The wheels from the car screeched.  The mother’s heart stopped.  The child screamed.  The mother ran to the street out in front of the house as fast as she could. She was scared spitless when she saw the tricycle and her daughter lying on the pavement.

That’s the way mothers are. That’s the way fathers are. Anytime your child is injured and anytime your child is sick, you become very, very upset, especially if the child is seriously ill or injured. That is just the way God wired us as mothers and fathers.

You can tell your stories and I can tell my stories about illnesses and injuries. For example, when our child Anne was little, maybe three years old. I came home one afternoon and you could feel the tension in the house as you opened the front door. A dog had bit my daughter right across the face. It was ugly. We rushed off to the doctor as fast as we could. We were totally upset. The doctor stitched her face up as she way lying there in a straight jacket. It was not a fun afternoon. This nasty event feels like it occurred just like yesterday but it happened more than two decades ago.

Or the time our little boy fell off the swing and had a huge cut under his chin and we were off to the doctor again. Totally upset.

Or the time that the same little boy grew up and was driving a car and had a car accident. The police called and said that our son was in the emergency ward. The police didn’t tell how bad he was other than we should get there real fast.

Anytime one of our children is seriously injured or ill, we are deeply upset.

Therefore we can really understand the story for today because we find a woman who was very upset that her daughter is very, very sick. The Bible tells us that she was severely possessed by a demon. In those days, during Biblical times, they did not have concepts of viruses and demon possession was a common diagnosis by doctors. There is another story in the Bible about another child who was reported to be severely possessed by a demon and then the Bible author later called it epilepsy

Can you imagine during Biblical times and your child goes into convulsions? You don’t know what causes it. Can you imagine living with convulsions within your child and not knowing the cause of it?

So you go see the local doctor by the name of Dr. Abrahamson and he says, “Well, your child has a bad demon. What did your child do that was so bad or what did you do that was so bad she got a demon living inside?” That wasn’t very nice but happened again and again in Biblical days.

Well, this woman, in spite of the so-called help from her doctor and her friends, decided that she would go and find this Jesus of Nazareth who happened to be in town that day.

She comes up to Jesus and kneels before him and says, “Jesus, Son of David, would you please heal my child?”  What does Jesus do? He turns his back on her and gives her the silent treatment. That doesn’t seem very nice to me.

So she goes and talks to the disciples and begs the disciples, “Would you talk to your master and ask him to heal my daughter?” His disciples approached Jesus and he said to them, “Listen, I am going to heal the Jewish people first and I won’t get around to the Greeks until later.”

The woman is a Greek person. She has a sick kid. She is not intimidated by silence. The resistance of Jesus and his disciples does not intimidate her.

So she falls down at Jesus’ feet. This is her third attempt to get through to Jesus. She calls out, “Jesus, have mercy on me and heal my daughter.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, you are like a yelping puppy at a man’s table.”

And the woman, being quick witted, said, “Well, a master takes crumbs off the table and feeds his yelping puppy and shuts him up. You just heal my daughter and you will shut me up.” Jesus looked at her and smiled and said, “Great is your faith, woman. Depart, your daughter is healed.” The woman went home and found her daughter well.

One of the things that I like about this woman is the way she prayed. She prayed in such a way that she was constantly bugging God. I love that passage where she comes up to Jesus and says, “Jesus, heal my child.” Jesus gives her the silent treatment. (Doesn’t that sometimes happen to us when we pray to God? It seems all we get is silence.) But this woman wasn’t intimidated by silence. She wasn’t intimated by the silence of Jesus.

So she goes and asks the disciples, “Tell your master to heal me.” And they say, “He’s busy with other things. He has to heal the Jews first and then the Greeks.” This woman is not intimated by the disciples’ response either.

For a third time she tries. She comes to Jesus and says, “Heal my child. Please.” And Jesus replied, “Woman you are like a barking dog, like a yelping puppy underneath the table at lunch time.” She quickly replied, “But even a master feeds a barking dog and he shuts up.  Feed me and I’ll be fine. Heal my daughter and I’ll be quiet.” It was the persistence of this woman in prayer. The moral of this story is that is the way that God wants us to pray. God wants us to pray with that kind of bugging, nagging persistence.

Now, for some of us, God is so busy with the big issues of life that he doesn’t have time for my little petty concerns. God is in charge of the laws of nature, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws and physics and God is running around taking care of all the big laws of the world and God does not have time for me and my little problems. That is NOT what Jesus teaches. Jesus teaches that God is concerned about our cancer, that God is concerned about our bankruptcy, that God is concerned about our drug or drinking problem, that God is concerned about our marriage which is having problems, that God is concerned about all these things which for us are not petty at all. God wants us to come and persistently ask in prayer

Sermon by Rev. Edward Markquart