Frank C. Senn has been the Pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Evanston, Illinois since 1990. He is also Senior of the Society of the Holy Trinity, a religious order for Lutheran pastors.

He holds a B.A. from Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, a M.Div. from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.

He has served congregations in South Bend, IN, Louisville, KY, Chicago, IL, and Lincolnshire, IL before coming to his current pastorate in Evanston.

He was Assistant Professor of Liturgics at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago from 1978-81 and has taught courses at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the University of Notre Dame, and Concordia University in River Forest, IL.

Active in liturgical circles, Dr. Senn has served as President of the North American Academy of Liturgy and The Liturgical Conference. Active in ecumenical affairs, he was a member of the Lutheran-Episcopal Dialogue in the U.S.A. from 1977-81, served as the ecumenical officer of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Anglican Theological Review.

Dr. Senn is the author of nine books, including most recently The People's Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Fortress Press, 2006).
Other recent books include Christian Liturgy—Catholic and Evangelical (Fortress Press, 1997), A Stewardship of the Mysteries (Paulist Press, 1999), and New Creation: A Liturgical Worldview (Fortress Press, 2000).
He has contributed chapters to other books, written essays and reviews in many journals, and provided articles to several dictionaries and encyclopedias. He has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Canada, England, Sweden, Iceland, and Australia.

Pastor Senn is married to Mary Elizabeth Langford and they have three children: Andrew, Nicholas, and Emily. He has been involved in community activities, including Scouting. One of his current activities is teaching American history to a group of teen-age home schoolers.

PROPER 20. YEAR A. August 17, 2008

Text: Matthew 15:10-28

At least once a month in Sunday School when I was a youth, we sang “What a Friend we have in Jesus,/ All our sins and griefs to bear!/ What a privilege to carry/ Ev’rything to God in prayer.” The old gospel song goes on to list all the burdens we bear and tells us to “Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

That apparently didn’t apply to the Canaanite woman whose daughter was tormented by a demon. She took her concern to the Lord and got no answer. And when she kept on pleading with him Jesus’ disciples told him to send her away. He replied—note, to them, not to her—“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she kept on pleading, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus’ response to her may be even worse than it looks in our polite English translations. The Greek word translated “dogs” here is actually the feminine form of the word, so if we really want to take seriously the words of scripture we may have to deal with the likelihood that Jesus said something like, “It isn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to bitches.”

So what on earth is going on here? Did Jesus really mean to call her a bitch or was he just having a bad day? We could avoid that question by jumping to the end of the story, as preachers usually do, and point out that Jesus finally responded to the request of a Gentile woman and commended her faith, and add that we have to be persistent and insistent in prayer. But maybe we miss something important by letting Jesus off the hook so easily. Why did he respond to this woman the way he did? It seems to me that there are two or three possibilities in trying to understand Jesus’ response, and none of them make it much easier.

1. Maybe Jesus was having a very bad day. He’s been dealing with lots of sick people already and in the midst of that he’s had the religious leaders hassling him. He’s already been getting pretty harsh with them, and now when he tries to get away for a bit of peace and quiet, someone else is demanding a piece of him. He runs out of patience and snaps at her, but then recovers his composure, commends her faith and grants her request.

The trouble with that theory is that Jesus has just told the crowd that “it was what comes out of the mouth that defiles, not what goes into it.” On the basis of Jesus’ own teaching, what came out of his mouth—these words of insult and put-down—defiled him. That doesn’t seem right, so let’s try another interpretation.

2. Perhaps what Jesus said wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Perhaps in another culture and with a different tone of voice and a sparkle in his eye, we’d understand that Jesus was not being offensive at all. Many biblical commentators have taken this explanation on the text. Some have argued that the word “dog” is in the diminutive form and so means “puppies” and it’s hard to talk about puppies without being playful.

