What is in Kelvin's Head?

Content Warning. This gospel reading contains scenes which some viewers might find disturbing.

Content Warning. Viewer discretion is advised.

Content Warning. This exegesis contains strong language which some listeners may find offensive.

Content Warning. The language used in this interpretation of the gospel contains expressions which were in common use at the time which may sound derogatory and disrespectful to modern ears.

Content Warning. The kind of language that can be heard in today’s gospel remains in use today. And it remains just as offensive as it always was.

Those of us who watch the television or listen to the radio in this country are probably all accustomed to hearing what are called content warnings.

You sometimes get them at the theatre these days too, pasted up on the doors before you go in.

This morning’s gospel probably needs a content warning to go with it when we read it these days.

But maybe it always did.

And maybe that’s the point of it.

I have to be honest. Matthew’s gospel is my least favourite of the four canonical gospels. I always have to take a deep breath when we start the liturgical year in which we read mostly gospel readings from Matthew’s gospel. For Matthew’s world always seems so much more clear cut than the world in which I live. Everything is black and white. It is all about the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the weeds, the wise and the foolish, the saved and the damned.

And I find all this rather tiresome. “What about the goats!” I want to cry. What about the weeds? Are they not God’s beloved flowers too.

And if forced to choose between spending the night at a party with the five wise virgins or the five foolish ones, well, I might not chose to go to the party that Matthew wants me to choose to go to.

But just now and again, something that Matthew writes slaps me across my presumptions and makes me take notice. The Beatitudes and the rest of the sermon on the Mount make it worth putting up with a whole lot of parables I find myself not liking. And then… and then there’s this.

First Jesus says that righteousness isn’t about what goes into a person but about what comes out of a person.

Someone is defiled not by what they scoff but how they scoff at others.

Matthew paints this picture of Jesus caring much more about what people say than about the way in which they are keeping certain religious laws.

And in a careless way, I want to cheer him on.

Yes! Go Jesus. Disturb the righteous. Bring down the mighty. Talk about people’s motives. You got it from your mother! Yay for Jesus.

And then right after telling us that Jesus cared more about what came out of people’s mouths than what went in, Matthew has Jesus saying something that is downright offensive with unignorably racist undertones.

And it is that which makes me love Matthew. The sheer theatre of this is astonishing.

Shock tactics – that’s what keeps you on your toes.

Shock tactics from a master storyteller who will not simply let us get away with simplistic interpretations about what his gospel is all about.

Even our English translators find this a bit much to translate honestly.

Someone asks him for help. She’s a foreigner.

He says.

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”.

But that’s not really adequate. That word dogs is a diminutive in the Greek.

Glaswegian might help us here.

“It’s nae fair to take the bairns’ food and throw it to the wee dugs”

Or even better, “It isnae fair to take the bairns’ food and gi it to the wee bitches”.

There is a glaring nastiness about Jesus’s words that I think are unmistakable.

Sometimes I’ve wondered whether there was a twinkle in his eyes and a snort in her response but I’m far from sure of that.

It seems to me that he did say something that was offensive then and would be offensive now and was called out on it.

This foreign women firstly cries out to the Son of God that she is in need. Then she cries out that she’s not accepting his answer and not accepting no for an answer either.

She’s not going to let racism have the last word.

And I think the gospel suddenly becomes fascinating and compelling as a result.

What you expect to happen doesn’t?

We don’t know her name but she is magnificent.

She is one of those deprived of a name by history. But one of those who cry out “Not in my name” when she encounters something which is offensive to her ears.

And I love her for it.

There was a very popular book a few years ago called “if you see Buddha on the road, kill him”. The basic idea was that you didn’t need someone to enlighten you – you had it in yourself to provide all the enlightenment you would ever need. The idea was that you didn’t need a guru to be enlightened.

I don’t entirely hold by that. I’ve found it necessary sometimes to learn from others.

But this woman makes me think of a similar kind of sentiment.

If you meet a God who is racist. Call it out.

If you are told about a God who is homophobic or sexist or bigoted in any way, don’t rest. Resist.

And if you encounter a God who doesn’t seem to care about the poor and the needy and the dispossessed… then fight him.

Wrestle with him as Jacob of old wrestled with God the whole night through.

Don’t be surprised if you come away limping, but don’t think you won’t win.

Content warning – Love wins in the end.

Love always wins in the end. In the face of this woman’s cheek, Jesus himself seems to suddenly understand his mission to the world in new ways. More expansive, generous, comprehensive, extensive, wide-ranging and unreserved.

Content warning. It isn’t just Jesus who can see a whole new vision of loving the world. We are the body of Christ so, so can we.

Content warning, it isn’t just the Canaanite woman who can insist that she too is made in the image and likeness of God.  That description applies to everyone here-present. And everyone who has ever lived. And everyone who ever will.

