While I was growing up, my family had a toy poodle. But my Mother comes from a line of meticulous Scots and Finns; and so Muffie the poodle lived in the utility room. She was never, to my memory, allowed into the rest of the house; and certainly not into the kitchen or anywhere near the table.

We, too, Anthony and I, began the relationship with Farley, our Sheltie, according to strict rules. No table scraps, no begging at meals. But Farley knew just what slight degree the rules could be bent; and so before dinner was ready each evening he would take his place right where my feet should go, under the table in front of my chair. A good place to stretch one direction or another to grab whatever stray crumb might fall during the meal!

Then as time went by, the table rules got bent a little more. He was so much a part of us, more and more not a foreign breed. He understood our speech and we came to understand his much fuller vocabulary of whimper, posture, body language, claw, touch, nudge, stare, ear twitch. And so at breakfast each morning, Farley eventually got a bit of toast (one of his favorite things) and at the end of dinner, a choice bite of meat or fish saved for him from my own plate. If I lingered too long before offering it, I would notice a chin delicately laid on my knee—just a reminder.

He lived heartily for eight years, and then suddenly cancer encroached before he had ever come near old age. Months later, when he lost his appetite for the dog food he had always relished, the rules became irrelevant. Mealtime became an inventory of the refrigerator. Whatever he would eat, he could have: tuna, yogurt, steak, cottage cheese. When he became too tired to bend and eat from his dish on the floor, then he got it from my hand. And when nothing else appealed any more, he got premium baby food—strained meat—eventually fed a teaspoon at a time from a medicine syringe.

Missing him as we do, I look back now and realize what happened: gradually he changed my mind about the artificial demarcation that we call "species," about "table rules," about ritual purity.

I found myself turning around, letting go of all our rules, all our contrived distinctions; knowing that what was important was not that he be differentiated from us like some lesser creature; but that the life he had be nourished. Farley’s lovely life had changed me; until I would have lifted him up onto the table if only it had meant that he could eat.

It was another "dog" who changed Jesus’ mind. As one of the earliest inhabitants of the pagan region of Tyre and Sidon, the Canaanite dog was known to be the worst of the lot, a long-hardened pagan, a longtime enemy. And this one, the disciples saw as a real cur:

A woman—and an unescorted woman at that, a woman whose undoubtedly shady past must surely have caused the demonic possession in the family; a woman brazen enough to initiate conversation with a man.

Jesus is silent in the face of her. The disciples, however, have their prayer shawls in a knot: Get rid of her, they urge, "Do what she wants, so she’ll get out of our hair."

But Jesus responds, "No; I wasn’t sent for her." Then, this "dog" who is satisfied just to be under the table proceeds to change his heart. She is not beholden to the "official rules"or even to Jesus’ understanding of his own vocation, but insists that she and her daughter have a right to healing. Centuries early, she foreshadows the words of Mark Twain: "I care nothing for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it." And she doggedly reminds Jesus that he is not after all servant of the "official version" or of biblical tradition, but of an uncontrollable Spirit who blows where she will blow, touches whom she will touch, beckons whom she will beckon, heals whom she will heal.

The Jesus we meet B.C.W.—"before Canaanite woman"—shows partiality to his own people, distinguishes between insiders and outsiders. This Jesus is a problem, if your theology demands perfection in a savior. I too have wrestled with him: precisely because of what He taught us, I shudder at his initial responses. But you know something? In the end, this incident endears him to me more. Here is no brittle, paper-doll Messiah, but one challenged as we are: one who shares our condition and is not ashamed to correct himself.

Because just then, this "Son of David" remembers who he is. He comes back to himself in a new way. He admits, as if it were the most natural thing in the world (and of course, it is), that he had been wrong and had his mind changed.

In a sense, it is Jesus’ own awakening, one that takes him far beyond first-century Palestine’s "honor culture." Jesus does not save face. He is challenged by the woman on his own terms—by her living, pushy faith—to make room for outcast and alien. It’s a profound conversion for him: continue reading in this gospel, and watch how his encounters have a shifted nuance, his stories a new and pronounced bias for the poor and the outsider. There is an insight threading its way through the rest of Matthew that traces back to the argument of a Canaanite "dog."

Being a faithful people is all about changing the table rules and getting changed yourself! It’s about who gets to be at the table, and who will be at the table in spite of us; and thereby about the social implications for relations between poor and non-poor, genders, orientations, abilities, pedigrees. It is about a banquet for dogs.

