A Foreign Story – 9/7/25

When a Muslim moves to America, often his greatest fear is becoming “Americanized.” This hit me while I was eating lunch with a Muslim friend years ago. He was telling me what he thinks of the relationship between Christianity and America. It’s sort of like a syllogism:

He said Americans are Christians, and immorality is pervasive in America. It’s the number one exporter of porn, and filthy films, and cussing, and fractured families. Therefore (this is his view of Christianity), becoming a Christian is essentially becoming immoral. This is the story he believes.

When I suggested, “Well, not everyone who is an American is a Christian. You’re conflating those two things.” He was shocked. He’d never thought of that.

Nabeel Qureshi, in his New York Times bestselling book, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, says something very similar. Before becoming a Christian, his family feared becoming what they called “Americanized.” He writes this:

“To be Americanized was to be disobedient to your elders, to dress less conservatively, and to spend more time with your friends than your family. Cursing, drinking, and dating were simply unfathomable.”

The story that he and his family believed made the thought of becoming a Christian unthinkable. And we’re not even talking about the big theological issues yet, just cultural.

In a very different way, Caleb Kaltenbach experienced the same thing. He grew up alternating between his mother’s home with her partner, Vera, and his father’s home with his gay partners.

His mom, when he was young, took him to pride parades and would point toward the Christians with the placards warning against hell. When he asked his mom, “Why are these people acting like that?” She replied,

“Well, Caleb, they’re Christians. And Christians hate gay people. Christians don’t like anyone who’s not like them.”

So Caleb grew up not knowing what he wanted to become, but knowing what he didn’t want to become. He didn’t want to become a Christian.

Just let both of these stories sink in for a moment. Whether their assumptions are fake or real, they have a real story they think is Christianity.

For Caleb, when he came to high school, some Christian friends invited him to a Bible study. He decided he would go just to prove how wrong they are, and he accidentally became one. Horrors. This created a problem because, when he came out to his parents, they were devastated. His mom wept. Her partner, Vera, put him through what he called the Spanish Inquisition.

As he describes in his book, Messy Grace,

“[Vera] shook her head and began by saying, ‘Do you realize the amazing opportunity you have been given to be raised by two women? Do you know that you are smarter than what you are becoming? Do you also know that you are siding with bigots?!’”

Pause for a second. That’s super helpful because it reveals the assumptions that Vera has, the story she believes, about Christianity. What does it mean to become a Christian? It means to become misogynistic, it means to apparently lose brain cells, and to become a bigot.

Caleb—and think about this: he’s a teenager—he responds to Vera:

“I put my head down and softly said, ‘I’m not like that. I will never be like that. I do not agree with your view of sexuality anymore, but that does not impact how much I love you.’”

Caleb eventually had the privilege of pointing both his parents to Jesus through his deep love and uncompromising truth.

What we see in both of these examples is people being confronted with a story that is so foreign. This is similar to what our upcoming LEAD Class teacher, Dr. Rosaria Butterfield, describes in her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert:

“My journey out of lesbianism was messy and difficult. . . . When I became a Christian, I had to change everything— my life, my friends, my writing, my teaching, my advising, my clothes, my speech, my thoughts. I was tenured to a field that I could no longer work in.”

She was a tenured professor at Syracuse University in women’s studies and queer theory. She was about to deliver a big speech. She threw away her notes. She goes on:

“Conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos. I sometimes wonder, when I hear other Christians pray for the salvation of the ‘lost’ if they realize that this comprehensive chaos is the desired end of such prayers. Often, people asked me to describe the ‘lessons’ that I learned from this experience. I can’t. It was too traumatic. Sometimes in crisis, we don’t really learn lessons. Sometimes the result is simpler and more profound: sometimes our character is simply transformed.”

Let’s pray. Father, the story of Jesus is naturally a foreign story to all of us. If your Spirit does not soften our hearts and open our eyes to see what is strange to us, we will not move from death to life. Jesus, use this story that we’re going to look at, this story of your interaction with a woman that appears accidental, but we know you were pursuing this woman, and you are pursuing us. We pray that you would give us humble hearts so that we don’t miss what you have for us. We pray in Jesus’s name, amen.

