Sermon: Listening with the Canaanites
Matthew 6:24-34
In today’s reading, Jesus invites his disciples to look at the world, especially nature, the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and gain a sense of place. The disciples are invited to open their eyes and look around to see what surrounds them in this Creator’s garden. The small things - the winged friends and colourful plants - flourish in the wild open places. They are not creatures of artifice, but the arts of God, and they help us to learn the sacred power that is present in the world.
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| Lilies from a friend's garden |
This “noticing” and gaining a sense of place can be an effective way to find inner safety and balance in the moments when we need to pull away from feelings of anxiety, fear, or sadness. Anywhere with a bit of colour and different things is good; if you can find a moment to go outdoors to engage your senses, then, go to the world! Ask yourself, “What are the five things I can see right now?” I was in the classroom when I was doing this activity for the first time. My notes told me that, in the class, I could see windows, a tree’s green leaves, my cup (brick red), the projector, a white water bottle. Then, ask what are the four things you hear from the environment (Mine were people chatting outside, my typing noise, fans, someone turning book pages). In the third exercise, ask what are the three things you can touch (i..e my jeans' texture, the cold table surface, the chair). The next is to ask two things you can smell (flowers and the spring). The last activity is to ask what is one thing you can taste. Tea.
When Jesus teaches his disciples in their private class, they seem to retreat from the crowd for restoration. Probably on the hills or in a flowered, grassy field (imagine, very nice!). And Jesus teaches his disciples that worrying (“what you will eat”, “what you will drink”, “what you will wear”) belongs to time… It belongs to tomorrow. It is the concern of tomorrow. Then Jesus says, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
What is interesting to note is that in this passage, in the teaching of that day, Jesus didn’t bring the disciples’ attention to the troubles of the day, but to the wonder and beauty of the day: Birds in the air, lilies of the field, tall green grass. These royal clothes God gives creation are more glorious than Solomon’s, yet do not last more than a day or two (“alive today and tomorrow and are thrown into the oven”). So their very beings are temporal. However, the secret of the kingdom of God lies in the spacious time of the kingdom of God: the place. the space. They are temporary but rooted in the sacred power present in the world, in the spatial connections. The birds, the lilies, the grass are not the concerns of tomorrow. These least yet full-of-life things consist of the power and the holiness of today, of the space of here, of the the place of now, in the repetition and in the cycle of nature.
Imagine… We are on a hill or in a field with Jesus and his disciples, and some of us are the Canaanites. The Canaanites are those who were native in the land even before the Hebrew people, the Israelites, came to the land to move, to settle and multiply, to live generation to generation with the faith that this land was given to them as the promised land, the land of milk and honey, by God, and to be conquered, following their freedom from slavery in Egypt. It is very interesting to me that in Jesus’ time, the Canaanites lived alongside the Israelites. (The Canaanites were not the people of the past!) In the Bible, we have the record of Jesus healing the child of a Canaanite woman. These Canaanites were also Ruth’s sister-in-law, Orpah, who returned to her Moabite people and to her gods. In the book of Ruth and Naomi, the story of Orpah is left without a story. As feminist Christians, we have learned to remember not only patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but also faithful women leaders such as Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth and Mary. Native women scholars tell us that there is another trajectory of faithful women leaders: Rahab, Orpah, and the unnamed Canaanite woman whose daughter Jesus healed and whose faith Jesus praised. (Matthew 15:21-28).
Kwok Pui-Lan is a prominent leading scholar of post-colonial theology from Hong Kong, and she contributes one chapter to the collection of articles, Wrongs to Rights: How Churches Can Engage The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. (Show the book. The editor is Steven Heinrichs, whom a number of people at Immanuel quite know well) Kwok Pui-Lan just hooked me into a whole new world of thought and made me want to learn about re-reading the Bible from Indigenous theologians. In her chapter, she says, “In the mid-1980s, women of colour in the US began to articulate Black women’s theology, Hispanic and Latina theology, and Asian American feminist theology. Yet the voices of Native American women were often left out. When I had a chance to edit a book on Third World women's theology, I purposely included Indigenous women’s writings in it.”
