Last week was the last Sunday of our Anabaptism at 500 series – looking at the center of our faith, life and work. I was scheduled to preach but was de-centered by covid. Thank you to Michelle for stepping up and being so inspiring. Thanks to you all for letting me extend the summer series by a week to share some of my thoughts on our work of reconciliation.

Reconciliation, like a lot of the good things we talk about in church, depends on your position and perspective. When people with power are adamant about reconciliation, beware. We need to ask, what is in it for the powerful to want a restored relationship with those who have historically had little power? What guilt is being assuaged? When straight people say we want to reconcile with queer people or white people say we want to reconcile with black people or other people of color, the question might be asked: how can we reconcile when we never had a relationship to begin with? How can we be reconciled when we were never “conciled,” or conciliatory up to this point?

As people with power, we might get defensive and say “we are just trying to do a good thing.” But that isn’t good enough. Some deep listening is in order. What is wanted? What is needed? What will it cost – in terms of power sharing? Who names what reconciliation will look like? Pastor Eugene Cho says: Everyone loves the idea of reconciliation – until it involves truth telling, confessing, repenting, dismantling, forgiving and peacemaking.

This story of the woman who hounds Jesus never gets old and this time I read it through the lens of reconciliation. The mother of this very ill daughter, will not leave Jesus alone. The woman’s desperation drives her to seek out the rabbi with a reputation. She will not stop until she gets what she wants: healing – and reconciliation with her daughter.

But Jesus doesn’t have any interest in the woman’s case. He doesn’t see himself having anything to do with her people, her kind. She is not a Jew and that is who he ministers to; Jews are his target audience.

Jesus has just finished some teaching about what it means to be clean and unclean. He says all the outer rules and commandments are inconsequential if they don’t effect what is on the inside. It is what comes out of us, from the inside, that makes us impure. What is in the heart shows whether is one is clean or unclean, whether one is pure of heart.

In Matthew’s version of this story, (Matt. 15:21-28) Jesus finishes this teaching and then hits the road. The woman pursues Jesus as the disciples attempt to run interference. They complain about how annoying and noisy she is.

In Mark’s version, Jesus finishes his teaching about clean and unclean and gets away from the crowds by hiding out in a house, with no disciples in sight. Seemingly out of nowhere this woman appears. A Syrophoenician, a gentile. Talk about unclean being inside.

In her desperation, the woman prostrates herself, begging Jesus for healing for her beloved daughter who has an unclean spirit inside of her. The mother’s love is so complete that the demon that torments her daughter’s spirit – also drives the mother to take drastic steps.

Though the woman is inside, right in front of him, Jesus puts up a boundary. The center of his work is the Jewish community. She is clearly outside the scope of his work. Though he speaks metaphorically, there is no doubt that Jesus’ response to her plea is a hard “no.” “Let the children be fed first, it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” There is no respect here at all, much less reconciliation. Jesus as good as calls the woman a dog.

How can our beloved Jesus, our model, be so cruel? How can he look past the woman in front of him and think only of his own calling? Has he forgotten that he was just teaching about clean and unclean? Why will he not help this young girl become clean on the inside?

——————————

You may know that I come from several generations of preachers and church people. It can be a gift and a burden. My father, near the end of his career, became the Franconia Conference minister, like his father before him. It was 1997, and Germantown Mennonite Church (in Philadelphia), the oldest Mennonite Church in the country, was voted out of Franconia conference. Part of my father’s job was to meet with the congregation and tell them that they had been removed from the conference and denomination because of the way they live out God’s wide mercy, love and welcome; they have LGBTQ members. My father (at the pastor’s request,) ushered the pastor out of the historic meeting house.

I have never thought of my own father as God but I do expect him to do the right thing – or what I imagine is the right thing. So when he did what his job required of him as a conference minister, I felt betrayed and disappointed and angry. I was angry at my father. I was angry at the conference – for hiding behind a mail-in ballot process. I was angry on behalf of my friends in the Germantown congregation. I was angry on behalf of my Queer friends and colleagues. I was angry at the larger church. For years I carried a smoldering anger, embarrassment and betrayal deep inside. Reconciliation was not the center of my being.

In 2002, five years later, I became one of the pastors here, in a congregation that also values and believes in and deeply loves our Queer members. I still carried distrust of the larger church – and then our congregation also came into conflict with our conference. Remembering my father and Germantown Mennonite Church, I hoped we would make some different choices. Could there be another way forward, that didn’t involve cutting ourselves off – if we could help it?

It was not easy, it was painful, it took negotiating, but instead of asking to be ushered out of the conference meeting, we asked to sing. We chose to send annual contributions to the conference, and we kept showing up at delegate sessions. Our choices sometimes felt painful and complicated but these deliberate actions created a glimmer of an opening for an eventual reconciliation.