For the last couple of weeks in Matthew 15, we have seen Jesus point us away from the traditions of men toward the Word of God, and then right into our hearts. Today, Jesus is going to illustrate how traumatic that journey is. He is confronted by a woman who has every reason not to believe. You didn’t think you were going to come to church to find reasons not to believe, but let’s look for reasons not to believe. There are four of them at least.

1. Unfamiliar Culture (and that’s saying it nicely).

A hostile, unfriendly, unfamiliar culture. Verse 21,

“And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out…” (Matthew 15:21-22a)

Jesus and his disciples travel about 30 miles from the top of that little sea. If you look at the word Israel and then go up to the right, you’ll see the Sea of Galilee. It’s about 30 or so miles to Tyre and Sidon, which is today Lebanon. These two cities are right on the coast of the Mediterranean.

The woman who came toward them is described in Mark 7:26 as a Gentile, so she’s not Jewish. Secondly, as a Syrophenician, which means she is of the Phoenician group who are from the Syrian side of the Phoenicians, not the North African side. Here in Matthew 15:22, she’s described as a Canaanite. Canaanite is a name for the people who kind of merged into the Phoenicians, but earlier they were known as the Canaanites, and they were the enemies of Israel.

Matthew is highlighting her ancestry. She comes from the Canaanites (who have now moved up Northwest) to emphasize, Matthew is wanting us to feel the tension of this interaction. These two peoples do not get along.

Just to give you one sample: Josephus, the Jewish historian, describes the people of Tyre as “our bitterest enemies.” If you read 1 Kings, you’ll see stories of Queen Jezebel (who was from Tyre) destroying the prophets and seeking to kill Elijah. What Matthew wants us to feel is that this is an unfriendly—at least, unfamiliar—interaction.

A modern equivalent might be for a Jewish man to go into the West Bank. When we are in Israel, and we go into the West Bank, our Jewish guide has to get off the bus and not go in for his own safety. You would think a Canaanite woman would have nothing to do with a Hebrew rabbi, but she does. Unfamiliar culture.

We’re looking for reasons not to believe.

2. Unanswered Prayer

Unanswered prayer. Look at verse 22:

“And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.’ But he did not answer her a word…” (Matthew 15:22-23a)

This woman, who is historically an enemy, is repeatedly crying out (the Greek tense communicates “again and again”) on behalf of her daughter. Mark 7:25 calls her “little daughter,” so her little girl is severely oppressed by a demon. And Jesus “did not answer her a word.”

He seems unconcerned, indifferent, uninterested. Have you ever felt that way? Like, “Jesus, if you want me to trust you, right now is the time. I desperately need help. My loved one is suffering. Please.” There are times when it feels like he doesn’t care. So this is where you think she would just give up, right? She’s crossing huge cultural barriers. She’s crying out to Jesus, and he is silent.

Look at the third one, it gets worse: unkind disciples.

3. Unkind Disciples

“And his disciples came and begged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she is crying out after us’” (Matthew 15:23b).

Her desperate plea does not elicit pity from them, it elicits frustration. And we don’t know, was it the accent? Was it the ongoing pleading? Do they want him to heal her so she’ll go away? Or just send her away? Either way, the disciples want her away.

Think about where this woman is right now: desperate for help, approaching a very unfamiliar culture, experiencing unanswered prayer (Jesus doesn’t seem to care at this point), she’s pleading with his disciples for help, and they just want her gone.

When many people walk away, they often say, “I don’t have a problem with Jesus.” Like Jen Hatmaker just said this recently:

“I don’t have a problem with Jesus, I have a problem with his followers.”

She even said, “I’m a big fan of Jesus,” which makes zero sense, but that’s another conversation. This woman can’t even say that. “I have a problem with Jesus, and I have a problem with his disciples,” at this point. And just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does.

