There’s this drinking game all the cool kids used to play. We called it “Never Have I Ever” and it was quite simple. You’d take turns going around the circle, and come up with something that you’ve never done. If someone else in the circle has actually experienced that thing, that person has to take a drink. So, I’d say, “Never have I ever gotten arrested,” and my buddy across the way who got caught streaking the chapel would have to take a drink. But when it was her turn, she could say, oh, something like, “Never have I ever gone skinny dipping on the Oregon Coast,” and you’d catch me taking a swig of my apple-tini. And we’d go around the circle, trying to catch each other in various acts of embarrassment, all while creating yet another opportunity for embarrassment by getting each other to drink, and thus reveal, a little too much about our lives.
The thing is, when I first started playing this game, I was, obviously and appropriately and very prudishly, 21 --not that I’m a huge fan of underage drinking. But when I first started playing this game, I didn’t take very many sips. Because, well, I hadn’t done much. See, I’d had my life all planned out. I had strict, distinct lines drawn on things like drinking and drugs, sexuality, getting a C, skipping classes, telling people how I really feel, and even getting angry. All of these things were forbidden. Unheard of. Morally compromised. Sub par. I had a mental list of things I was never going to do. I would never have credit card debt. I would never get a designer dog. I would never wear makeup just to prevent people from telling me that I look tired. I’d never compromise my passions just for a paycheck. I would love the sinner and hate the sin. I would have a fairytale marriage with a man of God who would be the head of my household and we would fall asleep in each other’s arms after our couples’ bible study every night. I would never doubt my Christian faith. I’d never stop trying to get my mother to pray the "Jesus Prayer” and therefore be “saved.” I’d never do drugs and I’d never get a speeding ticket and I’d never, ever, watch trashy tv or read romance novels for fun. I would always avoid big chains like Walmart and Starbucks and Amazon and always shop from the mom and pop stores down the street. And this continued on as I became a parent. I would never leave my kid in his carseat. I would never feed my baby food from a jar. Their butts would never know the feel of a disposable diaper, and I would never ever let them sleep in the bed with me or cry it out or stray from their schedule or watch too much Yo Gabba Gabba. (That was a popular show about ten years ago, just like Sesame Street, but for hipster babies.)
Needless to say, if I played the game now, 21 years later, it would be a lot more interesting. I’d probably have to pull out a second bottle of shiraz.
I had all these ideals that I wanted to keep, and to do that, I had to set up all these boundaries, draw all these lines, live in all these boxes so as to never compromise on those ideals. It’s a nice insurance policy, really. If I never take any risks, if I always draw inside the lines, then no one will get offended, I won’t step on anyone else’s shoes, and I’ll always have the confidence that comes with being right.
Now, there’s no doubt that boundaries can be really important. They keep us on track with our goals. They give us identity and perspective and a place to stand. And, most importantly, they can keep us safe. They can keep out all the scary things in life that might want to hurt us. They can keep out all the scary people in life who might want to hurt us. Most of us need boundaries. Especially in relationships. We need to be able to say, “No. That’s a little too close. Please give me some room.” We need to be able to protect ourselves from abuse and neglect and emotional manipulation, and boundaries are really important tools for doing all of that.
But the down side to boundaries is that, just as they can protect us from the bad, they can also keep out the good. They keep us from experiencing and understanding someone unlike ourselves. They keep us from relationships that can stretch us and grow us and challenge us beyond who we thought we could be. Sometimes we claim our boundaries are for our own protection, but in reality, they’re there because we have prejudice, we have assumptions, we have judgment and ridicule. Sometimes we have boundaries, not to keep us safe, but to protect this fragile little world that we have created for ourselves. And that’s when, at least in my life, I think I’ve really missed it. I’ve missed out. I’ve stayed a little too sober. I’ve refused to participate in that dangerous game that is also fun and connecting and radically vulnerable.
That’s what I want to focus on for this really hard, really uncomfortable passage for today.
Boundaries.
Even Jesus had boundaries. Even Jesus lived in a box of morals and values and prejudice that was built long before he was born that defined who was in and who was out. A line that was never to be crossed. A set of expectations that was never to be questioned. They had drawn a line around the Israelites in order to protect themselves, sure, but also in order to keep anyone who might be different from them out.
Walls to keep certain people in. Walls to keep other people out.
Jews in. Gentiles out.
But you have to be willing to really listen to the text, to let the words cross over the line past that world where you think you know who Jesus is, in order to discover who he really was. You have to be willing to let this account trespass into your neat orderly Jesus box. And this is hard, because in this particular encounter, at least for me, Jesus is not who I want him to be.
According to Dr. Tuell, professor emeritus at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, “It takes extraordinary eisegetical gymnastics to avoid the clear implication of this story.” And the clear implication of Jesus isn’t so flattering to our modern-day eyes. See, Christians, for centuries, have been doing theological backflips to make this text not say what it is actually, pretty clearly, saying. Jesus calls this woman a dog. Jesus refuses to heal this woman’s daughter simply because she is a Gentile. Jesus is living according to his time and his culture and the boundaries set up for him by his Jewish faith. Dare we even say that Jesus got it wrong here?
