"Boundaries and Borders" - Elliot Haught

Elliot Haught opens with a fence. A redwood one, built in his Oakland front yard with a few friends after the contractor quotes came back way too high. It's a good fence. It marks where the private yard ends and the public sidewalk begins, and the gate works like a portal between the two. Boundaries do that. They're useful, and they're deeply human. They're also how we decide who's in and who's out — and that's where this sermon goes. The readings for the day all circle the same question. Isaiah tells foreigners and eunuchs, the outsiders of ancient Israel, that they get a name in God's house that outlasts sons and daughters. Psalm 67 says "all nations" and "peoples" twelve times in seven verses, which Elliot admits is almost obnoxious. Paul warns the Gentiles in Rome not to get smug about being grafted into someone else's olive tree. And then there's the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 — an enemy of Israel, by the standards of the day — who asks Jesus to heal her daughter and doesn't take his first answer for a final one. Her faith is desperate, persistent, humble, and, Elliot argues, genuinely playful. She's the one who brings up the crumbs under the table. Fifteen centuries later, the church put her words in the Prayer of Humble Access. An outsider's line became the prayer we say right before we come to the table. As Elliot puts it: that's very much like God. Recorded August 16, 2026 at Holy Trinity Silicon Valley. Readings: Isaiah 56:1, 6–8 · Psalm 67 · Romans 11:1–2a, 29–32 · Matthew 15:21–28 More: holytrinitysv.org