as "dogs" become revealers of God.

We have five other dogs now, three beagles named Tinker Bell, Riley and Maggie, a Border Collie—German Shepherd mix named Spook, and a feisty Rat Terrier named Buddy. In a lot of ways BJ blazed the way for these puppies; we relentlessly spoil them. And I wonder what it’s like for them to sit at my feet during dinner time. From down there, you can’t see the whole spread, only the rim of a plate, perhaps whatever is lying within a few inches of the edge. It makes you hungry. But with faith, and a good nose, you can imagine the truth: there is more than crumbs there, for a little dog with the temerity to sit close.

As the United Church of Christ we must reach out to members of our community that some may regard as beneath them on the economic ladder of success. Our work with the homeless and low income neighborhoods will bring folks into our church that we might not normally invite into our club. They won’t value our traditions, they won’t idolize our worship space, and they won’t take the gospel at face value. They will be looking for more than crumbs from our table. And we’ll need to be ready to give them the best that we have. It is the kind of thing that must happen to each and every one of us. For even one sharp word or unapproving glance will negate the gospel that we preach. That is not a loving way to live. It is not a truthful way to live either.

We have to turn our priorities around, let go of all our rules, all our contrived distinctions; knowing that what is important is not that they be differentiated from us; but that their lives must be nourished. But we need to turn our criticism onto ourselves. It can be a shock, of course, to realize what we have been doing all along. Our habitual way of camouflaging ourselves has been stripped away. No longer can we make other people responsible for our own shortcomings. We begin to see other people as they really are and ourselves as we really are. We come to our moment of truth the way Jesus came to his.

May the mark of our lives and ministries be this: that we are not too proud to go sit under the table for a bit, listen to the language of the outsider and thereby learn about the feast of the kingdom of God that is to come. Amen.

(Special thanks to some other preachers that helped frame this theology for my experience! Barry J. Robinson’s sermon “Projection Withdrawal” for August 14, 2005 – www.fernstone.org, and Gail Ricciuti’s sermon "God of Mongrels"
from December 2, 2001 - www.csec.org/csec/sermon/ricciuti_4509.htm)