Expansive Sabbath: 12th Sunday after Pentecost
Rev. Emily E. Ewing
While this week’s readings are packed full with some tricky verses, they also provide a lot for fruitful reflection. From the ways Sabbath and ritual observances appear, scattered throughout the readings, to the expansiveness of God’s affirmation, mercy, and reconsideration, there is more sermon fodder than could possibly make it into one sermon. The readings also come with several potentially harmful inclusions and exclusions that are worth noting and considering. The trauma collisions between people from different walks of life draw us into our own considerations of power and privilege and how they impact us, other humans, and the more than human creation.
Commentary
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God gathers outcasts, affirming foreigners (and eunuchs).
Verse 1
God calls the people to maintain justice in anticipation of their deliverance.
Verses 2-5 (excluded from the lectionary)
God extolls those who keep the Sabbath and affirms the faithful who are gender minorities (eunuchs) who will not be cut off, not be “just a dry tree.”
Verse 6
God affirms the faithful who are (im)migrants.
Verse 7
God’s holy mountain is for all peoples.
Verse 8
God gathers the outcasts
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The psalmist calls the people to praise God.
Verse 1
God’s face shines.
Verse 2
Make God’s way known on earth.
Verse 4
God’s judgment is equitable and they guide nations on earth.
Verse 6
Earth’s abundance grows.
Verse 7
Creation, even to the ends of the earth, reveres God.
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Paul writes of God’s mercy for both Jews, like Paul, and Gentiles, like the Romans.
Verses 1-2a
God doesn’t reject people.
Verses 30-32
Disobedience could be better translated as “not yet persuaded”. It is a passive state, not an active rebellion.
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(After a conversation about defilement,) Jesus resists and then relents healing for a traditional enemy’s daughter.
Verse 11
Food does not defile people.
Verse 13
Plants not from God will be uprooted.
Verse 14
An antiquated understanding of blindness gives opportunity for faith-based ableism.
Verse 17
The intricacies of biological systems in animals with alimentary canals, like humans, earthworms, and more.
Verse 19
While the historical context to multiple types of evil intentions is vital to understanding them, the specifics are not the point as much as the understanding of how much harm can be done by humans.
Verse 20
Ritual handwashing is no longer necessary.
Verse 21
The region of Tyre and Sidon, referenced in Matthew 11:21, is known for extravagant wealth.
Verse 22
A Canaanite woman, traditional enemy to Israel, comes out, possibly meeting Jesus on the border between Jewish and Gentile territories.
Verse 24
Once again, Israelites are characterized as sheep, implying that God is the Shepherd.
Verse 26
Jesus likens the woman to a dog, an insult that dehumanizes. This also echoes Matthew 7:6
Verse 27
The woman adopts the hierarchical and anthropocentric model Jesus has referenced in order to secure healing for her daughter.
Verse 28
What are the demons tormenting children? How can our faith heal those harms?
Teaching and Preaching Suggestions
A Note of Caution
This week’s readings are rich and full of possibility; however, they also can easily cause harm. The lectionary cuts out mention of eunuchs from Isaiah, limiting the fullness of its text and possibilities when it comes to God’s expansive love. Consider including verses 2-5 as you read them in worship. Another reading with a chunk taken out is the Romans reading. While the Jewish Annotated New Testament does a great job at explaining what is going on in the whole of Romans 11, it would likely be a bit much for a sermon, so the exclusion of verses 2b-28 makes some sense. The difficult part is that Paul, a Jewish man, is trying to explain to the church in Rome, a bunch of Gentiles, that Jewish people are still God’s chosen people, even though they are “not yet persuaded” (NRSVUE translates it as disobedient) regarding Jesus, that the Gentiles now also are a part of God’s call because everybody is their own kind of not-yet-persuaded, and that the important thing isn’t whether or not the Israelites are part of this Jesus thing, but instead that God’s mercy extends to everyone, including Jews *and Gentiles*. It is easy to read into Romans 11 the antisemitic implication that if Jewish people are “not yet persuaded” then we just need to convert them or that Jewish people are disobedient and therefore God might not love them. Both of these interpretations come with a lack of context, but within the ways the lectionary works in worship, they are also real possibilities for those who hear the passage read without any context.
