(Anyone? Everyone? Jimothy is a raccoon from Seattle with a spinal deformity that makes him unusually round, weirdly adorable, and endlessly meme-able. If you’re on social media, he’s a sensation. If you’re not, it’s fine. You’re fine…barely missing anything. As you were.)

And then there was Christopher Nolan’s take on “The Odyssey.” Have you all seen it? Yes! Great! No. Me either. I actually haven’t seen it yet, but that isn’t going to stop me from preaching about it mostly because I have read dozens of think pieces about it. And one in particular kept coming back to me as I read today’s passage: Ezra Klein’s excellent essay entitled “Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse”(//www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion/christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk.html?searchResultPosition=3).  So I’m going to be moving back and forth between his essay and our reading for today as I try to make sense of this story.

I want to begin with Klein’s focus on the role of tricks and tricksters in “The Odyssey.” He points out that although the Odysseus of myth was a trickster through and through, Nolan’s Odysseus is not. He’s played by Matt Damon as a straight man and this, in Ezra’s mind, is “Nolan’s first trick.”

Many of you know what a trickster is, but Ezra is working with Lewis Hyde’s definition and it bears repeating here (from “Trickster Makes This World”). According to Hyde, tricksters - like Loki in Norse mythology or the Coyote of Native American myth - are characters who “uncover and disrupt the very things (their) culture depends on.”

Tricksters break the rules, both spoken and unspoken. They say the quiet part out loud revealing what we’ve all agreed to keep hidden.

Tricksters confront and question all the compromises we’ve made in order to maintain the status quo. They are essentially apocalyptic figures, characters who pull back the curtain exposing what we don’t want to see - think Toto exposing the Wizard of Oz - because once we see what’s really going on we can’t unsee it and things must change.

Through their actions, tricksters bring an end to what was - which is always hard - but they also open up the potential for new beginnings. Meaning, in the words of Klein, that they can be “either regenerative or ruinous….” Tricksters, in his words,:

represent a tension every society (and institution) must grapple with. A culture that cannot meet disruption with creativity cannot survive change. A culture that cannot protect its core values will be consumed by corruption (and lose its identity). Too much order leads to paralysis; too much chaos invites collapse.

And friends, I think this is precisely where we find Jesus this morning, right smack dab in the midst of this tension. He is so frustrated with the Pharisees because they refuse to see that change is afoot. God is doing a new thing in their midst, but they are so hung up on technicalities that they’re missing out on it.

Jesus has just performed his most impressive miracle to date: the feeding of the 5000. His disciples, fearing that there was not enough food to go around, had begged him to send the crowd away, but Jesus persisted.

He multiplied 5 loaves and two fish over and over again until all were fed and 12 baskets were left over, symbolizing God’s provision for the 12 tribes of Israel. Jesus goes on teaching and healing all the sick who are brought to him, but when the Scribes and Pharisees arrive to observe him, all they can see is that his disciples are not washing their hands before they eat in accordance with their tradition.

Now in fairness to them, this is not a question of etiquette or hygiene. This is a question of identity and faithfulness. Handwashing was one of the rules Jews of that time observed to remind themselves that they were all - from the least to the greatest, from Peter, James, and John in their sail boat to Caiaphas in his holy temple - part of a holy priesthood, a people set apart, descendants of Abraham who were blessed by God to be a blessing to the world.

But Jesus gets frustrated with them because they are so preoccupied with the identity piece of their faith and what it takes to preserve it that they are losing sight of the ultimate purpose of their faith, which was to be a people set apart for God so that they could bless the world in God’s name. These men are amongst the most dedicated and faithful people in Israel, and it is breaking Jesus’ heart because he can’t seem to get through to them.

You see the scribes and the Pharisees were not a part of the establishment like the Sadducees, whose power stemmed from their willingness to cozy up to the government (much like Christian nationalists are doing in our own day). Nor had they given up on changing society and run off to the dessert like the Essenes. Think of all those nice people you know (Christian or not) who don’t do politics because they are more focused on “protecting their peace,” if you will.

No. The Scribes and Pharisees were a whole lot like those of us here in the mainline church. They were faithful people on the ground resisting the oppression and excess of the Romans while trying to preserve their institutions and live out the values of their faith.

