Today we are welcoming into the community of Grace Church Alexander Wesley Taylor who is being baptized. Traditionally, baptism was a private, a family event, but it has become in recent decades a celebration for the whole congregation to enjoy, and to participate in. And in fact we, all are all more than observers here. We all have a role to play. During the baptism itself, we will all reaffirm our baptismal vows and equally important, we will all make a promise to do all that we can to participate in Alexander’s growth in the Christian faith.

These vows we make today may seem somewhat strange, even inappropriate if you have never participated in an Episcopal baptismal service. But they are important. They remind us of what we are about as individual Christians, as a parish, and as a Church. If taken seriously, and what vow should be treated lightly, these vows we make each time we witness a baptism, serve as a reminder of what we should be about as Christians. In short, they are our job description.

• Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?
• Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
• Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
• Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
• Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

That’s what you will agree to do in a few minutes, that’s what you’ve agreed to do, every time you have attended a baptismal service in the thirty odd years since this Book of Common Prayer has been in use. Perhaps some of you, thinking this is not what you expected when you came to church this morning, will sneak out the back. Perhaps some of you, will try to weasel out of it by not responding when I ask these questions. Fortunately, I’m new enough that I might not recognize who is walking out, in fact I would rather you left, than have you stay here and agree to things you have no intention of doing.

We have all, in our own ways, and to our own abilities, agreed to follow Jesus Christ. We are all, in our different ways, and to the limits of our own abilities, Jesus’ disciples. It’s not that some of us have what it takes and others don’t. Rather when we confess our faith in Jesus Christ, we are making a commitment to follow him, to try to see the world with his eyes, to do what he would have us do, to love our neighbor as ourself, to seek justice, and respect the dignity of every human being.

Part of our struggle with how to follow Jesus comes from the sense we have that the demands Jesus makes of us are far beyond our ability to achieve. Jesus was God after all, and his disciples were chosen by him, so when Jesus made some high moral or ethical demand of himself or his followers, it was easy for them. It’s not for us. But such a view is a far cry from the Jesus and the disciples depicted in the gospels. Paying attention to the text reveals a rather different dynamic—a Jesus who was human, just like us in every respect, and disciples who struggled, just like we do. There’s no better example of this than in today’s gospel.

One of the things I most like about the Gospel of Mark is the mystery in it. While Mark’s gospel is enigmatic throughout, it may be that there is no part of it that is as deliciously ambiguous as the story we have in front of us today. Let’s begin with the geographical setting. None of us had a map of Palestine in front of us while we were listening to Deacon Carol in the gospel, so we probably assumed that if you wanted to go from Tyre to the Decalopis, the town of Sidon was on the way. Far from it. Sidon is twenty miles north of Tyre; and the decapolis, the ten cities were to the southwest of Tyre—perhaps fifty miles. Given that Jesus and his disciples were walking, to go from Tyre to the Decapolis via Sidon is, oh I don’t know something like driving from Madison to New York City via Denver.

Then there’s the story of the encounter between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman. What I love about this is the interchange between the two. Jesus seems to be trying to conceal his identity; in fact, he doesn’t want to do ministry in this place, but this woman comes to him asking for his help. She is a Gentile, a Syro-phoenician, whose daughter is possessed by a demon. She behaves as she should, bowing down before him submissively. Jesus’ rejects herm comparing her to a dog, an unclean animal, by the way. His statement, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” implies that he shouldn’t be bothered by such requests, that her needs, and those of her daughters, were no concern of hers.

But the surprising thing is that she doesn’t settle for this response. She turns his “dis” of her, back onto him. “But even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” With that, she conquers Jesus in a little contest of wordplay.

This brief interchange sounds remarkably offensive. In a nutshell, Jesus responds to someone who has come to him asking for help with an offensive putdown. She, in turn, accepts the term for herself and turns it back on him. OK, call me a dog, but dogs eat the food that falls from the table. Jesus turns around with an equally surprising response. You’re right, and because you’re right, because you’ve won this contest, your child is well.

The story seems to depict Jesus in a very bad light; that he seems not to know he should reach out to Gentiles as well as to Jews. He seems to respond to human need as callously as we might brush off a panhandler on State Street.

In fact, this story is a turning point in Mark’s gospel. Up to this point, Jesus had ministered only to, and among his own Jewish people. Mark emphasizes the rather bizarre geography to make the point that Jesus has left the traditional homeland of Jesus and is traveling in Gentile territory. In the course of that journey, he begins to minister to Gentiles as well as to Jews, and this encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman seems to be the impetus for that ministry. After that, he heals a deaf man, also in Gentile territory, and the people acclaim him as the one who can make the deaf hear, and the mute to speak.

For Mark, it was this woman, a Gentile, pleading with Jesus to heal her daughter, who brought Jesus to understand that his ministry extended to Gentile as well as Jew. Whether it happened just that way is not the point. What matters is that Jesus reached out to Gentile as well as to Jew, and that Mark wanted to tell the story in just the way he did. For Mark, the encounter with this woman changed Jesus. It changed the way he thought about himself. This is not the only such point in the gospel. There are other times when Jesus seems to learn something new about himself—his baptism and Gethsemane, for example.
I don’t want to address the theological implications of this; they are profound, and one of the reasons the early church struggled with the question of just who Jesus was. For us, there is a different struggle and a different set of implications. The baptismal covenant, as I said, is a job description for Christians, but it does not describe what we are or what we do. Rather it provides us a vision of who we ought to be, what we ought to do. It is hard, and lies beyond our capabilities. The gospel reminds us that occasionally even Jesus had difficulty adhering to it. That should give us comfort, but it should also challenge us. Thanks be to God.