Remember, we’re looking for reasons not to believe: unfamiliar culture, all the way down to number four,

4. “Unfair” Labels

I’m putting unfair in air quotes. Unjust, unfair labels. Verse 24:

“He answered” [so Jesus is speaking now] “‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ And he answered, ‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs’” (Matthew 15:24-26).

I would think even the disciples who want her gone would have been saying to one another— You can see Peter saying to Andrew, “Did he just call her a dog? Jesus, the gentle healer, called her a dog?”

Once again, the story should end here. Jesus’s disciples are unkind; now Jesus seems worse. She should be deconstructing what little faith she had, doing a podcast, writing a book. I mean, that would sell: The Day I Got Dogged by Jesus.

Today, this story is often read through a critical theory lens. Some of you may remember, back in 2021, a Reverend Robertson made a big splash on TikTok when he said this about this woman— and see if you can hear how many critical theory slogans he uses to describe this story. This is Reverend Robertson:

“What’s amazing about this account is that the woman doesn’t back down. She speaks truth to power. She confronts Jesus and says, ‘Well, you can think that about me, but even dogs deserve the crumbs from the table.’ Her boldness and bravery to speak truth to power actually changes Jesus’s mind. Jesus repents of his racism and extends healing to this woman’s daughter. I love this story because it’s a reminder that Jesus is human. He had prejudices and bias. And when confronted with it, he was willing to do his work, and this woman was willing to stand up and speak truth.”

This is a classic example of the Bible being read through a critical theory, progressive theology lens. Tragically, this kind of interpretation is not unusual.

In 2021, so this would have been about six months after the TikTok video came out about this story, I was scheduled to speak at Furman at their FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes). I was planning on speaking on a different passage, but for some odd reason, at the last minute, I felt impressed to talk about the Canaanite woman (same story from Mark 7). So that night, I mentioned the TikTok video, and then I explained what the passage actually teaches in contrast to Reverend Robertson.

After I finished, a young woman came up and explained that two weeks ago, she had gone to a church where the minister agreed with the TikTok video and said Jesus needed to repent of his racism. She said,

“I knew something was wrong with that, but I didn’t know for sure, so I asked the Lord, ‘Please show me what this passage actually means.’ And then you showed up and talked about it tonight.”

Isn’t that cool how God does that? Two people who don’t even know each other, one prays, and he moves on another heart to answer that prayer.

Notice this story doesn’t end with Jesus repenting or the Canaanite woman deconstructing or speaking truth to power. Look what it says, verse 27:

“She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly” (Matthew 15:27-28).

With all these reasons not to believe, why didn’t this woman walk away?

Why did she walk away with a miracle rather than a story of church hurt or bitterness or deep disappointment?

By the way, when I talk about church hurt, I’m not minimizing the reality of it. It’s impossible to be a part of a group of people without, at some point, being hurt. I’m not justifying that either, but this kind of question fascinates me: Why didn’t she blog about her church hurt? Instead, she was blogging about a miracle and a life change.

I think the answer to that question is the point of this story. We could say it this way:

She isn’t trying to squeeze Jesus into her story; she enters his.

She isn’t trying to squeeze Jesus into her story; she humbles herself and enters his. What are some signs that this might be true?

1. She embraces the unfamiliar.

Remember, back up in verse 22, she said, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David.” A Canaanite woman, calling him Son of David. She is entering into a massive foreign story that goes back 2,000 years before her time, when Abraham was called by God and promised

“in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).

And then King David. When she says, “Son of David,” this is the David she’s talking about. King David was promised in 2 Samuel 7:16,

“And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.”

Then David wrote of the coming Messiah,

“All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations [including Canaanites] shall worship before you” (Psalm 22:27).

Do you remember how Matthew began? Matthew 1:1,

“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the son of Abraham.”

And so when this woman calls Jesus “Son of David,” she may not understand all these details, but she knows he is the fulfillment of a massive story from God for all people.

She wants in that. Like, “I’m not trying to squeeze you, Jesus, into my little story. I want to humble myself and enter yours. And you want me to do that as a dog? Fine. A cat? Fine. Whatever.” She embraces this exotic, enormous story. She embraces the unfamiliar.