As such, they should have been early adopters of the change Jesus is bringing. You would think they would have been happy to embrace the disruption of this gospel he is espousing. They should have been right on the front lines, helping him gather in the lost sheep of Israel so they could get organized and form a Peace and Justice Team to call people back to the vision of the prophets, bring good news to the poor, heal the sick, free the captives, welcome the stranger, and bring God’s kingdom to earth…but no.

There is a profound disconnect here, and it leaves Jesus angry. He is stymied. In his frustration he calls them all hypocrites and says to anyone willing to listen” talk about adventures in missing the point, folks “it is not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles them, but what comes out.” Can’t you see: it is how we treat others that really matters. And then he storms off and away from his own people into Gentile territory where he knows they will not follow.

Now, the last few times I have preached on this, I have not had a lot of patience with Jesus’ impatience and even less tolerance for the intolerance he is about to display. Stephen Mitchell has said that he can never read this exchange with the Canaanite women without feeling, “a thrill of dismay at Jesus’ harshness” (p 207, “The Gospel According to Jesus”).

Another commentator describes this as a moment in the gospels where Jesus gets caught with his compassion down (“Feasting on the Word” p 358  Iwan Russell-Jones).  His response to this women is horrible and I have never shied away from that.

But, if Jesus was in the sort of headspace I just described, confounded by the fact that he just wasn’t getting through to the people who should have been most receptive to his message, I can understand - not excuse, but understand - why he might have ignored the Canaanite woman at first and even why he brushed her off saying that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

I think maybe Jesus had a fixed sense of how this was supposed to work; how his mission was supposed to unfold. But things are not going according to plan and he needs a minute. He’s not in a position to deal with people like her right now because in his mind he has to convince his own people first before he can convince the rest of the world. If he can’t get God’s people to join him in what God is up to, he’s done before he even gets started.

But he and his people are stuck. They are at an impasse. What they need, whether they want it or not, is someone who can shake things up, disrupt the status quo, transgress customs and taboos that have become hidebound in order to re-energize a faith that is mori-bund.

What Jesus and his people need is a what?

A trickster!

Enter the Canaanite woman. Enter a woman descended from Israel’s most ancient of enemies, a people they regarded as so evil they committed a genocide in order to wipe them off the face of the earth. Genocide. This woman shouldn’t even exist, which is her first trick.

Now remember, Jesus has just said that it is not what goes into a person’s mouth that makes them unclean but what comes out. He has just walked away from the Pharisees for looking down on others because they don’t meet your standards of holiness, and here before him, crying out for his mercy, comes an unaccompanied, idol worshipping, gentile women with a demon possessed daughter from an enemy tribe.

She is really as other as an other can be, the most objectionable test case imaginable, which feels like trick number two.

Once again, the disciple's response is to send her away. They didn’t have the resources to feed 5000 people and they definitely don’t know how to deal with this.  But the Canaanite woman persists. For the sake of her daughter she kneels before Jesus and cries out: “Lord, help me.”

“It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” says Jesus.

“Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Her response is trick number three. All things considered, she never should have spoken to Jesus in the first place and having been rebuffed, she should have slunk away. But no. Her tenacity makes the invisible visible. Her audacity causes him to see and hear what we did not want to see or hear.

See her and acknowledge her, not as other, not as an enemy, not as a distraction from the mission or a drain on his already overtaxed resources, but as a some one.

See her as a woman who is so clever and devoted to helping the one she loves that she is willing to humble herself, change herself, and look outside of her own faith for help from the God of Israel.

If Jesus is despairing about how he will reach the world without the help of his own people, here is the world showing up at his feet in the guise of this woman offering to help.

The Canaanite woman disrupts the narrative of who is a friend and who is an enemy. She represents a break with the customs that are holding him and his people back and loosens the rules that Jesus himself longs to break. If Jesus acknowledges her humanity, her need, her respect - she calls him “Lord” after all- he will need to alter his plan. He will need to change the timeline.

