Proper 15 / Ordinary 20 (August 14-20)
Texts: Matthew 15:21-28;
Isa 56:1, 6-8; Rom 11:1-2a, 29-32
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/LIuE4NMLScY?si=iOLdftVQT2LFwR7B&t=975
Sermon Take-Home Notes
READING THE BIBLE FOR NONVIOLENCE
AT A TIME OF NATIONALISTIC VIOLENCE
Guest Preaching as Former Pastor (1994-2001) for 175th Anniversary
A lot has changed at Emmaus since I left twenty-five years ago to take another call. We were celebrating the 150th anniversary of the congregation at that time, in fact. I’ve watched from afar during that time, as you were able to swim against the current of change of across the wider church, a change mostly of shrinkage. Instead of slowly shrinking, you were able to expand your ministries to this neighborhood and to build a substantial Spanish-speaking congregation. I think this is something to be very proud of and very much worth celebrating this year.
I know it’s also something to be sad about in recent months, as you’ve found it necessary to close the doors of the Spanish-speaking part of your worshiping community. So, now, as you take some time to pause and celebrate 175 years of ministry, it’s also time to wonder what might be ahead. Losing the Spanish worship might feel like a difficult blow to bounce back from. I don’t know what you’re feeling these days.
But perhaps I can be of some help and encouragement, sharing a bit of what I’ve been about these past twenty-five years. Those who were at Emmaus when I was here know doubt remember and can anticipate what I’d like to share this morning. It’s been taking shape in my ministry for a long time but has become increasingly focused over recent years, especially in the last ten or so years as our nation has increasingly lived under the shadow of a violent Christian Nationalism. I might guess that the violence against Spanish-speaking people in our own community, which has been featured in that nationalism, especially in the last two years, played a big part in your needing let go of you Spanish worship. It has become unsafe for our Spanish speaking neighbors to go out in public, even to church.
But perhaps this experience of that kind of violence in our community can help galvanize you for what might come next. I offer this possibility as someone for whom standing up to violence has become my number one emphasis in proclaiming the Gospel. More and more I’ve come to see this as the church’s largest failure, too. Since the time many centuries ago, when the church allied itself with a violent empire, the church has become increasingly mushy on the issue of violence, making it a side issue that you can maybe take up if you’re that way inclined. Rather than seeing it as the early church did as the central revolutionary center of Jesus’ mission and ministry. Our readings today give us ample glimpses of this Gospel of Nonviolence.
Let’s begin with St. Paul. When Paul was confronted by Jesus on the road to Damascus, violence was front and center. He didn’t say to Paul, then still called Saul: “Saul, Saul, why don’t you believe in me?” That would be the question for church mission today, right? ‘Believe in Jesus!’ No, the Risen Jesus confronted Paul with the central issue of salvation: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4) Paul was doing violence against early Christians in God’s name. He was fracturing the human family which Jesus came to bring together and to heal. He needed to repent of his violence and become a healer. He needed to bring the message from the God whom Jesus the Messiah revealed to us, a God of unconditional love and grace, in whom there’s no violence at all.
This is what we’ve been reading about from Romans for numerous weeks now. That through the human violence of the cross — he didn’t die of cancer but at the hands of violent human beings — and God’s power of life through the Resurrection, God in Jesus is bringing jew and gentile together. That’s the whole message of Romans over and over again, in many, many different ways of saying it: I’m here as an apostle of Jesus to help bring the human family together. As we read a couple weeks ago,
We know, in fact, that God works all things together for good with those who love him, who are called according to God’s purpose. Those whom God foreknew, you see, he also marked out in advance to be shaped according to the model of the image of his son, so that he might be the firstborn of a large family. (Rom 8:28-29)
Firstborn of a large family. That’s God’s grand purpose in sending Jesus to save us from the violence that is continually splitting us apart. You found important and creative ways in this neighborhood to seek living that family life in uplifting ways these past twenty years or so. You brought together English and Spanish speaking followers of Jesus. You worked at modeling being that large, expanded family of God, of which God sent Jesus to be the firstborn. My proposal to you is that you can still find other ways to live that new family in Jesus — as long as we all find ways to stop being mushy about the human violence which continues to threaten and break apart that family.