2. She won’t stop praying.

She won’t stop praying. She kept crying out, and she had every reason to give up. But Jesus, as he says in Luke 18:1, “They ought always to pray and not to lose heart.” Don’t give up. Don’t give up. I think that’s a word for some of us in here this morning who feel like Jesus doesn’t care. He hasn’t answered yet? Don’t stop.

3. She refuses to stay offended.

This is big on a vertical and a horizontal level. It really doesn’t matter whether you grew up Southern Baptist, or non-denominational, or LGBTQ+, or Muslim, or Hindu, or atheist, or agnostic. If you’re going to come into the kingdom, you cannot enter the kingdom of Jesus without tripping. You can’t. You will be offended at some point.

I know this sounds harsh. I probably should qualify it, but let me just throw it out there: If you’ve never been offended by Jesus, you probably don’t know Him. You might know an Americanized version of Jesus who just happens to agree with all your political and cultural assumptions. But the real Jesus will, at some point, offend you. Why? Because Jesus is calling us out of our own familiar little stories into his massive foreign story.

Someone might say, “Well, why does he pick on her?” He picks on everyone! Have you been reading? Think of Matthew 15. If there’s anybody not to be picked on, it would be the religious leaders who are trying to do everything right. He says to them in verse seven, “You bunch of hypocrites! You’re blind guides leading people into deep pits” (15:7, 14). He is an equal opportunity offender. Look at 1 Corinthians 1:22-23,

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.”

He trips up Jews, and he trips out Gentiles. They’re like, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Why does he do that? Is he just trying to be obstreperous, like unnecessarily difficult? Does he just get some joy out of seeing us squirm? No, he doesn’t. Here’s why. In verse 28, Paul goes on to explain:

“God chose what is low and despised in the world—”

Pause there: “Those who have tripped.” Or, to go back to the Sermon on the Mount, who? “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” those who have fallen. In the sense that they know, “I can’t stand before God on any basis of my own. I can’t point to my resume or my ethnicity or my achievements or anything and say I should be here.” No!

“God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, [why?] to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. [Nobody.] And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God [he is our wisdom], righteousness [he is our righteousness] and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:28-31).

He is our only confidence. He is our true identity. He is our Savior.

As Jared Wilson recommends,

“When Jesus calls you a dog, in other words, you don’t argue with him— you own your dog-ness. It’s those who find this admission beneath them, who think themselves above Christ and his gospel, actually, who will end up losing in the end.”

A couple of questions to clean up.

First, are you currently seeking mercy or justice? Notice verse 22,

“have mercy on me.”

Many of us will spend our lives craving justice and be blind to our need of mercy. How do we know? Are you easily offended? Are you often offended? Do you have a difficult time forgiving or moving forward past hurts? You might think you need justice more than mercy.

Some of us should respond (I think rightly), “Doesn’t God care about justice?” Oh, he does. He is so passionate about justice. He loves justice way more than you love justice. The reason you love just is because he wired his love for justice in you. But the thing is, he loves justice and he’s better at bringing it about.

He strongly recommends Romans 12:19-21,

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ To the contrary, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Second, what if you’ve grown up in a Christian family? The reason this question is important is that many of us wonder, if you were born into a Christian home and you’ve grown up going to church, the way of Jesus might seem so familiar to you that you’re thinking, “How is that foreign?” I think that’s a good question because it doesn’t feel foreign.

Even though I didn’t grow up in a Christian home (I was saved as a teenager and have been a Christian for a long time), I have a strong sense that there are parts of my heart that he continually exposes and pours his love and transforming truth into that reveal that there are parts of me that are still quite foreign to his love. So I think you can be a Christian for many, many, many decades and still understand that this is a foreign story that you have been swept into and that he is transforming you by and that you never lose the wonder of that.

