The Table Is Larger Than We Thought

A Deeper Dive Into Seeing Our Blindspots and Widening the Circle

“I want to be a fly on the wall,” my friend told me. “Keep telling me all the details of this next step of your journey.” This friend has walked with me through every step toward ordination, and so I asked her what it is she wants to know about what it’s like to be a priest in the church today. She said, “I’d like you to write more about your sermon process. If I heard one of your sermons, I’d likely ask you to sit down for coffee with me and talk more about it. How do I really apply it to my life? I’d want ot know how to go deeper.”

So, today, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Episcopal sermons are only about 10-15 minutes. That’s not much time to go very deep into a passage. If you want more, we’ll need to sit down and have a chat.

So, pull up a chair. Pour yourself a warm drink. Let’s stay with this Gospel a little longer.

The Sermon: The Table is Larger Than We Thought

Preached on Sunday, August 16, 2026 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, NewnanThe Twelfth Sunday After PentecostMatthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JgCexbTUWU

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There is a particular kind of courage required to walk into a room where you are not sure you belong. I learned something about that kind of courage when Lee and I moved to Egypt in 2007. At the time, people told us we were being brave. We were young Americans, moving to the Muslim world, trying to learn Arabic, trying to figure out how to navigate a completely different culture.

And then I discovered something rather quickly: people were incredibly kind to us. They would invite us into their homes. They wanted to feed us and know all about us. And many wanted to practice their English, which meant that some of my most embarrassing moments became opportunities for friendship.

For example, once I was trying to ask someone where the bathroom was. But a slight mispronunciation of one syllable meant I was standing in a train station asking a complete stranger where I might find the pigeon. And instead of laughing at me and walking away, this person looked at me with a broad smile, helped me find the bathroom, and corrected my fledgling Arabic.

I thought I was brave. Until I realized I wasn’t the person taking the greatest risk. Every week, our Coptic church held a healing service. And every week, Muslim men and women would come. They came with their ailments, some in wheelchairs. Some came carrying the visible and invisible burdens of mental illness. Some came with chronic illnesses, with pain, with grief, with needs they didn’t know where else to take.

And they came to a Christian church, to an Orthodox priest, asking for prayer. Think about what that meant. Egypt has a long and complicated history between Christians and Muslims. There have been centuries of tension and persecution, with each community carrying memories of having been wounded by the other. And yet these people crossed that boundary. They walked through the door into a Christian sanctuary. And they knelt before a Christian priest and asked for mercy. They were the courageous ones.

And they taught me something I have never forgotten: Sometimes the person we think is standing outside the boundary is actually the person showing us what faith looks like.

That is where I hear today’s Gospel. The Canaanite woman knows exactly what it feels like to go where you don’t belong—or at least where people think you don’t belong. Matthew makes sure we know it, too. Jesus and his disciples have gone into the region of Tyre and Sidon, a Gentile territory. And then a woman approaches Jesus.

Matthew doesn’t simply call her a woman. He calls her a Canaanite woman. To Jewish ears, that word carried a history. Canaanite meant enemy. It evoked the ancient peoples Israel had been commanded to resist, the people associated with idolatry and all the dangers of assimilation.

She isn’t simply from another town. She represents the other side of a boundary that had defined Israel for generations. And yet she comes to Jesus anyway. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David,” she cries out. Listen to her words. She knows something important. She knows who Jesus is, and she believes that because of who he is, there must be mercy for her.

And then Matthew gives us one of the strangest moments in all the Gospels: “But he did not answer her at all.” Jesus ignores her, but she persists. The disciples are annoyed and insist: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”

And Jesus finally says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And then, he says something even harder: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

I am not going to sugarcoat it here. The word Jesus uses is an insult. It is the kind of language that has been used throughout history to remind people that they are lesser, that they don’t belong. I think we should let that bother us. Because here is the strange thing: This happens immediately after Jesus has been talking about what defiles a person. He has just told the Pharisees that it isn’t what goes into the mouth that makes someone unclean. It is what comes out of the mouth. What comes out of the mouth comes from the heart. And then what comes out of Jesus’ own mouth is ugly.

