My Children Have Defeated Me!

2026-46
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15A-tr 2), August 16, 2026

Isaiah 56:1,6-8; Psalm 67; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

In the Talmud, Jews read the story of Rabbi Eliezer, who disagreed with his fellow rabbis about whether a certain new-fangled type of oven might be susceptible to ritual impurity. Eliezer insisted the oven was pure, but all the others disagreed.

So Eliezer dug in his heels. “If I’m right, let this tree prove it!” The tree leaped out of the ground, roots and all, and landed several hundred feet away.

The rabbis said, “Impressive, but the tree doesn’t add to your argument.”

“OK,” said Eliezer, “If I’m right, let this stream prove it!” Immediately the stream began flowing in the opposite direction.

The rabbis said, “Sure, but the stream says nothing about your argument itself.”

Eliezer was frustrated now. He shouted, “If I’m right, let the walls of this building prove it!”

The walls began to crumble. But Rabbi Yehoshua interrupted: “Hey! You walls, you have nothing to contribute to this debate.” So the walls stopped in a semi-crumbled state, out of deference to both of these illustrious rabbis. And the walls stand that way to this day.

Finally, completely fed up with his colleagues, Rabbi Eliezer shouted, “If I am right, let it be proved from heaven!”

And a voice boomed from heaven: “Rabbi Eliezer is 100% correct about this oven and about everything else he’s ever debated with you. Why are you arguing with him?”

But Rabbi Yehoshua responded to God, “It says in Deuteronomy, chapter 30, verse 12, ‘The commandment of the Lord is not in heaven, that we should ask who will go and get it!’”

And Rabbi Yirmea jumped in to clarify Rabbi Yehoshua’s point: “You already gave Moses the whole law at Mount Sinai. We have everything we need, then, and you don’t get to add to it now! Leave the interpreting to us.”

And God laughed with joy and cried out, “My children have defeated me!”

You know why I love this story? I think we Christians tend to get way too worried about offending God. It’s as if God had given us a life we have to take great care not to mess up, lest it cost us eternal life. We think that either we have to tiptoe around our whole lives so as not to make God mad, or we have to engage in a constant battle to defend God’s honor. This despite the fact that we have all but complete freedom over what we do with our lives! If it’s all on us not to screw up our fate in the afterlife, you know we’re doomed.

Yet God has given us a playground, not a battlefield. Playgrounds are sometimes the setting for heated arguments and even fights over how and what we will play. But at the end of the day, we know that a playground is for playing in, not for fighting in. Through their ancient traditions of holy argument—even holy argument with God—I think the Jewish people have the right idea.

Now, as for the story itself … do we, as Christians, need to care about the ritual purity of an oven? Of course not: we’re not Jewish. The rules of Jewish ritual purity don’t apply to us. Yet for some reason, Christians have earned a reputation for forcing complicated, culturally bound purity codes on others.

The first thing we need to understand is that in ancient Jewish tradition, there is a clear distinction between purity and sin. They are not the same thing. Ritual purity means being in a state fit to draw near to God. Everybody was ritually impure at various times in day-to-day life. There were processes and procedures for becoming ritually pure again, one of which was the simple passage of time. We don’t have an adequate parallel to this in Christianity, except maybe for the nagging suspicion that there are certain things one shouldn’t do or say inside a church building.

Sin, on the other hand, referred to violation of God’s laws. Today it’s common in Christian deconstruction circles to proclaim that sin is just a made-up concept meant to control people and keep them in line. And yes, far too often, powerful mean conflate sin with purity and use that idea to control the sex lives of women and girls. To do so is psychologically abusive and is itself sinful.

Well, let me clear the air a bit. I think we could do a lot worse than to define sin simply as actions that unduly harm others, whether we intend them or not. And to sin against one another is to sin against God.

But I’ll also stand against the Christian nationalist voices surrounding us and assert that per our own tradition, sin does not have the power to catch the unwitting and doom us to hell. Rather, as we stumble through life, trying to figure out how to manage all this uncertainty, sin is, like the Jewish concept of ritual impurity, an inevitable challenge. It’s a part of being human, and there are ways to deal with it.

Well, today we find Jesus addressing both ritual impurity and sin … and in his own way, he’s also grouping them together. To the Pharisees he says, “It’s not what you eat that makes you unfit to draw near to God. It’s what comes out of your heart and then out of your mouth.” (A doctor might point out that the heart isn’t connected to the mouth, but we get the point! This is storytelling, not a biology textbook.)

