Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Interesting gospel, don't you think. Here's Jesus, the one we understand to be without sin, supposedly calling this Canaanite woman a dog, or at least implying a similarity. What gives?

Well, it's not easy to tell. Even commentators have trouble with this one. But I like to think of this as a rabbinical encounter. The Jewish sense of humor, I think, is operative here. I see Jesus as having his tongue firmly in his cheek as he hears this request of one who represented the enemies of Israel from the time of Moses and the conquest of Canaan. He listens and then lets his disciples encourage him to get rid of her, playing on their prejudices. Pushing further, he suggests that it's only for the people of Israel that he has come. And when she pushes back, he brings the confrontation to a head. "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."

But she knows the technique. She isn't taken aback as one might be today with a comment apparently so brusk. She plays along, taunting him to do what he knows is right. "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." And he provides the healing she requests, not for herself, but for her daughter, which intercession is another indication of the value and integrity of her appeal.

Listen to this creative retelling of the story of creation (from "The Other Side"):

In the beginning God didn't make just one or two people; God made a bunch of us. Because God wanted us to have a lot of fun and said you can't really have fun unless there's a whole gang of you. So God put us all in this sort of playground park place called Eden and told us to enjoy.

At first we did have fun just like God expected. We played all the time. We rolled down the hills, waded n the streams, climbed the trees, swung on the vines, ran in the meadows, frolicked in the woods, hid in the forest, and acted silly. We laughed a lot.

Then one day this snake told us that we weren't having real fun because we weren't keeping score. Back then, we didn't know what score was. When he explained it, we still couldn't see the fun. But he said that we should give an apple to the person who was best at playing and we'd never know who was best unless we kept score. We could all see the fun of that. We were all sure we were best.

It was different after that. We yelled a lot. We had to make up new scoring rules for most of the games we played. Other games, like frolicking, we stopped playing because they were too hard to score. By the time God found out about our new fun, we were spending about forty-five minutes a day in actual playing because the games were too hard to score. God was angry about that—very, very angry. God said we couldn't use the garden anymore because we weren't having any fun. We said we were having lots of fun and we were. God shouldn't have gotten upset just because it wasn't exactly the kind of fun God had in mind.

God wouldn't listen, kicked us out, and said we couldn't come back until we stopped keeping score. To rub it in (to get our attention, God said), he told us we were all going to die anyway and our scores wouldn't mean anything.

God was wrong. My cumulative all-game score is now 16,548 and that means a lot to me. If I can raise it to 20,000 before I die, I'll know I've accomplished something. Even if I can't, my life has a great deal of meaning because I've taught my children to score high; and they'll all be able to reach 20,000 or even 30,000 I know.

Really, it was life in Eden that didn't mean anything. Fun is great in its place, but without scoring there's no reason for it. God has a very superficial view of life, and I'm glad my children are being raised away from God's influence.

We were lucky to get out. We're all very grateful to the snake. (Anne Herbert)

In this morning's gospel, Jesus is playing on the stubborn sin, present in his disciples and pervasive in his culture and ours, of keeping score. They counted her heritage, her nationality, her reputation, against this Canaanite woman. They wanted nothing to do with her so that they would be counted among the "saved," the "elect," the "acceptable." "Really it was life in Eden that didn't mean anything," they were saying in so many words to Jesus, "without scoring there's no reason for (life)."

One of the pervasive worldly values against which the gospel militates, is counting, tallying, keeping score, in order to determine our value as human beings. It's something we are quite familiar with in this season of the Olympic Games, in which hundredths of a second matter in many events. It was only one hundredth of a second in the men's 200 meter butterfly on Friday evening—yielding Michael Phelps' 7th gold medal, matching the record of Mark Spitz from 1972. So much keeping score!

Some of you here this morning are entering—and some are already fully ensconced—into a world, the academic world, where scoring can be taken nearly to its most profound extension and absurdity.

Our world turns statistical comparisons of data and persons into an art form. We keep track of the numbers and types of weapons, wars, and casualties. We compare annual incomes. Our world tends to base personal worth on how much we make, how much power we wield, how big a house we live in, how many cars we have in the garage, etc. ad nauseum. Most of our lives are lived to keep some score or other, wanting to make it as high as possible—as impressive as possible—so that people will be impressed. And perhaps we will impress ourselves. I still remember my SAT scores, for heaven's sake!

We all want to be counted, to count for something in life. We don't want to be counted out or have it be said of us that we are of no account. We want to be "counted on," accounted for, and able to give a good account of ourselves. All of that means keeping score.

And we want to out-score the best of them, or at least keep the score even as we "keep up with the Joneses." We often presume to attempt to settle the score. In order to find out who is first, who is Number One, who gets the gold medal, we have to keep score—DON'T WE?!

Jesus is telling us this morning, resoundingly, NO! The question put to us is "What ultimate value does all this keeping score—all this detail about what makes people different or better or worst or more acceptable—have?"

I think, in spite of our social behavior and evidence to the contrary, that there is something in us that knows instinctively that this game of keeping score, of excluding, of pre-judging, is totally without lasting value and without merit. There is no note in Matthew that the disciples took issue with Jesus' proclamation of the faith of this outsider, this Canaanite woman. They knew in their hearts that she was qualitatively no different from themselves; they knew in their souls that their objections to her were not of God but of their culture. I suspect that they were uncomfortable when Jesus' act exposed them; I suspect they were ashamed at what they had said.

I suspect that we, too, often get a twinge of similar shame when we take a rare moment to assess what we have done with our lives, when we recognize for a moment the uselessness of building ourselves up by keeping score as the world would have us do. I suspect that we also, like the disciples, tend to recoil from that feeling in fear of what truly facing it would mean. Our lives might cave in around us as we realize the paucity, perhaps the total lack of meaning in our lives.

All are acceptable to God, as Jesus demonstrates by action in this passage from Matthew. Everyone counts already. We have worth not because of what we do or how good we are or how we score or how much of anything we possess, but because we are God's creations, God's creatures. We have intrinsic worth, a concept largely foreign to our culture. Intrinsic worth—worth due not to what we have done but due to what God has done.

And we count, we—all—are worthy of respect and consideration because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, not for some small elite or elect, but for all people. Even Canaanites. Even women. Even Freshmen. Even African Americans. Even bronze medalists and those who come in last. Even straight white males!

We count already; we need not keep score. The things about which we keep score (money, grades, age, experience, knowledge, power, status, social position, etc.) are all transient. Ultimately, Jesus says, they don't count. All that counts is that we are God's. Any other keeping of scores or methods of recognition are pointless. They do not matter, ultimately.

The problem is that we base our identity, or tend to, not on what really matters, but on what the world tells us matters. We have so much invested in our own tallies, our own scores, that we miss the most important fact.

Edward Schweizer has said, "Men with a lust for greatness are blind to this truth. Instead of using people to get our beloved things [so that we can better our scores], we should love people and use things." The only status Christians see ought to be the status of people as creatures of God for whom Christ lived and died.

Scores do not matter because we are, to paraphrase 1 Peter 2:9, a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people—that we may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called us out of darkness (that is, false score-keeping) into God's marvelous light (that is, knowledge of what really counts).

The game of life ought to be scoreless. Amen.