Hilton Head Island, SC – September 8, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 15:21-28; Romans 7:13-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Now, if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. – Romans 7:16-17)
The concept of this sermon is easy to say, but hard to explain, and in some instances, even harder to accept. I shall begin by giving an example.
The United States government frequently sends surplus food to war zones in many places around the world to help prevent starvation among the people there who otherwise might not have enough food. You and I might also send contributions to organizations that send assistance to such countries or to other countries where famine is occurring quite apart from warfare. This seems to be a kind thing to do. However, it may cut into the profits of farmers or grocers or shopkeepers in those countries, because local people stop purchasing food from them when they can get free food that is shipped to them from abroad.
Or take another example. The Head Start program for very young children was started in the Lyndon Johnson administration in 1965. Well over twenty million children have participated in it since its inception. Hardly anyone would argue that it is a mistaken do-gooder program. Still, without question there have been many mothers, and some fathers, who were glad to enroll their children in Head Start who didn’t go to work while their children were being taken care of and taught. It enabled them to continue and to expand their indolent way of life, depending on the federal government to assist them in eking out a minimal living for themselves and their children. Was that or is that a humane thing for our society to promote? I have my own answer. What would yours be?
We are all familiar with the acronym “ADC”: Aid to Dependent Children. And when we hear the word “welfare,” we may conjure up thoughts of poor people being given assistance by the national or state governments to keep their heads above the economic waters which otherwise might drown them. Millions of Americans oppose those programs, because they think it allows many people to coast while the rest of us work (or worked) for our living. In their minds, welfare is a nasty word.
Is humanitarianism always humane? It depends on who decides the answer to that question. And it also depends on the circumstances under which the question is asked. Is it okay to send food and clothing to Ukraine and Gaza? Almost no one, other than miserable misanthropes, would object to that. On a predictable basis, North Korea fairly often experiences famine, because its form of draconian communism fails to produce enough food for its own citizens. Would it be okay to send food to Norh Korea, if North Korea would accept the assistance, which it wouldn’t? Would it be humane, or would it help underpin a corrupt government?
One of the most successful government aid programs to beleaguered nations was the Marshall Plan. It sent billions of dollars of aid to people in Europe whose economies had been shattered by World War II. By means of it the USA became the world’s Number One humanitarian aid-giver from that time to this. Some countries give a higher percentage of their national budgets to humanitarian foreign assistance, but no country gives a higher amount of humanitarian assistance than the USA, if only because our economy is still the largest one in the world, and we can easily afford to do what we do, and could do much more if Congress would approve it.
Nevertheless, there are many citizens in the United States who object to those political humanitarian impulses, and there are millions of people in other countries, even some of whom personally receive that assistance, who object to it. They are willing to bite the hand that feeds them, as we say. And no good deed goes unpunished, as we say. You can’t win for losing, as we say. Some folks are glad to get help, and others feel demeaned if it is even offered to them.
The foreign policy of wealthy countries may include what appears to be humanitarian help to struggling nations, but it also is intended to win the political support of those nations for the nations that provide the assistance. Foreign aid is meant to do good for the states who receive it and to do well for the reputation of states that give it. However, it is impossible for the richest country in the world to be loved by every other country in the world when we try to do good by helping impoverished states in other parts of the world. Furthermore, humanitarianism is not always humane. Those to whom kindness is shown may grudgingly accept it, but they may also take umbrage in the very fact that it is offered to them, because it calls attention to their need, and they may not like that.
Are the issues and problems these examples illustrate reasons to put the kibosh on our humanitarian tendencies? Certainly not! All humans need to be humanitarians, even if their humanitarianism may occasionally have some negative results. We cannot and we must not stop trying to help people or nations that are in great need of help. In innumerable places the Bible urges us to help humans in distress, and to do so primarily because we too are human.
The story of the Canaanite woman whose daughter Jesus healed has always been for me one of the most fascinating and perplexing stories in any of the Gospels. It is found only in Matthew (15:21-28) and Mark (7:24-30). In Matthew, it says that Jesus had gone “to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” Tyre and Sidon were and still are two cities in what now is the Middle Eastern state of Lebanon, just north of biblical and modern Israel. In Matthew, the mother is called a Canaanite, but in Mark she is called a Greek. One way or the other, she was not Jewish, and yet somehow she had heard of Jesus. She came to Jesus, begging him to cast out “a demon” the mother thought had taken possession of her daughter. In our minds, that would suggest the girl had a mental illness or ADHD or autism, or some other behavioral disorder.
In both Matthew and Mark, Jesus hesitated to heal the child, without explaining his hesitation. Enigmatically he said to the lady, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Then he said what to us seems like a cruel statement: “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
What is going on here? How could Jesus act with such apparent inhumanity? Did he really think he was sent only to Jews? Did he mean to avoid all Gentiles? If so, dear hearts, that would mean us! Surely he could not have meant that!
The only satisfactory explanation, as far as I can deduce, is that Jesus meant to give his disciples a vital lesson, namely, that in fact Jesus was sent by God not only to Jews but also to Gentiles, or in other words, to everyone. He dramatically made that point indirectly in what he said. This distraught mother gave him the opportunity to demonstrate to his twelve carefully chosen disciples that his mission was to the whole world, and not just to the people of Israel, but she didn’t know it. Fortuitously, the persistence of the mother helped convince both Jesus and the disciples of the universal appeal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for she said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” It was such a profound response from that very wise mother! By it she clearly implied that Jesus was her master as well as the master of the twelve apostles. In response to her, Jesus declared, “O woman, great is your faith,” and with that, her daughter was instantly made well.
