Scripture: Isaiah 56:1, 56:6-8; Matthew 15:21-28 Series: Identity
First in a three-week series on identity (Who am I? / Who is Christ? / Who am I in Christ?). Using the mirror’s distortion and Jean Valjean’s confession, the sermon argues identity is found not in origin but in what we do. Isaiah 56 calls us to maintain justice and do what is right as a practiced, grace-infused habit, while the ‘Martian observer’ tests us by our deeds. Yet works alone breed a works-righteousness that forgets the weak; God gathers the outcasts. The Canaanite woman’s persistent, humble faith models seeking mercy from the one who can grant it. We discover who we are by those to whom we humble ourselves, coming to the Lord’s table by grace, remembering we were known and loved by God before the world began.’
Illustrations: mirror-shaving, les-miserables-jean-valjean, martian-observer, habit-practice-skills, good-tree-good-fruit
August 20, 2023
Isaiah 56:1, 6-8 Matthew 15: 21-28
Thus says the Lord: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come and my deliverance be revealed. And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it and hold fast my covenant— these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel: I will gather others to them besides those already gathered. Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment. Matthew 15: 21-28
I have never been a big fan of mirrors. The time I look in a mirror the most is when I am shaving, which as you can see, doesn’t happen very often. I shave my neck, from time to time. But otherwise it doesn’t happen.
All of us have different relationships with our own reflection, different comfort levels with what we see in the mirror. Maybe there was a time in your life when you were very confident in what you saw in the mirror. There might also be other times when you were not. One of the curious things about a mirror is how it never gives you an exact image of yourself. It is a reflection. It has been inverted. It’s almost impossible for us to see ourselves as we are. We can feel ourselves, we can feel our internal reality. We can try and describe what that is, but when we look at ourselves in the mirror, there’s always this distortion.
This question, who am I? is a very important question for all of us to ask. It is usually one of those questions we ask a lot during adolescence or young adulthood, but which we don’t ask a lot at other parts of our life who am I? It’s not very much a finished question.
Les Miserables
I think about the the musical, Les Miserables, and this question comes up a lot. There’s a song, in fact, where this question is central. The main character thinks hears that someone has been arrested as him. Someone is arrested as Jean Valjean. If you haven’t read the book or seen the musical, when the main character was young, his sister was starving and he stole some bread. Then he was arrested for it and he goes to jail. He keeps on escaping from prison and so he’s be arrested again until he finally is paroled. He wanders through the country and decides to steal some silver from a bishop. The bishop, though, was a true man of God. He catches Jean Valjean, though instead of just the silver candlesticks, the bishop gives him the silver plates as well. The Bishop gave him more, he transformed his life. Jean Valjean turns his life around. He turns the silver into a small business making beads in the north of France. He becomes a very rich man. He becomes the mayor of the town. But then there is this one detective who is always trying to find him, Javert. Javert thinks he found Jean Valjean and arrests the wrong man and takes him to trial. And so Jean Valjean is in this challenging mental place about what to do and he sings a song.
He thinks that man is me He knew him at a glance That stranger he has found This man could be my chance
Why should I save his hide? Why should I right this wrong? When I have come so far And struggled for so long?
If I speak, I am condemned If I stay silent, I am damned
Who am I? Can I condemn this man to slavery? Pretend I do not feel his agony? This innocent who wears my face Who goes to judgement in my place
Must I lie? How can I ever face my fellow men? How can I ever face myself again? My soul belongs to God, I know I made that bargain long ago.
He gave me hope, when hope was gone He gave me strength to journey on
Who am I? Who am I? I’m Jean Valjean
Jean Valjean refuses to let another man suffer for him, that is what he learns about himself by asking this question. By continuing to ask the question, he confronts not only himself, but God’s grace on his life, and once he seriously asks himself the question, he cannot take the easy way out.
Who am I? What kind of person am I? Where are the situations where we can actually come up to that question? The deep questions of who we are in our identity. Over the next three weeks, that’s what I want to look at. It’s our identity, our individual identity and communal identity. These three central questions. Who am I? Who is Christ? Who am I in Christ?
We start with the Bible and we start with where we are.
