What does Tribe teach about feeling ignored by god?

At Tribe, the teaching on feeling ignored by God starts with an honest look at what that actually feels like, and it does not rush past the discomfort. In the Matthew 15 story Brian walked through, a desperate mother approaches Jesus and gets silence. Then she is told she is bothering the disciples. Then she is told it is not right to give children's bread to dogs. On the surface, every layer of the story looks like rejection, and Brian did not pretend otherwise. He let the congregation sit with how offensive that sequence reads before asking them to look more carefully at what was actually happening.

The turn in the story comes from something the woman said before any of the hard words landed. She called Jesus 'Son of David,' a title for the Messiah, and she said it as a Gentile, outside Israel, before he had done anything for her. Brian pointed out that the disciples heard someone being annoying, but Jesus heard a confession of who he was. The moment that looks like being ignored was not indifference. Brian says, 'Jesus wasn't insulting her identity by calling her a dog. He was creating a moment to demonstrate her devotion.' The silence and the sharp words were not a wall. They were the space where her faith became visible.

What Brian kept returning to was that the woman did not collapse under any of it. She held her ground, she answered the hard words on their own terms, and Jesus called what she showed him great faith. For anyone sitting with the feeling that God is not hearing them, this story at Tribe is not preached as a reason to try harder or perform better. It is preached as evidence that what looks like being passed over may be something else entirely, and that naming Jesus correctly, even before he responds, is itself the beginning of faith.

Taught from Matthew 15:21-28