Unfortunately most Greek scholars don’t accept that translation, and even if you do, it doesn’t help that much to have Jesus playing games with this woman when her need is so serious and her pleas are so specific. Jesus’ response, in this interpretation, sounds at best patronizing. So let’s try another interpretation.

3. Perhaps Jesus is a product of his environment. We believe, after all, that he was true man—truly human. You can’t be truly human without being part of your culture. In this fallen world cultures also participate in the fall of man into sin. All cultures have their prejudices. Just as some people who grew up in the Deep South only came to the conclusion later on in life that no matter how kind they thought they were to black people their attitudes were still racists (and the same is true of people who grew up in the North), so every Israelite kid grew up thinking of themselves as being members of the chosen race and everyone else as godless gentiles who didn’t deserve God’s love and care. Now since Jesus was fully human, and since the gospels actually tell us that he grew in wisdom and in favor with God as he matured, then does it seem unreasonable to think that Jesus would have taken for granted the prejudices of his culture until he was confronted with the need to question them? Would Jesus have come to a moment of enlightenment and changed his attitude? Would Jesus have repented?

One problem with this theory is that Jesus has already healed the servant of a Roman Centurion earlier in Matthew’s gospel. If we were in Mark’s Gospel Jesus would have already healed or exorcized demons out of gentiles as well as Jews, and the statement “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” is not found in Mark. Usually Matthew softens Mark’s account; here he hardens it. So let’s work with this interpretation and see what happens, even though it raises problems for the usual way we think of the sinlessness of Jesus.

Usually what gets in the way of our interpretations of biblical texts is the assumptions we bring to them. So perhaps that is the case also here, because there are two different ways of thinking about human perfection and sinlessness.

There is a static view that comes out of Greek philosophy that sees sinless perfection as the peak of human moral possibility. If you have to grow into it then you’re not perfect until you get there. Alternatively there is a growth view that comes more out of Hebrew spirituality that sees sinless perfection as steady growth in godliness, a growth that at each new possibility grows in the right direction.

I mentioned earlier the racist attitudes that we all grew up with. We are the products of our environments. A child cannot choose whether or not to be influenced by the only environment he or she knows. I remember once when I was in the home of an elementary school friend, I blurted out the “n”-word. My friend’s mother said, “Oh, we don’t use that word in this house.” Suddenly I was confronted with another way of thinking about race. (By the way, that word wasn't spoken in my house either. That shows you the power of the environment over nurture; I just learned it from the neighborhood.) From the moment we become aware that there are alternative ways of thinking we became capable of choice and therefore responsible for our attitudes. You know what? I never used that word again in my life.

Once Jesus could choose between a racist response to a person and another response, any specific choice for the racist option would have been a sin for which he was personally culpable. The sinlessness of Jesus did not mean that he didn’t inherit the racist assumptions of his culture. Instead it meant that as soon as he became aware of the alternative he was able to consistently move beyond those assumptions into greater godliness.

Now if this is the Biblical view of Jesus’ sinlessness, and it seems to make much more sense of the stories we have, then that is kind of exciting. Because that means that the sinlessness of Jesus, rather than being something that puts him in an entirely different realm from us and thereby beyond our comprehension, is actually something that is a genuine example for us to follow. Sure, we’ll make a lot more mistakes than he did and we already have, but every time we are confronted with a new challenge to change and grow and we get it right, or at least partly right, we are genuinely following in the footsteps of Jesus, who taught us a godliness, a riughteousness, that exceeds, that goes beyond, that of the scribes and the Pharisees.

One thing is for sure. If even Jesus underestimated the grace of God and had to be shaken into recognizing some people as loved by God, then you can bet your last dollar that no matter how broad minded some of us may be, none of us are yet beyond being shocked by who God is willing to love and welcome into the Kingdom! It is precisely because Jesus overcame the prejudices of his culture and granted the request of the Canaanite woman that we—that anyone!—can confidently take everything to the Lord in prayer. Amen.

– Frank C. Senn, STS, Pastor, Immanuel Lutheran Church, Evanston, IL

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