Jesus is all over the place. First an embarrassing argument with a gentile woman whose daughter is possessed by a demon and probably near death. Emily Dickinson describes the mindset:

I felt a funeral in my brain,

And mourners to and fro

Kept treading, treading, till it seemed

That sense was breaking through.

The woman's daughter felt a funeral in her brain. The woman felt it with her. She's ready to try anything. Crystals, a blood infusion from a disbarred East German Olympic physician, Ivermectin. Or wait, how about God? The one who tamed the chaos roiling her daughter's mind when he spoke the world into being. He has already defeated evil.

But cut the head off a rattlesnake and its death throes remain dangerous. Her daughter is endangered. The woman's faith is strong. Jesus is standing right in front of her. He can stomp this snake out easily. She drops to her knees begging for help. And Jesus calls her a dog. Let the children be fed first, for it's not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.

As if grace were coal, a limited commodity, not the product of love so super abundant the rim of heaven failed to contain it. As if his love were meant for a select few, not this zero Phoenician hyphenated outsider. She cracks on him with a comeback honed in a dojo known only to the perpetually disrespected. “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” Maybe, she whispered checkmate. Maybe it was a prayer. Jesus is undone. He stammers. “For saying that you may go. The demon has left your daughter.”

Before he encountered our unnamed heroine, Jesus was riding high. In the verses immediately preceding today's reading, he won a verbal joust with Pharisees and Sadducees triumphantly arguing that it isn't what you put into your mouth that pollutes, it's what comes out. And then just two or three verses later, he coughs up some pollution of his own and has it thrown back at him in the form of faith. How can Jesus not have been humbled by this exchange? He thought he was in control. Turns out this woman knew him better than he knew himself. Humbling. He thought God was controlled by the constraints and rules and prejudices of time, which is to say he thought he was. Turns out God is free, uncontrollable, out of control.

Ever lose an argument only to realize that your self is fathoms deeper than you knew? For me, this happened in therapy and on the basketball court in high school. Back then, my top ranked team lost to a tiny school from a dying mining town whose players warmed up in jean jackets. David with a denim slingshot. I walked out of that gym, 18 years old, humbled by a forced awareness. We control very little in this life. My legs felt weak, and it wasn't because I'd been chasing a ten point lead all night.

Decades later, in therapy, I realized that my drive to be a perfect pastor was not rooted in my love for God, but instead in a zombie-like determination to please my long dead father because grieving him wasn't possible when he died when I was fourteen years old. I walked out of that office humbled and reeling with relief, stunned by the fact that I had been trapped in the certainty of faith for more than twenty years.

Or I should say the certainty of mistaken faith. The horizon becomes wide ranging and expansive when you're dropped to your knees, because on your knees you're forced to either stare at the dirt or lift your gaze Godward. When you stand up, you find the ground beneath your feet feels less certain than it had before. Less certain, less stable. But uncertainty is more powerful than assurance. Certainty constrains. Uncertainty opens endless possibilities, even as it leaves you shaky, weak in the knees, reeling.

I like to imagine Jesus reeling as he proceeds from the region of Tyre, stumbling past Sidon, bouncing off the Sea of Galilee, and then sprinting for the region of the Decapolis, moving forward. The unmoored incarnation of a God who cannot be contained, who will not be controlled, who is out of control. Eventually, he encounters a man who cannot hear and cannot speak. The man's friends ask Jesus to heal.

Here's a confession. In childhood, the Three Stooges frightened me. They came on reruns on Saturday afternoons when the cartoons ran out. And when Larry, Curly, and Moe got rolling, poking each other in both eyes with one hand, fingers out, tongues wagging, ears wiggling, I was completely unnerved. I had to look away. It was as if these three men would do anything to make me laugh. I changed the channel. It was too much.

In most of his healing stories, Jesus speaks and wholeness comes to the infirm like wind, a fine spiritual thing. Mark doesn't mention the three stooges, but he does describe Christ's fingers in the man's ears, Christ's hand and his spit on his tongue.

Jesus seems out of control, determined to do whatever it takes to give anything so this man can be well. His spit and his touch. What's next? His body, his blood. We look away. We change the channel. And then we project our cold ideals onto heaven. God is unchanged and unchanging, distant and reserved, all -knowing, inscrutable, in absolute control of all things at all times. A series of attributes, I think, I really do. I think this is a series of attributes that might describe the aspirations of the patriarchs and philosophers who coined these attributes, but none of this sounds much like Jesus. As Stanley Hauerwas says, “get too close to Jesus and you'll find that Christians are stuck with a God who bleeds”.

