There is a natural yearning, a human tendency towards trying to find the commonality, the thing we all share. We say, things like,
“We’re all the same on the inside.”
“Everybody’s just doing the best they can.”
“We’re all in this together.”
But sometimes words like “we,” or an “all” or an “everything” or “all things” end up meaning not much of anything.
Sometimes in well-meaning attempts at trying to find the commonalities between people and circumstances, our peculiar differences that make all the difference get flattened and overlooked.
And when it comes to God – we have a riddle to unpack:
How is it that God, who has chosen one particular people, who we believe has become incarnate as one particular Palestinian Jewish man, who seems disposed to picking the peculiar and particular… how does God end up extending mercy and life to all of us and to all things?
I’m not able to unravel this riddle, nor should I… but I have a few spots in this knot, I’d like to pick at together.
The first thing is that sweeping generalities make for bad poetry.
Psalm 133 begins with a kind of yearning for harmony: “How good and pleasant it is, when kindred live together in unity!”
This a fine sentiment – but it only comes to mean something when this communal unity is compared to oil spilling over the beard and drizzling over priestly robes. It’s by smelling, feeling, this overwhelming, outpouring of anointing oil that we enter into the goodness of this prayer.
A boring prayer would go on to say that God blesses every mountain and every place. And we would forget that kind of prayer.
Instead Psalm 133 asks us to climb Mount Hermon in Syria, to feel the early morning dew, saturating its slopes, wetting our shoes and pantlegs… and to then travel far south down to Judea to traverse the mountains that surround the temple in Zion. God’s overflowing, drenching blessing means something now… when it is linked to these mountains, to the particular contours and histories of conflict and hope embedded in these geographies.
We experience something similar in our prayer time in worship. We most often pray in the specific. We lift up loved ones by name. We ask for God’s mercy to surround us at particular junctures in our lives, to sustain us in journeys to particular destinations. We name these places, these people dear to us. We long for God’s mercy and salvation to be experienced, not just in some blandly general way – but to descend, like dew, bringing life to webs of kin and friendship, to the beloved nooks of this planet, we know by name and call home.
Good poetry, like heartfelt prayer, lifts up, names something achingly particular.
In our gospel text, we hear an unnamed woman shouting out one of these sharply pointed prayers to Jesus –
“My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession. Show me mercy, Son of David!” –
She is not asking for healing in the abstract, but for her beloved child to be made well. This woman persists despite the annoyance of Jesus’ disciples, Jesus’ initial painful silence, and then comparing her request to a begging dog. Jesus’ describes a particular vision of what the scope of his work as a Messiah includes – he has come to the people of Israel, and not apparently to this Canaanite, Gentile woman.
The woman does not deny the uniqueness of who Jesus is as a Jewish Messiah – she honors him, calling Jesus son of David and Lord. But she then subverts his metaphor, persisting to demand the crumbs that have fallen off that metaphorical table and for her daughter to be healed.
And in so doing, she presses Jesus to deepen his own understanding of the implications of his ministry.
Paul, by the eleventh chapter of his letter to Jesus-followers in Rome, has been mulling over the reality of why it is that so many of his fellow Jews have not come to follow Jesus as Messiah, and at the start of the chapter Paul asks the hard theological question:
“Has God rejected his people.”
“Absolutely not! By no means!” is Paul’s short answer. His longer answer of course is more complicated – Paul is a proud Jew, descendent of Abraham in the tribe of Benjamin – and he describes how Gentiles, through Christ have been grafted like a branch onto the tree of God that people of Israel are the root.
But Paul is not willing to go the route of the bland and boring poet. He does not collapse difference or history or say we’re all really the same. He is clear that the church is not the new Israel and that the people of Israel continue to remain God’s people.
Paul’s answer is so long that our lectionary passage jumps over 30 some verse of Paul’s creative explanations to get to his final conclusions. Which is that ultimately all people experience the shackles of disobeying God – and the power of sin and death – and that it is only through God’s mercy and kindness that all of us that any of us experience life.
Paul tries to hold together the vexing and particular realities confronting him with his powerful experience of Christ’s love – and then at the end of our passage he does what any honest theologian must do – which is to acknowledge the true depths of God’s riches and wisdom and the mysterious of how it is that God works in the world.
Paul names how overwhelming it is to attempt to offer a word that makes sense in the face of this mystery. “Who has known the mind of God?” he asks.
And so he concludes the section, with not one more argument – but with a doxology, a hymn of praise to God.
“All things are from God and through God and for God. May the glory be to God forever. Amen.”
The Mennonite professor and poet, Jeff Gundy wrote a favorite poem of mine “The Cookie Poem.”
It’s a fairly long poem, so I’ll just read the end of it, but it’s essentially a long list, a litany of different types of cookies.
It’s a poet trying not to be boring and bland and general – but instead trying to hold together the small thing, the single particular cookie, to all things, all the cookies. And this poem, which is really a prayer and a doxology of praise – to God, who comes to us in the peculiar and the particular, in Jesus, and through him, holds all things together in love.
This poem shimmers with the faith of Paul whose life was thrown into holy chaos by Jesus…
…and the faith of the Canaanite women who sees the truth of who Jesus as a Messiah for the people of Israel and a savior of all… and who demanded a blessing from him, even if it had to come as crumbs.
This is the close of “The Cookie Poem.”
Weary
and heroic cookies, scathingly noted cookies,
flawed cookies who did their best.
Single cookies, queer cookies, cookies of color,
homeless cookie families sleeping in the car,
obsolete cookies broken down on the information
highway. Sad cookies, silent cookies,
loud cookies, loved cookies, your cookies
my cookies our cookies, all cookies
God’s cookies, strange sweet hapless cookies
marked each one by the Imago Dei,
oh the Father the Son the Mother the Daughter
and the Holy Ghost all love cookies,
love all cookies, God’s mouth is full
of cookies, God chews and swallows and flings
hands wide in joy, the crumbs fly
everywhere, oh God loves us all.
[Jeff Gundy, “The Cookie Poem,” Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology 8, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 42–43.]