Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.

Hi, everyone. If you're still grabbing your tea or coffee, I mean, it looks like you kinda wrapped up. Just make your way back to your seat when you're ready. Welcome here. If we have not met, my name is Bobby.

And it's Sunday and you're here and you're in your mass and, you know, we're adjusting again. So that's the name of the game. This is that last weekend before we really drop into our fall routines, some of us anyways, probably many of us. And I feel a special awareness of the fall. Two of my little nieces are in grade one.

Can't believe that. One of my nephews is away at university this fall after doing his first year of school in his bedroom down the hall from his parents, so we're really cheering for him. And this fall marks my commons anniversary. We have been in each other's lives for five years now. Yeah.

I mean, well, that's kind of a joy. For the clap, mean, it's a deep joy in my life, don't get me wrong. So I'm feeling all the fall vibes. Maybe you love the fall and maybe you don't. Either way, I really believe that there is blessing for us when we are aware.

So I am going to name some fall realities and you are welcome to come on board the Bobby Blessing Train. It's a thing now, that's it. So here we are. I bless every child, teacher, student at the start of a new school year. And I bless nervousness that will become resilience.

And I bless all new learning and loving. I bless municipal and federal elections. I bless our annoyance, which at least in part marks our privilege. I bless truth telling and all consideration of the common good, and I bless colder days ahead. I bless the science that helps us through a pandemic and I bless the fact that we are not who we were a year ago.

I bless our change. Now maybe you can think of other fall blessings and add them to the train, maybe even speak them to one another in the days to come. Now I am for real this time wrapping up our series, what makes you happy? And I say for real because in the last summer sermon I preached, I attempted to wrap up a series that wasn't even over. And my colleagues were very gracious about it, but also, I think, a bit curious as to what was going on with me.

And in reflection, I realized that as I prepared that last sermon, it's like I was there, but also not there. Do you ever have that? Like you're kind of going through some motions, but you're not really connected to the place you are. And when I get this way, it is super disorienting for me because I am a place lover. To which you might ask, you're a what, Bobby?

I am a place lover. And here is the Instagram proof. On July 15, I made this post. It's a picture of me smiling with sunflower leaves in the foreground, and I wrote, recently a stranger said, you must be nice. You're wearing a dandy brewing hat.

To which I felt all kinds of love for the city of mine, Calgary, the place where I'm growing sunflowers for the first time, always meeting the most interesting folks and part of a kick, bleep, community. We grow in all kinds of surprising places. Root deep, water well, talk to strangers. It's great here. And while that's lovely, what came next was revelatory.

My friend at NPurt posted this comment. Love how you are a place lover. You loved Vancouver so much and glad Calgary is now one of your loves. I have really great friends, but that's not all. Pierogi, who is one of ours, Colin Chewbacci, shared this comment at NPurt.

I feel like place lover is one of the top attributes a person can have. Not only is it positively contagious, but there's a feeling of affirmation for those who have always called these places they love home. And that's your sermon, goodbye. Just kidding, I'm staying. But seriously, today we are talking about what makes me happy, place.

The text is Mark seven verses 24 to 30 where an intrepid woman finds Jesus who has shown up in her region and argues with him until she gets her way. If you like an outline, like I like an outline, here is yours. Number one, where are you from? Number two, witty encounters. Number three, you win.

And number four, just so happy to be here. So let's pray together. Loving God, we take a moment to catch our breath, to settle in, to open up. Maybe we carry something heavy today, concern for a loved one, nervousness about the fall, grief at so much tragedy and violence in the world. And we ask you, Jesus, to settle in next to those places.

Remind us that you do not turn away from our sadness and our struggle. We take a moment to center on gratitude. For the sun on crisp fall mornings, for the rhythm of the seasons, for the love we have in our lives. Spirit, as we reflect on place today, on maybe for some of us, our leaving places, maybe for some of us, those places that feel very in between, For others, our own sense of home. Will you draw us into truth, into beauty, and into goodness?

Amen. So when I got married five and a half years ago, I asked my younger brother Adam to give a toast. And being that Adam grew up with two older sisters, I knew he'd likely take the opportunity to get back at me for all my bossiness. I am quite bossy. But also, the cool thing about my bro is that he speaks the truth.

So here's how Adam started this toast, and if you're in the room, you get a picture. When Bobby asked me to give a speech, I was honored and a little nervous. What does one say about their older sister? I asked Bobby what kind of speech she wanted me to give, and all she said was, don't pick on me. I thought about that.

I have always been that annoying little brother who picks on his older sister, and I can't change that. He carried on. Some of you may not know this, but Bobby was not always a city girl. She was raised on a cattle farm in rural Saskatchewan. If you are trying to picture Bobby as a farm girl and are having trouble, it's because it was never her.

While Kasia and I, that's my sister, rounded up cattle, Bobby was nowhere to be found. And for the record, I did round up some cattle. From a young age, he said, you could see that this young girl loved books and was destined for city life. Then Adam makes this really beautiful transition. Bobbi has always had a special love for whatever city she has lived.