One of the reasons why the examples I started with are so important to understand (how lost people think about Jesus) is it gives you a humility and a patience as you love on your non-Christian friends because you get it. I get it. I understand why you think this is crazy, because my heart thinks this is crazy. Apart from his grace, I would still think it’s crazy. It’s so foreign! And he puts within us this insatiable desire to know intimately what is foreign naturally.

One more question: Is Christianity exclusive or inclusive? And the answer to that is obviously “yes.” It is exclusive, because Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” There is one way. But it is inclusive because when we turn from our stories (which is repentance: we turn from our stories and all the assumptions that go along with that— some of which are real, some are fake), but we turn from our stories to his story, our stories get swept up into his story and redeemed and transformed by his meta-narrative (his grand story).

I want to let Richard Bauckham explain to us what this looks like. And I want to warn you, you’re going to have to work to stay with him, but it will be worth the journey. Here we go:

“The biblical story is not only critical of other stories but also hospitable to other stories. On its way to the kingdom of God, it does not abolish all other stories, but brings them all into relationship to itself and its way to the kingdom. It becomes the story of all stories, taking with it into the kingdom all that can be positively related to the God of Israel in Jesus. The presence of so many little stories within the biblical metanarrative [that is, grand story], so many fragments and glimpses of other stories, within Scripture itself, is surely a sign and an earnest of that. [All these little stories are like down payments leading us to the grand, big story.] The universal that is the kingdom of God is no dreary uniformity or oppressive denial of difference, but the milieu [the context, the setting] in which every particular reaches its true destiny in relation to the God who is the God of all because he is the God of Jesus.”

You get all that? In other words, our little stories are both rejected as we repent and believe and redeemed, swept up into and transformed to be made beautiful in his story.

C.S. Lewis, the Oxford professor who was an atheist, knew what it was like to be swept into a foreign story. As his mind became increasingly convinced that God exists and Jesus really did come and die and rise, his heart struggled. He explains in Surprised by Joy:

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [that’s where he lived in Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what was now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape! The words ‘compelle intrare,’ compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we should shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plum the depth of the Divine mercy.” And this is a great summary of the story of the Canaanite woman: “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

The hardness of Jesus is kinder than the softness of people.

Not long after his conversion, Lewis wrote a long letter to his brother. He mentions in that letter that he attended the communion at Holy Trinity Church in Oxford. His brother would have instantly known what that meant because C.S. Lewis, as he was exploring Christianity, would periodically go to church, but he would always dart out before communion. He knew he couldn’t partake. He knew he didn’t belong. But when he wrote to his brother and he said, “I took communion at Holy Trinity,” his brother knew he had become a Christian. He had been swept into what was such a foreign story.

The beautiful thing about communion is that even the name “communion” or “the Lord’s Supper” is communicating a bunch of foreign people. People who should not belong, belonging— not because they agree on everything and not because they’ve done anything, but because of what he’s done. His broken body, his shed blood on our behalf, to take people like Canaanites and Jews who should be enemies and make them family.

The reason Paul got so upset in 1 Corinthians 11 at the Corinthians when they took the Lord’s Supper and he said “some of you are binging and some of you are starving” is because that disparity is violating the point of communion. We’re brought in together as one who are all foreign to this story. No one can say, “I belong here, you shouldn’t.” Or, “I’m this worthy, you’re not.” We’re all unworthy. Yet by his grace, we’re all loved and swept in as we repent and believe. Let’s pray.

Father, thank you for showing us this beautiful example of a woman who—humanly speaking—should not believe. She had every reason to walk away, but she didn’t. You were drawing her, but you did it in such a way— in a sense, you break us down so that you can bring us in and build us up into a new person. We pray that you would do that this morning.

If there are some who don’t know you and there are doubts or hurts or fears or unanswered questions holding them back, we pray that your Spirit would draw them and that they would come to Jesus this morning. We pray for some of us who are carrying around weights of regret or hurt or just nagged by resentments, that we would see this woman and you would use her example to enable us to humble our hearts and receive a miracle rather than resentment. We pray now, as we gather around this micro-meal, that our hearts would be united in Jesus, by your grace. We pray in Jesus’s name, amen.