Isaiah
The section of the Bible most focused on identity is the prophets. Every prophet in the Bible has the central question of the identity of the people of Israel: are they following through with who God called them to be? Are they remembering God’s promises to them? Most often they’re not. What kind of person are you? What kind of people are you? The prophet Isaiah says in chapter 56:
Thus says the Lord… Maintain justice, and do what is right, Hold fast to my covenant. Let the foreigners join themselves to the Lord. Keep the Sabbath. these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer
Maintain justice and do what is right. Identity in the scriptures is not found as much in where you are from as we may think. Identity is not found as much in when you were born or who your parent is as what you do. There are many people born of the best families who walk away from God in the Bible. 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles are about kings who were given the greatest opportunity and squander it because of who they are. We see who they are because of what they do. They do not maintain justice. They do not do what is right. Maintaining justice is not an easy thing to do. It is a habit. Doing what is right is a habit. You need to build a virtue of prudence. Prudence is knowing what is good and what is not good. You habituate prudence. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle. You have to practice it. It’s like driving a car. You have to practice it. It is like playing an instrument. You have to practice it. No one is born with an innate ability to maintain justice and do what is right. You have to receive wisdom from the people around you and put it into practice. It is an infused habit which means God gives us the Grace to do it, but we have to actually do it. When I think about the moral life, I like to think about martians. Not that I want to go to Mars or visit aliens or anything like that, but just to think about this completely objective observer looking in at us and looking in at our life. What would they say? Someone who’s never met a human and they decided to observe you in all the things that you do, what would they say about who you are? The evidence they would have is what you do, not your excuses, not your reasonings, not your parents, not your culture, what you actually do. Who am I to the martian? Who are you to the Martian? Now if we stop there with only what we do, we’ve built a wonderful works righteousness religion, where the strong will maintain strength, and the weak are forgotten. But even in Isaiah it says that God gathers the outcasts. Outcasts are inherently weak. They don’t have a society to support them and God’s holy mountain is not for the people who are most supported, but for the people who maintain justice and do what is right. You don’t need to be successful to do that. Sometimes it’s easier to not be successful in order to be just because you have a lot less to lose. If you are quite wealthy and you’re given a business opportunity, but it is immoral, I would assume it might be trickier to say no to it. Or if you find out that a lot of your money came from a really bad, wicked situation, it’d be hard to give all that up. To give up your standard of living and tell your kids you can’t afford the college anymore because of this situation. If you don’t have any of those resources, you don’t lose anything. This isn’t to say God doesn’t want us to succeed but that each stage in life brings its own challenges. Who am I? Am I a person willing to maintain justice, to do what is right? Jesus says that A good tree bears good fruit. We know the goodness of the tree not by its roots, by where it comes from, but by the fruit that it produces.
Matthew
But none of us can do it on our own. And this gets us to Matthew 16. The Canaanite woman comes up to Jesus, “have mercy on me, Lord, son of David. My daughter is tormented by a demon,” but Jesus did not answer her. This Canaanite woman, this non-Jew, this dirty person, sees Jesus as important, “have mercy on me. Oh Lord.” Jesus does not answer her. The scripture doesn’t say he didn’t hear her. It says he did not answer her. The disciples respond and tell Jesus to send her away for she’s keeps shouting at us. She is getting annoying. Then Jesus replies, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She does not give up. She comes and kneels before him saying, “Lord, help me.” He says, “it is not fair to take children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she says, “yes Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. To which Jesus replies, great is your faith. I don’t think Jesus is calling her a dog. I think Jesus is offering her a chance to show great faith, to really show who she is and show the disciples what great faith looks like. Great faith doesn’t look like a Jew of the finest house. It looks like someone seeking God, seeking justice no matter what because that is what she’s seeking. This demon has possessed her daughter. She is seeking justice. She is seeking to make it right with the person who can make it right: the son of God. Even though she is not a Jew, even though she does not know the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the stories of Moses and the Exodus, she sees Jesus for who he is and seeks him. She seeks mercy. That is ultimately how we can respond to Isaiah and the word of God there. Maintain justice and do what is right. We must seek mercy. Isaiah doesn’t say, make justice, but maintain justice. Don’t make it worse. Seek mercy. Have more faith in God’s justice than in your own. A good tree bears good fruit. God infuses us with grace when our own root system is trash so that through God we can bear fruit This is how we find out who we are, by the people to whom we’re willing to humble ourselves. Where can you be humble? In what way can you be humble like the Canaanite woman? That’s where you find out who you are. That was with Jean Valjean. He was able to be humble, to admit who he was even if it cost him his worldly freedom. He asked himself Who am I? And realized he couldn’t live a lie anymore For us, for this church, for you and whatever walk of life you’re in, whether you are faithfully following Jesus or you’re still curious about who this Jesus person ends. Start with the humility of this question: who am I? and admit that maybe you don’t know the answer and you need to find the answer. You find the answer by what you do. What do you do? What would the Martian say you do? Are you the kind of person that does these things? Do you want to be the kind of person that does these things? Think for a moment. If an alien looked at your life, what are the five things that would notice? The five things you do the most? Is that who you are? And if it is not, do you have the humility to change that? The humility to admit it, to come to the table of the Lord and say, have mercy upon me. We’re not saved by our works, but by grace. And we reach out to grace because the wisdom that God has given us to see humbly our need for God, that we cannot maintain justice on our own. We cannot do what is right, but thanks be to God we have an opportunity in Jesus Christ. Next week, we’re going to talk about who Christ is, but we need to start here with ourselves. Start humbly. Start by looking at yourself. It might be in a mirror, it might be on a page of a journal. Look at yourself and ask this question, who am I?
And remember that whatever answer you come to, before everything, before the world began, you were known and loved by God. When all else passes away, God is there for you.
Let us pray, Heavenly Father, your great love offers us hope in a hopeless world. Help us to look at where we are and to let go of the lies that keep us from loving you and our neighbor. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.