August 9, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.
Have you ever said something you regretted? Something that was rude or uncalled for?
I could write a book about my verbal faux pas.
Chapter one would date back to my youth when I was a teenage airman. Perhaps my youth would explain my indiscretions. I joined the Air Force when I was 18 and was discharged four years later at 22. The entire time I was a cold warrior, my frontal cortex was still years away from adult maturity. Looking back, I tell myself: that explains a lot.
On some week nights I would visit the base Airman’s Club, a large Quonset hut that was equipped with a bar, a dance floor, and juke boxes. Although NCOs and officers were excluded from the club, the wing commanders would drop by on occasion to schmooze with the airman.
One night Colonel Daniel “Chappie” James strolled through the doors. He was a massive African American man who seemed too big to fit into the F-101 fighter jet he flew so adeptly. “I don’t get into the aircraft,” he explained. “I put it on.”
The airmen in the club that night started to snap to attention but Colonel James waved us down. “Let’s have a beer and take the night off,” he said.
He made the barstool look fragile and small when he sat down. “How about a brew?” he asked the airman tending the bar.
Soon several airmen began to gather around the Colonel, enjoying his friendly banter and asking questions. “Are we going to Vietnam?” “Are you bothered by G-forces when you make a max-effort takeoff?” “What do you think 0f LBJ?”
The Colonel answered each question with good humor and the airmen, soothed by several beers, began to relax around him. We laughed uproariously at something funny he said (as one does when a Colonel says something funny).
The airman sitting on the stool next to him, apparently drunk enough to think the Colonel could take a joke, lifted his full glass and poured it over the Colonel’s head.
The room froze. The Colonel looked dumbfounded at the airman and for a minute I thought the Colonel was about to hit him or rip the chevrons off his sleeves. But the Colonel accepted a towel from the bartender and wordlessly dabbed it on his head.
The big man stood up and the other airmen moved several paces away from him. The airman who poured the beer looked like he was going to cry.
I was feeling the effects of too many beers myself and I decided the airman needed support.
“He didn’t mean it, Chappie,” I said, my words slightly slurred.
I was stunned by my abject familiarity as soon as I said it. The Colonel looked stunned, too, and staired at me as if he was memorizing my face. I staired back, horrified.
Finally the Colonel threw the towel on the bar and hauled his six-foot-four inch frame off the stool. He stood long enough to allow his wet uniform to settle and marched resolutely out of the club.
That was in 1965, which makes it 61 years since my most egregious faux pas. My terrible bad choice.
Our adult daughter Katie is a developmentally disabled adult on the autism spectrum. This doesn’t slow her down much and she often has insights the rest of us miss.
We often tell Katie that when she does something inappropriate, she’s not being bad. She simply made a bad choice.
The scripture Katie quotes most often is Matthew 15:21-28. Jesus is approached by a relentless Gentile woman screaming “Lord help me” and begging him to drive an evil spirit out of her daughter.
Jesus pointedly ignores her. The disciples’ testosterone spills out in manly resentment and they growl at Jesus to send this trash away,
Jesus continues to ignore her. When she persists, he dismisses her emphatically.
“I was sent only to the children of the house of Israel.”
Katie’s commentary is precise.
“Jesus made a bad choice.”
Perhaps Katie is seeing a side of Jesus we rarely talk about. The human Jesus, tired and harassed by crowds seeking his attention. The human Jesus who, out of exhaustion, might say, “Don’t bother me.”
We know Jesus relents because of the woman’s faith and we may think Jesus was just testing her.
But Katie sees another side of Jesus.
“He made a bad choice.”
Eunyung Lim, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, says, “I often introduce this to my students as the ‘When Jesus goes low, the woman goes high moment.’”
Are we disturbed by this side of Jesus? Do we agree he is making a bad choice?
“Jesus’s replies are cold, if not disrespectful, from the outset,” says Professor Lim. “His indirect refusal to heal her daughter echoes Matthew 10:5–6, where he clearly circumscribes his disciples’ mission within an ethnic boundary (‘Go nowhere among the gentiles … go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’).
Some scholars suggest this is the first time Jesus has encountered a woman outside his own ethnic family and he may need some time to work his way out of the prejudices of his people. He is surrounded by his disciples who complain about the woman, reflecting the enmity Jews feel for Canaanites as well as their rancor that an apostate woman has the impudence to approach the Master.
But the woman is so worried about her daughter’s suffering that she overcomes the fear she must feel in the presence of hostile and powerful men.
She persists. She kneels respectfully and refers to Jesus by his Davidic title, Lord. She remains respectful and calm despite Jesus’ harsh responses.
“It is not fair,” he tells her, almost cruelly, “to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
The woman’s response is one of the most courageous and faith-filled declarations in Matthew.
“Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumb’s that fall from their master’s table.”
Was Jesus only testing her? Or was she testing him? Did she dramatically expand his understanding that his Messiahship was for all God’s people, not just Jews? Did she convert him? Did he suddenly understand he had made a bad choice?
Matthew uses the story to express his and his followers’ determination to shed the binds of ethnic prejudices and declare that Jesus came not just to Jews but to all people.
“The petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, once uttered by Matthew’s Jewish members,” says Professor Lin, are now actualized in the lives of gentile believers, Professor Lin notes “the Canaanite woman hears, ‘God’s will be done’ for her as she wishes; on earth as in heaven, she too finds her share in God’s daily ‘bread.’”
And praying those petitions is always a good choice.
