I want to speak to you this morning about the condition of invisibility.

Ralph Waldo Ellison, the great American fiction writer, wrote his only novel, Invisible Man in 1952. In this novel, Ellison, describes the plight of, what were then called, Negroes in America.

"I am," the novel begins,

an invisible man. . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

"I am invisible and I remember to walk softly so as not to awake the sleeping ones."

Still, like so many in his category of invisibility, he admits to being irresponsible.

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And alas it's seldom successful.

Like so much of his book, this passage especially is prophetic. You can hear in this irresponsibility Tupac Shakur and the many other "gangsta" rap artists whose profanity and violent language has a way of catching our negative attention but never quite overcomes the condition of invisibility. Only their noise is visible to us, or audible at least. These young men remain, as always, invisible to us as men.

There were certain advantages to invisibility, Ellison writes. This invisible man, who has no name throughout the almost 600 pages of this book, is thankful that he is invisible to the Monopolated Electric Light and Power whose power line he has tapped to bring light into the dark space of his underground world in an abandoned building in Harlem.

In this marvelous and troubling story recorded in the Gospel of Mark, we deal quite directly with the condition of invisibility. Jesus tries, as he often does, to get away from it all, but, as always, his reputation proceeds him and crowds gather around him seeking the healing that they know he can offer.

He set out, Mark tells us, to the region of Tyre on the Mediterranean sea. This is an area that is currently in the news. It is present day Lebanon. Then it was Syria.

A woman had heard about him and approaches. She bowed down at his feet. "Now, the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin." She was a Phoenician who lived in the Roman district of Syria. In Matthew's account of this same story, Matthew said she was a Canaanite. Both mean that she was a non-Jew. A pagan.

She came to him as we all do, out of her deepest need, her deepest fear, the possible loss of her daughter to an illness that was demonic. "She begged him to cast the deomn out of her daughter" Mark says simply, as Mark always does.

And here is the strangeness of this story about Jesus. He seems not to be seeing her at all when he says, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."

It is strange because we don't expect such harshness and insensitivity from Jesus. In Jesus, we have come to expect that no one is invisible, even, and especially, those who live at the very margins of society. Jesus would have seen the Invisible Man, even in the dark confines of the basement in which he lived. Jesus is the light. He would have no need of tapping into the line of Monopolated Light and Power. And yet here he is. Speaking about this woman as if she is invisible to him, as if she had no anguish, no flesh and bones, no tears, no dying daughter.

"Let the children (meaning presumably, the "children of Israel") let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."

Is this the Jesus I have worshiped since I was old enough to understand who he is? Would my Jesus have really said this? This is embarrassing. So embarrassing that it must have really happened, for why else would the church have insisted on remembering this incident?

He seems to be talking about this woman rather than to her. Even to me, he seems to be saying, you are invisible. You are a pagan.

But this woman, whom the church has celebrated throughout its history for her brashness, responds, respectfully, I think, but boldly, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

That's a funny line at first. It brings to memory all the times I slipped my green beans and peas to my dog under the table. "Let me just take the crumbs that the children drop from your table." She begs.

And then Jesus sees her and instead of reacting to her insolence he says simply, "For saying that, you may go -- the demon has left your daughter." Matthew in his telling (15:21-28) remembers Jesus saying, "Woman great is your faith." And the story closes in Mark's minimalist style with the unnamed woman going home to her daughter finding that the demon has gone.

Perhaps Jesus purposely set up the story this way. He only spoke to this woman as any Jewish man would have in his day. All pagans were, at best, invisible. No flesh, no bones, no dying daughter, no loves or hates, no passion -- quite simply, invisible according to the class barriers of his day. Perhaps the story is told this way to engage us. Or better, the story happened this way, to engage those around Jesus. They wouldn't have been surprised at his speaking this way. In fact, they would have been strangely comforted. Of course, this messiah is for us, his disciples would have said. For we are the children of which he speaks.

In Matthew's telling, again, the disciples try to get the woman to be thrown out of the house. But she will not accept the condition of her invisibility. And Jesus, having lured us into the trap of agreeing with him about this woman's invisibility, then turns the tables, as he always loves to do, and recognizes her great faith, which actually caused the healing of her daughter, in the same way that the Centurion's faith caused the healing of his servant. "Lord," the centurion, a highly placed Roman soldier, had said, "Lord, I am not worthy, but say one word only and my servant shall be healed."

In this way, the unworthy are worthy, the pagan are also saved, the invisible become visible by the light of the world.

I think that this is finally our attraction to Diana, the princess of Wales. She made it possible for the royalty of England to be visible to its subjects. Like the invisible man, England's royalty had seen long ago the advantages of invisibility. Have the British subjects only see the pomp, the circumstance, the Welsh guards in the bearskin hats and stoney faces and never see the human beings who, by historical accident have inherited the crown of England.

She insisted on her own visibility by assuming, what her brother called a "natural nobility who was classless and who needed no title to work her special brand of magic." In some ways, her insistence on leaving her estate of invisibility, her being honest about the state of her marriage to Charles, her confessions of attempted suicide, her bulimia, made her altogether human and altogether too visible. Then we couldn't get enough of her, thus her need for visibility became the absurd instrument of her own sad demise. Photographers who attempted recklessly to shine artificial light into the darkened windows of the cars she rode in, may have contributed to the crash of one such car in a Parisian tunnel. She couldn't just be Diana, she had to conform to some fairy tale that we had come to believe must be true. At the end of the book, Ellison has the Invisible Man say, "I have stayed in my hold, because up above there's an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern."

Ellison points out in the course of his magnificent book, that the condition of invisibility is ambiguous at best. He would have loved this story, I think, about Diana, Princess of Wales, for it points out the painful ambiguity of invisibility. He would have also loved this story about the Syrophoenician woman, who is invisible even to Jesus until she demands to be seen and heard. And in Jesus' way of seeing, visibility becomes a healing and a salvation.

We are all visible to one another in Jesus who is the light of the world. Any other kind of invisibility, I think, is destined to backfire on us. We are visible finally because Jesus loves us even when we cannot conform to any patterns and belong to any privileged class. Jesus loves me this I know, not because of any class or condition of the human predicament. Jesus loves me, this I know, just because he is Jesus. And that makes the most genuine sort of visibility possible, this is finally a love that casts out demons.

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