Content warning. The goodness of God’s love is for everyone.

Content warning. The goodness of God’s love is for you.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I have a question for those of you who went to Sunday School when you were young.

What’s the least appropriate thing you remember being taught there?

As we’ve been going through the stories from Genesis over the last few weeks, I keep thinking to myself – gosh, I remember learning this story in Sunday School.

I’m not sure that we teach bible stories in Sunday School in quite the same way these days that we used to do. (And that’s not necessarily a bad thing – Sunday Schools of my day were statistically spectacularly bad at retaining people in the faith – I’m the exception, not the rule, so maybe it is worth trying a different tack).

But here I am again on a Sunday morning reading one of the stories from Genesis and remembering doing the story in Sunday School completely uncritically, as though everything that was going on in it was perfectly normal. As though these were models to live by.

But as I read these stories 50 years later, I think that might be a bit of a problem.

The way we read stories matters.

But we’ll come to that in a bit. For the moment, let’s have another go at trying to read the story of Jacob and Laban and Leah and Rachel and see what we find for ourselves. (Genesis 29:15-28)

This is one of the most unlikely stories that you could possibly use to teach children anything about religion.

It isn’t just tricky questions about polygamy that we need to look at though they are interesting.

This is also a story that makes us think about honesty, decency and about relations between individuals, particularly relationships between men and women.

When I was involved in the struggle for marriage equality, I kept hearing from those who were opposed to that, pleading for us to remain with what they called Biblical Marriage – by which they meant one man and one woman married to one another exclusively for life and whose children were born exclusively of that union.

My former colleague Cedric Blakey had a mischievous little question that he used to ask of those putting forward this argument – which was to ask how many people in the bible they could name who fitted that pattern.

It is a question that bears repeating and thinking about.

There aren’t many at all.

(You are welcome to play along and tell me how many you can think of after the service).

This story is one of those I used to use to try to tease out what people were talking about when they referred to Biblical Marriage.

This story is a load of trouble.

It isn’t just that Jacob ends up married to more than one of the women either.

That’s a problem worth wrestling with but the bigger problem is that this is a story that is about women being traded and passed around by men.

And the bible is pretty ambivalent about it. Patriarchy is the dominant norm of the society we read about in Genesis. Even more – these stories are the bedrock upon which the patriarchal assumptions of our own societies are based.

But hear this, and hear it from the pulpit as we read this text today.

• The domination of women by men is a sin. And that should be remembered when we read the story of Leah, Rachel and Zilpah, the much forgotten maid.
• Trafficking women is a sin.
• And the dishonesty of Laban towards Jacob is a sin too.

There’s something I’ve been wanting to say from the pulpit for a while and this story seems the right context to talk about it.

Statistically it is the case that in a congregation this size there will be people present who have survived or perhaps still endure domestic violence. Both victims of such violence and those who perpetrate it are present in churches.

At the last but one Lambeth Conference of bishops of the Anglican Communion there was a session on domestic violence because someone thought it important simply to name an evil. What was less expected was that when the mostly female spouses of the bishops (who were mostly men) started to talk about the topic they started to talk about it from their own experience and started to name and speak about their own experience of being treated badly by their spouses. It is uncomfortable to acknowledge that this is a problem within faith communities. But silence doesn’t make it go away.

There’s one small detail about this story that always makes me think. It is the line about Leah’s eyes. We are told in the translation we read that Leah’s eyes were lovely.

I rather like the notion that thousands of years later, someone’s lovely eyes are still being talked about. However, I also know that this is a tricky line of Hebrew to translate. Perhaps the better translation is that Leah had gentle eyes, which has led some to speculate that what was noticeable about Leah, the less graceful and less beautiful of the sisters, is that she was always crying.

If your eyes are gentle or soft or weary of crying and you are scared of someone you live with then it might help to speak about it. Any of the clergy or the church wardens would be willing to listen and if appropriate to help you to find help – and there are those in this diocese who have worked hard to raise the profile of the problem of domestic violence and who may know how to offer to help.

Here’s the good news. The bible doesn’t teach me how men and women should relate to one another. It is our God given consciences and holy common sense that have to do that.

But the bible does teach me that the tears need to be wiped from every eye. Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.

And the bible teaches me that God is on the side of the underdog, the overlooked, the undervalued, the less preferred sister, the cheated son in law, the broken, the weary, the sad, the lonely, the abused, the hungry and the oppressed. And that is good news.

And God calls us all to wipe the tears and build a world of justice and joy.

It isn’t entirely clear who the narrator of the story is in Genesis. But someone noticed Leah’s eyes.

Trust me on this. Someone has noticed you too.

God looks on you and whether you are beautiful and graceful or whether your eyes are soft with tears, God looks on you and says.

“You are altogether lovely. And I love you more than anyone you know.”

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

AMEN