Each of those places has a special place in her heart. You can hear in my brother's words that I did not fit in where I was from, so I left. Sometimes we have to or we get to leave the places we are from. I had just enough privilege and opportunity to set out on my own. In our story today, a woman with some privilege of her own leaves home on a mission.

The story actually starts with Jesus leaving the place he's from, starting in Mark seven verse 24. Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it, yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia.

She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. Now working our way back through these verses, we find the woman's identity not in her name, but in her ethnicity. She's a Phoenician from Syria, probably a well-to-do Hellenized meaning Greek person. And in Matthew's gospel, she's called the Canaanite woman. Both of those descriptions lead us to the same place.

She's an outsider as far as Jesus and the disciples are concerned. Entire itself was a city on the Mediterranean. It was ancient and large and splendid. In the time of Jesus, it was under Roman rule. Miguel Delatorre, one of my favorite theologians, comments on this story saying that we're seeing a woman of color challenge Jesus' own culture.

That is a Jewish man sent to do Jewish things. He has something to learn from the Gentile margins. Now the gospel writers like to do this dance where Jesus hides out but people find him. And scholars call that the messianic secret. I just happen to love that a good story has a way of getting around.

And here's the thing about place. Place is storied. Theologian Jennifer Kraft argues that place is like a text. It is layered with meaning. She says rather than simply implying a geographical location, places are the result of dialectical relationships between geography and practiced human narrative.

Place is story on top of story on top of story. Let me illustrate that with a follow-up to my brother's speech. The story of my leaving our family farm is much more complicated than me just being a punk and wanting to leave. I was raised to leave our farm, our community. Family farms were no longer viable for most in my generation and younger.

And there's sadness to my generation's reality. I couldn't stay where my dad grew up, where his dad grew up, and all of my so called cousins were everywhere I was. And the move towards industrial farming meant all my cousins would spread out across the country. And that, I have to say, has become quite tragic. None of us knew how much our cousin was struggling until he took his life in January.

He was from the same place I'm from. We both had to leave. You probably know this, but the story of leaving can be so complicated. Leaving a family farm, leaving a relationship you have worked on for so long, leaving a home that is just not serving you and your loved ones anymore. Sometimes it works out, Sometimes it doesn't.

Tracing the complexities of your storied relationship to place, I believe, is a profound act of truth seeking and truth telling. And we'll see that back in the text. The conversation between Jesus and the woman in verses 27 to 28 is a witty encounter. Womenist theologians call it sassy. After she discovers that Jesus is hiding out in a house, the woman barges in and falls at his feet.

And she begs him to free her daughter, the one that she left back home in bed. And Jesus tells her first, let the children eat all they want for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs. Lord, she replied, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. Okay. What?

Let's break this down. Jesus is setting out a priority of access. The children he's talking about are the Jewish people he ministers to. Jesus has come from his hometown region where he fed 5,000. And the story in Mark six is known by scholars as the feeding of the Jews.

But here entire, Jesus is in an in between place. What's he doing so far from home? It's like his own language hasn't really caught up to where he is and the woman, she calls him out. What do you mean you'll only feed your children? You came to my town, the town of the dogs.

So catch up pal and throw me a bone. And before you get up and storm out of a church where we revere a savior who calls a woman a dog, let's assume Jesus is not just being a jerk here. Let's assume that he is aware of the boundaries of his culture. Look, lady, I can only spread myself so far. What do you want me to do?

To which she says, go further. Like you're already here. You have so much more to give, so give it to me. Give me what you can for my daughter. We have this idea that God is a decided fact.

And if God is a decided fact, the unmoved mover, well, God might feel pretty far away from you and the places you are. And maybe God is. And maybe God isn't. What I love is that this woman tells Jesus how to treat her. She walks right up to the son of God and challenges him and he listens.

He listens. This is the only person in the gospels who wins an argument with Jesus. So write that down in your journal. Nothing after this encounter will be the same. Not for her, not for all the Gentiles she represents in the story of salvation.

Now, I already spoiled the action in the next verse, but here it is. Then Jesus told her for such a reply, you may go. The demon has left your daughter. You win. A more literal translation uses the Greek word logos for reply and reads for such a word.

I like Elizabeth Malvin's take on the passage. She says Mark goes seems to go out of his way to present Jesus learning from a Gentile woman in a Gentile place about the inclusivity of God's realm. And in context, there's even more to this. In the time of Mark's gospel, Tyre is a region scarred by Jewish by the Jewish war. There's this thick tension between Jews and Gentiles.

And the historian Josephus says that in the conflict, the Tyrians were some of the worst enemies of the Jews. They turned on them, killed many, and imprisoned others in chains. Now many in Mark's community were Gentiles, and I can imagine it was tricky to keep historical animosity out of the church. So when this woman bursts into the house entire, Mark's audience might be like, oh, not her. She's one of those gentiles, a dog.

By including this story, Mark says to the church, get closer. Get closer to the people you abhor. Hear the word of brokenness from the people you're supposed to hate. Take in their outbursts. Take in their cry.