So what is Matthew doing here? I think he wants us to pay attention.

Because the Gospel is asking us to look beyond the surface rules and boundaries we use to determine who belongs, and to look instead at what is happening in the heart. And Matthew is not telling this story in isolation. Isaiah has already imagined foreigners being gathered into God’s house. Psalm 67 says that God’s blessing is meant to reach all nations. Paul insists that God’s mercy cannot finally be contained by our categories of who belongs.

And then Matthew gives us this woman: Someone who, according to the boundaries of the time, does not belong, and she comes asking for mercy. I wonder whether she knew the promises of Isaiah. We don’t know, but I wonder.

Because Isaiah had already said that God was going to gather the foreigners. God was going to bring in the people who had been considered outside, and here comes one of those people. She shows up. She is loud. She is inconvenient. And she insists that God’s promise must actually mean what it says.

Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” And she answers: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” It is an extraordinary response. She doesn’t attack Jesus. She doesn’t abandon the conversation. She doesn’t deny his metaphor. She enters into it—and then turns it. She is, in a sense, saying: “Yes, Lord. I understand your frame. But even within that frame, there is more mercy than you have accounted for.” There are crumbs. There is abundance. There is enough. And Jesus hears her.

“Woman, great is your faith,” he says. And her daughter is healed. We don’t know exactly what happened inside Jesus in that moment. Matthew doesn’t tell us. What Matthew does tell us is that Jesus listened to her, and the horizon of his ministry widened. Whether we understand this as a test, an encounter, or a genuine moment of learning, the result is the same: He hears the outsider, and the circle gets larger.

His heart did not change from stingy to loving. Jesus was always loving. What changes is the horizon. The circle gets larger. The mission expands. The woman helps reveal something that was already true about the heart of God. And that brings the story uncomfortably close to home.

Because we are very good at knowing who belongs. Religious communities have been doing it for a very long time. We draw lines: clean and unclean, insider and outsider, faithful and unfaithful, orthodox and heretical, us and them.

And boundaries are not always bad. Israel’s laws were not arbitrary. They helped a vulnerable people preserve their identity and remain faithful to God in a world filled with competing gods and cultures. The danger comes when a boundary intended to serve our relationship with God becomes a way of establishing our superiority over other people. When the boundary becomes more important than the love it was meant to serve.

As the theologian Douglas Hare puts it, “Exalting the merely legal over the truly moral is sheer hypocrisy.” In other words, we can follow the rules and still miss the will of God. And Jesus has just told us where to look for the difference: Look at the heart.

So perhaps the question this Gospel places before us is not simply, Who belongs? It is: What happens in my heart when someone I have decided doesn’t belong asks something of me?

Because we all have blind spots, and the trouble with a blind spot is that we don’t know it’s there. There are people we aren’t seeing. There are voices we have learned to tune out. There are experiences that fall so far outside our frame of reference that we don’t even recognize what we are missing. Sometimes we don’t hear because we are too busy. Sometimes, listening might require us to change. And sometimes, if we’re honest, there are people we would simply rather send away.

That is what makes the disciples’ response so revealing: “Send her away.” They don’t seem to recognize that the person they experience as an interruption is actually the person through whom God is about to interrupt their understanding.

And perhaps that is the question we carry into our own lives: Who am I not seeing? Not, “Who are those terrible people over there who don’t understand?” But me. Who am I not seeing? Whose voice have I learned to dismiss? Whose experience doesn’t fit neatly into the categories I have inherited? Who makes me uncomfortable enough that my first instinct is to create distance rather than listen?

Because the Canaanite woman isn’t simply someone Jesus ought to have welcomed. She becomes the teacher. She reveals something about the heart of God that the people closest to Jesus had not yet fully understood. And perhaps that is what God sometimes does through the people who interrupt us.

The person we experience as a problem may become an invitation. The person we think is outside the boundary may reveal that the boundary was never as important to God as we thought it was. The person we would rather not hear may be carrying something we desperately need to hear.

And this is where the image of the table becomes important. The woman comes asking for crumbs. She doesn’t demand a seat at the table. She simply trusts that there is enough.

