—a portion of the sermon by Jaime Bonney on August 20, 2017
Matthew 16:30-20

Like the Pharisees today, the Canaanites were seen as foreigners with dubious traits. The Canaanite woman’s shouts for mercy have to overcome obstacles of prejudice and perceived superiority that would separate her from Jesus. The hardest part of the story is that Jesus himself confronts her with those divisions. What the woman seeks is healing for her daughter, and in light of that, it stings especially that Jesus compares the disciples to children, while the Canaanite woman he likens to a dog. For me, the fact the Jesus himself says these words is chilling: Jesus is the Word made flesh, so when he says these words, they become real. It reminds me that none of us can discount when we hear expressions of prejudice in our own culture by thinking that the speaker doesn’t have the power or authority to wield such words. Speech has power. Only the power of our words can make us unclean.

There is a reckoning in the interplay of Jesus and the Canaanite woman—and how many of us, if we thought that it was God who was telling us something that made us feel hopeless would have the fortitude to keep shouting? But out of the depth of love, we can.

I find myself thinking of the power of the antisemitic words spoken in Charlottesville, said to Jews; or what confederate statues say to African Americans without using any words at all—and using my voice to shout to God about it. Each of us has a shout for mercy that we can keep shouting as long as it takes, and each of us has the will to know when it is ours to take up, just by hearing which cries rise from our own lips.

What upends injustice is only the willingness to shout, persistence and fierceness, clear-eyed perspective, and the ecstatic love of God working in us and through us.

The work of reconciliation and justice is hard and ongoing; one of the blessings for today is to rejoice along with Isaiah in the imagery of the world reconciled to God and with the Canaanite woman in her child’s restoration to health. And I would like to share with you another piece that brought me comfort from an unexpected place: an excerpt from a letter written by two great-great-grandsons of Stonewall Jackson to the mayor of Richmond, VA, requesting the removal of a monument for Jackson. They write:

Dear Mayor of Richmond,
As two of the closest living relatives to Stonewall, we are
writing today to ask for the removal of his statue….
Through our upbringing and education, we have learned
much about Stonewall Jackson. We have learned about his
reluctance to fight and his teaching of Sunday School to
enslaved peoples–in Lexington, Virginia, a potentially
criminal activity at the time. We have learned how
thoughtful and loving he was toward his family. But we
cannot ignore his decision to own slaves, his decision to go
to war for the Confederacy, and, ultimately, the fact that he
was a white man fighting on the side of white supremacy.
While we are not ashamed of our great-great-grandfather,
we are ashamed to benefit from white supremacy while our
black family and friends suffer. We are ashamed of the
monument.
In fact, instead of lauding Jackson’s violence, we choose to
celebrate Stonewall’s sister—our great-great-grandaunt—
Laura Jackson Arnold. As an adult Laura became a
staunch Unionist and abolitionist. Though she and
Stonewall were incredibly close through childhood,
she never spoke to Stonewall after his decision to support
the Confederacy. We choose to stand on the right side of
history with Laura Jackson Arnold….
One thing that bonds our extended family, besides our
common ancestor, is that many have worked, often as
clergy and as educators, for justice in their communities.
While we do not purport to speak for all of Stonewall’s kin,
our sense of justice leads us to believe that removing the
Stonewall statue and other monuments should be part of a
larger project of actively mending the racial disparities
that hundreds of years of white supremacy have wrought.
Respectfully,
William Jackson Christian
Warren Edmund Christian
Great-great-grandsons of “Stonewall” Jackson

Like the great-great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson, each of us has a message born from our experience and our pain, and a voice to speak it, of the love of God and the deliverance of all people. God bless each of us to its use. AMEN.

To see the full sermon preached that day, click here.