Is humanitarianism always humane? In that complicated and complex incident, it was. And normally it is. I choose to believe that Jesus had the end of this episode in mind as soon as the frantic mother spoke to him. Still, there are times when with the best of intentions of what we want to do, they still don’t turn out the way we intend.
When I was a minister on the staff of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, I was asked to serve on the board of the Chicago Christian Industrial League. It was an organization that housed, fed, and found jobs for homeless men who ended up on Chicago’s widely known skid row. Back then, I usually voted Republican in most elections. I knew that the League helped most of the men it served, but there were some I thought were taking advantage of its generosity, and they were assisted to continue living lives of dependence on others, rather than to become deliberately independent. Much later, I concluded that is not a matter I can adequately judge.
Over the past six decades, I have known many very active church people who contributed little or nothing to the churches of which they were members. Of course, I can’t know the reasons why any of them made that decision, but I suspect some of them thought that their church did things of which they did not approve. Therefore, because the Church of Jesus Christ is obviously a volunteer organization, they volunteered to give it nothing. If nations were volunteer organizations, they would never be able to do what they must do if they are adequately to serve their citizens. Fortunately, nations, states, or municipalities have a means of extracting money from their citizens, and I have spoken favorably of that edgy issue in infrequent past sermons.
In Tuesday’s USA Today there were two stories that pertained to the theme of this sermon. A front-page article addressed old public housing projects, and it featured one in Savannah. Far too little has been done to maintain and upgrade such developments, and some of them have become grossly outdated and dangerous. Nonetheless they are the only places their residents can afford. Frequently municipal governments are more interested in building new publicly-financed housing than in repairing old ones. They are forced to decide what is the humane thing to do. If they have too little in the town till, they may decide not to do anything, and let a future town or city council decide what to do. Doing nothing when something needs to be done is inhumane, and humanitarianism is often stymied by cautious legislators.
The other story was a long editorial by a man who grew up on a farm owned by his father that was previously owned by his grandfather. Because millions of Americans have remained committed to small farms that are not very productive, their standards of living and their optimism for the future have slowly but steadily eroded. The writer spoke of the day his father recently sold all his milk cows. His father had tears in his eyes as they were taken away, because it meant there was no way he and his mother would be able to stay on the farm.
Should government step in to assist such people? Should private charities do it? Farmers are proud people, and would they accept help? What is the proper humanitarian course, if there is one?
Last Monday evening I watched an hour-long television documentary about Kamela Harris, which included her thoughts on prison reform. Having been a district attorney for several years, she said she favors establishing far more secondary and especially higher education programs in prisons. If prisoners emerge from their incarceration prepared to take jobs with good pay, they will be much better able to become independent after their years of prison dependency. In addition, their recidivism rate will drop dramatically, she said. Is that a good idea, or not? Is it a humanitarian idea, or not? Does society or do individuals have an obligation to help others who clearly need some assistance if they are to escape the dilemmas in which they find themselves?
In the seventh chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, he was talking about how the 600-plus biblical laws are intended to make our lives richer, better, and more fulfilling. The problem is, said Paul, that none of us is able totally to follow every law. Situations, physical or mental inabilities, or “pure human cussedness,” as my mother would say, prevent everyone from following every law in the Bible perfectly. For Christians, and for many if not most Jews, we suppose that some of those laws are far too out-of-date anyway.
Paul expressed his dilemma in a typically Pauline manner. “We know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me” (7:14-17).
You know who Paul sounds like to me? Flip Wilson: “The devil made me do it!” Well, maybe - - - but I doubt it. There’s a lot more pure cussedness in us (if cussedness can legitimately be called “pure”) than there is devil. As I have opined on numerous occasions, I think there is no devil, and that “the devil” was invented to try to scare people onto the narrow way that Jesus talked about, if Jesus actually said that, which I doubt he did. (In the last year of my preaching, I am unloading lots of things I maybe shouldn’t say, but if the truth is told, I always said things I probably shouldn’t have said but had no hesitation to say anyhow.)
So where does all this leave you and me? We don’t have much influence on many major humanitarian decisions anymore, and in truth we never did anyway. But we can still be individual humanitarians. After January 5 I hope all of you will begin attending other congregations of the island. (I will address that topic in another future sermon.) When you find a new church home, I hope you will contribute as much or more to it than you contributed here. And I hope you have been giving to many other humanitarian agencies for many years, and will continue to do so.
If you wonder if a particular charity is reputable, you can Google “Charity Navigator,” as I did, and you may find a long list of reputable charities, which I didn’t, because I couldn’t, and that’s because I am a technoklutz, which I have also mentioned on numerous occasions. There are literally hundreds of worthy humanitarian groups that need assistance if they are to assist those who really need assistance. Give, even when you are not positive that your contributions will accomplish everything you want.
If there might be a small dose of unintended consequences in our humanitarian giving, we all need to give anyway. It is an important part of being a Christian. There is a famous limne in a poem by Tennyson that says, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Probably nobody has ever made this exact statement, but it is better to have given to something that didn’t work out the way you wanted than never to have given at all.
Be a Christian human. And if you can’t be that, at least be a humanitarian human.