Category: Sermon

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Sermon Response: “Even the Dogs”

I write this to my friends at Princeton United Methodist Church, as I wind and rewind the opening of today’s service. so that I can enjoy the soprano/alto duets for the pre-service hymns, “Eternal Father Strong to Save,” “To God be the Glory,” “How Can I Keep from Singing?”…..Barbara Fox 

What was your reaction to Pastor Jenny’s sermon today (’Even the Dogs” 8/16/20, available at on the facebook page or on that date at PrincetonUMC.org) about the Canaanite woman “Justa” pictured above? It was based on Matthew 15: 10-28 (video of the first part of that passage here).

1 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

Admitting it was a difficult story (did we catch Jesus on a bad day?) Jenny reminds us that Jesus was not only divine, he was human, raised as a Jew to followed the “clean and unclean” laws. The Hebrews believed that only by following the purity codes could they survive as God’s people.

In the comments I connected Justa  –who persisted against all odds to get Jesus to heal her daughter – with Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action and author of Fight Like a Mother, showing how the skill sets mothers use to manage their families can empower them to help any cause ”Every mom is already an organizer, a multitasker, and a hero going into battle every day for the ones she loves. Learn how to use those skills to enact change, pass laws that save lives, and FIGHT LIKE A MOTHER”

Then – I regretted posting that in haste. Did I distract or irritate someone who (quietly, because it’s really unpopular in Princeton) supports gun ownership? I can understand both sides. My late husband was raised in a family of hunters but came to reject the unreasonable gun lobby. Some of my children and grandchildren own guns, practice at gun ranges, honor the animals they hunt and are nourished by them. Others of my children and grandchildren – opposing the misuse of guns – march to support Moms Demand Action.

What connects Justa with Shannon Watts? All the mothers everywhere who fight for their children. I thought of the wives and mothers in the civil rights movement who put themselves ‘in harm’s way’ because they were less likely to be harmed than their men. Of mothers of children with rare diseases who fight for cures for their children. Of Deborah and Sara Hicks, fighting today at CHOP for the health of Zion.

Which person in this story are you, Jenny challenged us to ponder?

  • the daughter, who needs healing?

  • the disciple, who rejects the outsider

  • the Son of God, who we might say is changed by Justa?

  • the mother who raises a ruckus to make change?

One way “to grow as disciples of Christ” is to be in conversation with each other about our beliefs. You could comment in the link under the Facebook post, or talk about it in your small group, or email the Communications Ministry Team (Communications@PrincetonUMC.org) to have your thoughts published, or for a more private dialogue, email me or Jenny. What was your response to this or any other aspect of this passage? Had you heard of the Justa Center? Does my response smack of politics and you think politics should be separate from religion? What challenged you?

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“Everybody But Me” by Margaret Goss Burroughs

“Justa” the Syro Phoencian woman, or the Canaanite woman

What response can we have to this poem by by Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, “an American visual artist, writer, poet, educator, and arts organizer.” 

On August 16, 2020, in a sermon entitled “Even the Dogs,” based on Matthew 15: 10-28, Pastor Jenny Smith Walz read the poem below.

Here is another source, telling about  the amazing life of Margaret Taylor Burroughs, founder of what is now the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago.

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Response: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…”

What is YOUR concept of the Kingdom of Heaven? Or as we sometimes say, the “Kin-dom of Heaven.” You are invited to respond to Pastor Jenny Smith Walz. On July 26, 2020, when Pastor Jenny Smith Walz invited us to finish the sentence “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…” She referred to these verses from the lectionary,

Matthew 13:31—33

Matthew 13: 44—52

Romans 8:26—39

What is your idea of the Kin-dom? Your vision of a ‘beloved community?” YOU ARE INVITED to  comment on this Facebook post or ask the Communications Ministry Team (office@PrincetonUMC.org) how your words might be published.

Some resources:  a link to the bulletin) with this prayer:

 Form in us a new vision of community in which there is neither East nor West, neither South nor North. We pray for the sake of your Kin-dom that both is and is not yet.