Unfortunately, Jesus’ words here may have unintentionally confused later generations of Christians. Jesus is conflating purity and sin, but he has a rhetorical purpose in mind. He needs the Pharisees to see that ritual purity counts for nothing if you’re going to be a hypocrite about it.

Purity of an oven, then, is one thing. But what about purity of intent and purity of impact? Sin means harming others. Full stop. If Christians have a form of ritual purity, then, it’s about checking both our intent and our impact on one another before we dare draw closer to God. Are we being good to each other? Can we admit our mistakes, apologize, and learn from them?

See, here’s the thing: rules only apply within certain contexts. There’s no point accusing a baseball player of double dribbling, and you’re not going to penalize an American football player for picking up the ball and running toward the goal. Indeed, if you insist on transferring rules in from some other game—well, it’s going to ruin the game and make everyone on the playground miserable.

Let’s look at a contemporary example. Christian nationalists are just plain wrong to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom in Texas. The Ten Commandments were given to ancient Israel, not to the whole world. And though Christians adopted them and made them part of our own tradition, this does not give us the right to force them on a pluralistic society. Christian nationalist politicians break the rule of the Constitution, which applies to everyone living in the United States, while trying to introduce a rule that clearly doesn’t apply in this context.

So are we all subject to ritual impurity—the need to prepare ourselves before drawing close to God—and also to sin—acts of harming others on the cosmic playground God has given us. In today’s gospel, Jesus is anxious not because he fears we’ll unwittingly damn ourselves to hell—he has that part covered—but because when we don’t pay attention, people suffer. If we’re not open to change and growth, we continue to be part of the problem.

OK, this may be helpful for understanding the first part of today’s gospel passage. But what about the second part, where Jesus and the disciples travel to the coast and encounter a Gentile woman who begs for healing for her daughter? Healing is Jesus’ schtick, right? It’s what he does for everyone who asks, right?

It’s not surprising that the disciples are annoyed by this woman’s presence, as if she were an unhoused beggar by the side of the road and they just want to avoid eye contact. But when she refuses to go away, Jesus addresses her directly: “The healing I bring isn’t for you. It is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Excuse me, Jesus? I mean, we expect the disciples—hey, we expect ourselves to treat people rudely, because we are sinners. But not you! How can you say this to her?

Note that Matthew describes the woman as a Canaanite. That’s an archaic term by this period. The proper term for this woman, which Mark does use in his version of this story, is “Syro-Phoenician.” Most likely, Matthew intends to remind his listeners that this woman is descended from ancient enemies of Israel. Canaanites have no right to the healing that the God of Israel offers, right?

Except that this isn’t what the Bible says. Go way back to the Call of Abraham and you’ll see that the purpose of being the Jewish people is to bless the whole world—not to be insular, but to be generous, and to call all people together to learn from God, the source of wisdom worldwide.

The Jewish rules of ritual purity require the context of being Jewish. But healing requires no context at all. Everybody in the world understands healing and needs healing … even this foreigner.

If you like, you can decide that Jesus speaks rudely to this woman as a public teaching moment. He just told the Pharisees that it’s not about “What are you eating?,” but rather, “What are you putting out there into the world?” So Jesus speaks rudely to call attention to the need not to speak rudely. But wouldn’t that mean Jesus is manipulating her and the others around them? And why would we need to defend Jesus’ honor anyway?

Alternately, you can place Jesus in the position of God in the Talmudic story of the oven.

“You want healing? It’s not meant for dogs like you—only for my fellow Jews.”

“Excuse me,” the woman responds, “but what kind of dog owner are you if you never feed them? Do your dogs get nothing to eat at all?”

And Jesus laughs and claps his hands. “My child has defeated me!” And immediately he heals the woman’s daughter.

We see that Jesus is human, and we say that Jesus is perfect. Well, what if being perfect does not mean “having always been right” or “never needing correction”? What if the process of human learning is itself a higher form of perfection? What if Jesus is simply God learning from us? Indeed, whereas last week, Peter had little faith, and thus sank on the water, Jesus says to this woman, “Great is your faith!”

Don’t be afraid to argue with God. God has given you this playground, and even when you make wrong decisions, you’ll learn from them. Even when you hurt others, healing is possible. Who knows? Maybe your relationship with God could use a good argument. Maybe you and God will grow through it together. Amen.