Trinity 11

 Isaiah 56.1, 6-8, Matthew 15. 21-28

 

“Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live

Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

 And they went to sea in a Sieve.”

 

If you are a fan of Edward Lear’s nonsense poetry those words will be familiar. The Jumblies, who “went to sea in a Sieve”, despite being told that they would drown if they did so, were just one of a long list of unlikely invented creatures and situations he thought up. He’s responsible for the Owl and the Pussycat too – an unlikely pairing in real life, but one we are glad to see get together in a poem.

 

Edward Lear’s creatures are often in some way outsiders, odd and isolated, just as Lear seems to have been. He was probably gay, long before that was considered acceptable, and he certainly had epilepsy, in an age when there was a huge stigma about this. He kept it secret as far as he could, but doing so meant that he was often quite lonely, like the Quangle Wangle, another of his inventions, who sits alone at the top of the Crumpetty tree, shielded from view by his gigantic hat , “102 feet wide with ribbons and bibbons  on every side, and bells and buttons and loops and lace, so nobody ever could see the face of the Quangle Wangle Quee”. Eventually, to his delight the Quangle Wangle is joined by a bizarre array of animals who make their home on his hat and dance in the moonlight, reflecting Lear’s own lively sense of fun, and genuine love for and interest in others, but his wasn’t an easy life.

 

His wonderful, surreal writing has endured, I think, because most of us can identify with his characters, and their writer. We all feel like outsiders sometimes, like those Jumblies, as if our head were green and our hands were blue, way out of our depth, at sea in a vessel that seems bound to sink. The poems comfort us because they tell we’re not alone, and they proclaim that even the oddest of creatures can love and be loved, and the strangest of situations can have a happy ending.

 

In our Gospel reading we meet two other outsiders, who have a decidedly awkward encounter with each other. The first outsider is Jesus himself. He’s gone to the coastal district of Tyre and Sidon. It’s outside the land of Israel. Why he is there we aren’t told and it’s a strange place to choose if he wants simply to get away for a bit. Tyre and Sidon were notorious seaports in the land of Israel’s old enemy the Canaanites. It was full of dubious characters coming and going, of every race and background and it was a byword for sin and loose living. He must have known it would feel strange there, but it turned out to be even stranger than he’d bargained for. The woman who comes to him is a Canaanite, so she is automatically strange to him, but she is probably viewed with suspicion in her own community too. She’s a woman on her own, apparently a single mother in a society where women were expected to stay in the background. Why isn’t there a man to speak for her – her daughter’s father perhaps? We don’t know. She might be a widow, or perhaps he was a sailor, with a girl in every port, and he has gone and left her. Anyway, she is all her sick daughter has, and she’s determined to do what she can to help.

 

When the disciples beg Jesus to send her away, we probably expect him to rebuke them, but even he seems to have reached his limit of tolerance. He tries to say that she’s not his concern. Israel’s bread mustn’t be thrown to the dogs – it’s a shocking response. But she persists, and he suddenly seems to see beneath the label, and acclaims her faith. Her vision of God seems wider and deeper than his own at this point. I’ll come back to the complexities of that in a minute.

 

In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah is grappling with the same idea. The Temple, and the relationship with God it symbolised, weren’t just for the people of Israel, but for anyone who wanted to draw near to it, he says. It’s a strand of thought that runs through the Bible – the book of Jonah tells a story of the unexpected, and in some ways inconvenient, repentance of the people of Nineveh, whom Jonah has been sent, very reluctantly, to preach to. He would rather see these Assyrians, historic oppressors of Israel, blasted from the face of the Earth, but God has different ideas. But this expansive vision was always a hard one for people to get their heads around, and it competes in the Bible with sometimes brutal desires for conquest and domination, like the destruction of the city of Jericho, whose “walls come tumbling down” simply because the Israelites want, and believe God has promised them, exclusive possession of the land.

 

Creating “in” and “out” groups seems to be hard-wired into us, a protective, deeply dyed instinct that probably goes way back in our evolutionary history, when working out who was like or unlike us may have been vital to keep us alive. It can be counter-productive, though, cutting us off from those who might bring us blessings from their strangeness, new ideas and perspectives, precious gifts. “Who matters to us? Who counts? Who deserves a place at the table?”, these readings ask us, pulling us out of our comfort zones just like those Jumblies who “went to sea in a Sieve”.

 

That brings me back to the challenge of the story of the Canaanite woman. The mere fact that it’s in the Gospels at all is odd. It seems to show Jesus in a very bad light, but Matthew knew it mattered that it was told because the people he was writing for, an early Christian community, was living constantly at the boundaries of their tolerance too. They were Jews and Gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free, and they regularly floundered as they tried to work out how to get along together. To add to that, following Jesus had often alienated them from their communities of origin.

 

Knowing that that Jesus himself had worked through similar feelings was a huge encouragement. It told them that it was normal and human to notice difference and sometimes struggle with it. We need to acknowledge what feels strange and difficult, if we want our faith and love to grow, not simply try to ignore it which usually results in it seeping like silent poison into our relationships and attitudes anyway. Only when we’re honest about that sense of strangeness, as Jesus is here, can we be open to the discovery of God at work in unexpected places.  

 

That’s the message of Edward Lear’s Jumblies, too, who I started out with. Did they sink, on their perilous voyage? No, says Lear, they didn’t, and in the end, they were blessed by it.

 

“in twenty years they all came back,

   In twenty years or more,

And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!

For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,

   And the hills of the Chankly Bore”;

And they drank their health, and gave them a feast

Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;

And every one said, “If we only live,

We too will go to sea in a Sieve,--

   To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”

      Far and few, far and few,

         Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

      Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

         And they went to sea in a Sieve.

 

Amen