Her very presence destabilizes Jesus. Helping her requires re-thinking how he thought this was all going to work. It requires de-centering both himself and his people, but it will also enable him to find his way back to himself and the best of what he and his people espouse. Jesus is the hero of this story and yet, to come out ahead he must first lose, lose a rhetorical battle - something he has never done - with a foreign woman.

Yes, Lord, but…”

So much hangs in the balance in this moment. The question of whether her disruption will bring regeneration or ruin all hangs on Jesus’ response.  Will he send her away in disgust or will he see what is right in front of him. Will he cling to old enmities or see her full humanity? Can he change? Will he grow?

“Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”

Mathew tell us that her daughter was healed. But even more importantly, he then goes on to show us that so was Jesus.

For after he left that place, Jesus passed along the sea of Galilee and crowds of Gentiles, perhaps hearing of what he had done for that little girl, came out to him. And wouldn’t you know it, after 3 days of healing and teaching, they too got hungry. When Jesus saw this, he had compassion on them and multiplied 7 loaves and 2 fishes to feed 4000 because, as he said in his own words, “I do not want to send them away.”

No more of that.

“I do not want to send them away.”

After that feeding, 7 baskets were left over…a symbol of perfection and reconciliation, for the Canaanites were one of 7 tribes that Israel had conquered when they came to the promised the land. Jesus miracle is a sign that the God of Israel’s provision is for them too. A sign that this God, this gospel, this new kingdom, is open to all ("The Canaanite Conquest of Jesus,” by Grant LeMarquand http://www.tesm.edu/articles/lemarquand-canaanite-woman).

Ezra Klein says that according to Hyde, the Trickster brings the possibility of regeneration or ruin. They open the way for what has been broken to be either mended or severed forever. “Devastation comes when you cannot rejoin the worlds.” Salvation comes when divisions are healed.

But choosing regeneration and reconciliation requires change and change is risky. Welcoming, forgiving, feeding, healing, sharing what little we have with the other, the stranger, maybe even our the enemies, makes us vulnerable. It de-centers us to recognize that there are people with hopes and dreams as true and high as ours. It de-centers us when we acknowledge that they have the same right as we do - the human right - to life, liberty, and happiness.

Which brings me back to Nolan’s Odyssey and where we find ourselves as a country in the late summer of 2026. It is no secret that America is stuck in a quagmire of polarization, caught in an impasse between 2 visions of what it means to be an American and what it means to be Judeo-Christian.

We are caught between a spirit of exclusion and a spirit of inclusion, between nativism and welcome for the stranger and the refugee, between the iron law that might makes right and the golden rule.

And you may have noticed that many on the nationalist side have been looking to Rome of late for their inspiration. On the far right they speak openly of emulating Rome’s ethic of peace through violence and strength through conquest (See Stephen Miller’s now infamous interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”) There is an appetite, not just for Romanesque style arches, but for their style of global domination.

Given this fascination, Christopher Nolan could not have released the Odyssey at a better time. But as many commentators and Nolan himself has acknowledged, there is a Trojan horse of Nolan’s own making smuggled into the film.

Throughout Nolan’s Odyssey, character’s talk repeatedly about the law of Zeus: “treat the stranger as you would want to treated.” But as many a classicist has pointed out, that is not the law of Zeus, but an echo of Leviticus (19:34): “The foreigner who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love them as yourself, for you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.”

Nolan’s Odysseus eventually finds his way home thanks to the kindness shown to him and his men when they were strangers. Kindness they did not initially show to others.

At the beginning of the film, Odysseus quest for vengeance and appetite for conquest breaks the world. The destruction of Troy is portrayed as less of a triumph and more as a cause for soul searching. “To Homer,” says Klein, Odysseus “was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption.”

And so by the end, Nolan’s Odysseus comes to understand that his ethic of violence is unsustainableHe comes to understand that mutual loving care is the only way forward, even and especially for those who are other than us.

Odysseus finds his way home through repentance. A change of mind. A change of heart.

I think that we are a country at sea in this moment. We are a people who have lost our way, a country locked in battle, trying to find our way home. And so I pray that God would help us turn from ruin toward regeneration. I pray that we would find it in our hearts to choose love for the other over exclusion, mending over breaking, the way of Jesus over the way of Rome.

Jesus didn’t send “them” away. We shouldn’t either. Amen.