Suddenly the persona of the God enfleshed in Jesus does not only have to do with chosen people. Not only with purebreds—Shelties and Great Danes and German Shorthaired Pointers—but with mongrels. Mutts. Half-breeds and Heinz 57s. The ones that track mud into our sanctuaries and shake pond water all over our doctrine, who hungrily snarf up any little morsel that falls and don’t know how to sit and stay.

The secret we must all discover from outsiders like the Canaanite woman is that if we hold their name up to a mirror, we come face to face with the Holy name. And those we wrote off as "dogs" become revealers of God.

Recently I went and sat where Farley used to sit at suppertime—halfway under the table. From down there, you can’t see the whole spread, only the rim of a plate, perhaps whatever is set within a few inches of the edge. It makes you hungry. But with faith, and a good nose, you can imagine the truth: there is more than crumbs there, for a little dog with the temerity to sit close.

May the mark of our lives and ministries be this: that we are not too proud to go sit under the table for a bit, listen for the language of the outsider and thereby learn about the feast of the kingdom to come. Amen.

Interview with Gail Ricciuti
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot:  Gail, your powerful message about how Jesus’ mind was changed by the Canaanite woman is a lesson in inclusiveness, isn’t it?

Gail Ricciuti: It is. It struck me so powerfully that he was willing to change his mind. He could see that invitation to embrace the outsider. I think it is a powerful message for us.

Talbot: I am reminded of the German Christian martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose resistance movement against Adolph Hitler learned to see the great events of the world from below, from the perspective of the reviled, the powerless, the poor, the suspect; in short, for those who suffer. This is what you are talking about.

Ricciuti: Yes, and a lot of Latin American liberation theologians have taught us that also: to do theology from the underside of society, to start with the poor and look through their eyes. I think it is good advice to follow as we try to tackle the problems of our own day.

Talbot: You say being faithful means that the "table manners" must change, but that’s a transforming process. Doesn’t it also make us realize how bad our "table manners" have been?

Ricciuti: Oh, I think it does. I think we have often tried to do theology and talk about God from the perspective of the powerful. We have privilege and many of us are the affluent of our world. That leaves out so much. It is so limiting.

Talbot: How does this inform us, Gail, about what we see going on in the world around us today?

Ricciuti: Well, there is so much chaos and strife going in our world, so much threat, really, day by day. I think we need to pause and listen to the voices that are crying out. We often only look through one set of eyes: our own perspective. If we could take into account perspectives of people very different from ourselves and open listening ears, it might be a different world.

Talbot: This is all about justice, biblical justice; the reduction of human suffering.

Ricciuti: Absolutely!

Talbot: Your husband, Anthony, just defended his dissertation on that subject: "Jubilee Justice." Is that right?

Ricciuti: Yes. The economics of the Way. He is convinced that the early church had a certain approach economically to life, sharing things in common; that the book of Acts is actually a true story and not just metaphor.

Talbot: You are a co-pastor with your husband, for many years. That is an unique relationship. But you also have been in local church ministry for over 25 years; and now Professor of Homiletics at Colgate Rochester. How has your mind changed along the way?

Ricciuti: Oh, in so many ways! We probably don’t have enough time to talk about that. I think over the years of my ministry, my mind opened up from having folks with other voices insist that I listen and hear their experiences in life. And I became convinced from watching folks that we would often look at as outcasts or somehow as not worthy of being a part of the community, from watching their lives be lives of justice.

Talbot: Who were some of those folks?

Ricciuti: In particular, I think about gay and lesbian brothers and sisters who years and years ago the church pushed away and said, "No, you’re not fit somehow. You are not part of us." And yet, I witness in their lives so often the kind of justice, mercy, the fruits of the spirit that convince me. If those fruits are present then I have to listen because God’s spirit is present also.

Talbot: And so the church as an open and affirming community. You were also at Princeton Seminary for only 36 hours when you became a feminist!

Ricciuti: Yes. It didn’t take long! I was so startled. As a young woman, a much younger woman, I arrived thinking that it was the most natural thing in the world for me to go into ministry. I knew God had called me. And then I met folks, often fellow male students, who felt that the few women were there to find husbands and nothing else. So I have to credit that experience, my first days at seminary, with making me a feminist and giving me different eyes again.

Talbot: Now in this last year, the Senior Choice Award to you for the most outstanding professor at Colgate Rochester Crozier Divinity School. Congratulations, Gail. Wonderful.

Ricciuti: Thank you very much.