Scraps for the puppies

Kelley’s Chapel United Methodist Church, August 20, 2023

John I. Carney
11 min readAug 20, 2023

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Coca-Cola point-of-purchase display card, with photos of Coke and Diet Coke bottles with yellow caps and text reading “Kosher for Passover: Look for the (U) symbol on designated yellow caps.”
Photo by Mike Mozart, downloaded from Flickr (Creative Commons License, Attribution [CC BY 2.0])

Matthew 15:10–28 (CEB)

Jesus called the crowd near and said to them, “Listen and understand. It’s not what goes into the mouth that contaminates a person in God’s sight. It’s what comes out of the mouth that contaminates the person.”

Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended by what you just said?”

Jesus replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father didn’t plant will be pulled up. Leave the Pharisees alone. They are blind people who are guides to blind people. But if a blind person leads another blind person, they will both fall into a ditch.”

Then Peter spoke up, “Explain this riddle to us.”

Jesus said, “Don’t you understand yet? Don’t you know that everything that goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer? But what goes out of the mouth comes from the heart. And that’s what contaminates a person in God’s sight. Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adultery, sexual sins, thefts, false testimonies, and insults. These contaminate a person in God’s sight. But eating without washing hands doesn’t contaminate in God’s sight.”

From there, Jesus went to the regions of Tyre and Sidon. A…

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John I. Carney

Author of “Dislike: Faith and Dialogue in the Age of Social Media,” available at http://www.lakeneuron.com/dislike