Into The Midst of Conflict: a sermon for Year A, Proper 15

Preached on Sunday, August 14, 2011 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. Lectionary readings this sermon is based on can be found here. 


The Irish playwright and early advocate for women’s rights George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

This past week an unreasonable man, who has also been an ardent advocate for the rights of women, Father Roy Bourgeois, a Roman Catholic priest, received some troubling news. Fr. Bourgeois has long pressed for the ordination of women in the Roman church; going so far as to participate in the ordinations of several women as Roman Catholic priests, ordinations that, you won’t be surprised to hear, the Vatican considers illicit and invalid. The Maryknoll order of which Father Bourgeois is a member has dismissed him from its ranks over his refusal to recant and repent his support of the ordination of women.

Fr. Roy Bourgeois watches recently ordained Roman Catholic women celebrate the Eucharist.

The cause of women’s ordination in the Roman church has gained a little traction recently.  A surprising number of priests in the US – more than 150 – signed a recent statement protesting the treatment Father Bourgeois has received from the church. Just last month in Austria, more than 300 Roman Catholic priests joined in a call to disobedience and pledged to advocate for the ordination to the priesthood of women and married men. And in Australia, the National Council of Priests came to the defense of a bishop there who has advocated for women’s ordination and was forced to resign his see as a result. It’s seems to be no less than a groundswell in our sister church for the inclusion of women in the priesthood.

Last month, we celebrated the anniversary of our own groundswell. On July 29th, 1974, 37 years ago, three Episcopal bishops ordained 11 women to the priesthood in Philadelphia. These ordinations were at the time considered illicit by our church as well. And these women became known as the Philadelphia 11. Their ordinations were considered illicit because even though a majority of both houses of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church had voted for women’s ordination in 1970 and again in 1973, our canons required a supra-majority in each house for the measure to pass. But pass it did at the next General Convention in 1976 – and the ordinations of the Philadelphia 11 were recognized by the church thereafter.

One of those women, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, recalling that time, admitted that the Philadelphia 11, along with a few good men, had “defied convention and the (General) Convention ... and (deliberately) forced the issue.” 

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In today’s gospel, we see another woman forcing the issue. Jesus and his followers have travelled outside of Israel and Judea into Gentile territory. But it is clear that Jesus’ fame as a healer has preceded him, and a local woman, a Canaanite, comes out to petition Jesus. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David” she shouts. Her daughter is ill and she begs Jesus to heal her.

Neither Jesus nor the disciples are particularly pastoral in their response. Jesus, at first, ignores the woman. The disciples tell Jesus to get rid of her, give her the bum’s rush, because she’s being so annoying, following them and shouting out to them.

Then, she comes to kneel at Jesus’s feet, and plead yet again, “Lord, help me.” But Jesus’s reaction is a bit troubling to us, isn’t it? His retort to this woman is, basically, “Look, it’s not my problem. Not in my job description.” He even compares her and her people to dogs. This is un-PC by any measure. But the woman never relents. She comes right back at Jesus and says, “Yeah, well even the dogs get to lick up the crumbs that fall from the table.”

There is conflict here. There are heated words exchanged. There is real contention going on here. As we say down south, this is a lot of shoutin’ and name-callin’.

When conflict occurs, when voices are raised, when conflicted points are debated, we often feel uncomfortable. We don’t like it in our families. We don’t like it in our politics. And we really, really don’t like it in the church. Even more than that, if there is conflict in the church, many people think that, well that conflict and contention don’t have a place here, don’t belong in church. Some folks will tell you that conflict and contention are quite obviously un-Christian. 

In his book, Conflict and a Christian Life, Father Sam Portaro writes, “Conflict can actually be a force for good… Conflict is not just a problem to be resolved.”(1) Conflict and contention are a necessary part of growth and change, in the church and everywhere else. In order for change to come, someone has to raise a voice. In order for change to begin, someone has to force the issue.


It takes a Canaanite woman who forces the issue, who won’t stop praying for what she wants and needs. It takes a black woman refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus. It takes an AIDS activist chaining himself to the gates of a pharmaceutical company headquarters. It takes a priest willing to risk dismissal and even excommunication for what he believes. It takes 11 women refusing to ignore God’s call to them, and some likeminded bishops, who flaunt convention and even the General Convention, for change to come.   

Again in Conflict and a Christian Life, Sam Portaro writes, “The trouble with Jesus was -- and is -- that he stands in the midst of conflict, (and) allows that conflict” to occur. “The trouble with Jesus was -- and is -- that he invites us to follow where he has led.” (53).

That is what Jesus does in our gospel today. Rather than quieting the conflict, Jesus engages with it, and through this creative engagement, Jesus sees what is really there, what is really going on. Jesus comes to see the faith and the conviction of someone on the margins, someone from beyond the pale who might have gone unnoticed before.

Through the shouting, Jesus hears the voice of someone in need of his healing mercy and grace. He hears an outsider longing for the salvation that he has come to bring into the broken world. And when Jesus eventually hears that cry, really hears it, he heeds it.

Our collect this morning reminds us that God has given us his son to be “an example of godly life.” And we prayed that we might “follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life.” May it be so. And may we have the courage to follow Jesus into the midst of conflict, not to quell it, but to find what it might have to teach us. May we follow Jesus into the fray and hear there the unheard call for justice and mercy that we must hear and heed.  +Amen.

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins