Mother's Day Sermon 1/1 Introduction:  Have you ever just been done with someone? Like really, properly fed up with their nonsense? My brother is about 12 years older then me. And for as long as I can remember we have always picked on each other, as brothers do. Nothing abnormal about that. Like most brothers, we would look for any way to get under each others skin. Once when I was really little I finally got a turn to play the Nintendo. I was so excited Trenton got to use it all the time but it was finally MY turn. I don’t remember much but I do remember Trenton unplugging it in the middle of the game and running away laughing. Everything I had done that afternoon, lost!So, I was mad, like unreasonably angry, and I decided it would be a good idea to take every pencil in the house and shove them down the vent in my brothers room. (He had a test the next day) That’ll show him! Not really though. I just ended up making my dad spend an entire afternoon fishing pencils out of the vent. He was not happen. But my mom. Man, my mom had a look that would stop me and trenton dead in our tracks. I think ever mom does have that look.  She would stop whatever she was doing. She’d stop breathing, Her eyers would narrow and her lips would tighten. The moment we saw that we had messed up. That the line had been crossed. Today, in honour of Mother’s day I want to look at Matthew 15:21-27. It’s a story of how Jesus interacted with the women of his day. On the surface, with no context, it looks really harsh. It looks like Jesus is uncaring, critical and rude towards women. But this isn’t the case. Instead Jesus is showing how valuable women are to him. Section 1: Missing the PointSo our story begin with Jesus  & his disciples heading to the region of Sidon, a non Jewish land near Israel. The people here don’t worship God. While there a women starts to follow Jesus around. And she’s a wreck. She is crying, weeping as she follows Jesus. She begs to him “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.”Now understand, this is really impressive! In Jesus’ travels up to this point, very few people have understood that Jesus is the Lord, the God of Israel. Yet this foreign women, this outsider, sees there truth. Although she’s not from the right family or even the right country, she sees that Jesus truly is worth following. You’d think that Jesus would be astounded. That he would answer he immediately with “Yes be healed!”. That would make sense right? Shouldn’t he want this women he understands the truth to follow him? That’s usually what he does.Yet, Jesus doesn’t say anything not a single word to her. I can’t stress enough how weird and out of character this is for Jesus. I’ll be honest, I don’t have a great answer as to why. As I’ve prayed about it and thought about it over the past week my best guess is that Jesus knew what was about to come, how his disciples were about to fail him. His disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.”The disciples begged him to send this crying, wailing, distressed, broken mother away from them. Why was that? Well you have to understand the attitudes at the time. Back then Self-respecting rabbis did not talk to women. About two hundred years before the time of Jesus a scholar of Israel called Ben Sirach composed a book of wisdom sayings. In the book he wrote this “a Man’s spite is preferable to a women’s kindness; women give rise to shame and reproach.”. That’s the context for Jesus’ time. The general attitude towards women. So when Jesus was silent, the disciples just assumed that he was acting in a way which was appropriate. He’s ignoring the women. So they beg him to help her, if only she would stop bothering them. Let me be really clear that’s not Jesus’ way of doing things. He didn’t agree with the popular opinion of his time. He saw women as valuable and worthy of