And there is. There is enough mercy. Enough grace. Enough healing. Enough love. The problem was never that there wasn’t enough bread. The problem was the boundary around the table.

Isaiah says, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Psalm 67 says, “Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.” The blessing given to us is never meant to stop with us. It moves. God’s mercy moves outward. God’s healing moves outward. God’s love keeps crossing the boundaries we draw around it. And so perhaps the invitation of this Gospel is not simply to become more welcoming people.

It is to become more humble listeners. To recognize that we may not yet see the whole picture. To be willing to encounter the person who complicates our categories. To notice when our first instinct is to say, “Send her away.”

And to pause long enough to ask: What if there is something here I cannot yet see? Because sometimes the person we think is standing outside the boundary is the person showing us what faith looks like. Sometimes the person we experience as an interruption is the person God is using to interrupt our blind spot.

And, when we finally listen, we discover that the table was larger than we thought. There was never a shortage of bread. There was only a boundary around the table. And the good news of the Gospel is that God’s mercy keeps moving beyond it. Amen.

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If we were sitting together over coffee after church, I imagine this might be the point where you would say, “Okay, but what do we actually do with that Gospel?” Because it is a strange one. Jesus ignores a woman who comes asking for help. His disciples want to send her away. And when she persists, Jesus tells her that the food meant for the children should not be thrown to the dogs.

It is not exactly the warm, comforting picture of Jesus we might expect to hear on a Sunday morning. As it turns out, this Gospel passage had already been bothering me before I ever stood in the pulpit.

The Question That Started It

I first heard this passage the previous week at our healing service. Someone asked the question that many of us probably have when we hear these words: How do we reconcile this with the God we know in Jesus? It is a good question.

Our Rector offered some helpful context about the sociopolitical world in which Jesus and this Canaanite woman encountered one another—the long history between Jews and Canaanites, the religious and cultural boundaries, and the significance of Jesus entering the region of Tyre and Sidon. All of that matters.

There are also many ways scholars and commentators have tried to understand Jesus’ response. Was he testing the woman’s faith? Was he testing the disciples? Was he speaking from the particular understanding of his mission at that moment? Was he using a common rhetorical form that sounds much harsher to us than it would have in its original context? These are worthwhile questions.

But the more I sat with the passage, the less interested I became in solving the mystery of why Jesus said exactly what he said. Not because I don’t think the question matters. It does. But because I began to wonder if we can become so preoccupied with explaining Jesus’ words that we miss what happens next.

The woman speaks. Jesus listens. And the circle expands.

The Circle Gets Larger

That, to me, is the movement of the story. The Canaanite woman comes from outside the boundaries of the people Jesus has been sent to serve. She is exactly the kind of person the disciples have been taught to understand as other. Yet she comes asking for mercy. She refuses to leave. She speaks, and Jesus hears her.

Whatever we make of the difficult exchange that precedes it, the Gospel ends with her daughter healed and Jesus declaring, “Woman, great is your faith!”

The circle has expanded. When I say “the circle,” I don’t mean that Jesus suddenly discovered that he should be a nicer person. I mean something much more profound: Our understanding of who God’s mercy is for keeps getting bigger.

That is already the movement of the other readings this week. The blessing is never meant to terminate in the person who receives it. It moves. God blesses us, and the blessing moves through us. God gathers us, and then gathers others. God makes a table, and then keeps adding chairs.

I Thought I Knew Something About This

One reason this Gospel feels particularly personal to me is that I have spent much of my life having my own circle expanded by people whose experiences were very different from mine.

When Lee and I moved to Cairo early in our marriage, I learned that I could cross some religious and cultural boundaries much more easily than I had imagined. Our Muslim neighbors welcomed us into their homes. Our experiences among Coptic Christians challenged and deepened my understanding of Christianity. Later, living in Bangladesh opened me to Hindu and Muslim neighbors, to refugees and immigrants, and to ways of understanding community, faith, hospitality, and suffering that were different from my own.

I have been extraordinarily fortunate in that way. I’ve had experiences that have made my world larger. And perhaps because of those experiences, I had begun to think of myself as someone who was pretty good at crossing boundaries. Then this year, I discovered that I still had some boundaries I couldn’t see.