Quick, let's think instead. Sometimes it seems we have placed Christ inside our minds, turning him over and over and over again like a rock in a tumbler until he is polished and smooth, pleasing and easy to believe in, confined inside our minds. At its worst, that's what a theological education can do. At its worst, that's what rational religion can do. At its worst, that's what a lifetime of church going can do.

But one of the most beautiful things about Jesus is that he cannot be contained. One of the most difficult things about Jesus is that he cannot be contained. One of the most alarming things about Jesus is that he will not be contained, not by the first century, not by the prejudices of his own time or even his own mind, not by the grave, not by our assumptions, and certainly not by the confines of our minds.

How wild would it be if God came to be with us and one of the very first things he did was get in an argument with his mother at her cousin's wedding reception. Wilder still, if he lost the argument and then got everyone at the party super drunk. He did. What if he spoke to a herd of pigs and convinced them to leap off a cliff? He did. And then he cursed out a fruit tree. His friends were traitors and rebels, bad fishermen, despised women. His politics made no sense. He flipped tables over in a rage. He wept while he prayed. The government, the senior pastors, and the state senators conspired to kill him. And he returned, rose up, to forgive his murderers, meaning each one of us. What if God isn't in control of himself?

During my last two years of seminary, I worked as a support person for a group of previously institutionalized men. Each one of these guys had his own apartment and a part-time job. I would help them run errands, fill prescriptions, make dinner. I loved this job and I still think of it often. I loved the men I worked for.

My favorite was Dave. He was a nonstop talker, but he lacked the gift of inflection. His voice was always turned up to 11, no modulation. He loved science. was scientifically minded and he carried a childhood fascination with models and globes into adulthood. He taught me the word orrery. “Matt, this weekend I will make an orrery!”

In my first week of work, I walked Dave home from a doctor's appointment and stood in the doorframe of his apartment as he entered. The smell of multiple air fresheners leaked out into the hallway. He invited me in for a Coke. I declined and he invited me again.

“I got a lot more than two cases.”

I said “no” and he repeated himself. This went on for a while until he took offense.

“Come in!” he shouted and then he bellowed at me, “I got more pop than you can handle!”

He did. More pop, more verve, more intensity, more burning urgent honesty than I could be bothered with at the end of a work day. I backed away unnerved.

And although I dropped Dave off at his apartment three days a week for the next two years, he never invited me in again. He remained a client. We never became friends. To this day, I regret rejecting the man's hospitality unhinged as it might've been. But I hear it echoed in Jesus wild intensity. Nothing can stop his more than sane insistence, his verve.

His honesty, the burning urgency of Christ's new creation bursting into our old, staid order again and again and again, determined to unmoor us. It makes me feel giddy, nervous, which they say is just your body telling you it is excited. Still, it makes me fearful, but a carbonated kind of fear, which is to say Jesus makes me joyful.

I like to imagine God looking at us the same way Sylvia Plath looked at her children when they were young. There is electricity in her vision. You're clown-like, happiest on your hands, feet to the stars and moon-skulled, gilled like a fish, a common sense, thumbs down on the dodo's mode, snug as a bud and at home like a sprat in a pickle jug. Creel of eels, all ripples, jumpy as a jumping bean, ripe like a well done sum, a clean slate with your own face on.

You're the child of a God who cannot control himself. Mercy spills over the rim of heaven and soaks you like whiskey from the glass you couldn't balance. Dancing, you dancing at your own birthday party. It runs down your arm and soaks the cuff of your one good dress shirt. And if you go racing to the dry cleaner, turn your back on God, shove Jesus onto the cross and straight out of your life.

That won’t stop him from reaching you any more than his own ignorance or an immobile tongue stopped him from healing people 2,000 years ago. After all, we only get anywhere near the truth of God when all the sensible things to say about him are overwhelmed by the fact that the earth itself pitched and rolled beneath angel feet when the stones rolled away. The ground shakes. The earth's spine could break.

He is here for you. With spit on his fingers, he touches you. You're a clean slate with your own face on. Amen.