I’ve given you a glimpse of the nonviolent Gospel from St. Paul’s perspective. I’d like to turn for a few minutes to Matthew’s version of the nonviolent Gospel, with Jesus at the center of it. Matthew’s Gospel is the one that begins with as straightforward a teaching of nonviolence as we see in the Bible. You might remember this from my messaging twenty-five years ago: that it was part of God’s irony that it took a Hindu man, Mahatma Gandhi, to once again teach Christians about the centrality of the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Love your enemies. Pray for them. Be perfect as your Father in heaven.’ Perfect how? Perfect in love. It’s a movement which has gained a lot of momentum over the last century, thank goodness. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to India in 1952 to learn Gandhi’s ways and bring them back to America as the heart and soul of the Civil Rights Movement. Jesus teaching things like turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemies has once again become revolutionary over the past one hundred years.
But this teaching of nonviolence — in the face of the human tendency to rely on violence against one’s enemies, certainly not love of one’s enemies — it will always meet stiff resistance. This is true now, and it certainly was true back then. Jesus immediately met resistance to his straightforward teaching of nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount. So what did Jesus do? I believe he backed off from straightforward teaching to begin teaching instead in parables. In riddles, if you will. Stories and actions that have meaning on several levels at once. Last month, our Gospel Readings began with the story-parables, like the Parables of the Sower, of the Wheat and the Weeds, and of the Pearl of Great Value. There were also some verse we skipped over reading in Matthew 13, where Jesus explains his new tactic of speaking in parables. It’s about the resistance. He quotes Isaiah 6, for example, where God tells the prophet that he will meet resistance because God’s people have ears that don’t hear and eyes that don’t see. They will not understand. Jesus has already experienced the misunderstanding regarding his teaching of nonviolence, so he now resorts to speaking in parables.
But I believe that, in this middle section of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus moves on to another twist on parables. They aren’t just spoken stories using metaphors like seeds and pearls and nets. They are also dramatic actions which recall the Jewish stories of faith and bring new twists to them. They are acted-out parables, if you will. In your Sermon Notes, I give you an overview of how I see our Gospel Readings the past two weeks as acted-out parables — followed by an overview of how I see this morning’s Gospel about the Canaanite woman as an acted-out parable. In my view, the most important one, because it addresses human violence in its most horrific form, genocide.1
I may seem crazy, but the story which I believe is in the background of today’s Gospel is centered on Deuteronomy 7:1-2. You can read along with me from the Sermon Notes, and please keep in mind the two bolded words:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you — and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.
That’s in the Bible. God commanding genocide. Sickening, really, to think that God would actually command genocide. It’s the kind of passage that has been used by biblical people to justify genocide through much of Jewish and Christian history. Did the Nazis have this verse in mind as they were committing genocide against the Jews. Are there Israelis today who have these verses in mind to somehow justify what the Israeli government has been doing to the people of Gaza over the last couple years? Isn’t this the kind of passage from the Bible that chases people away from church life? Isn’t this kind of religious-based violence one of the reasons for the church’s shrinking numbers?
Which is why I believe the acted-out parable in today’s Gospel is so incredibly important. The first thing we need to know to understand the parabolic nature of Jesus’ encounter with this Canaanite woman is who led the people of Israel on their genocidal mission against seven nations, the people of the Promised Land. Do you recall? Moses gave sermon in Deuteronomy, but then he turned the reigns over to Joshua son of Nun. (N-u-n, his father’s name.) The next thing you need to know is that, in Hebrew, the name Joshua and Jesus are the same name. I’ve given you the details about the name Joshua in your Sermon Notes. For a Jewish person in the first century the connection of the name would have been clear: Joshua son of Nun went into the land of the seven nations in about 1200 B.C. and showed no mercy. About 1200 years later Joshua of Nazareth, son of Mary, went into that same land of the seven nations. Would he show mercy? In the drama of his encounter with the Canaanite woman, he lets her triumph over him in an exchange of words, and then, yes, he shows mercy. He heals her daughter.