I wonder if we were like the mother declaring our right to find healing? (Not that the conference is Jesus.) I wonder if we were like the daughter struggling to be taken seriously – but seen as possessed? (Not that the conference is our parent.)

As deliberate (and obsessed) as I was with our relationship with Allegheny Conference, I didn’t know how to resolve my feelings about the Germantown events with my father. As I got involved with the Inclusive Mennonite Pastors and Pink Menno, I often thought of my participation as penance for what my father had done. If he did the wrong thing, I would (self-righteously) do the right thing – not that I could say that to him directly but sometimes I did say it out loud to other people.

At some point, as I became less self-centered, (or maybe as things with Allegheny began to heal or maybe as my father and I began to speak more openly) I began to understand in a new way that what happened at Germantown was not only hard for me, but extremely painful for my father as well. My dad grew up in Franconia Conference where his own father, my grandfather, was a pastor and bishop. At age 26, my father was ordained by Franconia Conference. At age 35 he chose to put some distance between himself and his family of origin and we moved to Oregon.

I began to listen to my father, to hear how the conflict in the conference predated his return to Franconia. The connections ran deep; he carried more than a little regret that he hadn’t been able to work out other options with Germantown. Additionally, at the time of the splintering, his wife, my mother, sat outside a conference meeting with those who held a solidarity vigil with Germantown. My mother was, at the time, undergoing chemotherapy for a cancer that would kill her a year later. The losses associated with the events at Germantown were historical, institutional, personal, for my father.

Around the same time that our congregation was in “reconciliation talks” with Allegheny Conference, my father told me that he was asked by the Germantown pastor to write a chapter of the 325th anniversary book that was being written about the congregation. He was asked, entrusted to write a chapter? That kind of forgiveness floored me. Perhaps it was seeing this grace from Germantown that allowed me to be more open to my father’s experience. Or maybe it was the “reconciliation talks,”experiencing firsthand the intractability in our own conference that allowed me to understand the situation he had been in almost 20 years earlier.

Whatever the precipitating factors, I finally allowed myself to hear him, to see that I was not the only one that carried pain from the situation. He also carried pain and embarrassment and maybe some anger. We couldn’t fix that for each other; we had to deal with our own pain and anger. But when I could hear him, when I could see him, when we could see each other, the healing could begin. He was more than ready to let go of the guilt and hurt. Was I willing? It seemed like it was finally time for forgiveness, for reconciliation.

It wasn’t just what he said, it is also the actions I have seen my father take, that have softened my hard heart, that helped lead me to forgiveness. In his retirement, as an interim pastor, my father walked with a congregation, guiding them as they became publicly open and affirming. He is currently a member of a congregation where one of his pastors is a woman married to another woman and he gratefully receives her care and leadership. He has written publicly about the pain of being a church leader, feeling forced to do something he did not support. He has written publicly about how he would welcome and bless his grandchildren if any of them are LGBTQ. It so happens, at least one is. I am ever grateful.

Reconciliation could happen when I was willing to listen to and recognize my father’s pain, when I was willing to let go of my anger and resentment, when I was willing to put down my self-righteousness and embrace the complexity with humility. This is all very personal; I love my father. My dad turned 87 last month and I don’t want anything unfinished between us. Neither of us do.

Admittedly, there are other people that I have given up on, or decided it just wasn’t worth the energy to seek reconciliation. What does that say about the center of my work, the center of my faith? My commitment to reconciliation? ——————-

The amazing thing about this story of Jesus and the outsider woman who comes inside the house, the amazing thing is the woman does not take no for an answer. She takes the degrading metaphor that Jesus uses and she turns it on him.“Yes Rabbi, but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he says, ‘Your daughter is healed.”

 It sounds like an immediate reconsideration on Jesus’ part. But I imagine Jesus takes a few deep breaths – and wonders at the audacity of this anguished mother. He sees the love she embodies, the risks she is willing to take, the way she puts herself out there for her daughter.

Jesus sees the mother, he hears the mother, and he knows that she already has what she needs to help her daughter find healing. He tells her so. “For saying this, you may go home happy; the demon has left your daughter.” And when she goes home, indeed, she finds her daughter is healed and the demon, that had been inside her, is gone.

Reconciliation is not some magical, instant event, though it sort of sounds like it from this story. But the healing would not have happened if the mother had not been persistent, if she had not challenged the leader that she respected and needed. It happened because the one with power listened to the one with less power. And perhaps when the woman went home, she listened in a new way to her daughter who had even less power than her mother. And her daughter was healed. It makes me wonder at the ripple effects of reconciliation.

As Anabaptists, we claim that “Reconciliation is the center of our work.” And work it is. Reconciliation takes work –

and grace

and persistence

and listening

and forgiveness

and time, it can take a long time.

May we be given these gifts of grace, persistence, listening, forgiveness and time – to do the work of reconciliation – within ourselves, in our families, in the church, in our communities, in the world.