If you want to hear the sermon again, go here and choose July 26 

The Benediction was a poem from Rumi

The Last Word

The Absolute works with nothing.

The workshop, the materials

Are what does not exist.

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.

Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,

Where something might be planted,

A seed, possibly from the Absolute.

–Mevlana Julaluddin Rumi 1207-1273
Trans. Colman Barks
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Children’s Time: The Marvelous Mustard Seed

Though books read at Children’s Time are – yes – for children, they also help to illuminate what adults will hear in the sermon that follows. On July 26, 2020, Pastor Jenny Smith Walz drew on parables from Matthew 13:31—33 & 44—52 to preach on “The Kingdom of Heaven is Like..” She read a story about a child who plants a mustard seed in an empty garden. “It is an itty-bitty seed. It isn’t anything very special—yet.”

The closing lines of this book, The Marvelous Mustard Seed.   say that the parable of the mustard seed “helps us to imagine what can be….but isn’t yet.” Here is this story, read by a church in Tuscaloosa.

 

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JULY 26, 2020: “Jesus Speaks in Parables” and “God’s Love”

“He put before them parables: ‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered, ‘Yes.’ And he said to them, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’”

“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Written by Isabella Dougan

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Sermon Response: July 19, 2020

At Duke University, the statue of a confederate general was removed from the chapel entrance

On July 19, 2020, Pastor Jenny Smith Walz addressed the conflict I have been holding in my heart — how to condemn the evil of white supremacy and still love those (in my family and elsewhere) who perpetrated it, those (including me) who benefit from it, and those (in the #endracism movement) who — as they try to eliminate symbols of injustice from public places — find it hard if not impossible to acknowledge that someone who did evil may also have done good.

Let’s admit that we ignore 98 percent of the information that we see or hear. Of the remaining two percent, we put half into a bucket, labeled “I like this,” and the other half into a bucket labeled “I dislike this.”

Don’t believe that the human race is so cruel and blind? Here’s what Pastor Jenny cited as historic examples.

Let’s send the convicts to Australia.
Let’s create an Aryan society.
Let’s eliminate the Tutsis.
Let’s create different sets of privileges for those with black and brown bodies.
Let’s block whatever the opposing party in Congress wants.
Let’s leave our church because someone I don’t approve of can belong.
Let’s put this person’s name in stone on the bad list, so no longer can I see them as a whole person.

It’s the last one that twangs my heart.

Click the arrow for “previous” to get the July 19 service and sermon.

For the middle of this post click here

In this sermon I think Pastor Jenny is trying to open a safe space for everyone, no matter where they are in their opinions.  She closed with this poem, ending… 

May my peace and acceptance
be the seeds I sow
for the next harvest. 

from Weeds and Wheat, by Steve Garnaas-Holmes
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To Ponder: Sermon excerpt July 19, 2020

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…
This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and the Struggle that Changed a Nation

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Recommended Reading: How the Stars Fell into the Sky

To go along with the lectionary passage for June 19, 2020, the parable of weeds among the wheat in Matthew 13, Pastor Jenny Smith Walz read, for children’s time, How the Stars Fell into the Sky, by Jerri Oughten, the retelling of a Navajo folktale. In this clip, we learn how First Woman tried to write the laws of the land using stars in the sky, only to be thwarted by the trickster Coyote.

“What is there to do next that is half so important as writing the laws,” said First Woman. But Coyote lacked First Woman’s patience and shattered her careful patterns. “There was no undoing what Coyote had done.”

Says Jenny — “these stories help us know why it is so hard to know what is to be done. When you feel confused, maybe you look to the stars. Maybe you talk to God. I hope we can remember that God is patient, patient with us, with a confusing world, and that God will always help us and hold us.”

“Help us when we are confused and scared to remember the stories you teach us and that you are always there….”

Here is Matthew 13: 24-30

24 Another parable he put before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. 27 And the servants[a] of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants[b] said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he said, ‘No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”