Sermon: Dogs and Dawgs

Texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

Date: September 10, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            I had a very full, mostly good summer.  Along the way I ended up spending time with an unusual, even freakishly large number of far-flung family members.  John and I have a lot of relatives.  We got together with two of my branches when my Dad died in mid-June—family members from all over the Western U.S., including Alaska and Texas came to cry and swap stories and eat ham and jello and pie together.  Jill and Steve and Chris and Larry and Jerry and Mike and Ann and Kay and Rush and Betty and Carol and a whole boatload of others.  It wasn’t the whole family, but it was a lot of us.  Then in July we went briefly to the Hermes family (that’s my Dad’s branch) camping reunion in north Idaho---Eric and Katrina and Aggie and Kristie and Connie and Keith and Chad and Jewel and Doug and a whole pack of others.  Last weekend we were with John’s dad’s branch of the family, another gaggle of aunts, uncles and cousins—Pat and Phil and Janice and Lawrence and Ardith and Dick and Heather and the Lynns and Mauro, etc, etc. 

            Not everybody could come to that reunion, though.  The Kansas cousins had started school already.  Jane’s family is getting ready to move.  And Polly wasn’t invited.  Neither were Tula, Jessie, Luna or Olive.    Nope.  Not invited.  Big signs on all the doors: “No Pets.”

            All the dogs had to stay home from the family reunion.  Well, that’s ok.  I didn’t mind having Aggie at the Hermes family camp out, but I was glad she stayed off to the side, out of the picnic shelter, when we were eating.  I don’t like having dogs around the table when I’m trying to eat.  John remembers a neighbor, a childless couple, that used to set places at the dining room table for their dogs, but I think that’s weird and kind of icky.  Dogs are dogs.  They can be part of the family, sort of, but don’t set their dog chow next to my goulash, know what I mean?  They can clean up what Baby throws on the floor, if they like strained spinach and cheerios, but save the china and the chimichangas for Grandma Jessie, not barking Jessie. 

            Don’t give the children’s food to the dogs; it’s just not right.  If the dogs are going to eat, let the kids be fed first and the dogs can have the scraps if there are any.  Dogs are dogs.  People are people.  Just good common sense. 

            Jesus may have been repeating a common-sensical saying when he encountered the Syrophoenician woman in our story in Mark’s gospel this morning.  “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  If he had been addressing himself to a golden retriever, we probably would have agreed with him.  But it is rather jarring, isn’t it, that he is speaking to another human being who is asking for his help, begging him to heal her daughter.  When he answers her, it sounds a lot like he is calling her a dog and her little pup too.  Sounds like he’s pointing out that she’s not really a part of his family.  Like there’s no room for her at God’s welcome table. 

            It’s rather like a political gaffe in our day and age, mics left on, recordings leaked, slurs tripping of the tongue while the camera spills it to the whole world; the kind of thing that makes political handlers pull all-nighters trying to write credible apologies.  Like political handlers, biblical scholars have spent centuries trying to explain why Jesus would say such a thing, coming out with suggestions like “He meant it in a cute, affectionate way, like a sweet widdle cuddly puppy.” 

            Not likely.  The fact is that she had at least three strikes against her—she was a woman, a foreigner, and a Gentile (a non-Jew)—plenty of reasons for a first-century Jew to declare that she was not part of the family.  Jews called Gentiles dogs on a fairly regular basis.  “Gentile dog.”  It was so common they probably hardly thought about it.  Not that we expect Jesus to use even standard insults; it’s shocking, like hearing your mother curse.

            Maybe that’s the point.  Maybe hearing Jesus demean someone highlights just how awful it is when one human being addresses another as if they were not really human.  We’re so used to it in the course of human history that it seems normal, standard.  Maybe it takes hearing someone like Jesus refer to the line between the children and the dogs for us to be shocked into saying, “Wait a minute.  That’s not right.”

            The line drawn verbally between the children and the dogs shows up all over the place, doesn’t it?  Sometimes it takes light-hearted forms—“Girls rule, boys drool.”   But most of the time putting someone in their place on the other side of the “dog” line is meant to intimidate or hurt.  While I was noodling on the texts, for instance, I googled on the Baha Men’s song “Who Let the Dogs Out.”  One web sight plays the song while flashing pictures of women considered unattractive by our standards of beauty.  It’s meant to be funny, of course, but imagine what it would be like to see your face or your daughter’s face in something like that.  Ouch.  I doubt Jesus was using “dog” in the same way we do in our culture to slam an unattractive woman—“dog” as an insult then had more to do with being unclean, a creature who would eat anything tossed to it.  In our era, many Hindu and Muslim people still feel dogs are unclean and try to avoid them.  Calling someone a dog is still a powerful insult in many human cultures.  Whether it’s unattractive or unclean or uncouth, consigning someone to the dogs is saying “You’re not good enough,” or “You’re not as good as I am.”   

