On Sunday like many others, I was wrestling with the perplexing story of the "Canaanite woman" in Matthew 15: 21-28. How quickly we turn a blind eye to the shocking words of Jesus to this woman in distress, although as I said on Sunday, both Matthew and Mark include this story after a dialogue between Jesus and disciples about what and who is unclean and why, and the Pharisee's rejection of him because of such teaching, and using the longer reading from the Matthew suggested by the lectionary helps our understanding (though few use it). I did also use Jesus' questioning of Simon Peter's understanding to refer to another story in Acts that took place near this episode, much later, when the "slow-of-learning" Simon Peter's eyes were opened to the breadth of Jesus' ministry and God's grace... I will come back to that tomorrow. As part of the sermon I said I couldn't imagine what was going through the mind of this nameless woman, desperate fo
Dialogues, monologues, sketches, poems, rants, theological and liturgical bits and bobs and miscellaneous other verbal doodles...