A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Patricia A. Gillespie
Isaiah 56:1-7
Psalm 67
Romans 11:13-15,29-32
Matthew 15:21-28
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, .....It's a well known Robert Frost poem ... something about the goodness of separation and division – "good fences." Something about clinging to the past and not seeing the present. And something about not wanting those divisions -- "Something there is that doesn't love a wall ..."
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' ....
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. ....
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
We at Good Samaritan have had a wall that we loved collapse.
It was Friday the 13th of August and the west wall of our church came crashing down.
No one was hurt. Windows were damaged.
And now we are wide open to the world.
There is no longer a wall between us and "the Original Main Street" of Sauk Centre.
The wide-open welcome of our mission statement is apparent.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Our readings today are about walls being broken down. About breaking through prejudice, through whatever separates us, whatever walls us in.
The Canaanite woman breaks through the prejudice of Jesus and his disciples that wouldn't allow them to listen to a foreign woman. And today, August 15, is traditionally the feast day of another woman who broke through walls of people's expectations. It is the Feast of Mary, mother of our Lord.
Walls of prejudice can do more than separate us from people, can separate us from new ideas. Frost writes, "he will not go behind his father's saying." His father's saying is like a wall built of the old ways that he clings to, shutting out new ideas.
How easily we can be trapped by a wonderful building or a beautiful idea, or by a good tradition, as Jesus and his disciples were. Then our minds may be so full of our building or our issue that we are closed to new life and healing.
Then it's time for the old to crumble away, to make way for new life and growth. Then it's time for a Canaanite woman to show up in our lives, doing for us as she did for Jesus & his friends: showing us there's something we haven't imagined yet.
No one likes that our wall has fallen and our windows are shattered.
But our faith proclaims in the cross that it is out of brokenness
that new life arises.
When the walls fall down and the stone is rolled way,
the light comes in and we may see everything new.
Our faith allows us to feast even on the crumbs; and, when the walls fall down around us, to see beyond the rubble of the old walls of God's house to a place where we understand that God's home is within our lives.
Let us take this Friday the 13th omen as a sign. Indeed as a sacrament: as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. May the walls of our prejudice collapse so that we too are open to God's world. We're seeing the old models of ministry crumble to make way for new ministry and new life in our church. It is a time of opening up and new vision for our parish.
The Spirit will not be walled in. And where there are no walls, we can be joyful in God's house of prayer and begin to build something new.