The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15A)
Genesis 45:1-15
Matthew 15:10-28
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Austin, Tex.

When I was nine years old I received a Christmas gift from my parents that would change my life. I tore off the paper and opened the box and inside were seven paperback books with colorful illustrated covers: The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. At nine years old I was not quite too old for fairy tales and so I dove in, reading and re-reading the stories Lewis used to illustrate his insights into the Christian life in his characteristically warm and knowing prose. Of course, as I grew older, the world got more complicated and I got more complicated too. Lewis’s simple stories, with their talking animals and straight-forward endings where the heroes always win in the end, did not seem up to the task of helping me make sense of it all. The books found their way further and further down the shelf, and eventually into the closet. Lewis dedicated the first book in the series to his goddaughter Lucy, who was 15 when it was published in 1950. He writes: “…you are already too old for fairy tales… but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” And so, many years later, when I was unpacking my faith (and repacking it and unpacking it again), I returned to Narnia. I began to dig around in the garden of my soul and found that the stories Lewis had written were not far beneath the surface, nourishing me with the conviction that there is truth and beauty in the world, that God is not always safe but God is good, that even in the darkest cloud on the darkest night there is a voice that sounds like love gently beckoning us to take courage and steer toward the light. 

When he wasn’t writing children’s books, Lewis was a professor of medieval and renaissance literature. He was also a devout member of the Church of England, which makes him one of our cousins, so perhaps it is not surprising that I ended up Episcopalian. Lewis understood the power of story, and of storytelling; the same way you can remember something better if you sing it, you can remember a truth better if it comes with a story. Lewis understood the power of being able to imagine something beyond what we can see in front of us, that fairy tales have their staying power for a reason, not because they are simple, but because they are true. Lewis understood that the invitation to walk by faith and not by sight is not an invitation to live a life full of wishful thinking and optimism untethered from our actual lives. Rather a life of faith is one where we begin to grasp what extravagant, unrealistic things we hope for and hope in, even if only by imagery and metaphor, so that when what we hope for arrives we will be able to recognize it. Lewis understood that a critical part of the Christian life is to expand our imaginations, to shape what we think is possible, no matter how far it seems from life as we know it. This is, to me, one of the most compelling reasons to be a Christian and to be part of a Christian community. I do actually wonder what my life would look like today if I didn’t have Lewis’s stories rooting around in my heart as I wandered from place to place looking for God. When I think about the pivotal moments in my spiritual life, I often think about how someone or a group of someones had the audacity to hold up something beautiful and often quite simple, and believe that it reflected something deep and true: God seeks to flood the universe with right-side-upness, and that the chance to have an encounter with this God is behind every corner.

We can live such siloed lives, surrounded by people who look and act and think like us, who show us a limited view of what the world is or “should” be like. The Church is one of the last places I know where we can be confronted with something different from ourselves, something that invites us to expand our imaginations, not least the encounter with the living God. This is a theme that is running around all the scriptures. Time and time again, God’s goodness interrupts the world as we think it has to be and challenges us to consider something different. 

Joseph, in the chapters leading up to the scene we hear today, has been using his position of authority to toy with the emotions and indeed the lives of the brothers who hated him so and thought they had killed him. Finally, still without knowing who he really is, their love for their father is what breaks through it. What had seemed an intractable estrangement and opportunity for revenge dissolves and reconciliation floods the room. Joseph’s imagination expands, and later he will comment, “What you intended as harm against me, God has used for good” to save an entire nation from famine.

Jesus has a conversation with his followers and with the religious leaders of his day that on the surface can sound moralistic and arcane. It’s an argument about the right way to wash your hands before eating, which was really an argument about signaling who was in and who was out of the family of God. Not for the first or last time, Jesus is trying to get across the message that our attitudes and behaviors towards others are what sets us right with God, not using religious language and ritual to exclude others. And then, like any good Jewish prophet, he walks away and begins to demonstrate what he means in this conversation with the anonymous Canaanite woman. The faith of a non-Jew, someone who has no claim on God’s promises to Israel, expands the imaginations of those around her. Jesus’s actions challenge the disciples assumptions of who God is saving and his words challenge our assumptions about how a fully divine and fully human God can act. He reminds us that God is not always safe, not always willing to stay where we think they should, but God is always, unfailingly good and always on the side of the downtrodden.

In both of these stories the impossible becomes not only possible, but actual. Lives are changed. These are not simple fairy tales about the importance of being nice to other people. They are messy stories about real people, and all the things we bring with us: prejudice, suspicion, trauma, racism, whatever we use as an excuse to stay separate from one another. They are also stories about what God is doing about it. How is God expanding your imagination about what God can do, about how God can be? What voices are you letting feed that imagination about how the world is and how it should work? What are the sites of pain in your own heart and in the life of the world that need an interruption and expansion? How is God showing up on the edge of what you think is possible this year, this week, even this very hour?