            At the extreme, it boils down to “You’re not as human as I am.”  This way of thinking is so pervasive.  It’s like it’s in our genes to think of “me and mine” as the pinnacle of humanity and everyone else as less than.  Just a couple of weeks ago I heard a prominent politician saying about a group of enemies, “They don’t value human life the same way we do.”  The politician said this on international television.  I guess it just sounds so normal to say something like that that nobody seemed to raise a fuss about it. 

            This is what allows us to go to war; to believe that the enemy is not as human as we are.  I am sure that those who want to hurt our country’s soldiers and citizens tell themselves that we are less human, less valuable than they are, just like we do.  I’d guess there has been a great deal of angry talk about American dogs on the other side of the ocean.

            An image kept coming up in my memory as I was thinking about this disease of the human mind.  It’s an ugly image, one you probably saw in the news a few months back.  An image of a soldier holding on to a leash, and at the other end of the leash, a naked prisoner cowering on the ground.  Such a scene is at the end of the twisted road of logic which sees me and mine as more human than you and yours.   

            I wish I’d never seen such a thing as that picture.  But in a way it’s good because it confronts us in a very dramatic way with the diseased human soul that draws the line between the children and the dogs.  It helps us see that we need healing.  It causes us pain, but just like in the body, pain is a messenger that tells us something is wrong. 

            The lectionary gives us two stories of healing in the section of Mark we heard this morning.  In the second, Jesus heals a man who is deaf and has a speech impediment.  The gospel gives us a vivid description.  Jesus puts his fingers in the man’s ears, he spits, he touches the man’s tongue, he looks up to heaven, he groans.  And he speaks: “Ephphatha!” which means “Be opened!”   The man is healed. 

            Something like this is what our souls need.  We need to be touched by God, we need to hear a powerful word that moves our hearts to be opened.  Our hearts need to be opened to the truth that there are no dogs in the human race.  Our hearts need to be opened to the truth that we are no more or less human than the other humans.  Our hearts need to be opened to the truth that we are all part of the family.  Rich and poor; well dressed and raggedy; black and white; male and female; Christian, Muslim, atheist, what have you: part of the family. 

            Did God groan when Jesus tossed off the remark to the Syrophoenician woman about giving the children’s food to the dogs?  Did God find a way to say to Jesus’ heart, “Be opened”?  Jesus was focused on his mission to his own people, his fellow Jews; they were the ones to whom Jesus intended to give his healing gifts and his stirring words.  Yet when this brash woman with a twinkle in her eye comes up with this snappy comeback, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” his heart shifts and he heals the woman’s daughter.  I imagine him laughing with delight as this woman he had verbally put in her place stands up on her hind legs and looks him in the eye and leads him to see her humanity. From that encounter the mission of Christ was opened to Gentiles as well as Jesus’ own people of Jewish heritage.  Jesus demonstrates this openness in the very next episode; the deaf man he healed was a Gentile.  No talk of dogs there.

            Another thing worth noticing in that second healing:  The man, whose impediment is described literally as being “tongue-tied” has his tongue released at Jesus’ touch and he speaks plainly.  This is a healing that we need as well.  Too often we are tongue-tied in the face of insult or injustice.  If we hear someone being named as less than human, we should be speaking up about it, from the mildest joke intended to keep someone in their place to the grossest propaganda intended to fuel enmity among people.  This is no time to let sleeping dogs lie.  Rather than being dogged by fear of being unpopular we should be dogged in our pursuit of justice for all. 

            One more dog note before this sermon goes completely to the dogs.  The hip among you—that’s all of you, right?—know that it isn’t always an insult in our culture to call someone a dog.  You can see Randy on “American Idol” call the contestants “Dawg” in the friendliest possible way.  The key is in the spelling.  “Dog” becomes “Dawg.”  If you look it up on dictionary.com, this is what it says: “Entry: dawg; Part of speech: noun; Definition: a term of address for a close acquaintance or friend; Example: What’s up, dawg?”  Of course, I sound like an idiot saying something like “What up, dawg?”  I don’t plan to adopt it as a regular figure of speech.  But maybe there’s a hint there about the healing of hearts—when the stranger is no longer dog but dawg.  My friend, part of my family.