Matthew also has a lot that could cause harm. In the first, optional, part, Jesus uses blindness to describe those who he might consider willfully ignorant. This not only causes harm by associating blindness with ignorance, but it misses out on the actual wisdom and awareness of blind people. There are, in fact, many places where blind people are guides for other blind people, particularly those who have recently lost vision. The blind leading the blind can actually be a profound help in navigating spaces that are set up in a way that is particularly difficult or complicated to navigate as a blind person. This ease of ableism comes before a story in which Jesus calls a woman a dog. It is an insult and it means more or less what it would mean in English if we used a word to refer to a woman as a dog. What Jesus does is harmful, amidst a complicated context. Exploring and digging into this passage is a great plan, but dismissing the reality of the harm of calling a woman a dog or saying that it was ok, because it was more like puppy both cause more harm. The collision of trauma and identity between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is full of possibilities for conversations about interactions between various people with different areas of marginalization that give both people points of power over each other and also points of oppression in response to the other. Suzannah Porter coined the term “trauma collision” to describe this, and it continues to be a deeply helpful way of navigating complicated power dynamics and relational conflict.
Sabbath
This week’s readings are scattered with the importance of Sabbath and ritual observances. Isaiah reminds us that all who keep the Sabbath--the spirit of rest, recovery, and renewal--are cared for and blessed, brought together on God’s holy mountain. This explicitly includes both eunuchs and foreigners, those whose gender and sexuality did not fit within the binaries we too heavily enforce today and those who likely speak a different language and practice different customs. Psalm 67 supports Isaiah’s emphasis on Sabbath and worship as it is a call to praise, including knowledge of God throughout the earth and praise for earth’s abundant harvest.
Depending on your perspective, Matthew could be understood as pushing against Sabbath and ritual observances as Jesus minimizes the importance of ritual handwashing before eating. However, Jesus’ larger point that what comes from a person’s heart has power for good and for evil, returns to the depictions of faithfulness in action through Sabbath observance, worship, and praise. This push towards Sabbath and the rituals that have sustained the Jewish people for millenia is also a push towards care for creation. It is nonsensical to talk about Sabbath without considering Creation and the ways that true rest and renewal on the Sabbath also creates space for rest and renewal for Creation. During the beginning of the pandemic, when so many were abruptly shifted to working from home, animals and even some plants, started to make their way back into the cities and other areas that had been taken over by humans and our creations. When we rest every week, when we really start to lean into rest for ourselves and creation, we can start to imagine even larger rests and resets of land, wealth, resources, and plantlife through seventh year Sabbaths and Jubilees.
Expansiveness
As has already been stated, this weeks texts have a LOT to wrestle with. God’s proclamation in Isaiah expands who is considered as belonging, including eunuchs and foreigners and inviting us into our own thinking about who is missing and who has been left out from our communities, churches, and watersheds. Who has been pushed out to make way for sprawling developments, data centers, and warehouses? How do we wrestle with our own places of belonging, places of privilege and power, and places of exclusion, marginalization, and oppression? Where do they intersect beautifully and where do they collide in a spectacular explosion? How can we shift from sheep and dogs into the reality of creatures and beings deserving of love and care? Rather than allowing the reference to dogs to dehumanize a woman and her daughter, can we push into questions of care for the human and more than human communities? How does Paul’s letter to the Romans return the focus not to the divisions and binaries of chosen and rejected, but instead to the gift of God’s mercy and calling for us all?
Sources and Resources
For more about animals’ digestive systems, check out this section in Understanding Organisms: an Evolutionary, Ecological and Comparative Approach.
For more on the particular context of both Romans and Matthew, check out The Jewish Annotated New Testament.
For more on antisemitism in Romans, check out Daniel Patte’s essay, “Romans” in The Global Bible Commentary.
For a more explicit queer reading of Isaiah and Matthew, check out Timothy Koch’s “Isaiah” and Thomas Bohache’s “Matthew” in The Queer Bible Commentary
For more on these readings through a lens of Creation care and restoration, check out Lutherans Restoring Creation’s blog post.
To dig into these texts and others throughout the year more deeply from a particularly queer perspective, check out A Queer Lectionary: (Im)Proper Readings from the Margins Year A.
Contributor Bio
The Rev. Emily E. Ewing is an ELCA pastor originally from Colorado, but calling Baltimore home. They are a Leslie King Hammond Fellow at the Maryland Institute College of Art working toward their MFA in Community Arts. Their family of 7 adults, 3 cats, and 2 dogs inspire and support them as they combine creativity and spirituality to foster healing and empower justice in communities of every skill and age.
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