To me, re-reading the Bible, engaging the Bible’s stories, including the Gospel’s stories, from an Indigenous worldview, is incredible, and something I haven’t thought about much. I'm curious to know how this different way of reading the Bible can inspire us and deepen our understanding, not only to understand the world of the Bible Stories, but also God and ourselves. And my first reading about the indigenous worldview and theology already Inspired me to start appreciating the physical, spatial world more, (not only thinking in term of time but space) - how I am here and how I can be here in this concrete and lively world in a better, holistic way: The spatial interconnectedness. If we liberate Jesus from the stranglehold of the Western worldview, we can really see Jesus and Jesus’ point of view and teaching through new eyes.
Going back to today’s story, if the Canaanites hear Jesus say, “Strive first for the kingdom of God; see the birds, lilies, and grass in the field.” they might find Jesus’ views resonating with their own, looking at space and land with Indigenous (or traditional) eyes. You might remember I shared, in the first Sunday service last month, Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel’s quote on the Sabbath. “The meaning of Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week, we live under the tyranny of things of space: on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.” “Under the tyranny of things of space.” “Holiness in time.” Osage theologian Tink Tinker says (the main author of An American Native Theology) that the Christian tradition has been profoundly influenced by the concept of time (God’s plan on earth, God’s acting out in history, Jesus’ second coming, etc). Likewise Westernization is also very time-oriented: see the ideology of progress. "Seven-day cycle. Production schedules. Time clocks. Calendars. Personal wrist watches.”(quote), and in 2019, of course, the Apple Watch. Since “Enlightenment”, many powerful peoples and nations have believed that primitive and traditional societies had to change to catch up with modernity in the sense of linear time.
In contrast, Tinker says, “American Indian traditions are spatially-based rather than temporally-based.” “Power is manifest in all the things of the world; the sacred may appear at any time” (in the sense of place). “People are constantly reminded of the presence of God as they pass by certain rock formations, or rivers, or groves of trees.” (i.e. Petroforms in White shell, Sand Dunes trails in Spruce Woods Provincial Park) “Space, rather than time, becomes the evidence of God’s presence in the world in an immediate manner. Spatiality and the notion of interrelatedness lend themselves to a categorical difference between these indigenous cultures and the West.” (Show some images and arts of Indigenous artists.) The sense of space blooms wonderfully in the full expansion of interconnectedness (in the four directions, in a Circle, in a Medicine Wheel), in God (Wakonda) as reciprocal duality (the sky and the earth, grandmother - water - and grandfather - rock - ) in the world… These insights are from a very different world view than our Western one and they broaden the view of the Kingdom of God, not just in the sense of holiness in time, but more importantly, in terms of the sacredness that exists in place and in the environment, and that demands a “spatially related responsibility of the Two-legged people toward all people and all things", Two-legged, winged, living-moving things who share that place with them: animals, birds, plants, rocks, rivers, mountains and the like.
So, while sitting with the Canaanites and Jesus, everyone on the grass would have learned to see the kingdom of God in the sense of spatial sacredness… Seeing God and the kingdom of God as the creative power in the world, seeing the power of God, as Wakonda, as the reci procal duality - the sky and the earth - is hidden and manifest in all the things in the world. The sacred can appear at any time. To know this is to have an incredible, immanent sense of present time and present place. With this deep sense of place, this commitment and belonging to the land, this interconnectedness, we cannot destroy the earth and the earth’s community for our greed. We cannot damage living-moving things of the sacred territory to feed our desire for power, for tomorrow’s wealth! And Jesus makes clear that we cannot serve God, Wakonda, and wealth, mammon both… Then, the question for us is, How will we strive first for the kingdom of God as today’s trouble and also as today’s beauty in this here-and-now realm of the 21st century?