But there are a couple other clues to this acted-out parable, which Matthew has provided for us. Again, I’ve sketched them out in your Sermon Notes. The first is that Matthew has changed the ethnic designation of this woman. We know that Matthew had Mark’s Gospel in front of him when he wrote his Gospel, and so he could see Mark’s designation of the woman’s ethnicity, more correct to first century, as Syro-Phoenician. Matthew deliberately changes it to “Canaanite,” which would be like you or I calling a modern-day Norwegian a Viking. People from Norway were called Vikings a thousand years ago, but no longer today. So do you see the point of Matthew calling this Syro-Phoenician woman a Canaanite. Her ancestors more than a thousand years before her were called Canaanites — precisely when Joshua son of Nun showed her people no mercy. In the first century, Joshua of Nazareth faced her in a battle of words and he let her best him — just before showing her daughter mercy because of her mother’s great faith.
There is one final set of clues that go beyond this one isolated story in the final eleven verses of Matthew 15. When Jesus leaves the region of this Canaanite woman, the details are kind of fuzzy as to exactly where he is. But it sounds like it is in further gentile country. Wherever Jesus, or Joshua, is, he does the same things he did when we last saw him in Jewish territory. He heals the sick and casts out demons. The people are amazed, and Matthew writes, “They praised the God of Israel.” Now why would Matthew specify the “God of Israel” unless these were people who ordinarily praised a different God, a God of their own peoples. And immediately after this comment comes a second feeding story, this time 4000 people with seven loaves of bread and seven baskets leftover.
This is the final clue, I think. Numbers tend to be very important in the Bible. Do you remember how many baskets were leftover after the first miraculous feeding? Twelve baskets. Twelve being the number of the original tribes of Israel, which is why Jesus also designated twelve out of his many followers to be disciples. And after the second miraculous feeding, there’s seven baskets leftover. What might the number seven point to? Could it be the seven nations in the Promised Land to whom Joshua son of Nun showed no mercy?
I believe that this story of the Canaanite woman and the other stories which follow in Matthew 15 are an acted-out parable of Joshua of Nazareth going out among the first century descendants of the seven nations in order to show mercy. Because that reveals who God truly is, a God of mercy not genocide. In your Sermon Notes, I propose a strategy for reading the Bible: as this long story of God revealing God’s self to us. A God of love, of mercy and nonviolence and healing and grace. That culminates in Joshua the Messiah. Here, in today’s Gospel, Matthew crafts this parable acted-out in Jesus’s ministry in order to show mercy to peoples who a thousand years earlier another Joshua had slaughtered. God sent the Messiah into the world in order to let himself be conquered on the cross, and whose resurrection begins the process of healing and new life needed to gather God the creator’s whole human family into one large family.
Sound impossible? Well, it’s certainly very difficult, as you have discovered. You worked to unite the human family in this neighborhood, Spanish and English people together. Many forces were working against you. But I hope that means, for now, that you work at finding some different means to still pursue the same mission. I encourage you to find news ways to resist the violence of our times and to work to build healing. I encourage you to continue following the model of God’s son in creating one large human family.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Emaus Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, August 16, 2026
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/LIuE4NMLScY?si=iOLdftVQT2LFwR7B&t=975
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Note
1. I first came upon the following reading of this parable in Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope (Thomas Nelson, 2007), pages 154-59. McLaren cites his source as an essay by Grant LeMarquand, “The Canaanite Conquest of Jesus,” ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill, Vol. 33 (2005): 237-247; available online at: https://arcjournal.library.mcgill.ca/article/download/690/707
