Have you ever felt so desperate for something, you’d do anything to make desperation go away?
Last month, my boys and I embarked on a two-week road trip through Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, and even a tiny slice of Montana.
We camped. We stayed in guest bedrooms and an RV and a run-down motel by the side of I-80 in Winnemucca, Nevada. We ate more fast food than we probably should have, but we also drank healthy amounts of chocolate milk infused with potato flakes and fresh vegetables we brought along from our garden.
We floated down the Idaho River in a raft built for four one day, and the boys shared a single pair of roller skates for endless loops around almost all five of the states. We visited urgent care in Idaho Falls for a spider bite gone bad, got a handful of free Band-Aids at Walmart after a collision with a clothing rack, and treated a fair number of skinned knees and elbows along the way too.
When my husband flew up to meet us for five days, we trekked to the edge of eastern Idaho: we hung out with dear friends who live there at night, and squeezed in day trips and one last-minute overnight camping trip to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons in the minutes and hours in between.
It was a trip we won’t soon forget, but when all was said and done, I couldn’t stomach another In-N-Out burger. The car just wasn’t as cozy as it had once been. We just wanted to get back to our things and our space. My boys and I felt desperate to return home.
The allure of the road trip over, we’d do anything to get back to Oakland and see Rufus the dog and sleep in our own beds.
I wonder: have you ever felt so desperate? Beyond privileged two-week road trips, have you ever found yourself in a place of utter desperation? So desperate for healing, for resolution, for an end to the situation at hand that you’d do anything to make the hopelessness of it all go away?
I don’t think today’s Gospel reading is too far from a place of desperation as well. Although Matthew 15 contains two different sections of text, I want to focus on the second half, when Jesus and his disciples encounter a Canaanite woman.
Upon first glance, this is not exactly the most heart-warming text. It doesn’t exactly make you want to cozy up to Jesus and the men he hung around with. The story, if we’re honest, is actually somewhat appalling at times.
When a Canaanite woman, who is not named, comes up to Jesus and starts shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon,” he doesn’t even answer her. He ignores her. Although she shows desperate concern for her daughter, he acts as if nothing has happened. Some commentators say because she, a Canaanite, “represents Israel’s notorious ancient foe,” the “traditional religious practices and prejudices” of Judaism would have supported “Jesus brusque dismissal of her desperate concern for her daughter.”
But this is Jesus. And the Jesus I know isn’t like that.
Still, the story continues: when she keeps shouting for help, the disciples get fed up. Tell her to quiet down already! Come on, Jesus: this woman is being annoying! Instead of giving them – or her, for that matter – a straight answer, he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Is she not a lost sheep? Does she not somehow qualify?
Of course, the story doesn’t end there. But the words and behavior of the woman is also exactly what I am drawn to in this passage: because this woman is so desperate to see her daughter be made whole again, she doesn’t give up. She will do anything to see her daughter healed. She shouts, over and over again; she does not go away when they obviously want her go to away; and because she believes that Jesus just might be her daughter’s ticket to wellness, she goes and kneels before Jesus, she begs him to help her.
As one theologian says, “She looks to him like a dog begging for crumbs under the table! It is ritualized humiliation.”
Yet it is here – when Jesus makes a statement about it not being fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs, and she replies by saying, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,” that Jesus finally shows mercy on her.
He heals her daughter. He commends her faith. He rewards her desperation.
She believed there was something different about Jesus – that he was God’s change agent and could change the life of her sick and troubled daughter. Over and over again, she comes to him but he does not answer. Until, finally, he does. Because of her desperation, “she transgresses boundaries imposed by religious tradition, practice, and prejudice.”
This is not, as you may well have noticed, an easy passage to preach. We, or at least I, want Jesus to be the superhero of the story – I want him to Superman onto the scene and save the day. I don’t want to see him ignoring people and throwing out weird phrases and only choosing to heal people when he finally believes they believe enough that he is Lord.
Which is exactly why I choose to focus instead on the desperation of the Canaanite woman this morning. We can learn something from a woman who was willing to do anything to bring healing to her child.
What, then, finds you begging for desperation? What finds you on your knees, desperate for holy mercies that only come from above?
I think of the devasting wildfires in Maui, that at the time of this writing have already claimed 114 lives. I think of those who are fighting insurmountable illnesses, who are leaving abusive marriages, who are facing the inevitability of death when loved ones are placed on hospice. I think of those who don’t know where their next paycheck is coming from, who struggle with mental illness, who feel overwhelmed by loneliness and isolation.
Because with wild desperation comes a wild kind of mercy.
The irony is that God’s mercy does not always look how we want it to look. Sometimes God doesn’t respond the way we want God to respond.
But mercy is present nonetheless, joining the sender and receiver together. As the receiver, who in this case is wild, desperate us, does the only thing she can do: she extends her hands towards the air and receives, receives, receives.
She gulps down this mercy like water, her desperation quenched. She sees and she believes.
Might this wild mercy and wild desperation be the same for us.
Amen.
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This is a sermon preached on August 20, 2023 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California. If you liked this post, you might also like “Okay Fine, Just 8 More Books for You.” In the meantime, might this wild mercy be yours.
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