She was a feisty and
intelligent woman who helped propel her husband to fame. She also lived with a profound disability
after developing scarlet fever as a child.
That disease destroyed so much of her inner ears that she not only
became deaf, she lost her sense of balance and could not walk around at night
without falling over.
Despite her disability,
she learned to read lips and speak several languages so well she could pass for
a hearing person. Mabel became a businesswoman,
an entrepreneur, and so well known that her sculpture is in this park in
Canada.
She wouldn’t take pity
and she didn’t shy away from debate or learning. And she had the kind of character that wasn’t
afraid of speaking truth to power.
Remind you of
anyone? It’s easy to put her in the
scene with the scripture reading from Matthew.
A woman, one of the dreaded Canaanites who had been at war with the
Hebrew people since the time of Abraham and Moses, came to Jesus to ask for help. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. No one heard her, acknowledged her, pretended
she was even in the same place with her.
Rather like the pan handlers found near tourist sites, she persisted in
her calls for help. No one wanted to
make eye contact with her. They probably
all turned their backs on her rather than listening to her. Nevertheless, she persisted.
Eventually, and doesn’t
it almost sound almost reluctantly, Jesus engaged this outsider woman. As a rabbi, he didn’t have to talk to this
Canaanite, he didn’t even need to show her respect. The easiest thing for him would be to have
one of the disciples make her go away, or even simpler, move elsewhere until
she gave up.
Lots of articles have
been written about this story – was Jesus racist? Or was he acting out a living parable to
teach his disciples a lesson in radical acceptance? It’s easy to take either side of that debate,
and there is no conclusive evidence either way.
One thing that does
stand out is the woman’s humbleness. So
often when we engage with someone who has a different opinion than us, we can
quickly get defensive and angry. When we
don’t get what we want, we feel personally betrayed and disrespected. Business experts and social scientists alike
are raising concerns about the level of animosity in our society these days,
and how social media seems to prevent honest conversations and understandings. It’s far too easy to get caught up in fights online,
and churches are not immune to this. It
is easy to type something at someone that we would never say in person. And the level of conflict in our culture at
this moment is so bad that everyone from politicians to journalists, jurors and
judges are getting used to death threats and abusive language.
It’s in our own
neighborhoods, it’s in places where people have lost their homes to fires, it’s
in places where people are waiting to return home. It's around dinner tables
when global warming is being discussed, it’s in classrooms where concepts like
neo-liberalism or political correctness is being discussed. It’s in stores who have people pitching their
tents on sidewalks in busy cities, and it’s on walls in Winnipeg covered in
racist graffiti. We don’t know how to
take feedback without getting upset and we give feedback when no one has asked
for it.
Jesus and the Samaritan
woman had an encounter that could have become a terrible fight. Jesus said something that was dismissive at
best and confrontational at worst. But
the woman didn’t care. She didn’t let
the insult keep her from asking for what she needed. She didn’t get on her high horse or go off in
a huff. She acknowledged that he might
have a point, but her daughter’s health was more important than picking a fight
or getting her feelings hurt. She would
do whatever it would take to help her daughter heal. She didn’t take Jesus’ comments any more
personally than the comedians on the radio show, “The Debaters”, which if you
haven’t heard it, is worth a listen. She
probably lifted her eyebrow at him when she retorted, “even the dogs get
crumbs.”
She knew that when we
meet someone with different opinions than our own, it can be a moment for
growth if we don’t let our egos get in the way.
And the other person’s point of view may well hurt our egos a little bit
when we hear their story.
But one piece of this
story is where Jesus was. He was not in
Jerusalem or even Galilea. He was in
Sidon, a city in Lebanon, founded by Canaanites. In other words, he was on her land. Did he go there to hear other points of
view? To teach his followers, as Paul so
eloquently put it, “there is no difference between Greek or Jew, all
have the same Creator.” This would be a
lesson that they never forgot. They were
called to heal all who came to them, to have conversations with all even when
they looked, sounded, or acted differently.
They were to enter into
conversations humbly, and ready to have their most basic assumptions
challenged. Like the sculpture of Mabel
Gardiner Hubbard, the women they talked to would challenge their stories, their
theology, their assumptions about their place in the world and their
understanding of God. Most people have
no idea who Mabel was. But they all know
the man in the sculpture, her husband whom she made famous. Mabel pushed him out of his comfort zone by buying
a train ticket for him and packed his bags and his latest invention and took
him to a fair. The invention changed the
lives of us all. That invention was the
telephone, and her husband was none other than Alexander Graham Bell. Without her contrary point of view, our world
would look much different today.
There are times when we
have something as urgent as a world-changing invention or a family member
struggling with mental illness. We may
have to lift our eyebrows at people telling us we don’t need or deserve
help. And there may be times when we
have someone come to us who needs our help and won’t take no for an answer. May we recognize in those times that we are
all God’s children, and pray so we can humbly hear each other into deeper
understanding and deeper healing for us all.
Amen.
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