It’s important to recognize God’s subversive choice in making Mary and Elizabeth prophets of Jesus and of God’s kingdom because that that is what they were – prophets. The scene before us today may seem cozy and domestic – and perhaps it was. But it was not tame.

for Luke, the world into which Jesus is born; into which John’s voice cries out is relevant to the story. God’s salvation does not come in the abstract, as a disembodied idea or a pretty theory, but in the real time, in real places, through real people and real events. As one commentator (Troy Troftgruben, from Working Preacher) puts it: “God saves not in Nevernever land or “somewhere over the rainbow” but in history.”

The young man in today’s story is not so different from many of us. Faithful, responsible, desiring of God – and also self-reliant, materially comfortable, practical. He heard Jesus’ invitation as a burden rather than an opportunity; as a price to be paid rather than a path to freedom.

How do you hear it?

Today’s sermon takes the form of a demonstration – not of a capable wife but of a committed Bible reader wrestling their way through an ancient text in order to hear the Word of God within it. Here we go…

This is the gift we receive from the Syrophoenician woman: to be called out of our comfort zone; challenged on our assumptions about what the Gospel means and who it is for; and pushed to grow in new and exciting ways.

The offense isn’t that Jesus is somehow made present in the bread and wine. The offense is that Jesus is now present in whoever eats him; that they are made of him and by him and live because of him.

It’s not that hard to free people from hunger. All it takes is food – Jesus proved that when he took five loaves and fed the crowd of 5000 – and we have so much more than only five loaves in this world – we have more than enough food to feed every member of the human family.

It is so easy for loyalty and love to slide into idolatry, for us to allow nation or family to replace God as the recipient of our worship and the source of meaning and direction in our lives. And so we forget that we are called to something so much bigger…

The nature of God is a mystery, too high for us to attain. But we need words and images and approximations and so we continue to grasp at descriptions of God, pointing towards something we know to be true even if we can’t explain it or understand it.