Evidence of a feast

In seminary when we were learning embodiment of celebrating the Eucharist, we were taught --with the same bread that I make for our communion here-- that every crumb of the broken bread should be carefully picked up. Should be eaten or given back to the earth reverently as it is a holy and complete piece of the loaf that we have shared together that just didn’t make it to someone’s hands.

There is a lot of bread in the Gospel of Matthew.

Just before today's story, Jesus has fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish. And now Jesus has gone into the region of Tyre and Sidon, Gentile territory. These were wealthy port cities with a long history with Galilee. They depended on Galilee for grain. So bread is already in the air when a woman comes to Jesus asking him to heal her daughter.

And this woman is, in every way that matters to the people around Jesus, the wrong person to be asking. She's a Gentile. Matthew calls her a Canaanite, reaching back into Israel's oldest stories to name her as someone on the other side of a very old boundary.

But she comes anyway. And she asks for help.

And what Jesus says to her sounds, at first, like a refusal. "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

She kneels anyway. "Lord, help me."

And Jesus answers her with an image about bread: "It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."

And then she does something remarkable. She takes the image, the insult in fact, that Jesus has given her and finds more in it than he has said. "Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."

And Jesus says, "Woman, great is your faith." And her daughter is healed from that hour.

That's the story.

We sometimes preach this story in a way that makes it more comfortable than it actually is. We like to imagine that Jesus was testing her the whole time. That he knew exactly how this would end, and that he was simply drawing her faith out into the open so everyone else could see it.

Maybe.

As a former theatre person, I often find myself wondering about the tone with which Jesus says some of the more challenging things he says. These two lines from Jesus might be the ones I wonder about that the most. The text doesn't really give us a line reading. What the text does give us is this: Jesus states a real boundary. "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel."

And then this woman — a woman culturally seen as outside the story—changes what happens next.  

Her whole argument rests on a small detail: a crumb. A crumb is not a diminished loaf. It's not something that used to be bread but doesn't really count anymore. It's bread. Just small. She doesn't reject Jesus' metaphor. She takes it seriously. And then she finds something in it that everyone else had missed:

Even the crumbs are still bread.

And I don't hear resignation in that. I hear confidence. She's not saying, "I'll take whatever you can spare." She's saying, "I know something about this table that you haven't said yet. Even the crumbs belong to the feast."

What if, in this moment, Jesus receives something from someone who we don’t expect will teach him anything? What if he doesn't defend the boundary he'd just named? What if the boundary expands?

I want to pose a question for us to sit with:

What do we treat as too small to count as real bread?

I ask us that as this congregation, specifically, because I think we know something about crumbs that a lot of churches don't.

Five years ago, we were worshiping in the single digits. If you'd told us then what a Sunday here would look like now — twenty-five, thirty, sometimes forty of us in this room — we might not have believed you.

We know, not as a metaphor but as our own lived history, that a fragment is not the absence of a feast. It can be the beginning of one. That's not just a nice idea for us. That's what happened.

So when the woman points us towards the crumbs, its not a rhetorical question for this congregation. We've already lived the answer once. The question is whether we still trust what we learned.

Before this, Jesus feeds five thousand people with those five loaves and two fish. And when everyone has eaten, the disciples gather up twelve baskets of leftover fragments. And then, a little later, Jesus does it again. Four thousand people. Seven loaves. And again, there is more left over than anyone expected.

Matthew has already shown us, twice, what God does with fragments. They get gathered up. They're not thrown away. They're not treated as scraps that aren't worth the trouble.

I wonder what we've already gathered into baskets around here that we might have quietly filed under not enough to matter.

A handful of people willing to show up on a Wednesday. A little bit of space that isn't being used most of the week. Relationships some of you have with people who've never set foot in this building but who trust you. Skills sitting in this room that nobody has thought to ask about.

What if leftover isn't waste? God wastes nothing. What if it's simply something we haven't figured out what to do with yet?

When you believe you don't have much, the temptation is to hold tightly to what little you have because you're afraid it will run out. That's an old, familiar kind of scarcity.

But growth like we have seen can create a different kind of scarcity. One that is sneakier, because it doesn't always look like fear. Sometimes it looks like wisdom.

It sounds like: Let's not grow too fast. Let's make sure we can sustain what we've built. Let's not lose what makes this place special. None of which are bad things to say. I have said those things to us. Some of that really is wisdom. We have people to care for. We have a budget. We have a building. We have limited time and energy. Jesus names a real scope for his own mission in this story. He says, I was sent to the lost sheep of Israel. He doesn't pretend limits don't exist. So naming what is sustainable for us to pursue isn't, by itself, a scarcity mindset.

But perhaps the invitation is to remain curious about what God might do beyond the limits we can currently see.

That's what the woman does.

She doesn't deny the table. She doesn't demand that Jesus throw out the table and start over. She simply looks at the table and says: There's more here than you think.

Maybe that's a question worth carrying with us as we continue to grow. Not simply, Is there enough?

Maybe the question is: What if there is more here than we think?

What might God do with what we've already gathered? Who might see something in this congregation that we can't see because we're sitting inside it?

Someone will walk through our door. Maybe this month. Maybe this year. Maybe someone already has. They'll be looking for a place to rest. Maybe they'll be looking for a spiritual home after they've stopped believing one existed for them. Maybe they'll be looking for healing they don't yet have words for.

They may not know our stories, our jokes. They won't know what got us here. They may see things differently than we do. And they may see something we can’t see. They may help us notice another crumb. Another possibility. Another way the feast is already bigger than we imagined.

That's how this table was reshaped once already, back when there seemed to be so little here.

Maybe that's what the crumbs are telling us. They're not evidence that there wasn't enough. They're evidence of a feast.

And maybe the invitation isn't simply to be grateful that there was enough for us.

Maybe it's to keep noticing what else is here. What else God has given us. What else this table might become.

The woman in this story sees something that the disciples don't see. She sees that there is more. And perhaps that is her great faith. Not simply that she refuses to leave, but that she trusts the abundance of God more than she trusts the boundaries everyone else has drawn around it. She knows that even the crumb is still bread.

And somehow, that is enough to reveal that there is more than anyone thought.

"Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."

Great is her faith. May it be said of us too.

Amen.