Who the Gospel Is For

Asking For a Crumb

About a year into my lead pastorate in Iowa City, a woman came to the church who heard that I had grown up in Burkina Faso, and that I spoke French. She was from Congo, and figuring I would perhaps more easily and compassionately understand her situation, came to me for help.

She told me she had come to the United State on a temporary worker’s visa. At some point she married a man from Chad and they had a child together. The child was disabled. The timeline of her story was somewhat murky, but her situation devolved. After her visa was up, she was working with a lawyer to find a legal path to stay in the country. Her husband had adopted witchcraft, divorced her, and moved back to his native Chad. He warned her never to follow him, and if she did, he would kill her with his sorcery.

Obama’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came to her door late one night and arrested her and her disabled son. They were detained separately, and in that time her son was assaulted. She was asking for my help to find a way forward. She was in limbo: deportation hanging over her head and death waiting her should the US decide Chad, the land of her legal passport, would be her destination.

She wept in my office.

I wept.

If the gospel I preach is not for this woman, then it is not for anyone. It must confront the sometimes wicked actions of a sometimes good government. It must say something of disability, of divorce, of assault, and of witchcraft.

And it does.

This Sunday I am touching on the story of the Syrophoenician woman in Matt 15 Jesus calls a dog. Jesus’ harsh and racially-charged words are perhaps as shocking to the modern reader as her response: “dogs get the crumbs under the master’s table, and that’s all I want.”

One of the things I feel goes unnoticed is that this woman calls the miracle she asks for a crumb. And Jesus gives it to her, praising her faith.

So that’s what I do, and what I lead my church in doing. We are facing death and the devil everyday. We of course pray for God’s kingdom to come (it’s the Lord’s prayer!), but we also ask for miracles here and now. Which it turns out are just crumbs falling from the marriage feast of the Lamb.

Legal standing, healing, protection from sorcery, justice—these are all but a crumb from God’s table.

And so I pray like a dog, “give me, give her a crumb.”

[some details in this story were changed to protect identities]