I was serving as a chaplain intern at an urban church, spending time with people whose lives looked very different from mine. I would sit with people over lunch, listen to their stories, hear about their lives in group homes, their experiences with social workers, and their struggles with mental illness.

The subject of race kept coming up. People told me about being treated differently because of the color of their skin. They talked about assumptions people made about them because they lived in a group home. They described experiences that were ordinary to them but were new for me to hear. And I realized something uncomfortable: I wasn’t necessarily failing to see them. I was sometimes seeing them through assumptions I had already been given.

I would hear that someone was overwhelmed or struggling with their mental health, and my instinct was to swoop in and help. But sometimes they didn’t need me to fix anything. They just needed a little more time. I was responding to a category—mental illness, overwhelmed, needs help—rather than listening carefully enough to the particular person in front of me.

That distinction sounds small. It isn’t. Because once we begin seeing a person primarily through the category we’ve placed them in, we can very easily stop listening for what this particular person is actually telling us.

Learning to See the Whole Room

There was another moment in that role that stayed with me. One day, someone was feeling overwhelmed, and I thought my job was simply to sit with him. So I did. I stayed with him for quite a while. I thought I was doing the right thing.

And I was, in some sense. He needed someone to sit with him. But afterward, someone helped me see something I hadn’t noticed. Other people in the room were watching. My attention to this one person was creating anxiety for others. And their anxiety, in turn, was becoming part of the environment this person was trying to navigate. I had been seeing one person clearly. But I wasn’t seeing the whole system.

I needed to learn that sometimes caring for one person means paying attention to everyone else in the room, too. Sometimes the most helpful thing isn’t to move closer, but to give someone space. Sometimes another person’s anxiety is itself affecting the person we’re trying to help.

My vision had been too narrow, and that experience has stayed with me because I think that is one of the ways blind spots actually work. We don’t necessarily refuse to see. Sometimes we see one thing very clearly and miss everything around it.

We see the individual but not the system. We see the category but not the person. We see the problem but not the story. We see what we have been taught to look for, and miss what is actually in front of us.

So Who Am I Not Seeing?

This is where the Canaanite woman has stayed with me. I don’t think she is simply an example of someone we should be nice to. She is a reminder that the person standing in front of us may know something we don’t know.

That is humbling. Because I can be proud of having lived among people from different cultures and religions. I can tell myself that my circle is wide…and still have blind spots. Still make assumptions. Still listen through a filter. Still have people I don’t really see.

So if we were actually sitting here together over coffee, this is probably where I would ask you to consider something with me: Who am I not seeing?

Not who is society failing to see. Not who does the church need to welcome. Me. Who am I not seeing? Whose experience am I interpreting before I’ve actually listened Who have I reduced to a category? Whose needs have I assumed I understand? Who might be telling me something that I am too certain, too busy, or too uncomfortable to hear?

And perhaps there is someone sitting in the pews of our own churches whom we have not really seen. Not because we don’t care. But because our vision is limited.

The Work of Becoming Wider

I don’t think the answer is to become people who never have assumptions or blind spots. That isn’t possible. The invitation is to become people who know we have them. People who can be interrupted. People who can listen when someone says, “That’s not actually how it is for me.” People who can allow another person’s experience to complicate our understanding rather than immediately defend the understanding we already have.

That, I think, is one of the deeper meanings of faith in this Gospel. The Canaanite woman has faith not simply because she believes Jesus can heal her daughter. She has the courage to remain in relationship when the answer she receives is not the one she expected. And Jesus, for his part, listens. That matters.

So I am carrying one question with me this week: Who am I not seeing?

Maybe you would carry it with you, too, not as an accusation but as a prayer.

God, show me the people I have stopped seeing.Show me the places where my vision has become too narrow.Give me the humility to listen when someone challenges what I think I know.

And perhaps, as we pray that prayer, our circle will become a little larger. Maybe we will see the person in front of us a little more clearly.

Perhaps we will discover that the table was larger than we thought. There is enough, and God’s mercy is still moving.