Friday 21 August 2020

What has God put in your hands?

 Audio version here 

Matthew 15. 21-28

 

There’s a story told of an Irish saint from the sixth century, St Kevin, a man known for his feats of heroic prayerfulness. He was a hermit who lived in a cave by the side of Glendalough, a lake in County Wicklow. According to legend, at the beginning of Lent one year, Kevin settled down to pray. He stretched out his hands, as he always did, and sank deep into prayer. So deep was his prayer, that he didn’t notice when a blackbird landed on his hand. So deep was his prayer that he didn’t notice either when she flew away and came back again with a twig in her mouth. So deep was his prayer, in fact that he didn’t notice her going to and fro for all that day, hour after hour, bringing twig after twig, weaving them together. He didn’t notice her bring dried grass and weave that in too. He didn’t notice until right at the end of the day, when he opened his eyes and realised that there in his hand was a perfectly woven nest, and the blackbird sitting in it. And underneath her were three sky-blue eggs.

 

“Ah!” thought Kevin. “Now what shall I do? Sister Blackbird has honoured me with her company, trusted me with her young. Hmm! Well, there’s nothing for it but to wait, and while I wait, to pray”. So Kevin did. According to the story, he prayed for days and days, sitting quite still, not stopping to sleep or to eat. One week passed, and two, and in the third week he saw the eggs crack open, and little by little the blackbird chicks emerge. But that didn’t mean he could move. Far from it. Now it was even more important that he stayed still as the parent birds brought food to their chicks. So Kevin just carried on praying. By the time the chicks were ready to fledge and fly the nest, Lent was nearly over, and as Easter Sunday came he celebrated the new life of resurrection, and the new life of the chicks that had grown in the nest of his outstretched hands…

 

Well, you can believe it if you like, but it’s a good story, whether it happened or not.

 

I like it because it makes me wonder what unexpected thing God might have put in my hands to deal with. Perhaps it is something which I would rather not handle – maybe St Kevin had at least the odd moment when he wished that blackbird had nested somewhere else. Often in our lives there are situations which seem to us to get in the way of what we really want to be doing with our lives. We could be so much better, holier people if only… If only, we didn’t have that awkward boss at work, that difficult relationship at home, that illness to deal with, these cares and worries, those doubts and fears, this Covid19 pandemic. These things seem to us to be distractions, diverting us from the path we planned to take.

 

And yet it’s often in facing up to and dealing with these awkward realities that we find the greatest blessing. We find our hearts and lives expanding because of them. Sometimes we may find a solution to them. Sometimes we may end up having to live with them, but what looks like a diversion from the straight road we’d mapped out turns out to be a pathway which leads to life in all its fullness.

 

The second part of the Gospel reading we heard today reminds me of that too. Jesus is in the territory of Tyre and Sidon, foreign territory. Tyre and Sidon were Canaanite port towns to the north of Israel. What was he doing there? We aren’t told. Not having a seaside holiday, that’s for sure. Tyre and Sidon were a byword in Israel for sin and trouble, rackety towns where all sorts of people came and went, where sailors did what sailors have always done on their runs ashore. Maybe the father of the little girl whose mother comes to Jesus was a sailor. It would certainly have been unusual, a bit disreputable, for a woman to be out on her own like this, and even more so to be taking the initiative in challenging a male leader. Maybe he was a sailor who had gone away to sea and never come back, a sailor with a girl in every port, and this woman just happened to be the girl in this one. We don’t know. But she is obviously a nuisance, even to Jesus.

 

His disciples beg him to send her away, and he seems inclined to try, but she keeps on at him until he gives her what she wants - her daughter’s healing – and he doesn’t just do this, he also acclaims her faith.

 

It’s an awkward story. People have puzzled over it ever since it was written. Jesus seems so rude. It’s especially ironic coming after the passage before, when Jesus tells people to beware of what comes out of their mouths, the unguarded words which wound others! Some commentators tried to say that perhaps he doesn’t really mean what he says when he compares this woman to a dog and tries to send her away, or that he is just testing her faith, but I don’t buy either of those explanations. There’s a child’s life at stake after all. I think if the Gospel writers meant us to read it like that they would have said so. I think it is what it seems to be; a story about Jesus learning and growing, in response to the challenge of this brave and desperate woman. I wonder, in fact, whether that’s precisely why he went to Tyre and Sidon – to take himself out of his comfort zone.  He may have realised, in theory, that God’s love included the Gentiles, those who didn’t share his cultural upbringing and background, but encountering that difference in the flesh was another matter. Was God’s love really so broad as to include her. Yes, yes, yes, Jesus discovered.

 

The Gospel writers didn’t have to include this awkward story in their Gospels. It would have been much easier to leave it out. But they were writing for early Christian communities which also struggled to accept the sheer variety of people who found their way into this new movement, to live together, loving each other, just as we often do. They needed the encouragement of this story. “Even Jesus found this tough,” they might have said “and yet, what a blessing there was in welcoming those who were different”

 

So I wonder. What is it that God has placed in our hands today, as we stretch them out in prayer, like St Kevin did? What are the inconvenient, awkward, puzzling realities that we struggle to hold onto, the things we wish we could put down and walk away from, but which we know we can’t? Perhaps, like St Kevin, like Jesus himself, if we let them sit there, accept them for what they are, we might find that, in God’s economy, there can be blessing hidden in challenge, new life that hatches in our hands, if we have the patience and the faith to hold still and to watch for it?

Amen

 

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