And then would you look at that? Your hate has become compassion on the way to love. Christian theology has a phrase for this challenge of closeness, this proximity of place, common table fellowship. Jews, Gentiles, deconstructionists, fundamentalists, Catholics, Pentecostals, agnostics, all y'all are welcome to the table of the Lord. I like this point about theology of place in a book called No Home Like Place.

Belonging like place is socially mediated in infinite small steps and ordinary moments. The story of Mark seven is just kinda two people talking. And it doesn't happen immediately, but with small steps towards each other, thanks to the woman's insistence, they get to the same place. Common table fellowship, where you pull up a chair, you talk about what really matters, and you leave changed, seen, heard, healed even. And this is what makes me happy about place.

Every place I have lived has healed me. No word of a lie. I was healed when my neighbor Dave in East Vancouver gave me one of the most loving and safe hugs of my life and I don't even like hugs. I was healed by friendships with three sisters in three cities. Now, they're all my sisters in law because I married their younger brother.

I was healed when a friend said to me, just after I moved here to Calgary, there is one church you should work at, mine. And here I am. Sometimes, you're just talking to someone and as you spin around to go, the divine says something to you like, hey, how was that for you? Do you feel a little lighter? Jesus liked to say it this way, your faith has healed you and maybe you didn't even know you had faith to begin with but you know your ache.

You know your longing. You know the conflict in your life. And when you voice it, give it logos, give it words, you are heard. We can listen. And God heals you in and through the place you are.

It might not look like what you imagined, but you can get to a place where you are so happy just to be right here. Verse 30, she went home and found her child lying on the bed and the demon gone. Now maybe you noticed this and maybe you didn't, but this story begins and ends with home, the Greek word, oikia. And interestingly, Jesus often told people to leave home for the gospel. Maybe that's kinda sparking for you.

But here, Jesus tells people to go home. Jesus says different things to different people and maybe we would do well to pay a little bit more attention to that. You know, just as a bit of a side note. And the beautiful thing about the gospel accounts of people returning home is that they are some of the most intimate sites of reunion and worship. I imagine that as soon as the Syrophoenician woman hears Jesus say that her daughter is free from the horror of her condition.

She shoves the disciples out of her way and sets out on this really fast race for home. She breaks from running only to catch her breath and then she starts back up again. And when she crests that last hill and can see her yard, she knows it's downhill from here. This moment means everything to this one woman and her daughter. This would be family lore retold by the daughter on long walks to the market with her mom for years.

Mom, remember that time a healer came to town, and remember how you argued with him until he agreed with you. And now my mind is at peace and my body is my own. We noted earlier that scholars call the feeding of the thousands in Mark six, the feeding of the Jews. And later in Mark nine, Jesus will feed thousands and this time it's called the feeding of the Gentiles. And you gotta think that this woman has something to do with that.

New Testament scholar Joel Marcus says that this flow of stories is about the transcendence of Jewish particularism and how that fit with the increasingly Gentile church of Mark's own day. This resembles the old Hebrew notion of reciprocity which says the land belongs to Yahweh and all who dwell upon it do so by grace. My home is your home, is her home, is their home, and the divine is host to us all. Now, I don't exactly mean that literally. Let's be honest, most of you will never come to my house.

However, we can practice the hospitality of home, of place, everywhere. And I had a moment of hospitality offered to me in a park by my place this summer, and it became a bit of a parable I just keep thinking about. I was walking alone through the park, and I noticed a family with parents and nieces and nephews and cousins, I assume, all hanging out in the shade of some evergreen trees. And then these two little kids, maybe five or six, ran right up to me, and the little girl asked, where are your kids? And I said, I don't have any.

And then the little boy said, what's your dog's name? And I said, I don't have a dog. And by this time, the parents are like, kids, come back, come back, and leave that nice lonely lady alone. And just as these two were running back to their family, the little boy turned back, looked me right in the eye, pointed at me and said, hey, I'm coming to your house tomorrow. And I said something like, I sure hope so.

And off they went. What was so sacred to me about this interaction is that this little boy presumed friendship. He just presumed that in some way, we're connected, that we both belong in that public space and even in each other's private homes. A theology of place is about staying open to God's presence in the spaces you live or walk or shop or march or rest. So stay open to place with all its complicated history.

Stay open to place where the in betweens might be a crucial turning point in your own story. And stay open to place where you just might witness profound liberation in your own home. Before you know it, you will be a place lover too. Just imagine. Imagine the good that that can do.

Please join me in prayer. Loving God, as we think about place as a part of the human experience that can bring us so much happiness, we also know that there is a shadow side of place. So for those who don't feel a hopeful sense of place, for those who suffer in the places that they live, for those who on account of violence and war are frankly without place. We pray for peace and we pray for provision and we pray for action. Jesus, thank you that you are not like an insecure teacher.

May we learn and teach like you. So spirit of the living God present with us now. Enter the places of our placelessness, our restlessness, our pain, and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.