Gregory of Nazianzus said, “That which was not assumed is not healed. But that which is united to God is saved.” In other words, if Jesus didn’t experience it in his full humanity, then we aren’t saved in ours.
This very human Jesus just wants a break. He just wants to go on vacation. So he enters the land of Tyre, a predominantly Gentile town, in order to get a break from his people. He just wants to be left alone. He’s drawing a boundary between himself and them just so that he can get some rest. He enters a house and doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s there. He’s got boundaries on top of walls on top of limits inside neat little boxes. But somehow, this woman finds out about where Jesus is trying to keep himself safe, and she barges in. She trespasses. She knocks down the boundary that he has set up for himself. At least a little bit. At least enough to make him question all those lines and walls and limits and boxes.
She comes in, kneels at his feet, and begs him to cast a demon from her daughter. For something awful and oppressive has crossed through her daughter’s boundary, and that something is tormenting her. This woman challenges Jesus’s boundaries so that he might restore her daughter’s.
And he calls her a dog.
No. Not a cute little puppy. There were no dachshunds or labradoodles or French bulldogs at this time. Only scavengers. Scavengers who roamed the streets and fed off of dead flesh. They were considered filthy animals. Unclean. Rejected. Kicked and chased away. “Let the children be fed first. It’s not right to feed you filthy dogs.”
And the woman is not surprised at all by this abuse. In fact, she’s ready for it. She challenges his boundary once more, using his language, using his insult, in order to hold a mirror up to all these walls he’s set up for himself and reveal to him the very narrowness of his boundary. She says, “Even the dogs get the crumbs. And crumbs are all I need.”
She walks up to Jesus’s boundary and she invites him to move it. Not far. Just enough to heal her daughter.
So often we set up these boundaries in ourselves and we dig our heels in and we say, “This is my boundary. I will never cross it. I will always be this way. I will never change. This is my plan.”
And then life happens.
Our kids get sick. We lose our jobs. We suffer from crippling mental illness. We get off track. Our carefully curated plans go awry. Our “never will I evers” become, “well, maybe, this one time…”
And that’s when people enter in to our spaces and leave us changed. Life happens and things get messy and our black and white worlds turn to grey.
Suddenly, all the hypothetical situations that I have protected myself against become real, and when things get real, boundaries tend to crumble.
Life happens and suddenly we find ourselves on the other side of the boundary.
We wake up one morning and we think, “How in the world did I end up here? This was not my plan.” All this time we’d been saying, “Never will I ever,” until we find ourselves right there, right in the thick of it, seeing the complexity and the muddiness and the gray that we never thought existed before.
But “that which was not assumed is not healed; that which is united to God is saved” remember?
When we meet others who are also on the other side of the boundary, healing happens.
When we take on each other’s burdens, we’re healed. When we are fully and completely united to Christ through his humanity, we are saved.
I think Christianity has done a really good job at creating a “bounded set.” We’ve drawn a big ol’ circle around ourselves and defined who is in and who is out. We’ve drawn a line in the sand to say Christians do “this” but they don’t do “that.” There’s a them, and there’s an us. And if you just believe the right things, and behave the right way, you, too, can stay in our circle, you, too, can belong.
But after Jesus has this encounter with the Syrophonecian woman, after she has pulled the thread from his carefully constructed and protected worldview, Jesus is never the same again. Jesus himself steps out of his box, never to be found there again.
After we encounter this text, this story of how Jesus steps out of himself and into more of himself, we will never find him in the circle again. He will always be with them. Outside. Out there. Beyond the bounds we have placed upon him and upon ourselves. “That which is united to God is saved.”
Jesus heals this woman’s daughter, Jesus sees this woman outside of the prejudiced box he once put her in, and that bounded circle of us and them breaks wide open. He’s not just here for the Jews. But for the Gentiles too. Now there’s just us, all of us, looking for healing and trust and community outside of that list of rules and nevers and always that we have accepted as part of life because we want them to keep us safe, to keep the unwanted out, to give us clear answers and something concrete to be moored to.
When we meet others on the other side of the boundary, we might drink a little too much, we might get a little too vulnerable, we might embarrass ourselves or feel shame or regret. But we will also discover that we are not alone. We will meet one another outside of that bounded set, and Jesus will be there.
Jesus unites himself to the other.
And guys. We’re the other.
“That which is united to God is saved.”
But first, Jesus’s us and them paradigm has to be torn apart. This woman challenges Jesus’s predetermined boundary and Jesus leaves the encounter changed. Jesus leaves this encounter different. Jesus steps out from inside of his little box and becomes more…Jesus.
Jesus goes on to heal again, but this time in a really intimate, messy, unbounded way.
He sticks his figures in a man’s ears.
He puts his spit on his tongue.
And the man is healed.
That night, this healed man is sitting around the fire with his buddies as they pass the bottle of wine. One of them says, “Never have I ever been deaf but now I can hear, never have I been mute but now I can speak.” And the man grabs the bottle, and takes a deep, life-giving, drink.
Thanks be to God.
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