Rejecting Bitterness

 This week, believe it or not, I have been pondering the last sermon I preached on Matthew 15:10-28.  It's basically the story of an outsider "Canaanite" woman from the region of Tyre and Sidon who cries out "Lord, have mercy on me."  As you may remember, Jesus responds to her in a harsh way by ignoring and then by calling her a dog.  It's a shocking picture of a cranky Jesus who is letting his humanity show.

Ok, this is a difficult story to preach on because the outsider catches Jesus with a low compassion level for whatever reason but inspires compassion from him even though she felt rejection.  What I have been thinking about is the different times in my life when I have experienced down times, rejection and sadness.  I was reading the blog by Natalie Boltz Webber where she says that she is recovering from ANOTHER SURGERY and doesn't have the capacity to even write.  Facing adversity of the death of her father, breast cancer and mastectomy she says that she doesn't want to become a bitter old woman.  I have faced some of this in my life where I feel that I could have taken a different path and become a bitter person.  But I too don't want to be a bitter old man.  She writes that bitterness happens when pain and sorrow overtake us and push us over the edge into cynicism and anger.  In essence, it's a defeated life.  We protect ourselves with our bitterness so that our hopes won't be dashed again.

But if Christianity brings us any good news it tells us that life can be reversed.  Death overcome by resurrection, love overcomes hate and grace and mercy help us to start again.  It doesn't come with all the answers or protect us from the pain that seems to pop up in the living of our days but mercy is part of the answer, so is grace, so is love.  I'm counting on faith not to let me surrender to bitterness.   -MEH